James Baldwin At 100
Photo: © 1974 - Dutch National Archives

James Baldwin At 100

 © Jeffrey Robinson, 2024

 

My old pal Jimmy Baldwin, who died in December 1987 at the age of 63, would have turned 100 this week.

Not surprisingly, because he was who he was, there are loads of people who knew him – or thought they knew him, or wanted to know him – suddenly coming out from the shadows of literary hiding places to remind the world what an important writer he was. Rightly, he is considered one of the most important American authors and essayists of the 20th century.

And, what an important player he was in the civil rights movement. He was respected for his ability to express controlled anger by Martin and Malcolm and Medgar - and befriended by them - and also enormously admired by Bobby Kennedy who called on Jimmy to help him and his brother John understand how and why the American dream had come at the expense of the black man.

And, what an important “observer” he was – his word, not mine – of the gay movement. Being out was who he was and, except in his fiction, it wasn’t something he dwelled on.

Jimmy made the world a better place, putting his honest and clean elegance into prose.

 *****

Born in Harlem with the name James Arthur Jones, never having known who his father was and therefore given his mother’s last name – she was Emma Jones - he was handed a new last name at the age of three when she married an itinerant Baptist preacher named David Baldwin.

Growing up on East 128th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues – eventually with eight brothers and sisters, plus a family full of aunts and uncles and cousins living on the same black, and his cherished grandmother in there, too – some of his childhood haunts are still there.

While the storefront churches where, at the age of 14, he was preaching on Sunday mornings, might be gone, just across the street from his home was PS 24, the school that is today Harlem Renaissance Highschool. That’s where he decided he wanted to be a writer and where he wrote a play that one of the teachers actually staged.

A walk and a half away, was the 135th Street Library, a three story turn of the century building with a huge floor-to-ceiling bay window on the second floor. It’s still part of New York’s public library system. Maybe someday they’ll rename it The James Baldwin Library, which would be fitting because it had the most profound influence on him. He told me that as a kid he went there three and four times a week. "I read every book in the place. I mean, every single book in that library.”

During high school, up in the Bronx at DeWitt Clinton, he wrote anything and everything he could. Essays. Criticisms. Observations. It not only made him a star there, it encouraged him to the point that, once he was old enough to leave home, he moved downtown to the Village where he wrote more essays, criticisms and observations. Little by little, he started getting paid for his writing.

After several years, feeling increasingly uncomfortable as a gay black man in post-WW2 America, he moved to Europe to feel free-er, and to write more and better. There was a short period when he wrote in Turkey, overwhelmed by Istanbul, but mostly he wrote in France.

By the time he was 25, Jimmy was on everyone’s radar as a budding star. Then came three breathtaking books. A novel, “Go Tell It To The Mountain” in 1953; a series of ten essays on race in America, “Notes Of A Native Son” in 1955; and the groundbreaking novel “Giovanni’s Room” in 1956.

That book, describing a love affair between a black man and a white man, horrified his American publisher.

Jimmy told me, “The publisher announced that he was going to do me a huge favor and save my career by changing it to Giovanna’s Room. He said he wasn’t exactly sure that the country would accept a black man with a white woman, but he was positive that in 1950s America, the country would never accept two men of different races.”

Enraged that his publisher had so badly missed the point, he took it back and published it first in England.

Come the 1960s, he wrote two more virtuoso novels - “Another Country” and “Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone” - plus increasingly important essays on race, helping to fuel the civil rights movement.  

I told him I’d been blown away by “Train.” I still believe that Leo Proudhammer is Jimmy’s greatest character. I begged him to write a sequel. He politely said he’d think about it, then told me that Harold Robbins – at the time, the most successful author on the planet, selling 25,000 books a day worldwide – wanted to make the movie of “Train.” I asked how come it never happened. Jimmy said, because Harold invited him to Los Angeles with a round trip ticket... in tourist class.

*****

It was in 1970 when Jimmy moved to the south of France, taking up residence in a wonderful old “mas” – a traditional provincial farm house – on the road up to the walled Riviera village of St. Paul de Vence.

I showed up in the south of France in early 1971, eventually moving into a non-descript village outside Nice, and into a cottage on an old couple’s property. My place consisted of three tiny rooms upstairs, a big terrace, and a separate studio apartment downstairs that became my office. In between upstairs and downstairs, the old guy who owned the property parked his vintage mid-1950s Renault.

