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The Private Life: On James Baldwin

“From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed.”

For example, in an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he sought to explode the myth of the original, heroic, white settlers in America: “What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go some place else to make it. In the early sixties, Baldwin spoke in an interview with Mademoiselle magazine about sexuality in his customarily challenging tone: “American males are the only people I’ve ever encountered in the world who are willing to go on the needle before they go to bed with each other.” From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed—to be moved from the narrow confines of the public realm back towards the unsettled (and unbounded) space of the self, the questing, uneasy spirit.

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