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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglomerate Network and LitHub Radio.
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- [00:35]
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Jack Wilson
Hello. A letter from a listener in a far off place. An Irish writer, Colm Toibin, tells us about his love for the works of James Baldwin. That's coming up today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. It is the holiday season and like the rest of you. Wait, let's try this again. It's the holiday season. There we go.
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Colm Toibin
That's better.
- [01:44]
Jack Wilson
So it's the holiday season and like the rest of you, I'm trying to find the holiday cheers. In a world gone mad, sometimes we're all on this spinning planet together. And we sometimes forget that we're not just here by ourselves on our own. Other people are not just bit characters in our movie, here to supply us with what we need and want. We're all round characters. There are no flat ones. In a novel, yes, but in life, no. Round and round and round like the planet itself. We have a great show today with Colm Toibin here to talk about James Baldwin. We've talked about Baldwin before, of course. What do you need to know to whet your appetite? Baldwin might be one of those rare writers who have an almost 100% approval rating, at least among serious fans of literature. Even those who don't love his fiction, which is often a matter of individual taste. After all, fiction and poetry, even though. But even those who. Who maybe don't love his fiction will still find room for admiration. He captures a kind of intelligence and incisiveness and conveys it with powerful dramatic prose. And in what is rare for a thinker with his depth, he conveys his thoughts in a style that's highly readable. He doesn't overwrite. If anything, he underplays. But the prose moves. There's no denying the thought behind it. It's fast. And as a reader, you don't get ahead of Baldwin. You keep up. He makes it easy to keep up. It's a race car that he's driving, but it comes with a passenger seat. I suppose what you want to know about James Baldwin is all the David Copperfield crap, as Holden might say. Well, Baldwin was born in 1924 and died in 1987 at the too young age of of 63. Born in Harlem, died in France. In between he wrote several novels, some incredible short stories, some plays, some poems, and his essays, which might be his greatest work. He lived through the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement, and was a key contributor to both. He was a public figure and a champion debater. He dueled with any number of television personalities, and I've never seen him lose. But as we'll hear when we talk to Colm Toybean, Baldwin is not just an educator, an agitator, a didactic voice. His politics could be local, but was not always. He was also in search of the big universal questions that literature has always explored. His humanity was too large to be limited to the latest minor debate. Let's hear an email. This comes from listener Louis in Spain. How about some Spanish holiday music? Gabriel Gabriel's also from Spain, by the way. There we go. Los Pesos. If that's how you say it. Where were we? An email this comes from listener Louis, who says, Dear Jack, My name is Louis, and as 2024 draws to a close, I feel like the time has come to write to the podcast. Although I take a scattergun approach to the choice of episodes I download, I've noticed that your delight in receiving vignettes of where and how your listeners tune in is a theme. Over the years, I've also not yet heard of many other listeners from Spain, and so here I am in Galicia, where I've lived since leaving England aged 23. Galicia is a rural part of Spain, and I happen to live in a very rural part of it. I was chopping firewood the other day, Oak and Alder. Been listening to last year's seasonal episode on the controversy surrounding the famous Christmas poem a visit from St. Nicholas. Oh man, says Louis. Your delivery of the Clement Clarke Moore poem Old Santa Claus, highlighting its incongruous sadism, was just too much. Yes, that was quite an episode. Excuse me, something about the memory of that poem seized up the back of my throat. Louis says, I don't know if you've ever tried swinging an axe while trying not to succumb to paroxysms of laughter, but I think you can imagine that it's difficult. Let's pause there. Oh no. I have some horrible visions in my mind having to do with wayward axes. Maybe it's best to put the axe down, Louie, else one might chop off one's own head or a toe or two. Back to the email. I don't know if you've ever heard much about Galicia, but I can't recommend this Atlantic Corner Iberia strongly enough. Now, should I have said Galicia or Iberia? Please forgive any mispronunciations. I could use an autocorrect on pronunciations when it comes to foreign languages, especially think of my words floating at you listeners with a little red squiggle underneath them, and maybe they will magically correct themselves from the time I speak the words to the time they reach your ears. Get to work, inventors. I've just given you another million dollar idea. I actually came up with a trillion dollar idea once, according to a friend of mine who works in the car industry, but he and I agreed that it would be horrible for humanity and so we dropped the subject. That idea developed no further and no, I'm not going to tell you what it was in case there are some some Lex Luthor types among you. Okay, back to Louis and his email. Now, Louie spells his name with an s, but he pronounces it with an e. Louis. I actually checked with him on this because I wanted to get it right and he said it's without the s sound, pronounced like Louis. I don't mind if people get it wrong, though. In fact, here in Spain, people often translate it and call me Luis, or even the Galician version, Lois. I enjoy the diversity. End quote. Isn't that how we all should be? People accepting, embracing. And so my million dollar idea of the squiggle line underneath the mispronounced word fades into yet another botched and bungled plan. The squiggle erases itself and pretends it never existed. Okay, back to the email. In the Atlantic corner of Iberia, Louis says Hemingway praised the smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia. It's the birthplace of Nobel laureate Camilo Jose Sela, and its most famous daughter is a poet named Rosalia de Castro. She wrote in the 19th century of the Galician agriculture, agricultural laborers, the land and discrimination that Galicians and their language faced from other Spaniards. Her poetry paved the way for the Galician resurgence later in the 19th and 20th century through poets like Alvaro Cun Quiero