So engaging I read it twice over the weekend/beginning of the week. He is acerbic, sometimes bitterly so, but oddly optimistic. I read the '84 ed. where he writes about the difference in age (31 when it was published and 60 when this ed came out) and was struck by what he wrote then, with more experience and wisdom accrued, about change. Plus I highlighted the shit out of his essays, observational gems in every selection. And the The Melodeers account of their "Journey to Atlanta" remains ludicrous each time I read it, on par with "Equal in Paris" when it comes to shocking behavior. Fav quotes:Preface - "It is not pleasant to be forced to recognize, more than thirty years later, that neither this dynamic nor this necessity have changed. There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and a moral change is the only real one. “ Plus ça change ,” groan the exasperated French (who should certainly know), “ plus c’est le même chose .” (The more it changes, the more it remains the same.) At least they have the style to be truthful about it." (I find this twistedly comical considering they - French authorities - are truthful to a point in Baldwin's essay "Equal in Paris.")Autobiographical Notes - "In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use— I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine— I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme— otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.""One writes out of one thing only— one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. 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 not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else. I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.""I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."Many Thousands Gone - "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. This problem has been faced by all Americans throughout our history— in a way it is our history— and it baffles the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation until today."The Harlem Ghetto - "I have written at perhaps excessive length about the Negro press, principally because its many critics have always seemed to me to make the irrational demand that the nation’s most oppressed minority behave itself at all times with a skill and foresight no one ever expected of the late Joseph Patterson or ever expected of Hearst; and I have tried to give some idea of its tone because it seems to me that it is here that the innate desperation is betrayed.""In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet."Notes of a Native Son - "I had not wanted to go to the casket myself and I certainly had not wished to be led there, but there was no way of avoiding either of these forms. One of the deacons led me up and I looked on my father’s face. I cannot say that it looked like him at all. His blackness had been equivocated by powder and there was no suggestion in that casket of what his power had or could have been. He was simply an old man dead, and it was hard to believe that he had ever given anyone either joy or pain. Yet, his life filled that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his newborn child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to hear concerning man, concerning the life of man."Equal in Paris - "The story of the drap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were “great.” I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real."Stranger in the Village (takes place in Switzerland) - "Joyce is right about history being a nightmare— but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.""People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.""No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So that the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you. - James Baldwin from "The Negro in American Culture", Cross Currents, XI (1961), p. 205In his dramatic and provocative short piece Notes of a Native Son (1955) included in the ten essay volume of the same title, Baldwin connects a series of coincidental events, unifying them in a brilliantly conceived aesthetic design. Segmented in three parts, he reviews: an act of rage against a waitress in a restaurant; his father's death and his sister's birth; a race riot in Harlem, his father's burial and his 19th birthday. IIn order really to hate white people one has to block so much out of the mind – and the heart – that this hatred becomes an exhaustive and self destructive pose.Baldwin examined parallels between his younger, unenlightened self and his father's characteristic of garnering the enmity of many with his often unchecked fury. An experience of discrimination in a New Jersey restaurant ignited Baldwin's already building rage, leading him to throw a water pitcher at a waitress. Suddenly frightened by what he had done, he fled the scene, later speculating: "I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart." III imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.July 29th, 1943 : The coincidence of his sister's birth, the same day as the death of his father - a man who was, to Baldwin, "certainly the most bitter man I have ever met," whom he considered was poisoned by the intense loathing, fear and cruelty he carried in him (diagnosed with mental-illness and later tuberculosis) - symbolically shaped in Baldwin's mind the death of an old toxic bitterness and the forming of an untainted, new beginning, to forgive and accept..."life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and right and wrong...." Ironically, his father's simple words echoed with posthumous meaning, that "bitterness is folly." IIIHarlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need.August 3rd, 1943 : As if "God himself had devised [ it ] ", the day that marked his 19th birthday, the day his father was returned to the earth, a race riot roiled in Harlem. Ghetto members vented their anger, fought one other, destroyed and looted in "directionless, hopeless bitterness", leaving smashed glass and rubble as 'spoils' of injustice, anarchy, discontent and hatred. These events deeply affected Baldwin who upon reflection sought a change from ill-will to good, to let go the demons and darkness that threatened to consume him - the hatred, bitterness, rage, violence, disillusionment, the social problems perpetuated by 'being Negro in America.'It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.As a writer, Baldwin depended greatly on his past experiences, grasping at every bittersweet drop. "I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly." Whether by coincidence or divine making, Baldwin's reflection on those fateful few days was spiritual, cleansing, revelatory, life-saving. From it germinated a new philosophy and idealism that lingered strongly and eternally, nourishing a poetic power and sustaining a literary genius for many years hence. First read February 27th, 2014
What do You think about Notes Of A Native Son (1984)?
This is a great collection of Baldwin's essays. It's only semi-autobiographical, because he seems to veer away from the specifics of his home life a little bit, at least in the beginning (which was pretty damn rough). It's definitely not a memoir, as it's advertised (at least not in our current sense of the word). All of his essays have a point about race relations in America, so anything that he writes about his own experiences in Europe eventually end up back to why American blacks and whites have such difficulties with each other. It's a quick read.
—Lee Anne
"Notes of A Native Son" is a collection of James Baldwin's essays up to the mid-1950's. Subjects are as diverse as a criticism of the movie "Carmen Jones" to his tale of Christmas spent in a Parisian jail. The common thread, of course, is his take on what it means to be black in America (or a Black American in other countries). Not only do the themes still resonate today, but his observations and writing style could be mistaken for a much more recent publication. The essay that stands out as my favorite is the one about his extended visit to a small Swiss village that had never seen a black man before. Pretty powerful stuff.
—Bob Schnell
James Baldwin offers a treasure trove of insights, critical analysis, and wisdom on race & the experience of being alive. Mr. Baldwin is a gifted writer, and I'm eager to get to know him better. "We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void -- ourselves -- it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us -- "from the evil that is in the world." With the same motion, at the same time, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape." -- James Baldwin (from the essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel")
—Zach
