Abstract
These three images of involuntary alimentary expulsion attest, directly and indirectly, to the curious place of homosexuality in Baldwin’s career—as both central yet often unacknowledged, as audaciously represented yet hedged about with withdrawals and disavowals. In the first quotation, from a 1960 essay, Baldwin presents the artist’s work as an act of compulsive confession, a vomiting up of personal anguish. For Baldwin, this confession entailed the admission early on in his career of his own sexual queerness at a time when such admissions were courageous and dangerous. After earning critical success with a first novel based on his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), and a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin next published a homosexually themed novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956). That Baldwin was acclaimed as a ‘Negro writer’ and that Giovanni’s Room was about a doomed love affair between two white men did not, in the eyes of the reading public, make this confession in any way ‘oblique’.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.1
I gagged, literally, and began to sweat, ran to the water cooler, tried to pull myself together, and returned to the office to explain the intention of my novel.2
I felt that [Eldridge Cleaver] used my public reputation against me both naïvely and unjustly, and I also felt that I was confused in his mind with the unutterable debasement of the male—with all those faggots, punks, and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison, must have made him vomit more than once.3
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Notes
James Baldwin, ‘The Northern Protestant’, in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 246. Original date of essay publication: 1960.
James Baldwin, ‘Notes for The Amen Corner’, in The Amen Corner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 11. Further references are given in the text.
James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 459.
Peter Kerry Powers, ‘The Treacherous Body: Isolation, Confession, and Community in James Baldwin’, American Literature, 77.4 (2005): 806;
W.J. Weatherby, James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 96.
On Baldwin’s partially defensive adoption of the macho rhetoric of Black Power, see Douglas Field, ‘Looking for Jimmy Baldwin: Sex, Privacy, and Black Nationalist Fervor’, Callaloo, 27.2 (2004): 466–469;
Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1990), 61–62.
For a suggestive discussion of the interconnections between shame, race, and male homosexuality in one of the novels, Giovanni’s Room, and elsewhere in Baldwin’s work, see Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where ‘Black’ Meets ‘Queer’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 149–176. Stockton relates images of decomposition in Giovanni’s Room to the shameful notion of ‘homosexual miscegenation’, a preoccupation of the 1950s and 1960s that she also traces in Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Normal Mailer’s infamous 1955 essay ‘The White Negro’, to which Baldwin’s essay, ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, discussed below, is in part a response. On Baldwin and shame,
see also Reed Woodhouse, Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 17–35. 9.
Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), 1.
Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 126.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 38. Further references are given in the text.
The critical narrative of Baldwin’s artistic failure due to political involvement during the 1960s is too widely promulgated to be easily cited. But see, for example, James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of Jimmy Baldwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), who dates the beginning of the decline to 1963 (181). For counter-arguments, which insist on the integral relation of artistic achievement and radical race politics in Baldwin’s work,
see Bill Lyne, ‘God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth: James Baldwin’s Black Radicalism’, Science and Society, 74.1 (2010): 12–36;
and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, ‘A Prophet is Not Without Honor’, Transition, 58 (1994): 90–113.
James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 54.
Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic, 1975), 226.
James Baldwin, ‘Preface to the 1984 Edition’, in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1990), xxxi. Further references are given in the text.
In discussing this essay, my focus is on Baldwin’s account of his career ambition rather than his relationship with Mailer. For discussions of the essay in terms of the latter concern, see Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, 154–158; and Douglas Taylor, ‘Three Lean Cats in a Hall of Mirrors: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver on Race and Masculinity’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 52.1 (2010): 70–101.
James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Stanley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi: 1989), 80.
See, for example, Jerome de Romanet, ‘Revisiting Madeleine and “The Outing”: James Baldwin’s Revision of Gide’s Sexual Politics.’ MELUS, 22, no. 1 (1997): 8; Field, ‘Looking for Jimmy Baldwin,’ 459.
While ‘Preservation of Innocence’ is a fascinating essay, it lacks the autobiographical dimensions of ‘The Male Prison’ and ‘Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood’, and for that reason I do not discuss it here. For analyses, see: Robert J. Corber, ‘Everybody Knew His Name: Reassessing James Baldwin’, Contemporary Literature, 42.1 (2001): 166–167; de Romanet, ‘Revisiting Madeleine and ‘“The Outing”’, 6;
Roderick A. Ferguson, ‘The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption: Modernity, Race, Sexuality and the Cold War’, in James Baldwin Now, edited by Dwight A. McBride (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 235–243.
Baldwin’s insistence on the life-enhancing role of human connection across barriers of, for instance, race, gender, and sexual orientation is consistent throughout his career, though qualified by the deepening of his political radicalism during the 1960s. In a representative moment from a 1962 interview, Baldwin states, ‘When I am writing a novel, I am writing about me and all of you, and the great difficulty is to discover what connects us’ (James Baldwin, Conversations, 26). I dub Baldwin’s emphasis on connection ‘Forsterian’ to indicate Baldwin’s engagement with the mid-twentieth- century American liberal culture iconically represented by Lionel Trilling, for whom Forster was a touchstone, rather than to suggest that Baldwin had a strong interest in Forster himself. In fact, in No Name in the Street, Baldwin approvingly cites Forster’s famous tag ‘Only connect’, but misattributes it to Henry James (385). On Baldwin and liberal culture, see Michael Nowlin, ‘Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the Liberal Imagination’, Arizona Quarterly, 60.2 (2004): 117–140.
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© 2015 Guy Davidson
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Davidson, G. (2015). Sexuality and Shame in James Baldwin’s Career. In: Davidson, G., Evans, N. (eds) Literary Careers in the Modern Era. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478504_6
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