and Chelso Celso. Emilio Ferrero oh boy, the squiggle lines are back. All definitely worth checking out if you can get your hands on an English translation. So here I am, an English immigrant in Galicia, thrilled to have discovered your podcast in 2024 in what has been quite the year with the birth of my daughter and also me passing the tough exam to become an English teacher in state run secondary schools here in Galicia. Incidentally, the study for this exam led me to discover your podcast as I looked for the best way to absorb as much information as I could about English literature, this being a big part of the exam and man did I find it. I look forward to entering 2025 with the history of Literature to accompany me and eagerly await any festive installments you may have in the works, though I'm not sure last year's can possibly be topped. Yours in NW Northwest Spain Louie Louis what a wonderful message. I'm so pleased that you welcomed your daughter into the world this year and that you qualified to become an English teacher. That is. Win win. Good luck to you on both fronts. I am glad the world has people like you in it making things better, and I'm honored to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast. As for a challenge, well, this episode is a good one, I hope, and next Thursday is going to be another good one. And then we're going to be playing some greatest holiday hits soon enough. Our revisiting of James Joyce's classic short story the Dead. That isn't exactly festive. It sort of is, actually. And the episodes are good. I haven't really listened to them in a while, but I'm pretty sure I'll be taking you into the warm kitchen of my Grandma Rose in Wisconsin. Or maybe we'll edit that part out, but the feeling feel of it will be there. When I think of that story, I think of the warm kitchen of my Swiss grandmother. And of course we have James Joyce's stunning prose and Gabriel Conroy's reflections on life and connections with one another as the snow falls generally all over Ireland. How about speaking of Gabriel? How about our Gabriel? There we go. So yes, let's zero in on what truly matters this holiday season. Our connection with each other. Find your stable center, the best part of yourself, your core. Be rooted in that strength and then stretch toward the light, toward the sun and the stars and be as good as you can with as much as you can. Spread the joy and the love and the generosity, the kindness, the empathy. We will get through all this together with you and me, with Colm Toibin and James Baldwin, with James Joyce and Gabriel Conroy and with our Gabriel as the snow falls generally over the planet. And be careful with that axe, Combe Toybeen and James Baldwin after this.
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- [14:25]
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Colm Toibin
Okay. Joining me now is Colm Tobin, an.
- [15:09]
Jack Wilson
Irish novelist, poet, professor, journalist, essayist and literary criticism whose 10 novels are widely.
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Colm Toibin
Acclaimed and have won many awards. Our listeners might know him best for.
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Jack Wilson
His novel, the Master about the life.
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Colm Toibin
Of Henry James, or the Magician about.
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Jack Wilson
The life of Thomas Mann.
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Colm Toibin
He's here today to discuss a new book about a different writer and not.
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Jack Wilson
A novel this time, but a personal account of a lifelong inspiration and exemplar. The book is called On James Baldwin.
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Colm Toibin
Colm Toveen, welcome to the History of Literature.
- [15:41]
Thank you very much.
- [15:43]
So let's start with the first time you read James Baldwin. Where were you in life and what did you encounter?
- [15:50]
I know where I was because I put a date on the book and I Bought the book on my birthday when I was 18, and it was Dublin, and I was browsing in a bookshop. In other words, it wasn't on a course, it wasn't on a curriculum. And so I am just something about the book. I didn't know anything about the author much. I probably knew he was African American. I would have been interested in the civil Rights movement in America, as everyone in Ireland was. I saw this book, and for some reason, the typo, whatever it was about the book, made me feel I would buy this book because I had money for my birthday. And so I had the summer. And in the summer I read Go Tell it on the Mountain. And that was my first encounter with Baldwin.
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And what was your impression.
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In a way, with books like that, when you read them at that age, you simply turn the page. You take everything for granted. You think this is just a story.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Colm Toibin
And then somehow or other, the things within the story, the complexities and the strangenesses and the ambiguities, begin to matter in ways that you don't even understand when you're reading the first time at that age. So that I was watching this, the sort of tender portrait of a very sensitive and tender young man in Harlem, the Harlem, I suppose, of the 1940s, maybe even even the 1930s, in which there was a shadow. And the shadow was of the great migration of what had happened in the Southern states, and the fact that so many African American people had moved north and had moved north, not to go further into agriculture or in any way to be on any plantation, but to go to Harlem or to go to the cities. And so it's set in a city, which is Harlem, with this young man who's deeply religious, is trying to navigate his way through very sensitive feelings about religion, plus strange sexual awakenings, plus fear of his father or his stepfather, plus watching his mother very carefully and realizing his own difference from his own brother. Written in prose that is sometimes very, very plain. Yeah. Then sometimes soaring. Soaring prose that moves into areas which might have taken their bearings from, say, the Old Testament or the language of hymns, the language of prayer. But certainly it's an unstable novel in that sense. And that must have given me pleasure, the idea that you didn't know what the next paragraph was going to bring.
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Yeah. Now, when you say it gives you pleasure, did you know at this point that you wanted to be a writer? Were you reading this like someone who was trying to learn the craft, or were you just coming at this purely as a reader?
