James Baldwin

James Baldwin: A Biography

By David Leeming

Henry Holt & Co, 1995. 442 pp., $26.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/8984

Australian censors, in their own perverse way, have guided many Australians to good, challenging writers. James Baldwin, US essayist, novelist and playwright, was high on their list in the '50s and '60s.

Baldwin was a black homosexual who wrote some of the most angry yet sensitive works on the crippling effects of racism and homophobia on victims and perpetrators alike, who saw value in social and sexual relationships between black and white, and who was watched by the FBI for his growing black militancy. No wonder our political and moral guardians banned his books. Fortunately, the movement that Baldwin was part of has broken the censors' shackles.

The biography of Baldwin, who died in 1987, by David Leeming takes us into the bruised, traumatic but triumphant personal world of Baldwin. Born in 1924 in New York's Harlem, Baldwin became a preacher at age 14 but soon left the church to take up writing as his life's work. He left for Paris in 1948 after one too many "we don't serve Negroes here" in one too many restaurants. In 1956, the growing civil rights struggle in the US South drew him back. The bombing of integrationist schools, murders of blacks and rampant discrimination appalled Baldwin.

He threw in his lot with Martin Luther King, although Baldwin became dissatisfied with King's non-violence and Christian bourgeois values. The black pride of the Nation of Islam attracted him, but he was more in tune with one of that movement's one-time sons — Malcolm X — and he liked the defiance, if not the Marxist politics, of George Jackson and Angela Davis.

In the end, however, Baldwin occupied his own individual political and writer's space in the black civil rights movement. He rejected separatism, always seeing in even the most disgusting racist a "complex and redeemable humanity". Eldridge Cleaver overreacted, attacking Baldwin for his "shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic, love of the whites".

Baldwin warned against the gun as a strategy for liberation, arguing that love was the only antidote to hatred and bigotry. This drew the ire of some young black militants in the Black Panthers who saw him as passe and an "Uncle Tom". Baldwin's real limitation, however, was his rejection of politics. Although briefly a member of a Trotskyist group in Greenwich Village in 1943, Baldwin was suspicious of all "ideologies", preferring to write on the African American condition from the "human" rather than the "political" perspective, divorcing two perspectives that should be complementary.

Baldwin despaired at the apparent inability of white US workers to fight even for themselves, let alone for black rights. His one foray into union issues was to protest the Longshoremen's (wharfies) union's complicity in discriminatory, anti-black hiring practices. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote, "Consider the history of labour in a country in which, spiritually speaking, there are no workers, only candidates for the hand of the boss's daughter". This pessimism blunted the edge of Baldwin's anti-racist activism and writing.

Nevertheless, his books deserved the enthusiastic reception they received in the dark days of southern vigilantes and northern liberal faint-hearts in the racist United States. Although most of his work (like Leeming's biography) hangs politically directionless in the rhetorical stratosphere of his "human" perspective, James Baldwin's works gave, and still give, an unsurpassed personal voice to the social and political struggles of black people the world over.