Letter to Jimmy

3. in the footsteps of Professor Wright

You arrive in Paris on November 11, 1948.

You live in small hotels, first in the rue du Dragon, then in the rue de Verneuil, not far from the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in rooms often rented to students, whose landlords must be indulgent at the end of the month when it comes time to collect the rent.

You pick up the Bohemian life you had been living in Greenwich village very easily. Reading Henry James enthralls you, while at the same time the people of Saint-Germain bore you. You prefer instead the common people you encounter in cafés, and the North Africans and black Africans with whom you discuss their situation. Nevertheless, as this is the fate of expatriates, you also dine in the homes of your — usually white — fellow countrymen. During this period, you meet Saul Bellow, among others.

Your quest for your own identity explains your participation in these gatherings. You are caught in the trap of frequently spending time with your white fellow Americans. If such a situation helps you to better understand yourself, outside of the issue of race, it cuts you off for some time from French society, whom you frequent very little — you do not yet speak French, which does not help you meet anyone. Meeting other Americans reveals a shocking reality to you: the white American is as lost as you are, and, throughout the course of your discussions, everyone avoids the problem at the core of American society — the question of race. It is far easier to evoke the beauty of the Champs-Elysées or of the Eiffel Tower. .

Your mentor Richard Wright is already in Paris with his family. When you left New York, you had hidden the address of this venerable writer in your bag, as if it were a good-luck charm. Back home, he had always supported you, even helped you, in becoming an “honest man and a good writer.” And to some extent, even if you never clearly admitted this, it is because Wright is in the French capital that you feel comfortable with the idea of going there yourself.

People in the literary circle of black American exiles in Paris — a social circle Michel Fabre calls the “black bank”—know that a young author from Harlem is arriving. They had heard of him thanks to several articles published in various magazines and literary journals. Some had known him in Greenwich Village, while others were set to discover at last this “young, tense man, slight in stature, with extravagant hand gestures and a facial expression that could veer from tragic to comic. .”³⁶

This environment reminds you of the circumstances in which you met Richard Wright in New York, at the end of 1944. At this time, you are twenty years old. Wright, at thirty-six, is already famous thanks to his novels, especially Native Son. He is the first black American to have published a bestseller, and the tale that he narrates in his novel, about Bigger Thomas, a man of color who murders a rich white woman who is in love with him, incites a fury of protest. His comrades in the Communist Party in particular criticize him for portraying such a negative image of a black man. Be that as it may, Wright had achieved his goal: to expose the reality of American society, to express through Bigger Thomas’s character what you would later describe as “fury” and “hatred”, as a challenge to an America deaf to the demands of blacks.

Wright criticizes the American army head on, condemning their racism against blacks. He refuses to serve during the war because, as he underscores in a letter to one of his friends, “they ask us to die for a freedom that we have never known.” One of Wright’s biographers, Hazel Rowley, tells of how, in 1947, the writer distances himself from America, as do most of his black counterparts. Wright is encouraged by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and, in the end, settles in the City of Light with his wife — a Jewish American woman.³⁷

It would be an understatement to say that your admiration for Wright’s journey knows no bounds. You have read and re-read Native Son to the point that is serves as inspiration for the title of your collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. You dream of being like him because he had overcome the prevailing fatalism of his surroundings: “I had identified with him long before we met: [. .] his example had helped me to survive. He was black, he was young, he had come out of the Mississippi nightmare and the Chicago slums, and he was a writer. He proved it could be done — proved it to me and gave me an arm against all those others who assured me it could not be done.”³⁸

You want to meet him, talk with him; learn from your elder the meaning behind the effort, the discipline, and the demands of writing. And, while you are at it, how to achieve the same success.

Around this time, you knock on the door to his house in Brooklyn. The writer welcomes you with open arms, much to your great surprise, you who expected to find yourself face to face with an emotionally distant author, walled off by his fame. You are impressed, intimidated. He puts you at ease. And while you are enjoying some bourbon, you announce, in the euphoria of the conversation, that you have written fifty or sixty pages, a novel entitled In My Father’s House—which will become Go Tell It On the Mountain. You cannot gauge the level of excitement you have just stirred up in the mentor. He encourages you, and expresses a desire to read the pages that you had not brought with you. Do they exist, or had you made them up?

Leeming reports: “After a few days of furious writing, Baldwin sent the sixty pages to Brooklyn. Within a week Wright had read the manuscript, reacted positively to it, and, by way of Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper & Brothers, had recommended Baldwin for a Eugene F. Saxton Foundation Fellowship. .”³⁹

In 1945, you receive the fellowship of five hundred dollars in order to finish the book. It is a major step forward. And because the same prestigious Harper publishing house that publishes Wright supplies the funds, he speaks of you to his editor. A reading panel reviews your work. It is judged to be unpublishable, and, in the end, rejected both by that publisher and by Doubleday: “. . when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant. .”⁴⁰

It is of course a painful disappointment, but you do not give up trying to emulate your mentor. You ask yourself what, in the end, makes Native Son have such a profound effect? Is it the shock of a white woman’s murder by a black man?

You begin writing a new work, Ignorant Armies, which, as in Wright’s book, tells a tale of murder with the issue of race at the heart of it: Wayne Lonergan, a bisexual, kills his rich wife for reasons related to their sexual problems. The voice of the narrative is unclear: although the story does gather its strength and truth from your life in Greenwich Village, marked by the “problem” of a sexuality that was more and more turned toward men, you speak in the place of your characters. What is more, this book contained two novels in one! The proof? Out of this “rough draft,” two of your most well-known works of fiction would emerge: Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, two novels that portray sexuality, even homosexuality, in the most tragic light.⁴¹

Following in your mentor’s footsteps is not your only source of inspiration for the “failure,” Ignorant Armies. Your own existence prior to your arrival in France is its own series of tragedies. As James Campbell relates to us about your life: “His father, crippled with madness, had died in a psychiatric ward. Baldwin had lost his Christian faith, which had plunged him deep into crisis, and helped him, one could say, accept the awakenings of his homosexuality — something very little accepted in Harlem, where he lived, and accepted even less in Church, where he had been preaching as a young minister.”⁴²

•••

In New York you continue all the while to have meetings with your mentor. He takes off for Paris in 1946.

France will be the stage for your confrontation. Wright is as yet unaware that the pupil who had knocked on his front door had grown up, and, to survive, would need to trace his own path. Everything can perhaps be summed up with terrifying clarity in the following words: “His work was a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself. [. .] Richard was hurt because I had not given him credit for any human feelings or failings. And indeed I had not, he had never really been a human being for me, he had been an idol. And idols are created in order to be destroyed.”⁴³