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James Baldwin in Paris: Exile, Multiculturalism and the Public Intellectual Author(s): Lloyd Kramer Source: Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 27- 47 Published by: Berghahn Books Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299193 Accessed: 04-08-2019 18:41 UTC

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James Baldwin in Paris:

Exile, Multiculturalism

and the Public Intellectual

Lloyd Kramer

The constant movement of exiles and refugees into twentieth-century America has contributed to America's self-defined national identity as an "asylum of liberty." Although Americans have often expressed anxieties about the presence of foreigners in their society, they have also celebrated the fact that creative people have emigrated to the United States in order to escape fascist, racist or communist regimes in places such as Germany, Italy and the former Soviet Union. This movement of creative people became especially important during the 1930s and 1940s as European artists and writers sought freedom in the artistic, literary and academic communities of American society. Creative exiles from Europe sometimes developed complex, critical assessments of American culture and institutions, but their presence in the United States became an important historical example for Americans who wanted to show how personal and artistic freedom in their own nation differed from the repression of totalitarian states.

Popular conceptions of American freedom, however, made it difficult for analysts of exile migrations to see the movement of creative artists and intellectuals who chose to leave America after World War II because they felt deprived of freedom, equality or opportunities for a literary career.

Lloyd Kramer is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

©2001 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol. 27, No. I

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28 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

This pattern of expatriation was most significant among African-American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the early decades of the Cold War, when France seemed to offer an attractive alternative to racial barriers and exclusions in the United States. Although some prominent black artists and intellectuals of this era were denied passports and the freedom to travel (e.g., W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson), a "Lost Generation" of black Americans managed to establish a vital, new expatriate community in the city that had attracted so many famous white American writers after World War I.

The African-American community in postwar Paris included painters, jazz musicians, novelists and journalists, and it may have numbered about 500 persons in the years around 1 950. Its most famous public figures were the celebrated performer Josephine Baker and the much-acclaimed author Richard Wright, but Paris also became the refuge for many other black Americans who sought to escape from American racial prejudices in the streets, cafes and hotels of the French capital. During the same decade that numerous European exiles had settled in America, therefore, a parallel artistic migration took place among African-Americans who decided that their creativity, political critiques and personal survival required a flight to Europe.1

It is impossible to describe the diverse experiences of this creative African-American community in a short essay, but the evolving ideas of James Baldwin provide a remarkable example of how the expatriate experience in postwar France influenced creative black American writers as profoundly as the exile experience in America influenced creative Europeans. There were of course important differences in the governing regimes of the nations they fled, and yet the exiles who left Europe before World War II and the black Americans who went to Europe after that war shared the belief that they must leave their societies in order to find creative freedom and personal safety. Despite the inevitable frustrations of living in alien communities, the emigres in both of these migrations found new audiences for their work and new perspectives on their home

1 . The history of this postwar community has been examined in several important recent books. See Tyler Stoval, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York, 1996), pp. 130-215; Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France , /S40-/9£0(Urbana, 1991), pp. 160-256; and James Campbell, Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank (New York, 1 995), pp. 1 -35, 85- 119, 183-211. The estimated number of African-Americans in Paris comes from James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son (Boston, 1955, 1984), p. 118. On the American interpretations of the German intellectual migration, see Martin Jay, "The German Migration: Is There a Figure in the Carpet?" in Stephanie Barron, ed., Exiles + Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles, 1997), pp. 326-337.

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James Baldwin in Paris 29

societies, all of which points to the importance of exile and expatriation in the twentieth-century history of writers, artists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. More specifically, there were intriguing historical parallels in the ways that African-American exiles developed new perspectives on America's history and culture while European exiles in America were developing new cross-cultural perspectives on the meaning of their own native lands.

