survive them.
You spoke of a sense of tragedy. Again, in your book, you speak of us Americans lacking. We have tremendous potentialities, but you’re saying that we lack that which a non-American may have, a sense of tragedy.
Yes, I think we do, and it’s incredible to me that—and I’m not trying to oversimplify anything—but it is incredible to me that in this country, where, after all, materially, for the most part, one is better off than anywhere else in the world, that one should know so many people who are in a state of the most absolute insecurity about themselves. So they literally can’t get through a morning without going to see the psychiatrist. And I find it very difficult to take this really seriously, since other people who have really terrifying and unimaginable troubles, from the American point of view, don’t dream of going anywhere near a psychiatrist and wouldn’t have the money to do it if they were mad enough to dream it.
It seems to me it points to a very great, well, not illness exactly, but fear. Frenchmen that I used to know, Frenchwomen, spend much less time in this dreadful internal warfare, tearing themselves and each other to pieces, than Americans do. And why this is so is probably a question for someone else. But it is so, and I think it says something very serious about the real aims and the real standards of our society. People don’t live by the standards they say they live by. And the gap between their profession and the actuality is what creates this despair and this uncertainty, which is very, very dangerous.
In the last chapter, the last part of your book Nobody Knows My Name , the black boy looks at the white boy—it’s your relationship to Norman Mailer—but the very last part says if he has understood them, then he is richer ; he, in this instance, the white boy. “Then he is richer and we are richer, too; if he has not understood them, we are all much poorer. For though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real vision of ourselves as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this country now that where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Mmm-hmm. I mean that.
And the hour has gone so ludicrously rapidly. James Baldwin, who has confessed, in a very beautiful way. But the confession, here, is most brief. We merely scratched the surface in slightly knowing James Baldwin.
Perhaps, one last question, James Baldwin. Who are you now?
Who, indeed! Well, I may not be able to tell you quite who I am, but I think I’m discovering who I’m not. I want to be an honest man, and I want to be a good writer. [A pause] And I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. I think you just have to play it by ear and pray for rain.
“CITY OF HANDS WAS BORN IN MUD AND FIRE,” FINANCIAL TIMES, 2005
CHICAGO. Where shall we begin? For years the impression of Chicago in a popular sense, thanks to Warner Bros. movies, was Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson—Chicago was the home of the mob, Al Capone.
The name Al Capone and Chicago were at times synonymous, and Chicago was a tough, rough city.
Its beginnings were swampland, the Potawatomi Indians, who were pretty well scalped financially by the pirates who we call our Founding Fathers and after whom streets are named.
And Nelson Algren, a Chicago writer years ago, a great critic of Chicago in a very lyrical way, wrote The Man with the Golden Arm , The Neon Wilderness ; he wrote a book called Chicago: City on the Make . It’s like a prose poem.
Chicago began with French voyageurs , and then the Germans came. Many were liberal Germans. In terms of the ’48ers—1848, you know, was the year of many rebellions, all of which failed, and so Chicago had a sort of liberal, to some extent,
German tradition. You find that in the arts. For example, the Chicago Symphony [Orchestra] was primarily Teutonic—Brahms, Beethoven, Bach.
At the same time, Chicago became what I call the
You spoke of a sense of tragedy. Again, in your book, you speak of us Americans lacking. We have tremendous potentialities, but you’re saying that we lack that which a non-American may have, a sense of tragedy.
Yes, I think we do, and it’s incredible to me that—and I’m not trying to oversimplify anything—but it is incredible to me that in this country, where, after all, materially, for the most part, one is better off than anywhere else in the world, that one should know so many people who are in a state of the most absolute insecurity about themselves. So they literally can’t get through a morning without going to see the psychiatrist. And I find it very difficult to take this really seriously, since other people who have really terrifying and unimaginable troubles, from the American point of view, don’t dream of going anywhere near a psychiatrist and wouldn’t have the money to do it if they were mad enough to dream it.
It seems to me it points to a very great, well, not illness exactly, but fear. Frenchmen that I used to know, Frenchwomen, spend much less time in this dreadful internal warfare, tearing themselves and each other to pieces, than Americans do. And why this is so is probably a question for someone else. But it is so, and I think it says something very serious about the real aims and the real standards of our society. People don’t live by the standards they say they live by. And the gap between their profession and the actuality is what creates this despair and this uncertainty, which is very, very dangerous.
In the last chapter, the last part of your book Nobody Knows My Name , the black boy looks at the white boy—it’s your relationship to Norman Mailer—but the very last part says if he has understood them, then he is richer ; he, in this instance, the white boy. “Then he is richer and we are richer, too; if he has not understood them, we are all much poorer. For though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real vision of ourselves as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this country now that where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Mmm-hmm. I mean that.
And the hour has gone so ludicrously rapidly. James Baldwin, who has confessed, in a very beautiful way. But the confession, here, is most brief. We merely scratched the surface in slightly knowing James Baldwin.
Perhaps, one last question, James Baldwin. Who are you now?
Who, indeed! Well, I may not be able to tell you quite who I am, but I think I’m discovering who I’m not. I want to be an honest man, and I want to be a good writer. [A pause] And I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. I think you just have to play it by ear and pray for rain.
“CITY OF HANDS WAS BORN IN MUD AND FIRE,” FINANCIAL TIMES, 2005
CHICAGO. Where shall we begin? For years the impression of Chicago in a popular sense, thanks to Warner Bros. movies, was Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson—Chicago was the home of the mob, Al Capone.
The name Al Capone and Chicago were at times synonymous, and Chicago was a tough, rough city.
Its beginnings were swampland, the Potawatomi Indians, who were pretty well scalped financially by the pirates who we call our Founding Fathers and after whom streets are named.
And Nelson Algren, a Chicago writer years ago, a great critic of Chicago in a very lyrical way, wrote The Man with the Golden Arm , The Neon Wilderness ; he wrote a book called Chicago: City on the Make . It’s like a prose poem.
Chicago began with French voyageurs , and then the Germans came. Many were liberal Germans. In terms of the ’48ers—1848, you know, was the year of many rebellions, all of which failed, and so Chicago had a sort of liberal, to some extent,
German tradition. You find that in the arts. For example, the Chicago Symphony [Orchestra] was primarily Teutonic—Brahms, Beethoven, Bach.
At the same time, Chicago became what I call the
Similar Books
