Hilton Als’s Essential James Baldwin

A hundred and one years after James Baldwin’s birth, the writer has become as much an icon as a public intellectual can be—a status that, if justified by the beauty of his prose and the novelty of his thought, also risks obscuring the richness and variety of his body of work, which encompasses novels and essays that explore race, homosexuality, film, family, American life, and more. Hilton Als, a staff writer who has written about Baldwin many times, joined us to share a few essential entries from Baldwin’s bibliography. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Devil Finds Work

This is one of Baldwin’s late books, published in 1976, when he was fifty-one—a little more than ten years before he died. It’s about the ways in which race figures in American and Western European cinema, and about the subterranean areas of your mind as affected by the light and power of cinema.

It begins with Baldwin’s love of female movie stars—such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford—and how the fictional women they played reminded him of people in his real life. At the time that Baldwin encountered these women onscreen, he was one of many children in a poverty-stricken family, living in Harlem, and the movies were, I think, a way for him to understand the power of fiction, and to find safety from the chaotic emotional rigidity of his father’s strict Baptist home. It so happened, of course, that the brown or dark figure in the movies at the time was generally a villain. Baldwin writes about how strange it was to look back and realize that he was always cheering for the good guy, who was white—that there was this dissonance between the white figure on the screen and himself.

“The Devil Finds Work” shows him at a moment when he has earned the right to speak with a greater freedom of form. In his later books—this one and “No Name in the Street,” in particular—the structure is very different from his earlier works, which have a great formal beauty but are recognizable in structure. Before, he was a dedicated student of people like Henry James, but as he grew as an artist, his ideas about what an essay could be grow much more expansive.

Notes of a Native Son

“Notes of a Native Son” is just one of those landmark collections about which the less said the better. I think one of the things we can say is that Baldwin’s friend Sol Stein, whom he knew from high school, and who edited the book, had a wonderful idea, which was to tell him that an essay collection has to have a narrative. That’s when Baldwin sat down and wrote the title piece, which is based around an account of his father’s funeral, of how racism is metabolized in American life.

I think I read it for the first time in junior high school. I remember being very intrigued by the cover. It looked like a Romare Bearden collage, and I did judge books by their covers in those days. I think I read the title essay first, and, because I had a rather complicated relationship with my own father, I was amazed that you could step out of your sense of loyalty—that you could speak of family secrets, whether they were racial or familial, out in the world. It was incredibly eye-opening for me, and heart-opening, a kind of shock. That all you had was your voice, and what were you going to do with it? Were you going to stifle it, in order to be a proper citizen in a world that really hadn’t accounted for you? Or were you going to speak and, therefore, be yourself?

Go Tell It on the Mountain

This is Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical début novel. It’s also his best novel, because it’s his most felt, understood, and imagined book. He took the lives of some family members and made a narrative of his own freedom, and of his own desire to not be with those people. But you can’t leave, you can’t become the prodigal son, without understanding why you’re the prodigal son.

The book revolves around the young son of a preacher, but encompasses, too, the lives of his father, mother, and aunt. The stories of those characters—particularly the aunt—are incredibly affective and beautifully realized. I think that, as a boy, he must have pictured what his own family’s lives were like before they became whoever they were going to become as adults. It was his desire to understand them that really feeds the book’s power.

I feel there’s something he’s struggling with a lot in his fiction, which is, How do you make a world when the world around you is so fractured and disintegrating? How can you imagine anything but the terror and the horror that you see? I think that, as a realist novelist, he was trying to get those feelings in there. But he was also a poet, and I think the poet in him got eclipsed by realism, by the demands of the times. Like many people, Baldwin got caught up in the sixties. He had a lot of important work to do publicly. But that doesn’t necessarily feed the isolation required to create a fictional world. And I wish he’d had longer to live in order to get back to being a poet.