James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son (Classics Club, 20 Books of Summer, Paris in July)

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer." [9] 

James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son is a collection of previously published essays that comes out in book form late in 1955. The original essays appeared between 1948 and 1955 in magazines such as Harper's, Commentary, and Partisan Review. They were somewhat rewritten for the book.

His first, and at that point only published novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, had come out in 1953.

Baldwin gives himself a couple of briefs in this. The first is literary criticism, and two of these essays are probably the most famous in the book: 'Everybody's Protest Novel', about Uncle Tom's Cabin, and 'Many Thousands Gone', about Richard Wright's Native Son. He doesn't really like either one.

Native Son (1940) is also discussed in the essay on Uncle Tom's Cabin, and briefly in other essays. Well, the title of Baldwin's book is Notes of Native Son; the book was on his mind, and that of a lot of the rest of America. Baldwin and Wright had been friends, with Baldwin looking up to the older writer; but these two essays lead to their estrangement. Baldwin lumps the two novels together after noting that the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin are too thin to be believable, and so, even in their avowed political purpose--to stop slavery, to end racism--the novels don't succeed. Worse, the very limitations that Wright portrays in Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, reinforce White prejudice, and are internalized, to their detriment, by Blacks:

"Recording his days of anger he [Wright] has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro...This is the significance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation." [26]

"It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us [white America] makes our victory certain." [28]

Granted, seeing the world through Bigger Thomas' viewpoint limits a broad perspective on Negro culture of the time, or on American culture. Does it eliminate it entirely? Baldwin rather suggests it does, but I'm not sure I think this entirely fair. I've read Native Son, but it's been years, and I'd have to read it again to decide. (And now I want to.) But I doubt I'd agree. I also think Baldwin isn't quite acknowledging how much Native Son means to him. After all, Giovanni's Room, Baldwin's next novel, features a protagonist with limited options who ends up on Death Row, quite similarly to Native Son.

The one other cultural essay is a review of the movie Carmen Jones, which I haven't seen. The movie has Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge and is an all-black retelling of the opera Carmen. It's famous because it's the first Academy Award nomination for best actress given to a Black woman, Dandridge. She didn't win. But Baldwin here is in a fierce and funny mode that he does well.

He's also fierce and funny about Henry Wallace's Progressive Party and Wallace's campaign for president in 1948. Baldwin's younger brother David was part of a vocal group that was invited to sing at churches in Georgia to help get out the vote. They were supposed to be paid and fed. But even Progressives in a good Progressive cause can't be bothered to look after a foursome of black teenage boys--in the South!--who aren't paid, and are barely fed. Worse, the organizers get offended when their negligence is pointed out.

There are several other essays on the American scene of the time: life in Harlem, anti-Semitism in the Black community, the death of his father (step-father in actuality, though always referred to as father in this essay). That last one pairs well with Go Tell It On The Mountain and sheds light on the novel. While the fierce Baldwin can also be funny in a way that feels uniquely his, when he starts making sociological categorizations, I'm afraid his prose can turn ponderous.

"For Paris is, according to legend, the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d'amour,..." [93]

I hadn't really thought about it when I started, but the book works for Paris in July; a third of it or so are his experiences in Paris after he moves there in November of 1948. He describes the American expat community in Paris at the time; American Blacks' relationship to Blacks from French Colonial Africa. The best of these essays--though in some ways the scariest for Baldwin--was on the eight days he spends in a Paris jail over Christmas of 1949. A friend in a fit of pique steals a sheet from a hotel on his way out; Baldwin uses the sheet in his own cheap hotel, because he can't get hotel management to change his sheets. Baldwin is arrested as a receiver of stolen goods. The case seems a joke, but Baldwin spends eight days in jail--more because of the holidays and bureaucracy than anything else, because when he does appear before a judge it's thrown out. But he's a Black man in jail! He knows France isn't America, but while his French is improving, he's not yet fluent. Just how much exactly is France not like America? After a couple of days he begins to wonder.

A book I actually put on my Twenty Books of Summer list...

...because I'd earlier put it on my Classics Club list...

...and a classic is kind of what it is.

It's also more or less an accident that I'm putting this post up on the Fourth of July, but appropriate, too:

"I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." [9]

Page numbers from the Library of America edition of Baldwin's Collected Essays.