Baldwin developed a passion for reading at an early age and demonstrated a gift for writing during his school years. Baldwin published numerous poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and his early work showed an understanding for sophisticated literary devices in a writer of such a young age. After graduating from high school in , he had to put his plans for college on hold to help support his family, which included seven younger children.
He took whatever work he could find, including laying railroad tracks for the U. Army in New Jersey. During this time, Baldwin frequently encountered discrimination, being turned away from restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was African American. After being fired from the New Jersey job, Baldwin sought other work and struggled to make ends meet. On July 29, , Baldwin lost his father — and gained his eighth sibling the same day.
Devoting himself to writing a novel, Baldwin took odd jobs to support himself. He befriended writer Richard Wright , and through Wright, he was able to land a fellowship in to cover his expenses. Baldwin started getting essays and short stories published in such national periodicals as The Nation , Partisan Review and Commentary.
Three years later, Baldwin made a dramatic change in his life and moved to Paris on another fellowship. The shift in location freed Baldwin to write more about his personal and racial background.
I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. The move marked the beginning of his life as a "transatlantic commuter," dividing his time between France and the United States. Baldwin had his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , published in The loosely autobiographical tale focused on the life of a young man growing up in Harlem grappling with father issues and his religion. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with my father," he later said.
In , Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published his next novel, Giovanni's Room , the following year. The work told the story of an American living in Paris and broke new ground for its complex depiction of homosexuality, a then-taboo subject.
The author would also use his work to explore interracial relationships, another controversial topic for the times, as seen in the novel Another Country.
Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women. I relished the attention and the relative immunity from punishment that my new status gave me, and I relished, above all, the sudden right to privacy.
It had to be recognized, after all, that I was still a schoolboy, with my schoolwork to do, and I was also expected to prepare at least one sermon a week. During what we may call my heyday, I preached much more often than that. This meant that there were hours and even whole days when I could not be interrupted—not even by my father.
I had immobilized him. It took rather more time for me to realize that I had also immobilized myself, and had escaped from nothing whatever. When Baldwin was just 15 years old, he met American painter Beauford Delaney, whom he quickly came to consider both a great friend and mentor.
Baldwin also found a sort of father figure in the artist and would often refer to Delaney as his " spiritual father. James Baldwin and Maya Angelou shared a special relationship. At some point in the evening, many of the guests began sharing stories of their childhood, and Judy was particularly moved by Angelou's tale.
Judy shared Angelou's story with Random House editor Robert Loomis, and urged him to ask Angelou to write a book—but Angelou declined, saying that she was wrote poems and plays, not books. Neither had my discomfort with the way he had finally compromised that perspective. James Baldwin was disenfranchised from the start. Born James Arthur Jones, in Harlem Hospital, on August 2, , he was the illegitimate child of Emma Berdis Jones, who worked as a cleaning woman to support herself and her son.
He never knew his biological father. In , his mother married a Baptist preacher named David Baldwin; together, they reared eight other children, in a series of Harlem tenements. In the midst of the anger and chaos of this household, the young Baldwin developed an insatiable appetite for literature.
In fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on—except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. Escape was intimately bound up with issues of race. He would have refused permission if he dared. The fact that he did not dare caused me to despise him. The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would. Among his classmates were the future writer Emile Capouya, the future editor Sol Stein, and the future photographer Richard Avedon, with whom Baldwin coedited the school magazine, The Magpie.
But even as Baldwin was travelling beyond the boundaries of the black community he was also trying to find his place in it. He underwent a religious conversion when he turned fourteen, began preaching shortly afterward, and proved to be good at it.
Capouya believed that his friend remained in the church out of cowardice:. He knew that I spent all day Sunday in church—the point, precisely, of the challenge. At one-thirty, I tiptoed out. That was how I left the church. He was seventeen.
Shortly afterward, he left home, but he continued to help support his large family, working first at a defense plant in New Jersey, and then at a meatpacking plant in Manhattan. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood. Baldwin buried his stepfather, moved to Greenwich Village, and embarked on a new life as a bohemian. His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me. Though the notion of suffering. At this point, the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew.
The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for Moses to lead him out of Egypt. It is likely that this connection in suffering was clear to him as a citizen of Harlem, where the Jew was stigmatized for his whiteness, just as blacks were marked in the larger world for their blackness.
But such observations must have also strengthened his sense of belonging to his new intellectual community. Certainly this community helped to redefine Baldwin. And nothing is more necessary to a writer than attention. And I loved him. The reviews and essays Baldwin wrote for The Nation and other magazines are models of linguistic precision and critical acuity. In them he laid the groundwork for the themes he would explore and develop in his later essays: the tensions between blacks and Jews; black stereotypes in film; the effect of poverty on everyday life.
At the same time, he was developing a style as a writer—a style that blended a full-throated preacherly cadence with the astringent obliquities of a semi-closeted queen. Baldwin was also struggling to embrace a wider racial vision. In November, , Baldwin decided to leave the country. He arrived with just over forty dollars to his name and few contacts other than Richard Wright, who had arrived there two years earlier.
But postwar Paris proved to be a refuge for a number of black Americans. And black Americans who went there, from Richard Wright to Sidney Bechet, were so colorful, and so talented, and so marvellous, and so exotic.
0コメント