SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
August marks a hundred years since the birth of one of America's greatest writers - James Baldwin, grandson of a slave, citizen of Harlem, Paris and the world. He wrote bold novels - "Go Tell It On The Mountain" - and piercing social critiques - "The Fire Next Time." The year before his death, James Baldwin appeared at the Library of Congress in 1986 and read from his essay collection "Notes Of A Native Son," written in the 1940s and '50s at the onset of the civil rights movement.
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JAMES BALDWIN: (Reading) It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, as life as it is and men as they are. In the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power, that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
SIMON: To honor James Baldwin's centennial, there are three new special editions of his work published by Vintage Books. Kevin Young, the esteemed poet and director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, has written the introduction to one of the books. And he told us how he especially admires how James Baldwin's art managed to mix the political and personal.
KEVIN YOUNG: One of his most powerful essays is about the death of his father and his coming back for the funeral over the broken glass after, I believe, one of the Harlem riots. And that's one of the powerful things he writes about, is how his relationship with his father, which was somewhat contested. His father was very strict, and he really saw that as a larger metaphor for America and his relationship that was complex and, at times, conflicted.
SIMON: And how did he relate that to who we are as Americans and what America is?
YOUNG: Well, in many ways, he was bold enough to think of his own experience as an American experience. And we have to really go back and think about how transcendent and how powerful that was to center himself and say, I am America. One of my favorite books of his is "Giovanni's Room." And I love the way that he starts that book with a quote from Walt Whitman - I am the man, I suffered, I was there. And that kind of Whitmanesque idea that you alone, this eye is an American eye, is one that we share, that we can participate in, I think, is really powerful. And he saw that in his autobiography, but he also made that in his fictions.
SIMON: "Notes Of A Native Son," his collection of essays, came out in 1955. And what did "Notes Of A Native Son" do for how we see ourselves in this country, and Black America in particular?
YOUNG: One of my favorite quotes in "Notes Of A Native Son" is in this little preface that's often not reproduced, where he says, I want to be an honest man and a good writer. That's where he's really learning, in public, to think about the world through the eyes of someone who wasn't told they should belong. He finishes high school. He doesn't have a college degree. How is he supposed to be one of our great thinkers? And, of course, that's what he was. And I think that book is really where he sets down his philosophy. He writes about the legacy of slavery and its sort of original sin. And he's thinking about how love can unite us. For him, love is that new religion, if you will, that place where he can house his beliefs and that can join us all and triumph.
SIMON: "Giovanni's Room," 1956, set in Paris. You have done the introduction to a new edition. How frank was Baldwin in writing about gay and bisexual life at a time in America when it was mostly unexplored?
YOUNG: Well, I trace in the introduction a bit of the history of novels that dealt with some of those issues, and I think he fits in that tradition. But I also think he's pioneering and that he's really frank about it and not apologetic. There is a sense of doom in the novel, but it's really because the character who speaks in the novel cannot love. And that idea that being unable to love or admit who you love is tragic, I think, is really powerful in the book.
I also think it's really interesting that he chose to set the novel in France and to write about all white characters. And I think that was one way that he tried to capture gay life, but also not bring in race in an obvious way. But it's also metaphoric, the book, and very much thinking about darkness and Blackness in kind of religious terms, that kind of quality of what makes someone pure, what makes someone innocent. And there's ironies abounding in that choice that he's made.
SIMON: Yeah. What did Baldwin find in France that he didn't in Harlem or elsewhere in America?
YOUNG: A kind of ironic set of things. He had to go away to find what it meant to be an African American, to be an American more broadly, and that those two things were linked. I think that's where he was able to write about, say, the blues. And he writes beautifully about how he had to go to Switzerland to listen to Bessie Smith and not hear it in sort of racial terms that seemed tied to poverty, which he had experienced but also seen. It really almost took him out of himself and take him out of the pressures that he felt, the indignities he experienced.
And while they weren't absent in Paris, they were different. And for him, he also found community there. And people think of him as escaping into, say, a white world. But he really is escaping to a world of Algerians and Africans and expat African Americans in Paris. And that was really important to him in that postwar moment.
SIMON: Are there particular words or a scene from Baldwin's works you would urge us to find today as we remember him?
YOUNG: One of the things I write about in the introduction to "Giovanni's Room" is just collecting his books that I have managed to find. And there's one that he's inscribed to the wonderful writer Owen Dodson. And he inscribes it, with love, Jimmy. And then, keep the faith.
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YOUNG: Keeping the faith, I think, is what I think about when I think about Baldwin and the ways that his faith toward humanity, his belief in us, and his insistence on his own humanity, and his insistence that our humanities were tied to each other, that you can't deny someone theirs and keep yours, is a good reminder all the time.
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SIMON: Kevin Young, the esteemed poet and director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Mr. Young, thanks so much for being with us.
YOUNG: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF "THE VERNON SPRING'S "MOTHER'S LOVE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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