Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France
408
Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822372349 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/29/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 105 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Foundations, Façades, and Faces
Through the Glass Blackly, or Domesticating Claustrophobic Terror
I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only. ...
No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. ... I don't see anything in American life — for myself — to aspire to. ... Nothing at all. It's all so very false. So shallow, so plastic, so morally and ethically corrupt.
— Baldwin, in Troupe, "Last Interview (1987)"
About twenty minutes into the documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989), the aging Baldwin, front and center in a black-and-white close-up, describes his condition as an African American writer who has spent the majority of his career away from the United States: "You don't ever leave home. You take your home with you. You better, you know. Otherwise you're homeless." As he writes in "Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone" (1977), too, "when 'home' drops below the horizon, it rises in one's breast and acquires the overwhelming power of menaced love" (PT, 646). Baldwin's politics and poetics of home embody a vexed relationship between their material and metaphorical powers, occupying a contested terrain where affect, location, temporality, identity, and the stories they tell remain in constant tension, assembling and disassembling their own multiple configurations.
Baldwin's comments on home as baggage and unrequited love also cement a different, popular image of him as a cosmopolitan — a supremely confident artist and jetsetter, comfortable living and traveling throughout the world. By the 1960s, he had become a well-known writer, activist, and intellectual; by the 1970s, he was secure financially, living in France, his books translated into multiple languages and read all over the world. Yet, while his fame outside his home country seemed to have reached its apotheosis, his works were not selling well in the United States. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, his popularity declined and reviews of his works were predominantly negative. Never able to produce much during visits to New York City — the place of his birth, which he visited often to be with friends and his large, beloved family — Baldwin kept searching for writing havens outside his homeland.
A child of impoverished African American migrants from Louisiana and Maryland who sought better jobs and economic stability in the industrial North, Baldwin grew up keenly aware of his parents' desperate efforts to keep their large family housed, clothed, and fed in a city that offered only badly paid domestic work to women of color, and equally badly paid menial jobs to the men. Born in the Harlem Hospital to a single mother who never disclosed the identity of his biological father and later married a preacher named David Baldwin, young James was raised among those he calls the "truly needy," in housing projects situated alongside what he calls the "American Park Avenue," uptown in Harlem (PT, 680). His elementary school teacher, Orilla Miller, who worked for the Works Progress Administration in New York City, often visited bearing clothing, cod-liver oil, and books for the sickly child. Young James was also his mother's right hand, helping to raise eight stepsiblings born in quick succession, who later became his homeland "tribe."
As he recalls in No Name in the Street (1972), the excruciating poverty and hardship of his early life affected them all profoundly, including his tyrannical stepfather: "Between his merciless children, who were terrified of him, the pregnancies, the births, the rats, the murders on Lenox Avenue, the whores who lived downstairs, his job on Long Island ... and his unreciprocated love for the Great God Almighty, it is no wonder our father went mad. We, on the other hand ... simply took over each new child and made it ours" (PT, 451). Baldwin never forgot his lower-class origins or his parents' southern roots: "You can take the child out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the child," he points out in the essay "A Fly in Buttermilk" (1958) (PT, 161). By the 1980s, he maps his genealogy thus: "My father was a son of a slave. ... I'm really a southerner born in the North." His birthplace gave him a vocation as a way out of poverty: "I had to become a writer or perish," he explains, adding a transnational dimension to this process and confirming the position of international intellectual sage it subsequently earned him. "What we call the political vocabulary of this age cannot serve the needs of this age. ... Europe is no longer the center of the world," he pronounces in an interview. We must rethink how we choose our leaders, he writes in "Notes on the House of Bondage" (1980), combining being "Uncle Jimmy" to his nieces and nephews with being a politically engaged intellectual who has frightening relevance for our moment, amid ongoing wars, humanitarian crises, terrorist attacks, and the white supremacist tenor of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath.
Having spent the majority of his writing life abroad, in France (1948–57), Turkey (1961–71), and France again (1971–87), with diverse sojourns in between, Baldwin describes himself euphemistically as being uprooted and living in flux, a "transatlantic commuter, carrying my typewriter everywhere, from Alabama to Sierra Leone to Finland" (AD, 122). Yet he clarifies that he did not so much wish to leave his home country in 1948, as he was driven out of it by desperation, racism, poverty, and homophobia, not to mention the desire to become a writer. In 1961, between travels that later led him to Turkey, he tells Studs Terkel, "I never intended to come back to [the United States]" (JB, 19). As he writes in the introduction to his last volume of essays, The Price of the Ticket (1985), two decades later, "There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. ... The architects of the American State ... decided that the concept of Property was more important — more real — than the possibilities of the human being" (PT, xvii, xix). That Baldwin made human beings and their possibilities central to his works is well known. What is not, however, is how the ideas of home and homelessness and the desire for domesticity have determined these possibilities for his characters as citizens, family and community members, and complex individuals, and how all these factors affected him as an author who made his life story as a black queer American who lived internationally integral to his craft.