By then, Jimmy was a very big deal, and almost certainly in the annual discussion for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And while he waved it off nonchalantly, the one time I mentioned it, I could see it was an oversight that bothered him.

He would live in that farm house for the last 17 years of his life. A few years ago, it was torn down to build a tacky apartment house.

In the beginning, I was struggling to pay the bills with short stories for women’s magazines and feature journalism, first for the Christian Science Monitor out of Boston – in those days, it was one of the five newspapers read daily in the Oval Office – and later the International Herald Tribune out of Paris. Before long, my features were appearing regularly on the back page of the IHT, which for any writer in Europe – but especially a young one - was like playing Carnegie Hall.

As was the case with most Americans in Europe in those days, Jimmy read the IHT every day. Somehow, I never found out how, someone he knew mentioned that I was writing in a small village outside Nice, and he said, “I want to meet him. Invite him to the Colombe D’Or for drinks.”

Two Things:

First, the Colombe D’Or is a very fancy and equally famous restaurant with a boutique hotel attached, perched at the entrance of St. Paul de Vence. While I later got to know it well, in those days I not only couldn’t afford a seat at the bar, I barely had bus fare to get there. For Jimmy, this was his local.

Second, inviting me to meet the man was part of a longstanding literary tradition that is not widely discussed. The guy who’s made it says hello to the kid trying to make it, pays for a vodka tonic and imparts wisdom and encouragement. He did it, not because I could do anything for him, but because along the way others did it for him. I’ve done it, just as Jimmy did. Just as Anthony Burgess, Graham Green and even the richest cheapskate Harold Robbins were all happy – to varying degrees – to chat, to impart wisdom and to encourage me.

Harold, who happened to have a real knack as a story teller but was, most of the time, totally full of himself, lived in Cannes. He told me he was the Charles Dickens of the 20th century. I wanted to say, “But Dickens could write.”

Anthony Burgess was in Monaco. He sat me down in between his writing desk and his upright piano, then suggested, “If you write something well enough, the reader should be able to play it on the piano.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Except he was fun.

As for Graham Green, who lived in Antibes, when he said, come on up, I said, “For Tea?” He replied, “No, for Scotch.”

They took the time because it is a way of giving back. Because they each understood how words of encouragement from someone who’s been there and done that, goes a long way towards helping someone struggling to write to forget that he’s hungry.

These days I don’t do it as often as I probably should - in fact, only rarely - but that’s because time is running short. It’s autumn. And there are still many things left to do before the winter snows.

*****

So Jimmy and I sat in the tiny bar at the Colombe d’Or for several hours and spoke about writing, about hopes, about jazz, about ambition and about life. At the end of that early evening, he told me, “Stop by the house anytime.”

For the next decade and a half, I did.

Seeing Jimmy to talk about anything and everything was part of the draw. It was also because you never knew who you were going to meet at his place. From Harry Belafonte, Sydney Portier, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret to some rough looking black truck driver whom Jimmy had befriended for a lost weekend.

One day, when he said, come for lunch, I walked in to find Nina Simone sitting at his table looking slightly worse for wear. Jimmy didn’t look too happy either. She’d been invited to perform at the annual music industry’s international conference, MIDEM, but had gotten difficult.

The day before that lunch she’d invited Jimmy to her concert in Cannes. I can’t recall if she’d become discontent with her accommodations - a suite at the Carlton - the day before the concert or right after it, but she was now living at Jimmy’s place.

Normally, that would not have been a problem for either of them. But her concert was. She took the stage to rapturous applause, stood next to her piano, looked out at the audience and pointed to Jimmy. She introduced him and invited him to come on stage. He didn’t want to. So she explained that unless James Baldwin was sitting on the piano bench next to her while she sang, there would be no concert.

He later confessed to me that he’d never been so embarrassed in his life.

Needless to say, lunch was quiet.

The jolliest and most memorable lunches with Jimmy were up the road and into the hills behind Vence, at the Arman’s.

The French/American "new realist" sculptor Arman – whose first name Armand got changed along the way, while his last name, Fernandez, simply disappeared - together with his sensational American wife Corice became my Gerald and Sara Murphy. (Sorry for the obscure literary reference but Scott Fitzgerald's “Tender Is The Night” is dedicated to Murphys along with the note, “Many Fetes.”)

