So salvation is a difficult word to use in such a context. It’s not happening to me in the same way, because I’m James Baldwin I’m not riding the subways and I’m not looking for a place to live. I’m not so sure! I’m not sure I’ve escaped anything. And they don’t even know they’re doing it. The whole society has decided to make you nothing.
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You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You begin to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France-it was a matter of getting out of America. I wasn’t part of any community until I later became the Angry Young Man in New York. I went through this period where I was very much alone, and wanted to be. And she had to climb five flights of stairs every morning to make sure I was kept alive. An old, old lady, a great old matriarch, nursed me back to health after three months she used old folk remedies. This Corsican family, for reasons I’ll never understand, took care of me. To my surprise I wasn’t thrown out of the hotel. Borrowing money whenever I could-often at the last minute-I moved from one hotel to another, not knowing what was going to happen to me. The forty dollars I came with, I recall, lasted me two or three days. Later, when I’d encountered other Americans, I began to avoid them because they had more money than I did and I didn’t want to feel like a freeloader. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t want to know anyone. When I arrived in Paris in 1948 I didn’t know a word of French. My best friend had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me.
Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York. Would you tell us how you came to leave the States? His most recent work includes The Devil Finds Work, an attack on racial bias and fear in the film industry, and a novel, Just Above My Head, which draws on his experiences as a civil-rights activist in the 1960s. It is piled with writing utensils and drafts of several works-in-progress: a novel, a play, a scenario, essays on the Atlanta child murders, these last compiled in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Baldwin’s mood had brightened considerably since the previous day, and we entered the office and study he refers to as his “torture chamber.”īaldwin writes in longhand (“you achieve shorter declarative sentences”) on the standard legal pad, although a large, old Adler electric sits on one end of his desk-a rectangular oak plank with rattan chairs on either side. Returning Sunday at Baldwin’s invitation, the sun was shining and we were able to lunch outdoors at a picnic table, shaded by a bower that opened onto property dotted with fruit trees and a spectacular view of the Mediterranean littoral.
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During the blackouts we would discuss subjects at random or wait in silence while sipping our drinks. Erratic power shortages caused by the storm interrupted the tape machine by our side. Saturday, a storm raged amid intolerable heat and humidity, causing Baldwin’s minor case of arthritis to pain his writing hand (left) and wrist. We lunched on an August weekend, together with seasonal guests and his secretary. Paul de Vence, where he has made his home for the past ten years. Our second talks were held at Baldwin’s poutres-and-stone villa in St. It was in Paris, he says, that he was first able to come to grips with his explosive relationship with himself and America. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years of a burgeoning career and wrote his first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, along with his best-known collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. Photograph by Allan Warren, The Paris Review No. Interviewed by Jordan Elgrably Issue 91, Spring 1984