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No, honestly, I was a Reader. I just had no idea that. I mean it was seemed. It seemed so perfect, the book that they did. You could learn anything from it. It itself was so complete. So no, I had no sense of that and I had no sense also of the connection between this book and my own life. It even seemed distant or exotic. I think we expected books then. I mean I was reading Tasker for example, you know, so far away from small town Ireland, you know that any. What you were trying to find that was any book that told you what the outside world was like. Not a book that reflected your own experience or seemed to mirror Irish reality, but a book that was as far away as possible what was going on day by day. So I read the book entirely for pleasure, just simply almost equivalent you call recreation. But of course reading ceased to be recreation very quickly because you found yourself so connected it to the character that it wasn't merely just entertaining yourself, you were doing something else. But you can't really put a name on that.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah.
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Colm Toibin
Well, let's talk a little bit about identifying with the book or not. And I was interested to read when you were talking about James Joyce's relationship with religion. And I think from the outside you might think, well, you know, he's in Dublin and, and he's reading James Joyce and so that might really speak to him in terms of religion. But it seems like Baldwin's experience with religion might have been even closer. So what was it like for you to read a book like Portrait of the Artist or a work like Go Tell it on the Mountain? If you could compare that experience a.
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Jack Wilson
Little bit for us.
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Colm Toibin
Yes. Eddis Gorthy was a small town. It was dominated by the cathedral which was built by the great church architect of the mid 19th century, who was Augustus Welby Pugin. So it was built by the great church architect. It was neo Gothic, meaning it had sort of soaring steeple plus all these sort of shadowy spaces. Yeah, and it's an all obviously all this stained glass. Now on Sunday, five or six masses on a Sunday and I was an altar boy. I would maybe be an altar boy for three of them. And the entire town would assemble at different masses and then you had obviously your benediction, you had the rosary, you had infinite amounts of Catholic ritual and prayer. There was a boys conferred here on a Thursday at about seven in the evening you were meant to go to the cathedral, all the boys of the parish and assemble and they would turn the lights not down to full darkness, but they would dim the lights and they would open the Tabernacle, and the host would be produced, you would bow your head. And the priest eventually said these words. They said. He said, I was about eight years old. He said, death comes soon and judgment will follow. So now, dear boys, examine your conscience and find out your sins. And we all did. We all bowed our heads and we thought for a while. And the thing about this is it should. Sometimes it was profoundly boring, just tedious, and you needed to be over. Other times it really began to support the poetry of it or whatever. There was the beauty of it. It really was very affecting and stayed with you. So, yes, I found elements of this in Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce. And I found even more elements of it in the Baldwin book in. In Go Tell it on the Mountain, because of the way that John is watching uneasily all the time. He's not part of a group. Whereas with Stephen, you have a sense of Stephen in Portrait of the Artist, James Joyce's book, you have a sense of his pride. His pride is giving him the distance. But John Grimes in Baldwin's book doesn't have this pride. He has a sort of funny watchfulness, a funny strange intelligence that stands back. And so they're both portraits of artists, but very different sorts of artists. And I think I felt closer to the watchful one.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Colm Toibin
Now that I think about it, I don't know if this is an oversimplification, but it almost seems like Stephen is becoming aware that he's better. But in Baldwin it's more just that he's becoming aware that he's different.
- [22:39]
Yeah. And that, yes, that he's different, but he's also susceptible in his difference is a sort of susceptibility to strangeness, susceptibility to beauty, but it's also a susceptibility to anyone in the congregation, including watching an aunt praying. But also there's a young man comes in who's new, and we realize he's watching him with some strange coiled desire, which is not named in the book, but it's very much present in the book. There is a sort of same sex desire. There seems in a way masked by religion, or the religion seems to be an aspect of it. So he mixes up the two things in ways which are very interesting. Baldwin does.
- [23:20]
Jack Wilson
Right. Right now, when you were talking about.
- [23:23]
Colm Toibin
Baldwin and the geography of his migration experience and him landing in Harlem, I was wondering if it might have struck you that there were some parallels with Ireland or with movement that occurred and relocations and so on. But is that something that hit home with you, or was that not something you had yet encountered?
- [23:48]
Yeah, it's very much there where. When I was growing up, it was in the shadow of the 1916 rebellion, of the Irish War of Independence that came between 1918 and 1922. And my grandfather had been interned by the British after the rebellion, and my uncle had been interned during the Irish Civil War and also arrested and held during the Irish War of Independence. Now my uncle lived into the. Into 1995, so that he dies in his 90s. So that really, all my life, but certainly all my childhood, he's there. And the shadow of those events are really present. It isn't as though they're mentioned all the time, but you're always aware that 50 years ago, 60 years ago, something amazing had happened and that you certainly lived in the shadow of that. Even though your own life was pretty ordinary, there was a sense of something extraordinary had occurred not long before. And so I suppose in Go Tell it on the Mountain, I found that idea absolutely fascinating, that while John Grimes is living in what is mostly in that book, a very peaceful Harlem, that the sense of that peace could be broken anytime and was broken in ways that are described, I think, with ferociously graphic imagery in the south in the generation before. And that idea of the generation before haunting the book, unsettling the book, and being there all the time in the book, I think it's something that I would have recognized from my own life as being things that had happened in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, being present for me, as, say, I came to the age of 10 or 11 in the 1960s, and that those 30 years earlier was present. It was palpable, and it made a difference.
