A 70’s piece on The Uses of James Baldwin by Benjamin DeMott takes on a new resonance after a viewing of No Direction Home. Baldwin figures in the Dylan documentary because he was a presence in Greenwich Village during the 50s and 60s, but these two bohemian culture heroes shared more than a social context as the opening lines of DeMott’s article suggest:
Pity spokesman: their lot is hard. The movement of their ideas is looked at differently, studied for clues and confirmations, seems unindividual – less a result of personal growth than of cultural upsurge.
DeMott defined a range of difficulties faced by any artist who went public in the 60s including one problem having “to do with expense of spirit”:
Few Americans have been called on as frequently as James Baldwin in the last decade and a half to function as the public voice of rage or frustration or denunciation or grief. Repeatedly, on television, on college platforms, at hundreds of public meetings, the author of The Fire Next Time has had to seek within himself both the energies and the vocabulary of fury—to search for the words that will make real to himself and others the latest atrocity. Traditional oratory can perhaps be equal to cattle prods, mortgage racketeers, heroin syndicates, and assassinations. But where in his word-hoard can a spokesman reach for means of articulating feelings about defenseless children bombed to death while singing a hymn at Sunday school? What terms does he find to name his revulsion on learning that at a state prison an already wounded prisoner was stabbed three times in the rectum with a screwdriver by a “corrections officer”? How does he conduct a hunt for language that hasn’t been emptied out by repetition – how can he witness his own scramblings for freshness without coming in some sense to despise this self-involved fastidiousness? To function as a voice of outrage month after month for a decade and more strains heart and mind, and rhetoric as well: the consequence is a writing style ever on the edge of being winded by too many summonses to intensity. You write, if you are James Baldwin, “The land seems nearly to weep beneath this civilization’s un-nameable excrescences” – and perhaps hesitate for a minute, dissatisfied by the sentence, the willed pathos. But what can be done? Shrug, and let the words stand.
Yet DeMott’s clarity about the price of spokesmanship didn’t lead him to disdain Baldwin’s effort to “achieve our country.” His reading of Baldwin’s work serves as a reminder there were artists who couldn’t escape from American dilemmas in the 60s. Not everyone could feel their way in and out of the moment like Bob Dylan. Take the following excerpt from “The Uses of James Baldwin” as a tribute to its subject and to his close reader as well. When Benjamin DeMott addressed his fellow citizens (“a faintly improbable audience” as one of his admirers allowed) he sometimes felt like he was trying to drive an ax into ice, but he kept chipping away for fifty years, writing from his heart until it finally gave out around midnight on September 29, 2005…
Despite the trials and afflictions of his spokesmanship, [Baldwin] retains a place in an extremely select group: that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers. He owes his rank partly to the qualities of responsiveness that have marked his work from the beginning and that seem unlikely ever completely to disappear from it. Time and time over in fiction as in reportage, early and late in his career, Baldwin tears himself free of his rhetorical fastenings and stands forth on the page utterly absorbed in the reality of the person before him, strung with his nerves, riveted to his feelings, breathing his breath. Here he is in 1972, remembering Birmingham, a talk with Reverend Shuttlesworth, an instant at which the minister considers the issue of safety. It’s nighttime, early in the voter-registration drive; ahead lie stepped-up bombings, and murders. The two men have been talking together, in Baldwin’s hotel room. During the conversation Shuttlesworth keeps walking back and forth to the window. The writer realizes his guest is checking on his car below, making sure nobody puts a bomb in it. He wants to say this, wants to acknowledge the danger and his own awareness of it – but the minister offers him no opening. At last, as Shuttlesworth is leaving, Baldwin speaks out (“I could not resist…I was worried…”), and he sees the man’s face change (“a shade of sorrow crossed his face, deep, impatient, dark”), and at once he lives into the response imaginatively, naming it from within, sensing the “impersonal anguish,” showing forth the minister wrestling within himself, confronting fear with the almost-sustaining truth that “the danger in which he stood was as nothing compared with the spiritual horror which drove those who were trying to destroy him.”
Precisely the same swiftness of penetration occurs as the writer remembers a classic moment of exclusion. He enters a small-town southern restaurant through the “wrong door”:
“What you want, boy? What you want in here?” And then, a decontaminating gesture, “Right around there, boy. Right around there.” I had no idea what [the waitress] was talking about. I backed out the door. “Right around there, boy,” said a voice behind me. A white man appeared out of nowhere, on the sidewalk which had been empty not more than a second before. I stared at him blankly. He watched me steadily, with a kind of suspended menace…He had pointed to a door, and I knew immediately that he was pointing to the colored entrance. And this was a dreadful moment – as brief as lightning, and far more illuminating. I realized that this man thought he was being kind.