Although Baldwin's personal experiences and literary insights during his early years in France (1948 to 1957) were crucial in his own creative life, his early insights in France carry a wider contemporary significance in the context of recent theoretical studies of exile and cultural creativity. Long before the intellectual world had discovered postcolonial literary theory or described the cultural construction of public spheres, Baldwin had identified the key issues of these now-familiar arguments: the interest in "diaspora" as a pattern of modem social-cultural experience, the emphasis on "hybrid" cultural identities and narratives, and the concern with public intellectuals who strive to play a shaping role in the public cultures of modem societies. Each of these theories needs more

explanation, and I will come back to them with reference to contemporary intellectuals. Among the various connections that seem to link Baldwin to latter-day postcolonial theorists, however, I want to stress the experience and theme of exile. Baldwin's outsider perspective on America in the early 1950s pushed him toward an early narrative of American multiculturalism - a narrative that emphasized the cultural hybridity of America rather than a "melting pot" of Euro-American cultural assimilation. Living in Paris helped Baldwin see beyond the American, Cold War, nationalist narrative, which argued for an essential American unity, coherence and consensus in the struggle against communism and un-American activities. In contrast to the dominant national narrative of

his time, Baldwin was already arguing in the 1950s (much like postcolonial theorists in the 1990s) for the multiple voices of a national culture and for the mixtures rather than the purities of a national identity. In short, the life and work of James Baldwin in post-World War II Paris suggest the importance of African-American expatriation in the emergence of new critical perspectives on the complex multiculturalism of American history.

Baldwin (1924-1987) grew up in Harlem and left New York for France in November 1948. Like most African-Americans who expatriated themselves in this era, he was not facing a direct threat of arrest or government harassment, yet he clearly felt the need to leave the United States in order to survive as a free person and writer. Baldwin's youth in

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30 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

Harlem and his subsequent work in a New Jersey defense industry had shown him the dangers of racial prejudice and the rage that African- Americans developed in response to white racism. The rage, as Baldwin described it, led toward several possible outcomes - all of which could destroy a black person in America.

His stepfather, David Baldwin, represented the option of personal bitterness that could lead to insanity. Regarding all white people with distrust because of his own painful experiences, David Baldwin gradually lost his ability to work (he was a minister in Harlem) and sank into a mental and physical decline that expressed the high psychic costs of living with endless resentments and anger. By the time of his death in 1943 the stepfather had shown the son "that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me."2 But the other options for a young black man were not much better, as the youthful James Baldwin concluded after seeing how riots in Harlem destroyed property and vented the rage of angry African-Americans (in the very week of his stepfather's death) without offering any real change or even a hope for change among people caught in poverty, unemployment or social alienation. "Hatred, which could destroy so much," he explained, "never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law. "3 Yet he understood how

powerful the hatred could be, and he almost turned to personal violence one night in a New Jersey restaurant when he was denied service because of his race. Personal assaults on white people might be as momentarily satisfying as the mob violence of a riot, but Baldwin recognized that both forms of violence were likely to harm the victims of racism even more than the racists. Despite or because of his rage, Baldwin decided that his life "was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart."4 He managed to escape from the restaurant and other such situations without ruining his life through an attack on other people, only to find yet another option for black rage: suicide. One of his closest friends in New York, an African-American political activist named Eugene Worth, killed himself in December 1 946, leaving Baldwin with another example of how rage could turn inward in the most extreme forms of self-destruction.

2. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son , p. 89. For detailed information on Baldwin's life, see David Leeming, James Baldwin : A Biography (New York, 1994), and James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (London, 1991).

3. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son , p. 89.

4. Ibid., p. 98.

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James Baldwin in Paris 31

Meanwhile, Baldwin had decided to become a writer, though the demons of his life in New York seemed to stymie all of his attempts to write a novel. Fearing the possible alternatives of madness, violence and suicide, Baldwin eventually chose to follow the precedent of Richard Wright and move to Paris (Wright settled in Paris in 1947 and lived there for the rest of his life). "I left America," Baldwin explained later, "because 1 doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem

to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them."5 The motive for Baldwin's departure from America thus resembled the motivation for countless other exiles who fled their native societies in the modem era: he believed that the

profound constraints and oppressive boundaries in his own culture gave him the choice of leaving home or facing the prospect of personal destruction.

Baldwin later reported that he was skeptical about the Romantic legends of Parisian life, but he seemed to enjoy the cafes and Bohemian freedom of the Left Bank during his early years in the city. Paris had long attracted African-Americans because of its reputation for tolerance and its apparent openness to black artists (one of Baldwin's teachers, the African-American poet Countee Cullen, had stimulated his interest in France with such stories when he was still in high school).6 Yet Baldwin found few opportunities for contact with Parisian intellectuals, and most of his friends in Paris were white or black Americans. He especially liked the anonymity and tolerance of Parisian life, which left him free to wander through the city without the anxieties he had felt in New York. "It is this arrogant indifference on the part of the Parisian, with its unpredictable effects on the traveler," he noted in a retrospective account, "which makes so splendid the Paris air, to say nothing whatever of the exhilarating effect it has on the Paris scene."7

The expatriate experience thus brought new freedoms to Baldwin, but it also gave him new questions about his own identity and provoked the kind of personal redefinition that occurs so often among displaced persons. Left alone in the streets and cheap hotels of Paris, he found himself reconstructing his American experience and identity in ways that

5. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York, 1961), pp. 3-4.