- [25:28]
Jack Wilson
Right.
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Colm Toibin
So I was going to ask you to kind of look at Baldwin with. With the advant, all that you now know about literature and some of his influences and so on. But it occurs to me that we'd be jumping so far ahead that what I really should ask you about is what you did next in terms of Baldwin. Did you go on to read more of his books? Do you look at Go Tell it on the Mountain as kind of a turning point in your life? Did it inspire you to do anything differently?
- [25:57]
What's extraordinary is what Baldwin did next as a novelist. Judy wrote Giovanni's Room.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah. Yeah.
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Colm Toibin
Now, Giovanni's Room has no African American characters, it's set in Paris, and more or less everyone in that book is gay. So in other words, he was being treated as the new witness, as somebody that downtown New York really badly needed, someone to explain to them what was happening up there in Harlem in that funny hour on a Sunday morning, which is such a separate hour for people in America. You know, that if you go to a black church, it's such an entirely different experience if you go to a white church. They wanted all that information.
- [26:33]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Colm Toibin
And Baldwin just evaded, just stepped away from being their witness or their guide to writing a book about something else entirely, which was Failure to Love. Oddly enough, it's a much more moral book than Go tells Other Mansion. It deals with moral questions about loyalty, love, and the failure to love really being the drama of the book. And so what was interesting for me was watching an artist deciding almost strategically to move away from what he was famous for and best known for, to see if there was anything else that interested him more, that would fire his imagination even more. And then, of course, with the third novel, Another Country, Baldwin sought to bring his two worlds together. The world of his, as it were, bohemian friends that he'd made in Paris or in Greenwich Village, to the. To the world of his family, much more conservative, traditional world of his family in Harlem, that there are elements in his third novel, Another country, where he tries to bring the two together. In the meantime, he's becoming an essayist. In the meantime, he's becoming a playwright. In the meantime, he's becoming a poet, and the meantime, he's becoming a television performer. Now, for anyone like me who started as a journalist and moved from journalism into sort of long form journalism, writing poetry as well as journalism, and then beginning to write short stories, and then beginning to write fiction and then continue to write longer essays, and then writing for the theater, writing for opera, continuing to write essays and articles. Baldwin's a really great example. I mean, I suppose the other one would be someone like Norman Mailer or someone like Joan Didion. But what was fascinating about Baldwin was that he came out of a particular historical dilemma, which was how to live as a black man in America, how to manage that as an artist, how to confront it, how to evade it, how to explore it. And I think for anyone coming like I did, from a divided society or a society in the process of change, and certainly change, I want it in Ireland that you spend your time involved in areas of pure commitment to that change and other times where you simply need to get away from it, to get away from the struggle, to find a place bold in South France or Istanbul or Paris, just to get away, just to be able to breathe, to be able to see things differently and to be able to explore That I don't think Norman Mailer or Joan Didion, who would be the two, I suppose, great essayists of that American decade, that neither of them are under the same sort of pressures as Baldwin was. So I think he is in certain ways an exemplary figure. Even though I think he would laugh at the idea because he was also someone who was very good at self mockery and, you know, self deprecation. But at other moments, and this is an extraordinary idea that Baldwin understood the television studio. Now, he's no training in this. It wasn't as though he went on a course or did a degree in it. He just knew when television lights were on, how to look, how to sound and what to say. And he spoke slowly often, which was not you're not meant to do on television. And he stopped sometimes. He. He seemed to argue with himself sometimes. And one of the great things about YouTube now is there are about 10 clips of what you can watch Baldwin and you can see what an extraordinary mind he had. And it was a sort of. There was a sort of glorious arrogance about him sometimes. But he had the truth to speak and he thought people should listen to him speaking. And it was often a difficult truth because he was saying, you think there's a black problem, we don't have a problem. You white people have a problem and you have to deal with the problem in yourselves. Don't think it's a racial question, it's not. It's your question. And he would say this much more eloquently than I've just said it. And he became famous for this. And it's always a different television fame, as anyone has had, it is always. It's always a difficult thing because when a year later, no one remembers, we remember now we can see these clips. But if he's trying to write novels and trying to write stories and trying to write plays, this becomes a great distraction. You don't just ever go on television and come off out of the studio and go home. There's always a sense, the adrenaline you get from the performance is so great that you end up sort of almost wandering the street that evening. You know, it's not an easy thing, television. It's almost like acting where you want to become very used to it. And there's a sense of Baldwin being hugely unsettled by things in his own personality that were sort of glorious and that. And that gave him sort of edge. But those very things didn't represent quietness or didn't make the necessary quietness easy. He still did manage to write, I think, three great novels, a number of really great stories. But. And of course, the essays remain for some strange reason. Essays written on the hoof, written for the moment, written for a magazine, written for deadlines. Those essays remain in, I suppose, because of the level of commitment he had not only to truth, but to complexity. That it wasn't a simple business in those years saying something true. It was a complex business. And he gave the complexity its full, I suppose, full shape. And therefore the essays remain great examples of a man arguing with himself. And so the rhetoric comes only later. He's argued with himself, I think he makes, I think, durable prose. And then he's obviously arguing with other people. And that gives a rhetorical edge to the essays. There's a thousand pages in the Life of America, the big essays of James Baldwin, the one edited by Toni Morrison. And honestly, there isn't a dull moment. And it is strange, after all these years, after so many things have changed, to realize one thing hasn't changed, that a glittering mind applying itself in prose to a difficult subject will, if he's lucky, will come up with something that 50 years later remains, or 60, 70 years later remains, totally readable, totally engaging and oddly relevant to now.