Amidst terror, James Baldwin takes a feeling from the inside. He registers an exact reading of the combined sense of power and inner, moral self-approval in the white who shows him “the right way.”
Furthermore, throughout the career from the beginning to this moment, James Baldwin possesses a coherent – if devastatingly despairing – view of recent times, is able to see even the most dreadful events as part of a pattern. For some citizens the fates of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy can be gathered only under a vague rubric (“violence in America,” “shocking,” “beyond understanding”). Baldwin’s perspective is that of someone noting connections, replacing soft illusions of randomness with hard-boned inevitabilities, and often justifying his readings by citing particulars not only of his own feelings but of those of the victims. Everywhere linkages are fixed between events that white memories tend to hold apart – witness these comments on the close of the great Washington Monument petitionary march and its sequels.
Martin finished with one hand raised: “Free at last, free at last, praise God Almighty, I’m free at last!” That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony…I was in Hollywood when, something like two weeks later, my phone rang, and a nearly hysterical, white, female CORE worker told me that a Sunday school in Birmingham had been bombed, and that four young black girls had been blown into eternity. That was the first answer we received to our petition.
Merely by pointing at “sequels,” Baldwin bares the structure of the times as given in the experience of his community, and it remains a fearful sight.
Best by far, however, is the author’s willingness to accept the obligation imposed on him by his pride – namely, that of specifying the losses to the culture as a whole flowing from its blindness to truths born in and taught by blackness. True pride is never less than stunning – which is to say, even if it didn’t impose obligations, Baldwin’s pride would remain a phenomenon notable in itself. These fierce resistances, iron spurnings of every prepared slot of “inferiority” – it is wrong to view them aesthetically and thereby drain them of their psychological urgency; yet it’s hard to gaze on them without remembering Keats’s remarks on the “fineness” of a quarrel in the street. The key to the excitement in Baldwin’s writing is the imminence of contest, the brooding rage to prove self-worth, to duel with the humiliators and cut through to their place of blankness. And it’s his grasp of his comparative worth that demands the duel, forces him into “availability,” openness to others; he’s driven to perceive inner realities as they exist for persons not himself at least in part because, the system being what it is, others are bound to misassess him too, bound to need setting straight. There are no wild moments of release in the later books matching the terrible passages in Notes of a Native Son wherein the young Baldwin told for the thousandth time “…don’t serve Negroes here,” roars up from his chair and hurls a half-full pitcher of water, shattering mirrors behind the bar. The gestures in the name of worth become gestures of mind, and sometimes take the form of dismissals of traditional culture:
The South African coal miner, or the African digging for roots in the bush, or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral of Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history’s arrogant and unjust judgment.
The dream of demolishing history is extravagant and in the end self-diminishing; the force of the will, the superb hatred of bowing down nevertheless compels admiration.
But, to repeat, the prime use of Baldwin’s writing is as a guide to the fortunes possessed by the dispossessed. Other writers – Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Paolo Freire – hint at the size of the holdings, open up awareness of the way in which a thousand assumptions would be transformed if standard middle-class reality had to negotiate its acceptance with things as they truly are. And these writers exceed James Baldwin in restraint; Baldwin’s proud-hearted love of his people often sends him close to euphoric boasting:
the doctrine of white supremacy, which still controls most white people, is itself a stupendous delusion: but to be born black is an immediate, a mortal challenge. People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.
But when he lays out his case experientially, it has uncommon authority. “I have been to Watts to give high-school lectures,” he writes, and:
These despised, maligned, and menaced children have an alertness, an eagerness, and a depth which I certainly did not find in – or failed to elicit from – students at many splendid universities. The future leaders of this country (in principle, anyway) do not impress me as being the intellectual equals of the most despised among us. I am not being vindictive when I say that, nor am I being sentimental or chauvinistic; and indeed the reason that this would be so is a very simple one. It is only very lately that white students, in the main, have had any reason to question the structure into which they were born; it is the very lateness of the hour, and their bewildered resentment – their sense of having been betrayed – which is responsible for their romantic excesses; and a young, white revolutionary remains, in general, far more romantic than a black one. For it is a very different matter, and results in a very different intelligence, to grow up under the necessity of questioning everything – everything, from the question of one’s identity to the literal, brutal question of how to save one’s life in order to begin to live it. White children…whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded – about themselves and the world they live in…
The writer means to create an image of his people that will not only recover their dignity, that will not only spell out what they have to teach, but what will sting all sane folk to jealousy. It is a typical spokesman’s project – many will say, adopting postures of regret and pity – and doubtless there’s justice in the observation. But the lesson Baldwin continues to teach – you make your way to actualities only by waking to the arbitrariness of things – goes out a few miles beyond “race issues.” And those among us who can’t or won’t master the lesson, or who, having mastered it, carp instead of clap at the pugnacity behind it, had best save pity for themselves.
From October, 2005