Summary
At the time when he wrote these “Autobiographical Notes,” James Baldwin was 31 years old. He begins by describing his childhood reading, which included Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Because people around him insisted he read the Bible, he resisted reading it. Baldwin’s first publication came out when he was around 12 years old. It was a piece about the left-wing Spanish Revolution in 1936, but it was censored in the church newspaper. Baldwin also received encouragement for his writing, as when New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent him a letter of congratulations and when he was awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship at 21.
In his twenties, Baldwin began living in the Village (i.e., the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan). He began writing book reviews, which he remarks were “mostly as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert.” Tired of this situation, Baldwin went to France. This is where he finished his semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).
Baldwin describes how difficult it is to be a writer, saying that it sometimes feels like the whole world conspires against him. Because the world does not care about the writer’s talent, one has to find other ways to feel valuable. Baldwin writes that, for him, race represented both the challenge to and the reward for being a writer: “[F]inally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.” He had to grapple with race before he could move onto other topics. Race affects everyone in the United States, he argues. One can only understand it by digging into the “[t]he history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country.” He argues that race is central to the works of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and many others. Making reference to Ernest Hemingway, Baldwin writes that his primary responsibility as a writer is to “get [his] work done.” He ends by stating: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
Analysis
Baldwin introduces his life to the reader by discussing his literary influences, what it means to be a black writer in America, and his principles for creating good and honest writing. Baldwin’s influences are wide-ranging. In trying to describe his style, he writes: “I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the storefront churches, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech—and something of Dickens's love for bravura—have something to do with me today, but I wouldn't stake my life on it.” Though Baldwin earlier states that he avoided reading the Bible, here he admits that its language influenced his writing (after all, as a teenager he worked briefly as a preacher) along with everyday black speech and nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens.
Baldwin also argues that being a black writer in America means that one approaches the cultural heritage of Europe and North America differently. He describes himself as a “bastard of the West.” Having his family roots not in Europe but in Africa means that he approaches everything from Shakespeare to Bach, the Chartres Cathedral to the Empire State Building differently. “These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history.” While the black writer is fully knowledgeable about these traditions, he is separated from them. “This was not my heritage,” Baldwin writes. To live within a tradition while also being distant from it is a situation particular to the black writer. Many of the themes in this book center on this question of the black writer’s position in the world, which Baldwin describes here as a lack of place.
Another challenge of being a black writer, according to Baldwin, is that there is so much written about the “Negro problem.” In terms of racism in America, merely compiling information is not enough to transform things. In fact, the assumption that one has solved something simply through reading can also be dangerous. However, the writer’s job, according to Baldwin, is to dig deep into the roots of problems and social issues: “It is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.” Even so, Baldwin argues that the issue of race creates a particularly difficult challenge for the black writer. To be a good writer one must build on one’s personal experiences. However, being black in America means being prevented from looking too closely at one’s own experiences because the hate and fear one experiences can be so overwhelming. In this way, Baldwin states here, the task of the black writer is doubly difficult.
