THE MESSENGER

The lives and loves of James Baldwin.

- LOUIS MENAND

An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is true. People write because they have something to say. Baldwin had something to say, and he spent his life saying it. But many who thought they got his message didn’t get it at all.

Baldwin was high-strung and emotionally labile. He wasn’t exactly charismatic—there was a strangeness about him which he did nothing to conceal—but he was magnetic. The poet Richard Howard described him as a “rather silly, giddy, predatory fellow who was extremely unattractive-looking. There’s a famous eighteenth-century person who used to say, ‘I can talk my face away in twenty minutes.’ And Jimmy could do that.” He put his hands on you. He looked you in the eye. He poured you another drink. When he gave a lecture, he held the room. He had been a preacher when he was very young, and he knew how to work a congregation.

He could charm, he could engage, and he could also rant. Some people who knew him thought that the ranting was an act, and to some extent it was: it was a calculated way of making a point. He spent the winter of 1961 living in the guesthouse of the novelist William Styron, in Connecticut, while he worked on a novel. “We’d feed him,” Styron remembered, “and he’d come around at night. We’d have these very liberal political people over, and Jimmy . . . used to stand in front of the fireplace and say, 'Baby, we're going to burn your motherfucking houses down.'” The liberals no doubt loved it. As he no doubt knew they would.