6. On the influence of Cullen, see Leeming, Baldwin, p. 22.

7. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, p. 128.

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were disorienting as well as liberating. "In America," he wrote in Nobody Knows My Name, "the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, that barrier was down. ... It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me - anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me."8 This search for self-identity led toward new insights into how the African diaspora had shaped his place in the world, how his own national identity expressed a "hybrid" cultural history, and how the social role of a writer must move from isolation back to a public identity and public interventions. All these themes in Baldwin's Parisian work expressed his creative response to expatriate experiences, but they also lead toward some of the most influential theories in our own era's intellectual culture.

Theoretical Accounts of Diaspora, Hybridity and Public Spheres

The term "diaspora" has of course long referred to the Jewish experience of dispersal from Palestine in late antiquity, when Jews began their long history of migrations around the Mediterranean into Europe and Africa. In recent decades, however, the meaning of "diaspora" has been employed to include the forced dispersion of Africans during and after the era of the slave trade. In fact, the concept of diaspora is now used to describe migrations of people in many regions of the world (including

8. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name , pp. xi-xii. Baldwin's complex quest for and definitions of identity have attracted much recent attention from literary critics and specialists in "cultural studies." In addition to the recurring analysis of Baldwin's racial, sexual and literary identities, some of the most important work on Baldwin compares his experiences in France to the "exile" positions of other modern novelists. See, for example, Bryan R. Washington, The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald , and James Baldwin (Boston, 1995), and Cyraina E. Johnson-Roullier, Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce, and Baldwin (Albany, N.Y., 2000). Where Johnson-Roullier places Baldwin in a cultural context of exiled literary modernists, I want to place him in a context of social and cultural theorists who have helped historians rethink the meaning of multicultural societies and the role of writers in modem public life.

Other important recent books on Baldwin's identity and cultural significance include D. Quentin Miller, ed., Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things not Seen (Philadelphia, 2000); and Dwight A. McBride, ed., James Baldwin Now (New York, 1999), which also provides an excellent bibliography of the rapidly growing contemporary scholarship on Baldwin's life and writings. A valuable account of French responses to Baldwin can be found in Rosa Bobia, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin in France (New York, 1997). Bobia's work offers a helpful resource for future research by listing over 500 French articles about Baldwin that were published between 1952 and 1988.

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James Baldwin in Paris 33

China, India and the Arab middle east), especially in places where Western imperialism disrupted traditional political, commercial or cultural relations and pushed people toward new centers of global economic power. Whatever the specific origins of these extraordinary movements of population, the key consequence in virtually every case has been the mixing of different cultural traditions. Diasporas inevitably produce cross- cultural exchanges and "mixed" communities that must negotiate new cross-cultural relations in politics, commerce, and culture.

Among the various theoretical accounts of this "mixing," Stuart Hall's description of "cultural identity and diaspora" offers particularly useful insights into the dynamic, interactive processes that continually reshape the identities of those living in modern multicultural societies. As Hall describes them, "cultural identities come from somewhere, [and] have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation." Hence the typical modern cultural identification is "not an essence but a positioning," and the meaning of an identity is "always already fused, syncretised, with other cultural elements." The great result of diasporic population movements has thus been a "necessary heterogeneity and diversity," and the individual identities of people in these Diaspora cultures "are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew."9 Hall's account of these identity-shaping diasporic processes emphasizes the experiences of African-Americans in the Caribbean, where a European and African cultural "syncretism" shapes virtually every aspect of collective and personal life. More generally, however, Hall's description of diasporic identities offers an excellent perspective for understanding cultural identities in much of the modern world, including the identities of exiles and refugees. "Identities are never unified," he explains in one of his summaries of modern cultural history. Instead they are "increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions."10 People who live with the historical legacies of diasporas thus construct hybrid communities and personal identities that can never achieve or express the imaginary purity of a coherent, fully unified culture.

9. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire, 1 993), pp. 394-95, 400, 402.

1 0. Stuart Hall, "Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity?" in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London, 1996), p. 4.

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34 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

This concept of "hybridity" forms a dominant theme in "postcolonial" theories that seek to explain the cultural position of people in formerly colonized societies, but it also provides a conceptual framework for understanding the lives and writings of African-American writers. Although responding to a history of slavery and racism within their own society rather than to the conquests of a foreign colonial power, these writers have regularly faced the problems described by postcolonial theorists: How does one define and defend languages, traditions, ideas or experiences that a dominant cultural system has denigrated as inferior? African-Americans have long been marginalized and excluded from the cultural mainstream (a kind of internal exile), so that black American writers have often found themselves in what the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha would call the liminal position of an internal "other" in American society. This experience of "cultural liminality" and "cultural difference" marked African-Americans as outsiders before they ever went to Paris, thus placing them in the position of other postcolonial writers who define themselves in a "hybrid" relation to European history and culture."

As Bhabha and other theorists have noted, postcolonial writing often challenges dominant Western literatures, yet that challenge to Western cultural assumptions means that such writing also remains in an endless dialogue with the very traditions it challenges. The Western "Other" is always present within the postcolonial identity, just as the colonized "Other" is always present within the identity of Western people. This complex, cross-cultural exchange within postcolonial writing frequently leads to an emphasis on themes of exile or displacement and fosters a postcolonial literary tendency to "interrogate European discourse . . . from its position within and between two worlds." Postcolonial writers find themselves on the margins of Western literary traditions whose cultural "codes" and assumptions must be both used and criticized by authors who seek to redefine their own literary and political identities.'2 Even the

1 1 . Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation" in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London and New York, 1990), pp. 299-302; quotation on p. 299.

1 2 . The quoted comments on postcolonial writing appear in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back : Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York, 1989), pp. 29, 196. For other discussions of postcolonial writing and theory, see Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds., Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post- Modernism (Calgary, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994); and Patrick Colm Hogan, Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crisis of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa , and the Caribbean (Albany, NY, 2000).

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James Baldwin in Paris 35

most radical rejection of a colonial legacy therefore places the postcolonial writer in various interactions with European history, much as the African-American writer in Paris (or at home) can never quite escape the history of American racial exclusions and violence. African-American writing thus resembles postcolonial literature by bringing the "hybrid" construction of literature into prominence and by stressing the continuing influence of historical conflicts in subsequent cultural and political interactions. "The cultural inheritance of slavery or colonialism is brought before modernity," Bhabha argues, " not to resolve its historic differences into a new totality," but to produce "another hybrid" in which the "other" of the past enters inescapably into the identity of the present.13

The social position of exile or expatriation may well help writers explain how the history of diasporas and postcolonialism has created hybrid, cross-cultural identities, but such writers still face another problem that can be even more difficult than defining a "hybrid" self-identity: How do cultural "outsiders" enter the public cultures of societies in which they see themselves as excluded, marginalized or exiled? This question of the outsider's entry into a cultural or political public sphere leads to the theories of Jurgen Habermas, whose influential account of an eighteenth- century public culture ( The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [1962]) has helped to provoke a wide-ranging debate on the modern social role of "public intellectuals." As Habermas explains it, the public sphere in modern societies is the realm wherein writers and intellectuals seek to change culture, social life and government through rational critique and public debates. Located between the official institutions of government and the personal affairs of private life, the ideal "public sphere" provides a forum of critical analysis in which the best argument persuades a reading, public audience through the use of Reason. "The art critics," Habermas notes in one of his examples of the classic public sphere, "could see themselves as spokesmen for the public . . . because they knew of no authority beside that of the better argument and because they felt themselves at one with all who were willing to let themselves be convinced by arguments."14

Such definitions of the "critic" emerged during the Enlightenment and encouraged intellectuals to view their work as public interventions in ongoing debates about politics, knowledge, art and social relations. Yet

13. Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 241-42.

1 4. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 41.

