For James Baldwin
Solomon, Barbara P.
The air snapped and crackled. December weather. The white Christmas minilights were already lit in New York. It was a funny day, this eighth of December. Overnight one had got accustomed to the...
...Overnight one had got accustomed to the American flag and the hammer and sickle entwined on television...
...It was hard in 1960 to emerge as a female writer and be taken seriously...
...And Jimmy had the biggest, grandest cathedral funeral, as befitted his life—he had started out as an ordained preacher in Harlem...
...I drove home inch by inch through snowdrifts...
...And poor...
...Despite his anger at the deprivations whites have inflicted on those born black, I don't think so...
...There has probably never been a generation so ill equipped to deal with reality on any terms whatever...
...To his and my astonishment, James Baldwin, whom I had never met, replied with an amazing foreword, and thus changed my life forever...
...he accused Mailer of not daring to be homosexual, of being a Harvard boy, a bourgeois— "My mother took in your mother's washing...
...q 222 • DISSENT...
...Maybe other books could have been written, or people should have said different things or fought some battles harder and left others unfought...
...Emmanuel de Margerie, the French ambassador, spoke, but no white American writer...
...then there were 1960s hippies, and small children, and Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee, and Max Roach...
...In a period when even Tennessee Williams didn't quite dare to write overtly about homosexual love and desire and despair, Jimmy took the plunge: he wrote Giovanni's Room...
...Jimmy's true obsessions had to do with human emotion and its arrests, the claustrophobic anguish of one generation beating incommunicably against another...
...His stepfather had been a Harlem "storefront" preacher—he had no real church, just an odd occasional room somewhere...
...I wasn't a close friend of Baldwin's, but I felt a piece of my youth die with him in that sealed coffin carried down the steps on Amsterdam Avenue...
...I felt this omission shortchanged and distorted Baldwin's real literary place...
...He reminded me of Chekhov's fragile hero in The Seagull...
...As Toni Morrison said, there were many Jimmy Baldwins, and many different things will be written about him...
...I brought it home from Paris...
...He gave me my start as a writer—he "named" me...
...after an awful year of stomach cancer he died in Saint Paul de Vence...
...They were always taking each other's measure...
...No, that wasn't it...
...think ultimately, a true New York writer, particularly of the 1950s and early 1960s, that literary moment when conversations were quick with ideas, essays dazzled, and everyone listened, and everyone fought, and words were so important...
...There was jazz...
...It was like a good tennis match...
...Undoubtedly Updike thought he was being gallant in even recognizing that I had written a book, and in those times, and in those Harvard circles, his remark came out sounding vaguely like a compliment...
...Baldwin had a devilish side...
...But together they also impishly gave a party in New York in the late 1950s celebrating the end of the Beat Generation— neither one defined himself as Beat...
...The horn just floated at us...
...In New York, far from the parties in Washington, there was a sense of things ending...
...Neither Hemingway nor Fitzgerald ever wrote so concretely about being an alien in Europe...
...Then a white man walked in, and we ended up seated together...
...He leapt back over those 1920s writers, fished up Henry James, held on to him for dear life, modernized him...
...It meant driving that night to Northwestern, out in the suburbs...
...Andrew Goodman had just been killed in Mississippi...
...They played "When the Saints Go Marching In" with almost unbearably pure pitch...
...Jimmy Owens played the trumpet and horn, and Danny Mixon the piano...
...This afternoon Reagan and Gorbachev were signing their nuclear arms agreement...
...In Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) he combined a high-style Parisian urgency he had picked up in France—he first went there in 1947—and a special American intimacy born of the rhythms of the American writers who went before him—his hero was Henry James, also a self-exiled novelist and a great essayist— and the biblical cadences and moral messages that were the birthright of a Harlem storefront preacher's stepson, and the rhythms of jazz, and the anger of having been born black...
...It is always risky when committees, even good committees, try to mobilize the kind of urgent autobiographical anger born out of something deeply private within a writer...
...That was smart of you...
...The greatest anguish Jimmy felt as a writer probably was that despite the emotional power of his early novels—Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room—he didn't write any book as great as Ellison's The Invisible Man, undoubtedly one of the three or four great American novels of the second half of the twentieth century...
...Later, I walked the few short blocks between the cathedral and Columbia...
...Indeed, certain segments of the movement attacked him for escaping the battle and living in France, and even for writing so much about being homosexual...
...The services were High Episcopalian, which is the fanciest and most snobbish that American religion can get, but it was the rhythms of black jazz that soared through the vaulted cathedral...
...People in charge of causes never understand that a writer's voice can't be owned...
...John the Divine on the then-Puerto Rican Upper West Side...
...He said he was Arthur Geller, an old friend of Jimmy's, but that in the 1960s they had had some falling out...
...Baldwin had a tremendous influence on Styron and Mailer...
