A British interviewer once said to James Baldwin (1924-1987), "When you were starting off as a writer you are black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have said to yourself, 'Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?'" Baldwin laughed, "Oh no, I thought I'd hit the jackpot." With this in mind, it is not surprising that themes of identity, sexuality, and justice would dominate Baldwin's work. Baldwin began reading voraciously at a young age, particularly Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). At the age of fourteen, Baldwin gave up reading and his early dreams of writing in order to become a preacher in his family's pentecostal church. However, by seventeen Baldwin had left his ministry and his faith and had decided to become a novelist. Having graduated high school and without the means to go to college, Baldwin lived in Greenwich Village and worked in a New Jersey defense plant before eventually expatriating himself to Paris. In Paris, he worked on his first novel Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)--a novel that drew on his experience in the church--and many of the essays that would comprise Notes of a Native Son (1955). While Baldwin made a fair reputation for himself as a novelist--achieving success with Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962)--he established himself primarily as an essayist with such masterpieces as Notes and The Fire Next Time (1963). A spokesperson for the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin went on to become a national figure, frequently appearing on television debates and news documentaries.
Baldwin's early career was nurtured by the New York Intellectuals, a group of literary critics, philosophers, and artists many of whom had broken with the Communist Party (CP) in the mid-1930s because of Josef Stalin's transformation of the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. Chastened and disillusioned, these intellectuals became known as the anti-Stalinist left. They were fiercely committed to an anti-totalitarian politics. Beyond Stalin's policies, the group also broke with the Party over issues of aesthetics. The CP upheld socialist realist art, which depicts and valorizes images of workers and everyday life and demonized modernism as bourgeois and elitist. In contrast, the New York Intellectuals held that art ought to be judged by its own merits, autonomous from direct political concerns, and championed modernist literature and visual art. Indeed, despite the reactionary politics of many modernist artists, they often claimed that modernist art could, in its own way, be good for a democratic society. As the battles of the 1930s subsided, the New York Intellectuals found themselves at the center of American political and literary life. Their journals Partisan Review and Commentary became taste makers, helping to canonize the modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s and establishing new authors such as Baldwin, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. As they became more central to high culture, they also began to rail against the mass media and popular culture. In their mind, mass culture was both dangerous to democracy (providing the perfect vehicle for propaganda) and high art (robbing it of an audience and stealing its innovations).
Early in his career, when his debt to the Intellectuals was at its height and he depended on them for publishing venues, Baldwin often adopted this discourse to suit his needs. Holding that art ought to be complex and separate from politics, Baldwin's essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949) and "Many Thousand's Gone" (1951) criticized Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1941) for its depiction of Bigger Thomas, an impoverished African-American who accidentally kills the daughter of his white employer and then later goes on a rampage. For Baldwin--although not all of his fellow Intellectuals--Bigger Thomas is little more than an inverted stereotype meant to make a political point. It is not art, but almost a work of propaganda that allows its viewers to feel vindicated simply by reading it. However, Baldwin was just as interested in civil rights as his predecessor, and Baldwin's difficulty early on was to speak candidly and honestly about race in terms that the New York Intellectuals would embrace. "Equal in Paris" (1954), which we are reading for today's class, illustrates this point perfectly. "Equal in Paris" makes allusions to "Before the Law," a story by the Czech modernist Franz Kafka, a figure the Intellectuals adored. At the same time that it avoids the type of direct advocacy that Baldwin found in Native Son, "Equal in Paris" nonetheless attempts to make a point on race.
In 1957, James Baldwin and his high school friend and editor Sol Stein attempted to adapt "Equal in Paris" for the Theatre Guild's United States Steel Hour (1953-63), a drama anthology program then appearing on CBS. Despite their mutual dislike of mass culture, Stein had hoped that he could adapt the essay first for television and then later for the cinema, securing for Baldwin and Stein some much needed extra income. Unfortunately, despite Baldwin and Stein's many modifications to the story, "Equal in Paris" proved too controversial for television in the 1950s. The script was ultimately rejected by the program's producer William Fitelson, who was also the lawyer for Partisan Review. While we will talk about why Baldwin and Stein's adaptation was not produced by the Theatre Guild, as you read the script I want you to think about both the changes the authors made and why it might have not been filmed.
James Baldwin (1327), "Everybody's Protest Novel" & "Equal in Paris" PDF
For interested students, my work on Baldwin can be found at: http://ezproxy.canyons.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1551696175?accountid=38295. Use the current username (bread) and password (butter) to log in.
Study Questions:
1. What is Baldwin's point about race in "Equal in Paris"?
2. How might Baldwin's essays, particularly "Everybody's Protest Novel," be responding to Trilling's criticism of overly political or ideological fiction?