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36 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

the "public sphere" faced a crucial problem from its earliest history: there were always questions about inclusions and exclusions in cultural life. Who had the right or the opportunity to join the debate? Women and the lower classes were typically excluded, and racial minorities were often deemed irrational and hence incompetent to participate in public discourse. Meanwhile, exiles of every race and gender have found it difficult to join the public sphere of their native societies, though they have often sought to describe, challenge and transform their home cultures through writing or other creative work. Habermas's ideal public sphere was theoretically open to all would-be participants, but African- Americans in twentieth-century Paris would find that access to American public culture remained one of the greatest problems for writers who wanted to join in public debates. The black experience thus raised questions about the structural limits to the ideal public culture. "The public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access," Habermas notes. "A public sphere from which specific groups [blacks, exiles?] would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all."15

Habermas's conception of public intellectuals participating in a transformative public debate suggests the specific intellectual problem that Baldwin, Wright and other exiles faced when they sought to change America through the books and articles they were writing in Europe. How do outsiders enter a modern public sphere, and how can writers affect their societies from the marginal position of exile? Baldwin gradually found answers for these questions as he explored the meaning of the African-American diaspora and the construction of America's hybrid cultural history. Indeed, moving from the general claims of contemporary cultural theorists to the specific example of James Baldwin, 1 intend to argue that the Parisian experience enabled Baldwin to link the cultural meaning of the African-American diaspora and postcolonial hybridity to his own identity as a critical public intellectual in America's post-World War II public sphere.

Baldwin in Paris

Baldwin's departure for Paris in 1948 expressed an acute personal perception of his "outsider" position in American culture. Although he

1 5. Ibid., p. 85; see also Habermas's summary of how the public sphere evolved during the Enlightenment in ibid., pp. 27-56, and the discussion of various limits to the public sphere in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

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James Baldwin in Paris 37

saw himself clearly marked as a racial outsider, Baldwin also felt profoundly separated from American society because he wanted to be a writer and because of his gay sexual identity. These artistic and sexual identities strongly reinforced Baldwin's view of himself as the marginal American, though the depth of his anxiety became more recognizable after he had settled in Paris. The Parisian perspectives that helped Baldwin understand his racial "role" in the United States also gave him new insights into the ambivalent social position of the male American writer. "The American writer, in Europe," Baldwin later explained, "is released . . . from the necessity of apologizing for himself. It is not until he is released from the habit of flexing his muscles and proving that he is just a 'regular guy' that he realizes how crippling this habit has been."16 Settling into a new life in Europe, Baldwin found that literary work in France did not automatically condemn him to a marginal social position, in part because Europeans saw art and literature as an integral component of culture rather than as an inappropriate activity for a "regular guy." The realization that writing could be honorable work helped Baldwin embrace his personal artistic aspirations, and he remembered feeling that he had finally left a dark tunnel for his first view of the open sky.17 Yet even this liberated life in Paris could not destroy Baldwin's sense of himself as an outsider. On the contrary, he became all the more aware of the alienating personal and collective legacy of the African diaspora when he encountered Africans, French officials and Europeans who knew nothing about his own cultural history.

Despite the fact that many African-American intellectuals were traveling in Africa by the 1950s and finding a new affinity for African culture, Baldwin stressed a deep personal ambivalence in his own contacts with Africans in Paris. To be sure, Baldwin supported the anticolonial movements of African students in France, yet he always assumed that life in America had forever separated African-Americans from the experiences and perspectives of black people in Africa. "The French African," Baldwin wrote, "comes from a region and a way of life which - at least from the American point of view - is exceedingly primitive, and where exploitation takes more naked forms. . . . His bitterness is unlike that of his American kinsman in that it is not so

treacherously likely to be turned against himself." Africans opposed colonial powers, but they did not know the painful, disorienting consequences of the diaspora experience. In other words, "the African

1 6. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, p. 6.

17. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

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has not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past. His mother did not sing 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,' and he has not, all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin as the only acceptable beauty. " 1 8 History had separated African-Americans from Africans; history had left Baldwin feeling as alien to Africa as he felt to America.

