James Baldwin: A Biography

To resist reading James Baldwin in the tradition of Henry James is to acquiesce in the tendency of America to classify its people and writers primarily by race. Baldwin often paid homage to James’s example, and a developing body of criticism has explored their literary relationship. David Leeming’s interview with Baldwin in the fall, 1986, issue of the Henry James Review constitutes a central text in that discourse, and now his authorized biography of Baldwin frequently invokes the “model” and “kindred spirit” of “Henry James, the writer he most admired” (Baldwin 61, 17).

All students of modern literature will find James Baldwin: A Biography a moving personal and historical narrative. Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin died in France in 1987; now that his generation is passing threescore and ten, its writers begin to loom as titans who lifted the public language of the 1950s and 60s to a height that, in retrospect, seems dizzying. In addition to contemporaries who fell early—Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy—Baldwin debated, chronicled, and befriended figures as diverse and imposing as Margaret Mead, William Styron, Chinua Achebe, Philip Roth, Kay Boyle, Alex Haley, and John Cheever. His first books bared racial alienation with a rage and grace that penetrated the cautiously liberal suburbs of that period. Reencountering Baldwin’s brilliance, I recalled reading The Fire Next Time in my parents’ house and feeling simultaneously wary of being asked about it and unable to put it down.

Wisely, Leeming’s prose does not compete with Baldwin’s; instead it lets events of Baldwin’s life and excerpts from his writing speak for themselves—and surprisingly often they speak of Henry James. Leeming, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, handles such materials judiciously. His work on James includes a dissertation directed by Leon Edel and several published articles.

Yet his most definite contribution to the shared history of these writers arises from his work in the 60s as Baldwin’s assistant. As W. J. Weatherby previously noted in James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (1989), hanging above Baldwin’s writing desk was an autographed photo of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of James, given to Baldwin by a great-nephew to the novelist. Leeming clarifies and extends the literary significance of this gift: after reading a 1965 essay by Baldwin in Ebony magazine that concluded with an extended allusion to The Ambassadors, Michael James sent the photo with an understanding that it “was, in spirit, really from his great-uncle: ‘Let this be [he wrote] a curious note across fifty years’” (254).

Baldwin amplified this “note” in an unfinished essay on Henry James and in numerous published writings that, like James’s, criticize Americans’ “innocence” and their “failure...to see through to the reality of others”—a problem compounded for Baldwin by race but redeemed, as for James, by the writer’s life and work. Again like James, Baldwin carried his life and work to Europe, writing “essays [describing] the plight of the black American in Paris in the style of Henry James” (57). These essays were collected in Notes of a Native Son, whose title derived not only from Richard Wright’s Native Son (1942) but also, “Baldwin always said, [from] James’s autobiographical Notes of a Son and Brother” (101).

Leeming, perhaps respecting his long friendship with his subject, relates Baldwin’s life with painstaking restraint; thus, however frequently Henry James appears in this biography, these apparitions appear substantial, even understated. The reader glimpses Baldwin sharing “Henry James fever” with friends on train trips, or answering a Swedish journalist’s question, “what book he would recommend to a ‘Black Power militant,’” with “Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima,” or lecturing at Amherst College “on expatriate writers—among them Henry James...and himself” (68, 300, 366). At various stops on his life’s journey Baldwin is represented “sharing a love of Henry James” with the likes of Dan Wakefield, Frank O’Hara, Stanley Geist, and Laurence Holland (161...