A 1961 interview with Studs Terkel contains an early articulation of Baldwin's authorial interest in domesticity as he describes how the famous blues singer Bessie Smith became his creative inspiration during the early 1950s. As the opening bars of Smith's "Backwater Blues" flood the air, images and sounds of ceaseless rain swirl around the singer's persona stranded in her house like a prisoner of the elements, waiting and wailing for a boat to rescue her, "'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more." Somewhat breathlessly, in his still younger-sounding voice, Baldwin emphasizes how much both the contents of Smith's blues songs and her way of performing them shaped his desire to be a writer, or to master and domesticate a certain idiom and delivery that were uniquely her own. What he longed to do was channel them into his work as an artist of the word:
The first time I [ever] heard this record was in Europe, and under very different circumstances than I had ever listened to Bessie in New York. [And] what struck me was that fact that ... she was singing ... about a disaster ... which had almost killed her, and she accepted it and was going beyond it. ... [There's a] fantastic kind of understatement in it. It's the way I want to write. ... When she says "My house fell down and I can't live there no more" — it's a great ... a great sentence. A great achievement.
Rescued by a boat and left "upon some high old lonesome hill," Smith's persona looks over the watery landscape overtaking her collapsing house. Stranded along with "thousands of people ain't got no place to go," yet feeling all alone, shocked, and stuck, she sings her story's conclusion: "Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go / ... Mmm, I can't move no more / Mmm, I can't move no more / There ain't no place for a poor old girl to go."
A somewhat similar scene, and one of the most striking examples illustrating how the desire for writing the way Smith sang of home stayed with Baldwin for decades, appears in his last novel, Just above My Head (1979), located in Harlem, the American South, and western Europe. Although narrated by a man, and with a black queer male artist at its center, it features a complex black woman, Julia Miller, who is key to the book's several braided plotlines and who embodies the story from Smith's "Backwater Blues." A former child preacher prodigy, Julia is so spoiled by her parents, and especially her father's desire for the material profit she makes in the pulpit, that her sanctified-brat refusal to let her seriously ill mother see a doctor until it is too late costs the mother's life. Orphaned at fourteen, with her younger brother sent away to live with relatives in distant New Orleans, she is left alone with her cruel, alcoholic father, who rapes her, usurps her wages, and keeps her a virtual prisoner in their apartment.
Like that of Smith's blueswoman persona, Julia's disaster is of biblical proportions: it obliterates her home and almost kills her, too. And while the physical structure of Julia's house may be still standing, her home and body have been shattered forever. The trauma she must hereafter carry changes her, turning her into a horror-stricken pillar of salt akin to Smith's flood survivor, who is left alone, immobilized, surveying the apocalyptic landscape of despair surrounding her:
Home was not the place she wanted to go, or to be: but she had no place else to go. She walked slowly because she dreaded getting there. ... She would endure ... feeling like something struggling at the bottom of the sea. ... With all her heart, she wanted to flee — she could not move. ... She was sitting still, watching everything crumble, and disappear. ... She had to move, and yet, she waited. ... With all her heart, she wanted to flee — she could not move. She could not move and yet, she knew she must. Soon it would be too late, she would begin to die. (JAMH, 237–38, 240)
Julia's tragic story is told on multiple levels: through Baldwin's elegiac re-writing of Smith's lyrics, cadence, and imagery; by means of other characters' tales about her; and through kaleidoscopic narrative strategies that I return to in chapter 4. It also illustrates what Cheryl A. Wall calls the "blues-inflected line" of African American literary tradition that "insinuates itself at the beat," but also creates a safe space of improvisation, where "singers like Bessie Smith can sing ahead or behind the beat." Most important for my purposes, Julia's story revolves around a tragic loss of home and lifelong efforts to survive and heal the trauma of her childhood by traveling away from the United States and forging domestic spaces and modes of dwelling where she can be safe, find peace, and accept the narrative of her origins and forge a new life.
Standing at the core of Baldwin's epic last and unjustly underappreciated novel, Julia's story is among many throughout Baldwin's oeuvre that offer moving, profound, even revolutionary alternatives to traditional mid-twentieth-century models of black domesticity and stock images of white-picket-fenced homes in dominant American national culture. The majority of Baldwin's works, I argue, engage two powerfully interlinked themes related to this conundrum-riddled subject in the twentieth-century United States: the necessity to survive away from one's home and difficult childhood, and the desire to create alternative kinds of domesticity and modes of dwelling for black bodies that do not fit normative gender, sexual, familial, religious, or social roles and designs. Foregrounding these themes, we can trace their presence and variations throughout Baldwin's novels, plays, and essays. They gain particular urgency and momentum in the works he wrote following his Turkish decade, having settled in the South of France by 1971: If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), The Devil Finds Work (1976), the aforementioned Just above My Head, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), and his last unpublished play, The Welcome Table (1987).
