James Baldwin at 100!

I opened the book at random to the following sentence, underlined in pencil many years ago: “The fact that I had never seen the Algerian casbah was of no more relevance before this unanswerable panorama than the fact that the Algerians had never seen Harlem. The Algerians and I were both, alike, victims of this history, and I was still a part of Africa, even though I had been carried out of it nearly four hundred years before.”

Thank you, thank you, Jimmy, for every sentence you wrote! We met only twice, but I still feel the warm intensity of your engagement with a young interlocutor, helping me out on that first occasion when I was booed for a bad early homage poem for Langston Hughes at my first poetry reading at Shakespeare & CO, & even if on the 2nd occasion I was holding a France-Culture Radio mic between us, as I was interviewing you for the publication in French of “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” — a book you were angry at your scared US publishers for holding back so that this French translation came out first.

Here, a little extract from an autobiographical piece where I mention first reading Baldwin: “The small upright book [see the old photo of my desk], the third from the left, is the first with a readable title: Blues for Mister Charlie by James Baldwin. It is a Dell paperback, so the title page tells you, that you bought in Stockholm in July 1966, the month you turned 20, & had inscribed with what you then believed would become your Americanized writer’s name, “Pieter J. Joris.”…. The most visible book, the one lying flat just left of center, is James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. You still own this copy. It has that same version of your name on the flyleaf, but the place of acquisition now is Paris and the date is November 3rd — still written in the European style of day/month/year — of that same year, thus not long after you returned to your medical studies. That fall, in Shakespeare & Co., you bought the newly available paperback of Baldwin’s Another Country, long extracts of which you remember reading aloud with your friend Poo who sometimes crashed on the floor of your 7th floor walk-up student mansarde on the rue de Rennes, a place magically situated roughly half-way between Boulevard Saint Germain and Boulevard de Montparnasse…”

And I have never stopped reading him since & never will.