- [32:24]
Yeah, well, it seems like you read it and you think he was ahead of his time. And then as you continue to read, you think he's ahead of our time. His intelligence is so powerful. But as you mention in your book, when you were talking about Go Tell on the Mountain, he often has such a plain style and just one syllable words. And the way he puts it together, though, is very gripping. And you don't get the sense that he's talking down to you or that he's simplified and sometimes you get from a writer like Hemingway, but that it's a style that he's creating out of these plain words that can achieve a maximum effect.
- [33:09]
Yeah. There are two things he doesn't mention much in his essays or in anywhere. When is Hemingway and the idea of the shadow over someone like him who say, you know, he's born in 1924, meaning really in the. In the 1940s, he started to think about prose. That for anyone in that position, you know, including people like me in Ireland in the 60s, the figure of Hemingway and the figure of Fitzgerald were really amazing because they wrote so well. And you can see moments in Baldwin where he's picking up from. But he never says that. He never gives them credit for that. It's as though he's destroying his father in all sorts of ways. Including his white father called Hemingway and indeed Fitzgerald. The other thing is that he really is a child of the Harlem Renaissance, because He's born in 1924, he's going to high school, say he's going to school in the 1930s, when essentially the energy has gone out of the Harlem Renaissance, which means that figures who were famous poets, famous writers, are now high school teachers. So he has a figure like Countee Cullen, who was a famous poet in the Harlem Renaissance just six or seven years earlier, was riding high, was going to live in Paris, was coming back to Harlem, was a famous figure in New York. He's now teaching. He's Baldwin, briefly. He's Baldwin's French teacher. And if you look at who's teaching in that school, who else is studying in that school Baldwin went to, you realize that the Harlem Baldwin comes out of is a very complex place. When Baldwin starts to go to study there, I mean, as a student in, say he born in 24. So we're talking about from 34 to 1940. We're watching Baldwin really being educated by very serious people who had a great influence on him. He doesn't go on much about the Harlem songs, I think partly because it was so present in his charges, mainly men, but also figures like Nella Larson had emerged. And if you think about Langston Hughes and those figures who were national figures and there were writers and there were people obviously you could still see on the street or your books, people had or poems, people knew and they all went to Paris. I mean, the first stop after Harlem was not Greenwich Village, it was Paris. And so Baldwin's going to Paris in 1948 was not an accident or a strange adventure. It was a natural thing for someone African American from Harlem, his talent to do.
- [35:26]
Jack Wilson
So.
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Colm Toibin
There are all sorts of context. You can place him. What's fascinating is he himself wished to free himself from those contexts. He wasn't ever going to say, oh no, I really was influenced by Hemingway. He's never going to do that. Nor is he going to say, oh, I'm just part of a movement. No, he really was self invented to a large extent, including his own sort of myth of himself.
- [35:48]
Getting back to that moment you described earlier, where he wrote his second novel and didn't do what might have been expected, whether it was from the public or my guess is his publisher probably would have been happy with, with a repeat performance, but that he went out on this new territory.
- [36:04]
Jack Wilson
What do you think he was trying.
- [36:06]
Colm Toibin
To do or what exactly made him want to do something so Different? Was it just the pressure of having to repeat himself, or was there something artistic he wanted to explore or that he was going through a search for his own identity and this was part of that, or what do you trace it back to?
- [36:26]
I think that he was susceptible to anything that came into his mind, you know, that he wasn't strategic. It wasn't as though he said, well, I've done that and now I'll do this. It was that in those years in Paris, he saw something. He saw that it didn't matter now whether he was black or white, didn't matter even whether he was gay or straight. What mattered now was would he be able to love? What would it look like if there was a possibility of partnership in a room, which would include sex, which would include love, which would include companionship? What would that look like? And if it didn't happen, what would that drama be? The drama of a failure to love under those circumstances? And you can see how it would capture. Even the Web described it, it would capture anyone's imagination. Imagine you went to Paris as a young man, or you brought your hero, your protagonist there. And imagine that your protagonist was gay. And imagine your protagonist met someone in a bar and there was a possibility of being with that person. And your protagonist did everything to avoid intimacy, to avoid continuity, to avoid mutuality. And that's a novel, that's a drama. You can see the failure. You can see what's at stake. Everything's at stake. And so he moved from his first novel, where everything was also at stake, because it's about a young man's confrontation with religion, with family, and with a sort of nation, and being so puzzled and confused and anxious, so desperate to sort of fly those nets. But the second novel then, will be set in Paris. One of the reasons, of course, is that it becomes very difficult in those years for all in writing in the 1950s, building up to the time of the civil rights movement. In other words, when that the energy is there to say we need change, how do you have a young African American man from Harlem who is super sensitive, super intelligent, and ready for the world? So Baldwin stops Go tell on the Mountain when John grimes was about 15, and we're allowed to imagine his adulthood, but not much. In other words, it's not as though the adulthood of such a man will be easy to shape. Baldwin does it in another country where his character Rufus is African American. The opening 70 or 80 pages of the book is really about Rufus as he's attempting to navigate that strange world where there's so much is possible, but also so much is closed. It is as though someone has been let out of solitary confinement into the wider prison. And the wider prison brings many greater dangers. I think one of the interesting things also is that Baldwin was not interested in writing a novel which would deal with the race question, meaning would have white people and black people in conflict. That he didn't write that in Go Tell it on the Mountain and Go Tell it on the Mountain hardly anyone quite gets to speak that. It is really set in a Harlem which is just naturally a Harlem made up of African Americans, as it was. One of the things he took from Joyce, besides writing about a religious character in Portrait of the Artist is the idea in Ulysses that almost no one English gets to speak. Even though it's 1904, even though the English are running Dublin, even though it's the British army in Dublin, it's the Lord Lieutenant is English, they don't get to speak. The conflict between Ireland and England is not the drama. The drama is a comedy around a given day. But all sorts of people appear and say various things, but none of them, I mean some of them are about nationalism in Ireland and England, but so many of them are about sex or love or drink or jokes or stylistic changes in the novel itself. But you know, just that idea of not sticking to an agenda which is binary, which is black white, which is European police brutality versus black people, which is Harlem versus Manhattan, that these easy binaries didn't really interest him that much. I mean, and in fact he was not going to be tied down by them. So he is exemplary in that sense. He did think his way through some of these difficult problems to avoid a sort of easy dullness in the novel. Oh yes, A is black, he must be good and B is a policeman, white, he must be bad. You can do that sometimes, but be very careful you don't make it the central drama of your book.
