DRAGON: The 100 best nonfiction books / No 26 / Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)

Monday, July 25, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 26 / Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)

100 best nonfiction books: No 26 – Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)

Baldwin’s landmark collection of essays explores, in telling language, what it means to be a black man in modern America

Robert McCrum

Monday 25 July 2016

In the spring of 1820, Thomas Jefferson, who, in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, had launched a withering assault on slavery, confessed to an associate that the plight of the American negro was a momentous question, which, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror”.

Race, still the greatest of the unresolved issues within America, has already inspired one entry on this list – No 5, Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. With James Baldwin, African-American literature reaches one of its 20th-century masters in fiction (Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room), a name to stand alongside Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and, most recently, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

Baldwin is also the author of some important nonfiction, several landmark essays of great power and beauty on the place of the black writer in white America. In this genre, Notes of a Native Son is a recent classic. For Henry Louis Gates Jr, it was Baldwin who “named for me the things you feel but couldn’t utter… articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time”. The 10 essays collected in Notes of a Native Son – on subjects ranging from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to 1940s Harlem – distil Baldwin’s thinking. It is a source book for a subject that Langston Hughes described in a review of Notes as “the troubled problems of this troubled Earth”.

James Baldwin

Baldwin frames his work as a crucial journey of self-discovery. He had, for instance, first to confront his complex relationship with his father, a preacher: “He [Baldwin’s father] could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm.”

At the same time, almost as taxing, he had to investigate himself: “I was trying to discover myself – on the whole, when examined, a somewhat dubious notion, since I was also trying to avoid myself.”

In Notes, Baldwin is much franker about the “condundrum of colour” than the complexity of his life as a gay man, perhaps because race could be rhetorically linked to a historical crime: “It is a fearful inheritance, for which untold multitudes, long ago, sold their birthright. Multitudes are doing so, until today. This horror has so welded past and present that it is virtually impossible and certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring in time.”

Describing himself as “a survivor”, Baldwin senses the stirrings of liberation in postwar America and notes the changes that have begun to occur in his lifetime:

“When I was young, I was being told it will take time before a black person can be treated as a human being, but it will happen. We will help to make it happen.”

On top of this struggle, there was for Baldwin the continuing problem, common to all artists, of authenticity: “One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience… The difficulty then, for me, of being a negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation… I have written about being a negro… only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.”

At the same time, unique as it is, Baldwin insists that his is an authentic American story, even if it’s one that “no American is prepared to hear”. He writes: “The story of the negro in America is the story of America… it is not a very pretty story, a shadow which lies athwart our national life. [The negro] is a social not a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged.”

Baldwin is edgy and provocative about this idea: “In our image of the negro breathes the past we deny, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It is this which defeats us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an unenlightened wailing.”

Finally, Baldwin goes on to nail the problem with passion and persuasiveness: “The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land… In the case of the negro the past was taken from him whether he would or no; yet to foreswear it was meaningless and availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite literally on his brow.”

Throughout his writing, Baldwin never shies away from a frank and disquieting acknowledgement of feelings: “There is no negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods… naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter; to violate, out of motives of cruellest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people...”

Despite this admission of rage, Baldwin can also be entertainingly satirical, as in his essay on Carmen Jones: “Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the goat at the same time – and then to peddle the results as ginger ale – has seldom produced anything more arresting than the 1955 production of Carmen Jones.”

All of the foregoing culminates in the title essay, Baldwin’s declaration of independence. Speaking of his struggle to vindicate himself as an artist, he writes: “This fight begins, however, in the heart and it has now been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.”

This becomes a statement of intent which Baldwin would fulfill many times over in the career that followed.

A signature sentence

“I knew about jim-crow but I had never experienced it; I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up: negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realise that I was always the only negro present.”