...That volley deeply changed American writing...
...His suggestion that female writers were getting more than they were entitled to and had an unfair advantage in no way reflected the actual situation for women writers in 1960...
...In his own eyes he was born short, puny, ugly—and homosexual...
...I took a taxi across Central Park...
...But Lennon was an international symbol of the 1960s...
...The lead article in the first issue of the New York Review of Books, in December 1963, was a review by Fred Dupee of his essays, The Fire Next Time...
...After he wrote about Europe in his special way, he gave us all permission to write about our encounters with Europe minus awe for Europeans...
...I wasn't sure how it ended up that we were so separated from the blacks in the restaurant...
...At noon in the Cathedral of St...
...They volleyed with each other to win, and each improved the other's style...
...While I was standing on the street looking for a taxi, two young black women came up to me...
...Though some American novelists have made lots of money, writers have no official place in our society—we have no tradition of the grand funeral for "hommes de lettres" that has been such an integral part of French history...
...What flashed through my mind was that angry period in the 1960s when what had seemed to start out wonderful fell apart, and disintegrated into slogans and violent polemics—Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, lashed out in hatred of the white audience who came to see his play The Flying Dutchman...
...I kept talking so much to them, they must have thought me garrulous...
...First came the Processional— the Babatunde Olatunji African Drum Salute reverberated through that great gray stone space, like a wailing for dead African kings...
...But in his combination of novels and essays, Baldwin developed a special literary voice, moral and angry, that shaped American writing far more than has been acknowledged...
...Sure, he was proud of having been given the Legion d'Honneur, but his pride was at having merited it as a writer...
...John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue up near Columbia University, near the border between white New York and Harlem, near the streets Garcia Lorca wrote about in his time in New York, James Baldwin was being buried...
...Jimmy yearned for quality—in writing, in ideas, in the look of things, the style of life...
...Why didn't we talk to them about Jimmy, or they to us...
...Then the speeches and the music were over...
...Come hear me speak," he insisted...
...I was glad they had stopped me...
...He had the special delight in magical luxury of a kid who grew up bone poor in Harlem and who washed dishes in Greenwich Village spots before bolting to Europe...
...Maybe we were living through historic times...
...During the funeral I thought of that day in the early 1960s when I bumped into him during a Chicago winter snowstorm...
...He was sixty-three years old...
...I got it the summer the dollar was high...
...John's for Jimmy—were gathered at the next table...
...Trilling had had a discreet on-campus Columbia Chapel memorial, which had suited him...
...he taught all of us the rhythms of the essay...
...Baldwin desperately wanted the civil rights movement to succeed, but their special need of him placed strains on him in ways beyond their imagining...
...The High Episcopalian ministers in their long white lace robes carried their tall gold crosses...
...He went to Paris because he had that very American idea, specifically of his generation, that it was the civilized place where writers went...
...They were followed by the mourners— a sad family, an aged mother, conservatively dressed members of the black bourgeoisie, Columbia professors in beige raincoats and Burberrys, a few glorious women dressed in the phantasmagorical stuff of a Josephine Baker...
...Peter Manso's book on Mailer records some of it...
...After the funeral I went across the street to the Green Tree...
...Jimmy had so much to combat...
...And black...
...Copyright © 1988 by Barbara Probst Solomon...
...I nearly hadn't worn it, but then I had thought of Jimmy, and the flashy, stylish way he dressed, and thought, what the hell, why not...
...Why were we having this conversation on Amsterdam Avenue about fur coats right after Jimmy's funeral...
...it took away some of the bad feeling I got in the restaurant at the color separateness of the tables...
...Unlike the Beats, both Jimmy and Norman were moralists, in awe of life and death and the grand verities...
...it was as if nothing had happened in between—to me or the world...
...Odetta sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...
...A crowd was gathering in the "Strawberry Fields" opposite the Dakota to sing Beatles music—it was also the seventh anniversary of John Lennon's death...
...He said to me: "So, publishers put a picture of a female author on the back of a book, and in come the reviews...
...His rage at the bitterness of being black in America formed him, but his writing transcended color—his style and way of writing has had an enormous impact on a whole generation, black and white...
...Galindez, the Spanish professor who was kidnapped by Trujillo's agents and dumped out of a plane to crocodiles, never was given anything official at Columbia...
...So Jimmy's funeral was extraordinary...
...even his years in France had been shaped by the books our generation had devoured about Hemingway and Fitzgerald in places like Cap d'Antibes...
...SPRING • 1988 • 221 IAMBS BALDWIN It was no accident that two of the writers who eulogized James Baldwin were women— early on he accepted women as writers, as beings capable of thinking...
...The eulogies by Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison— both of the women close friends—indicated his literary complexity...
...But I felt a chill inside me during the services when Amiri Baraka delivered his revolutionary MarxistLeninist tract in Baldwin's name...