And with Corice and Arman, there were indeed many fetes.

They quickly became my closest friends. He’s gone but she is, forever, family.

They lived in a splendid modern villa with a huge terrace overlooking the grounds. And that terrace, with its the long stone table, was the site of hundreds of, if not thousands of – I only exaggerate a little – memorable five hour lunches that Corice cooked so magnificently that she was well worthy of Michelin stars.

Lunch began at 1 and everyone was still at the table, laughing and telling stories until just before sunset.

Jimmy was there, as were various actors, painters, sculptors, politicians, rock stars and, more often than not, the inimitable Bobby Short.

Bobby, whose appearances in the showroom at the Carlyle in New York – that today bears his name - were always sell outs. He summered in his wonderful villa in Mougins, and over decades of summers, Bobby’s presence was constantly a treat. But until one of those lunches, Bobby and Jimmy had never met.

When they did, it was as if they’d known each other all their lives. Given who they were, they sort of had.

It was that day when Jimmy made an interesting confession. He’d just published “If Beale Street Could Talk,” a contemporary love story set in Harlem that deals with inequalities of the justice system. He said that Penthouse Magazine, a now defunct, then slightly more in-your-face version of Playboy, had offered him $10,000 to run a specific chapter of the book.

He turned it down, announcing to everyone at the table, “I am not going to have my kids fucking for the first time in that magazine.”

Everyone at the table applauded.

I whispered to Bobby, “There’s a song in that,” he nodded, “Indeed there is,” and spent the rest of his life singing Cole Porter, instead.

Finally, there was also my annual 4th of July party on the terrace of my little place, which I held every August because that’s when my Parisian friends were in the south. I made fancy French folk eat cheeseburgers, chili con carne and homemade cheesecake on paper plates. They conceded the paper plates for me. The Coca-Cola went untouched.

One year, Jimmy was talking to Anthony Burgess when a young British novelist I knew came up to say hello to them. Jimmy and Anthony were polite, shook his hand and asked him name.

He answered, “Ken Follett.”

They smiled politely and went right back to talking about whatever it was they’d been talking about, neither of them having any idea that this British guy was selling more books than both of them put together.

After a dozen years in the south of France, it was time for me to stop being Peter Pan. By then I’d met a beautiful French brunette who laughed, and decided to kidnap her to England. We lived there for the next 25 years – her and me against the world, driving on the wrong side of the street – and punching out two (absolutely sensational) half-breed kids.

But before I did anything that serious, I needed to introduce her to my friend Jimmy. In a funny way, I think I kind of wanted his approval. Aline didn’t quite know who he was, but she understood everything about him when we arrived at his place, when he opened the door and when she saw his face.

She was smitten.

Jimmy was short and tiny, but his face was huge, with protuberant eyes, a large mouth and a cavernous space between his upper two front teeth, which lit up his face when he smiled and laughed. It was sheer magic.

He was sheer magic.

We visited with him for the afternoon and Aline couldn’t take her eyes off him.

We would see him many times again over those final six or seven years of his life, in the south of France and in Paris, but the memory that stays with me for eternity is of Jimmy at his gate as Aline and I were leaving.

He hugged her and kissed both her cheeks and told her, in French, that she was beautiful and that he was so glad to meet her. Then he turned to me. With those eyes bulging and that mouth wide open, he said in his best Harlem-hood tone of voice, “You’re... a... lucky... guy.”

I was. And I am. Not just because Aline has been my partner in crime for 40 years, but because, once upon a time, James Baldwin was my friend.

Happy birthday, pal.

#####

      

Shout out to another friend, Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude Jr, whose bestselling book on Jimmy and his America is a major contribution to the life and times of a thoroughly unique man. It's here:

Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own

Also, if you've enjoyed any of this, you can find more on Substack. The site is free to browse and free to subscribe to.

Finally, I’d be flattered if you followed along with me on Linked In.

Better still, send an invite to connect on Linked In and I will happily accept. I’d welcome your company.

 

Nick Kenton

Senior Television Producer and Show Runner

5mo

Beautiful words and story… St Paul de Vence is a magical place. Thank you.

Lester Joseph

President, Joseph AML Consulting LLC

5mo

Great story Jeffrey! Thank you for sharing it. You’re the best!

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