That underexplored period, which Baldwin spent in his last home in the Provençal village of St. Paul-de-Vence in France, is as important to his artistic trajectory as was the Turkish decade that preceded it. His prolific output, experimentation with literary genres and styles, and bold engagement with black musical forms during that time could all be deemed characteristics of "Late Baldwin." That underappreciated incarnation arises from his complex, if not conflicted at times, interrogations of various models of black masculinity in No Name in the Street, through much bolder explorations of genres and gender, as well as racialized sexuality, in the two novels that followed, culminating in The Welcome Table, in which the main character, or his porte-parole, is a black queer female singer. He also began to think of androgyny and nonbinary subjectivity as uniting aspects of identity for all Americans, and he preached these themes in his much-quoted late essay "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood" (1985; later retitled "Here Be Dragons"). These late aesthetics and thematic threads go hand in hand with the writer's autobiographical and autoethnographic explorations of homelessness and exile as a black queer artist who could find his place neither among those African American activists and artists who embraced heterosexist and patriarchal black nationalism or Afrocentrism (and for whom he cared a lot), nor among mainstream white elite establishments that gravitated toward postmodernism and later poststructuralism (for whom he cared little). The 1980s mark Baldwin's sharp turn inward, away from American culture and politics, and especially toward performances of the feminine within and without the United States. To this reader, that introspective turn had as much to do with his interest in nonbinary gendered and raced sexual identity pervading his late works as with his glamorous black women friends — Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Florence Ladd, Bertice Reading, Vertamae Grosvenor — whose company he often enjoyed at his house. His close friendships with French women, and especially Yvonne Roux, the owner of La Colombe d'Or in St. Paul-de-Vence, and the actor Simone Singoret, who lived nearby and was his frequent guest and close companion, helped him craft complex portraits of women characters. Baldwin's late novels, along with essays such as "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood" or "To Crush the Serpent" (1987), reflect these inspirations and his desire for sophisticated, nonnormative, utopian domestic spaces, while building up nonbinary models of the self through an interrogation and frequent disavowal of both white models of gay identity and also black nationalism and politics of respectability.
The works Baldwin wrote during that late period also offer bolder autobiographical revelations concerning circumstances of personal pain and authorial anguish, reflections on his early childhood and family home and deep conflict with his stepfather, whose abuse left enduring trauma. They refer in more intimate detail to his coming of age as a young, bisexual, lower-class artist in Harlem and Greenwich Village, and they document his search for writing havens and modes of dwelling first within and then outside of his home country. However transitory, those domestic spaces he recalls, reimagines, and alternatively forges within and eventually outside the United States helped Baldwin script a new story that could accommodate his complex authorial and private identities — what we might call "black queerness" today, but what Baldwin perceived simply as a sum of his multiple, strange selves ("all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin") as a black American man who loved "some men and some women."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Me and My House"
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Copyright © 2018 Magdalena J. Zaborowska.
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction. If I Am a Part of the American House, and I Am: Vitrines, Fragments, Reassembled Remnants 1
1. Foundations, Facades, and Faces: Through the Glass Blackly, or Domesticating Claustrophobic Terror 51
2. Home Matter: No House in the World, or Reading Transnational, Black Queer Domesticity in St. Paul-de-Vence 85
3. Life Material: Haunted Houses and Welcome Tables, or The First Teacher, the Last Play, and Affectations of Disidentification 145
4. Building Metaphors: "Sitting in the Strangest House I Have Ever Known," or Black Heterotopias from Harlem to San Juan, to Paris, London, and Yonkers 213
5. Black Matters of Value: Erasure, Overlay, Manipulation, or Archiving the Invisible House 295
Notes 317
Bibliography 351
Index 377
What People are Saying About This
“The thing that startles, the trick that steals the breath as one reads Me and My House, is Magdalena J. Zaborowska's unrelenting insistence that James Baldwin was an embodied, social, thriving, and multifaceted individual deeply enmeshed in a vibrantly complicated domesticity. Not only does Zaborowska break through hackneyed accounts of Baldwin's isolation but she also disrupts the clumsy boundaries that separate critic from reader and fiction from criticism, allowing us to understand the work of James Baldwin as not simply material to be studied but also a bright model for the production of our own social and cultural critique.”
“Magdalena J. Zaborowska is one of the foremost experts in the world on James Baldwin. Given her unparalleled access to an unusually substantial amount of source material and her deep knowledge of her subject, Me and My House offers rich new material and fresh ways of understanding Baldwin's relationship with writers, artists, and activists. Specialists and general readers alike will find this book engaging and enlightening.”