...One of them was a designer...
...But with Mailer it was different...
...What would never have been questioned then was his subtle distortion of reality...
...His first essay, on Harlem, was published in 1948 in Commentary...
...The mourners carried Jimmy's coffin down the cathedral steps to the waiting black limousine parked on Amsterdam Avenue, and the funeral cortege drove slowly back up through Harlem, on the way to the cemetery...
...I thought of my time in the 1950s as a student there...
...He was the first person I knew to own a sheepskin coat, sport a fur hat, and wear an oversize muffler...
...He led Styron to Confessions of Nat Turner...
...In the late 1940s, when Jimmy went there, France still had literary resonance for Americans...
...But I did, because Jimmy had a certain lonely urgency to him, a charisma—a way of making you do what he wanted...
...I suspect he learned a lot from Henry James, some of it about style, some of it about how to convey a special sort of male anguish...
...I see him before me in that wonderful outfit...
...In the media Russia and America were positioned as Allies...
...Because Jimmy wanted to be loved, to please, he sometimes was too vulnerable to the demands of the outside world...
...Jimmy was a novelist at that precise crossroads when the idea of a novel was beginning to falter...
...But some of his best essays were about his discovery in France of his abiding "American-ness...
...Though the emphasis in the funeral was on Jimmy's blackness, in many ways he was a product of the primarily white New York post–World War II literary scene...
...And here was Jimmy's funeral...
...Even harder if you were "bourgeois" and had never in obvious ways suffered or could be thought to be the voice of ill luck, the mute, and the marginal...
...His parents were in the theater...
...it really is beautiful...
...it was an awful night...
...When I was still at Columbia in 1960, I wrote The Beat of Life, which, ironically, was about Columbia students who lived near St...
...He had had a heart attack a few years ago...
...Baldwin's taunts about Norman's Harvardness resulted in lifting Mailer out of his lumbering Dreiserian moralism into something swifter, more modern: "The White Negro" was Mailer's retort to Baldwin...
...In the foreword Baldwin wrote for my novel The Beat of Life he was sharply critical of the Beats: "the dubious protection of the uniform, the pose, the shrillness, the fake poetry and the fake jazz...
...Though James Baldwin became a symbol to the black civil rights movement, he was before that, and I This piece is taken from Ecstasy and Horse-Trading, a collection of essays by Barbara Probst Solomon to be published in September by North Point Press...
...Your coat is such a different way of working fur—where did you get it...
...Real lovehate...
...Understandably, the speakers stressed his role in creating a written moral language for the civil rights movement...
...In the taxi on the way home, I thought about those days and those unexpressed covert landmarks, even angers, that connect people in a generation to each other...
...Students, Columbia University professors, writers, people from publishing, people from Harlem—all sorts and all ages came...
...I blinked...
...Finally he was being buried, in the biggest cathedral in the world, in one of the grandest writer's funerals in New York ever...
...I assumed they had been at the funeral—why stop me on the street...
...Elegantly dressed blacks—they had come to St...
...Literary anger—black and white—wasn't a result of the civil rights movement, but preceded it...
...He didn't leave America just to get away from the unbearable conditions of black life here—after all, he didn't go to Africa...
...The sons never had any fathers to kill and so never became men, which failure is having a disastrous effect on everybody's daughter...
...Images of different deaths, different funerals connected to the place came to mind...
...Cork Smith, my editor, sent galleys of the novel around...
...On the way back I simply wanted to remember the way it had happened...
...How to describe those times...
...Fred Dupee had been my professor...
...There probably were about five thousand people at the cathedral...
...I remember, after it came out, that I met John Updike at a Cambridge dinner party...
...Jimmy's relation to the civil rights movement 220 • DISSENT IAMBS BALDWIN was more ambivalent than the eulogies indicated...
...What Baldwin did was new—he "liberated" our generation from the lost-generation idiom...
...I drove in the middle of a blizzard and then stayed on and talked with him and his friends until three in the morning...
...But was Baldwin's ambition, really, to have been known as a "black writer...
...Maya Angelou's remark that he knew that black women need brothers wasn't merely a warm eulogy but a rarely commented-upon truth about Baldwin...
...We had something to eat and coffee, and he talked about knowing Jimmy in New York in the 1940s...
...It reminded me of my childhood in this city, the World's Fair, and World War II...
...But that's like saying nobody should have died...
...A decade before the feminist movement he expressed those thoughts in what he wrote about my book: . . . it is about the death of love, the hideously whistling space where all our values used to be...
...But as I sat in that vast SPRING • 1988 • 219 IAMBS BALDWIN solemn space, I thought, finally, how American, and full of dreams invented and acted upon, Jimmy's life had been...
...Baldwin was my youth—the only writer of my time to have earned such a funeral...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