- [40:31]
Okay, let's take a quick break and.
- [40:33]
Jack Wilson
Come back with more on James Baldwin.
- [40:46]
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- [42:09]
Colm Toibin
Okay, we're back. So, column, do you see any parallels with Baldwin and Henry James? Do you think he took anything from James?
- [42:19]
Yeah, he was fascinated by James. And I mean, he took so much from, for example, he sort of named some of the great jazz players and felt that he wanted to take some of the energy and the soaring systems used by figures like Miles Davis and Ray Charles and work with them as an artist in prose. But then at the same time, he wanted to find what is at the center of a Jamesian sentence. Now, Henry James sentence, they're notorious often for being long, although they're not all long. They're not always long. But if they're long, what they're doing is they're offering us nuance, they're offering us qualification, modification, that nothing is exactly the case because it's nothing. Something else needs to be said about it to qualify it. And I think that idea of a cast of mind that accepted complexity as natural, that didn't expect anything to be simple, that presumed that anything said would have to be qualified or modified or in some way refined. And he found this in James and it interested him enormously.
- [43:22]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [43:23]
Colm Toibin
Well, even your description of the subject of his book, will he be able to love, sounds very Jamesian to me.
- [43:32]
Yes. Also in Giovanni's Room, he's working with a tradition which James certainly began in a novel like the Ambassadors, where Henry James has his character Lambert Straighter, arriving in Paris as though for the first time and being very moved by the sort of sensuous nature of the light and then the sensuous nature of the buildings, and then suddenly a whole area of himself opening up. And I think that happened to Baldwin himself when he went to Paris in 1948 at the age of 24. That idea of what Paris. And that's something that also was there in the Ambassadors.
- [44:11]
Jack Wilson
Right?
- [44:13]
Colm Toibin
Now, you've written about Henry James and the Master, as I mentioned, and Thomas.
- [44:18]
Jack Wilson
Mann and the Magician.
- [44:19]
Colm Toibin
Did you consider writing a novel about James Baldwin?
- [44:23]
No, I didn't. For some reason. That experience of being born in Harlem and then having to navigate the world from that initial perspective is beyond me. You know, it's something that I'm interested in reading about, and I'M interested in writing about, but to try and imagine what it was like. There's something I wouldn't get right. And it isn't just words. Would they use that word or this word? I think that that funny idea in the Harlem that Baldwin was brought up in of being oddly repressed and being fully aware of the terms of that repression and then oddly free in the sense that, you know, when you went to school with your family, it wasn't a daily business of repression. It was always there. He was always aware of it. A sort of brutality in the air. And I have no idea how that would affect your dreams, how it would affect your. Your desires. I. It honestly is something I wouldn't. I think the difference between being born in Ireland, in Southern Ireland in 1955 and being born in Harlem in 1924 is much greater, oddly enough, as far as I'm concerned, than being being born as Henry James or being born as Thomas Mann. I simply couldn't imagine it. I couldn't write about it. I could study it. But to try and get. To try and get a day to day sense of what dreams, what moments are like. And with Baldwin, sometimes he's too mysterious for me and sometimes he's too open. But what's there always is that the background is so different, is so, so extremely different that I don't. I don't think I could see it.
- [46:03]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [46:04]
Colm Toibin
Now, you also are a very accomplished nonfiction writer with a lot of experience doing that. But are there any tools that that fiction might have provided you that you found yourself wishing that you had available where you feel limited in any ways by making this book a nonfiction book?
