James Baldwin’s 1970 Turkish Interviews: “The American Way of Life” and the Rhetoric of War from Vietnam to the Near and Middle East

On the ninth and tenth of May 1970, the American writer James Baldwin agreed to do a videotaped interview in Istanbul with an aspiring young Turkish film maker Sedat Pakay.¹ The two had first met at Robert College, now Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, Turkey, where Pakay had been a student in the early 1960s.² Though readers are more familiar with Baldwin’s years abroad in France in the late 1940s and 1950s, beginning in 1961 the writer maintained semiresidency in Istanbul for nearly eight years.³ He had first come to Istanbul with his friend, the Turkish theater actor Engin Cezzar, whom he had met at the Actor’s Studio in New York. He then would come and go, often staying for months at a time. From the fall of 1966 to the summer of 1967 he would rent the Vefik Pasha Library, a Romantic nineteenth-century villa surrounded by gardens and towering pine and plane trees looking out over the Bosphorus Straits toward the Asian continent. His direct neighbor was the fifteenth-century fortress of Mehmet the Conqueror. It was from here that the Turks conquered the Byzantines in 1453. Constantinople would then become Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire for the next four hundred years.

Though much less populated than it is today, in 1970 Istanbul was a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis. Baldwin would live at the Vefik Pasha Library with his brother David and his friend and assistant, the young Robert College English professor David Leeming. In his 1994 biography of Baldwin, Leeming recalls “the simple daily routine” at the villa:

Jimmy got up at noon and ate a substantial meal. He then worked until six or so, when visitors began to arrive. Drinks and dinner followed and then long nights of talking, which usually included Jimmy’s reading aloud segments of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone or parts of other projects temporarily abandoned or planned. . . . More than anything else, we discussed events in America, the state of the movement, the riots in the cities. The discussions were frequently heated and there was shouting and sometimes there were tears.

(Leeming 275)

Geographically distant from the United States, yet politically and emotionally engaged, Baldwin was keeping close tabs on social crises in his homeland while protecting himself from various forms of pressure there. Baldwin, it seems, found things he needed in his adopted Near Eastern city: he found a temporary solution to his increasing need for separation and sanctuary from American culture and its domestic politics as his fame rose dramatically in the 1960s. He also enjoyed in Istanbul an international community of trusted friends. Asked “Istanbul, why?” in a 1970 Ebony magazine interview, the writer responded:

[It is] a place where I can find out again—where I am—and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again. . . . To begin again demands a certain silence, a certain privacy that is not, at least for me, to be found elsewhere.

(Adelsen 44)

Istanbul proved a city of refuge from the demands of public life in the United States, and this privacy was not loneliness; this metropolitan silence offered an environment that facilitated his writing. He would finish two of the most important works of his career while residing in Istanbul: the long essay The Fire Next Time (1962, 1963) and the novel Another Country (1962). While there he would write Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1969). Though he would never again live in the United States on a permanent basis, his Istanbul fiction and nonfiction, like all his work, would continue to focus on America.

The subject of the 1970 Istanbul interview is also the United States, its then-current political failures and social challenges. The direction he takes his theme in the interview, however, is more consciously global in scope than much of his writing. The interview is thus an important example of the transnational reach...