{"id":104029,"date":"2016-10-26T13:00:04","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T17:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104029"},"modified":"2020-06-11T12:28:15","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T16:28:15","slug":"love-jimmy-hilton-als-jacqueline-goldsby-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/10\/26\/love-jimmy-hilton-als-jacqueline-goldsby-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Love, Jimmy: Hilton Als and Jacqueline Goldsby in Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

At fourteen, <\/em>James Baldwin<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u201c<\/em>underwent \u2026 a prolonged religious crisis<\/em><\/a>\u201d and discovered \u201cGod, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell.\u201d At the same age, Hilton Als was given a copy of <\/em>Nobody Knows My Name\u00a0and discovered James Baldwin. He then entered into a tempestuous love affair with Baldwin\u2019s work, one that shifted, over\u00a0the years, from ardent infatuation and reverence to disaffection, settling<\/em>\u00a0somewhere in between: \u201cno matter how much I tried to resist my identification with Baldwin,\u201d he writes in his 1998 <\/em>New Yorker essay \u201c<\/em>The Enemy Within<\/em><\/a>,\u201d \u201cwe were uneasy members of the same tribe.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Last month, Als discussed Baldwin\u2019s legacy at the Windham-Campbell Prize festival, where he\u00a0was honored for his\u00a0work in nonfiction. His interlocutor was Jacqueline Goldsby, a professor of English and African American Studies at Yale. <\/em>What follows is a sliver of that conversation, published with permission by the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes.\u00a0<\/em>\u2014Caitlin Youngquist\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

GOLDSBY<\/p>\n

When did you become aware of Baldwin\u2019s literary power and his possible influence on you as an essayist?<\/p>\n

ALS<\/p>\n

Baldwin was very real to me, all the time. It was through Owen Dodson, who was, I think, the second black person to go to the Yale School of Drama, and Baldwin was always a living thing to me because of their relationship. Owen was a great director and was the one who first staged Baldwin\u2019s play The Amen Corner<\/em>. He had this thing he\u2019d say\u2014he\u2019d call you Negro. When he was upset with black people he\u2019d say,\u00a0Negroes! And he\u2019d shout it from the middle of his apartment. One thing he shouted about was the memory of Baldwin and his boyfriend living with him during The Amen Corner<\/em>. The two of them used to have these playwright-director rows, and Baldwin was eating him out of house and home because he had nowhere to live. So my relationship to Baldwin began as a kind of gay catfight.<\/p>\n

Owen had the most beautiful library\u2014on Fifty-First Street. It was sorted by author, and he had first editions of everything. You\u2019d pick up a book, let\u2019s say a Truman Capote first book of short stories, and it\u2019d say, Dear Owen, it pleases me that you love the book. Love, Truman. Hope to see you soon. Or, Dear Owen, it was a ten-day marvel. Love, Jimmy. He had the first edition of Notes of a Native Son<\/em>. Like Amiri Baraka, it was the first time I\u2019d ever seen a man of color on the cover of a book. The second-most influential book cover at that time was Toni Morrison\u2019s The Bluest Eye<\/em>, and when you turned the book around, she looked like the people I was related to. But reading Baldwin, of course, changed everything, because I realized you could write in a \u2026 there\u2019s no other way to put it, really, except it was a kind of high-faggoty style to me.<\/p>\n

GOLDSBY<\/p>\n

What do you mean?<\/p>\n

ALS<\/p>\n

What you learned then as a gay person was how to survive in gay bars, so the language had to be very precise\u2014sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. The thing that was systematic about the writing was the emotion throughout. That didn\u2019t necessarily mean the idea was going to be consistent. Baldwin wrote in arias of feeling and thought, and when he\u2019d get bored with one idea, he\u2019d go on to another. This took me years of reading to understand. I was so taken by his certainty of feeling\u2014it was the thing that really made me see that it was possible to live a life that had value in literature. One thing I learned from Baldwin, as a writer, was to use singing\u2014the sound of singing\u2014as prose. To make prose sound like an aria, to bring a chorus in, to take actual lyrics and expand on them.<\/p>\n

Baldwin proved that if he wrote it down, it could have power beyond the moment. So for instance, in \u201cThe Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer\u201d\u2014his essay about Norman Mailer\u2019s \u201cThe White Negro<\/a>\u201d\u2014he has these moments only a queen could write. He\u2019s not only embroiled in this idea of patriarchy but also with a brilliant way of putting down the assumptions of power. There\u2019s a moment in that essay where he quotes Jack Kerouac\u2019s On the Road\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I so drearily was, a \u201cwhite man\u201d disillusioned. All my life I\u2019d had white ambitions \u2026 I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces of men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Baldwin writes, \u201cI would hate to be in Kerouac\u2019s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem\u2019s Apollo Theater.\u201d Or when Mailer says to him, \u201cI want to know how power works,\u201d and Baldwin counters with, \u201cI know how power works, it has worked on me and if I didn\u2019t know how power works, I would be dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

GOLDSBY<\/p>\n

In the 1963 documentary Take This Hammer<\/em><\/a>, Baldwin travels to San Francisco to take in how race is lived, how the urban North is not, as he puts it, \u201cmorally distant\u201d from Birmingham. I want to turn to that film now, because it picks up on the ways Baldwin would\u00a0carry\u00a0his voice and his analysis of power through feeling. Here\u2019s an extraordinary clip about a topic you\u2019ve written so brilliantly about.<\/p>\n