- [46:21]
Yes. I suppose that what Baldwin talks about, and he gets this from Henry James, is the idea that what matters most is the private life and that the need and the urge to have a private life. I think he was thinking about the idea that in the 1960s in America, if you were African American, that was really what the battle was for. That you could be alone, that solitude could not be threatened, that you were dealing with your own spirit rather than with the body politic. And I don't have a real sense of Baldwin alone. I have a sense of him on tv. I have a sense of him publishing, touring, talking, dancing, drinking. But the idea of Baldwin alone for a day in a space other than when he was ill, I don't really have a sense of that. And we may get that because we don't have his letters. You know, he wrote a huge number of letters and there's a Volume of the letters will come at some point in the future, but because we don't have it now, we're missing a whole sense of him. Whereas with Henry James, it's very easy to imagine he spent so much of his life alone that he was not a noisy man in any way. He didn't speak much in public, and he. When he went out in the evening, his days were spent alone. Yeah, it's that idea in those two novels about Henry James and about Thomas Mann. I was interested in the Solitude with Baldwin. The solitude is not what's most interesting about him. What's most interesting about him is that he was a cat. And he was really taking years, like 1963. Like, you can't work out how did he get from San Francisco to New York that day and be back in Seattle the next day? How did. How did he travel? Where was he living? How did he get clean clothes? And you realize he's up late, he's laughing, he's shouting. He's. He's in love with someone. He's writing something as well. And there are two scenes that I felt I could work with. And one was Bob Silvers, who was the editor of the New York Review of Books, told me that when he was. I think Bob Silvers was working for Harper's Magazine. They had to print the COVID before the rest of the magazine because it was colored. And they had to put Baldwin's name on the COVID because he was writing the article. But he didn't deliver. And it really is serious. And Bob goes all over New York trying to find him. Eventually gets him. And he's in a small apartment, I think, somewhere in the. In Greenwich Village. And he says, look, you. It's. And it's midnight. You go sleep. You lie down in that bed and you go sleep. I. By the time you wake up, that article will be done. And Baldwin worked through the night. At six in the morning or seven, Bob woke and there was the article. Bob said it was one of those great pieces, you know, famous Baldwin articles written through seven hours of very careful. I mean, you could call it frenzy, but it wasn't frenzy. It was controlled work. I could certainly start a novel with that. And the other one is where he said he's staying in a cottage in Connecticut again in the early 60s. And William Stern owns the big house. And Stern is up there with some. It's say 1962 or something, year like that with some Kennedy Democrats. And they're talking about the need for reform, especially the need for reform in the south, they're talking about busting, they're talking about Civil Rights Act. They're talking about all those matters. And Dr. King and Saren, who tells the story, said he just remembered Baldwin's down at cottage, and someone said, bring him up, like, let's have him here, because we need to know really what's going on. But he always knows he's got street cred. And they send down for Baldwin, of course, who's been drinking. And Baldwin comes up and looks at all these liberals, all these white guys who want change. They say, like, what do you think about the legislation that so and so is proposing? And Baldwin just says, hey, hey, man, we're gonna burn your shoes down. You know, obviously, he's saying this as a joke to them, like, meaning, don't ask me, you know, will little reforms please us? Will little reforms be enough for the black population? It's gonna be bigger than that. Wouldn't have to do something much bigger. And he kept saying that no matter what they said, it's a baby, baby, we're going to burn your cities down.
- [50:24]
Yeah.
- [50:25]
And you could just see the amount of laughter, you know, and the amount of fun.
- [50:30]
It almost doesn't feel like a writer. It almost is like you're describing an athlete and you're telling us like, he was a heavyweight boxer and this was the match he had in, you know, when everyone thought he was washed up, but he came back and he. He defeated the champion. Or this is a, you know, like a legendary story that he turned up and he. He dominated here and he did this there.
- [50:59]
Jack Wilson
And it's fun.
- [51:00]
Colm Toibin
Yeah. It's like if he was an actor or it's like with Miles Davis.
- [51:04]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [51:04]
Colm Toibin
Or like Marlon Brando, one of those legendary figures who could both disappear and everyone aware they'd gone, that could suddenly appear with this extraordinary performances. He certainly. He certainly had elements of that, by the way, on the matter of boxing, one of the reasons why I really do love him is that he's no time for boxing, and he couldn't understand it, and it didn't interest him. And this is a time when every American writer, even the women. I mean, it wasn't just a male thing Joyce Carlos did later on.
- [51:34]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [51:34]
Colm Toibin
That to write about boxing was to write about the essential American matter.
- [51:38]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [51:38]
Colm Toibin
And that you went out with your chiseled prose style and tried to describe uppercuts and lower cuts, and honestly, it's the most loathsome business, boxing. And, I mean, I just don't notice really rich people boxing each Other. And Baldwin just didn't enjoy it. And they sent him to a boxing match and he really didn't know what to say. So he interviewed Sonny Liston, and in the end he just said, I wished him well. I thought it was a beautiful thing to say to Sonny Liston, you know, I wish you well.
- [52:05]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [52:05]
Colm Toibin
Not ask him some stupid question about the violence that was within him or some awful thing. And Baldwin, his description of the match, the boxing match itself, is really awful. It's really bad. It's really inept, and I love it. You know, he just. It just isn't his thing, boxing. He just that. That violence doesn't interest him. He was interested in things that were funny, that were glittering. I mean, as a journalist, as a man, he was interested in the, I suppose, the possibilities and things. He didn't find anything in boxing except violence and dullness and the fact that they were. The people were poor.
- [52:39]
Did he enjoy his own performances, his debates or his speeches, his television appearances? Did he view that as kind of a necessary part of being a public intellectual, or did he do them out of a sense of obligation or duty, or did he have fun when he was sparring with them? I mean, I should say that I agree with you that I think for a lot of people today, they might not know his writing hardly at all, but they would be familiar with those five or six clips that seem to go around all the time of his speeches or things. He says, he's so good on television, he's so witty, he's so polished and so thoughtful, and he's just such a fun figure to watch and so compelling. But what. What was his attitude toward that side of him or that side of his occupation?
- [53:33]
Let me take you up on the word thoughtful. He made thoughtfulness into a sort of game where it gave him pleasure. It. There was a sort of glittering edge to it.
- [53:44]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [53:44]
Colm Toibin
So. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, he took enormous pleasure in life and he made that into both the politics and the poetics. In other words, that life was capable of making him so laugh so much and just amuse him. Why should that not be available for everyone? Well, like what? What's your problem? And the other one, I suppose, is that he. Yeah, he. He actually was also almost a religious figure all his life, and that. That what he was saying on television, he felt mattered so that he. Yes, there was an element of him enjoying it because he was enjoying his own intelligence and also he was enjoying being so right. And I saw this happening in Northern Ireland in about 1968, 69. When a number of figures emerged who were simply more eloquent than anyone expected them to be. And on television, figures like Bernadette Devlin made an enormous difference because of the terms they were using, the tones they took, the high moral seriousness versus the rhetorical wit. And Baldwin had all that, certainly. I mean, you can just see in those performances. But you can also see it, I think, in the essays, the sense of someone taking pleasure in the next thought he's just had, because he has a way of making it sound both complex and true. And that was his great gift.
- [55:03]
Do you attribute anything in your own writing career or, I guess, in your own personal life to him? Did his example pave the way for you in any sense?
- [55:14]
I think the idea that he was so close to his family and so close to that Harlem of his childhood and so loyal to all that, and then he went out into the world and found other ways to live, moving, moving, wavering between the two, that it was as though there was no. There was no question of being able to take sides in that or being able to say, you know, I have one identity. I have one identity. He would have thought that was an absurd notion. He had myriad identity. And. And so, I suppose for anyone who's gay, for anyone that's from a closed community or a very sort of rigorous religious society, his example of how to maneuver, how to navigate, and how to, in a way, soar above all that, but also be rooted in it. I mean, his roots remain in Harlem. His roots remain in Harlem. And I think that's very important if you're a novelist, for example. For me, I'm really from. I'm not even from Ireland. I'm from a very small place in Ireland. And it's that small place that matters to me, that comes not just in dreams, but the minutes I'm starting a novel sometimes say, oh, my God, here we go again. You know, the same names of street. I suppose. I suppose that idea that there was someone who. Under the most difficult pressures. You can just imagine the pressures of being a young man like him emerging in the late 1940s. What the chances of him becoming a famous writer, a famous commentator, library matter for that sort of fame for American writers now. Like, he's so cool still. The way the mind works, the way the wit works, the way his respect for authority. I mean, just his even mild, slightly mocking laughter at the idea that white people spend their time watching Doroth Day and Gary Cooper. He said the way he even would write the words versus Miles Davis and Ray Charles. He felt he had coolness on his side. And, you know, that has been very important, I think, especially in somewhere like England where the idea of being black or having that sort of response to jazz or to serious music has really infected English society, I think improved us in many ways. And Baldwin's cool.
- [57:23]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [57:25]
Colm Toibin
Okay, well, the book is called On James Baldwin. Colm Tobin, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [57:33]
Thank you.
- [57:40]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. Thanks to listener Louis and to Colm Doybean and James Baldwin. Do check out Colm's book on James Baldwin. It's a great introduction if you're new to Baldwin and a great companion if it's time for a Baldwin refresher. We will be looking at Black American Women writers of the 20th century on Thursday and then immersing ourselves in James Joyce and the Dead for two episodes, which we're going to bring to you ad free for the holidays. Then we'll revisit a conversation that I had about John Keats with Anahid Nursesian. And in the new year we'll return with some new content with your old favorite Mike Palindrome as he and I dive into a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also in the new year. Oh boy. Our 252025 episodes look real people and they look spectacular. Hopefully they'll sound that way too. I'm on Blue sky at Jack Wilson. Just Jack Wilson. J, A C K E Jack with an E Wilson. No need for the real or whatever the or whatever it was I was using back on Twitter Blue Sky, Jack Wilson and hol pod for or updates from Emma, I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [59:11]
Zibby Owens
From Academy Award winning actor Matthew McConaughey's soulful and humorous picture book to New York Times best selling authority Kristin Hannah's the Women Moms don't have Time to Read Books is an author interview podcast unlike any other. In 30 minutes or less, each episode of this chart topping and Webby award winning show dives deep beneath the COVID fostering friendship and camaraderie, support and curiosity, connection and compassion. Hosted by me, Zibby Owens, author, bookstore owner and head of what the Lady Times called the zippy verse. Moms don't have Time to Read Books has something for everyone, whether you're a mom like me or simply a busy reader. So don't miss out. Follow Moms don't have Time to Read Books on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now. New episodes are released every weekday, bringing books to life.
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Colm Toibin
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Colm Toibin
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