Baldwin was of course meeting both Americans and Africans in the cultural context of Europe, but European cultural identity also seemed alien to an African-American writer who remained outside France and

outside Europe even after living there for many years. The French were tolerant enough of African-Americans, Baldwin reported in one of his essays, yet they did not really understand black Americans or the wider American culture from which they came. According to Baldwin, the French "consider that all Negroes arrive from America, trumpet-laden and twinkle-toed, bearing scars so unutterably painful that all of the glories of the French Republic may not suffice to heal them."19 French officials may have been less likely than white Americans to discriminate overtly against black people (at least most black Americans viewed the French as less discriminatory in the late 1940s), but there was little French comprehension of African-American culture or history. Indeed, when Baldwin was arrested for allegedly stealing some sheets from a French hotel, he found himself sinking into an isolation and alienation that seemed to exceed the pain of even his worst moments in America. Stranded in a miserable French jail for a week in December of 1949, he wondered if his "flight from home was the cruelest trick I had ever played on myself, since it had led me here, down to a lower point than any I could ever in my life have imagined - lower, far, than anything I had seen in that Harlem which I had so hated and so loved, the escape from which had soon become the greatest direction of my life."20 The "outsider" among Americans and Africans thus discovered that he could not stop being an outsider in France; he had merely found new isolating forms of life on the outside as he pondered his position in a French prison.

More generally, however, the whole history of European culture left Baldwin wondering how he could find his place in a culture that had evolved so differently from both Africa and the diasporic culture of his

18. Ibid., pp. 121, 122.

19. Ibid., p. 120.

20. Ibid., p. 150. On the significance of this imprisonment, which came about because another American had taken sheets from a hotel and given them to Baldwin, see Leeming, Baldwin , pp. 69-73.

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James Baldwin in Paris 39

own African-American ancestors. Living in France and (for a time) in a small Swiss village, Baldwin concluded that his own history did not lead to the same traditions, culture or experiences that had shaped the Europeans who surrounded him.

I know [Baldwin explained] . . . that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when 1 followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres ... a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper."21

The feeling of separation from Europe became especially strong while he was living in a Swiss village, where many people had never seen a black person before his arrival. Wandering through the village as a lone black man "among a people whose culture controls me," Baldwin found himself identifying with the Africans who had watched Europeans arrive to colonize their land and culture. "Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory," Baldwin wrote of the Europeans around him, " - but 1 am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive."22 The diaspora that had separated Baldwin from Africa also denied him a comfortable home in Europe, where the legacy of history would always remind him of how he was (and was not) part of a conquered culture.

There were of course other options for an African-American writer in search of a stable identity. Some black intellectuals (e.g., Dubois, Robeson, the young Richard Wright) embraced leftist or communist political groups, and others turned to the cultural politics of Negritude and black essentialism. Baldwin was not much drawn to either of these

options, however, mainly because he was eager to resist every category of political, racial or cultural identity that could reify and entrap the individual. Like Stuart Hall and other recent theorists who have analyzed the fluidity of cross-cultural exchanges, Baldwin stressed the fusions rather than purities in races and cultures. When he attended an international conference of "Black Writers and Artists" in Paris (1956), for example, he wrote about the event from the position of a skeptical

2 1 . Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son , pp. 6-7.

22. Ibid., pp. 164-65.

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40 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

outsider. He opposed the kind of racial essentialisms that he detected in writers such as Leopold Senghor or Aime Cesaire, and he had little confidence in the political elites emerging to lead postcolonial states in Africa. In Baldwin's view, the advocates of essentialist black cultural identities seemed not to understand the inescapable links between African and Western culture. "For they were all, now," he wrote in reference to the black writers, "whether they liked it or not, related to Europe, stained by European visions and standards, and their relation to themselves, and to each other, and to their past had changed."23

By the time Baldwin attended that famous conference in 1956, he had in fact moved a long way toward defining his own cultural history of the complex interactions that connected black and white people in American society. He had therefore gone beyond his earlier preoccupation with the problem of being simply an outsider - outside America, outside Africa, outside France, outside European culture, outside political movements, and even outside heterosexual social mores (his book Giovanni's Room [1956] dealt explicitly with homosexual love and apparently helped Baldwin understand that crucial sexual dimension of his identity). Instead of stressing the many ways in which the African Diaspora had produced alienation, Baldwin began to emphasize the positive cultural opportunities that were produced by a diasporic experience that, for all its miseries, generated a new space for cultural fusion, mediation and creativity.

As Baldwin noted in his descriptions of exchanges with Africans in Paris, the distinctive African-American experience offered unique openings for cross-cultural connections and insights. "We could, therefore," he wrote of the African-Americans in Paris, ". . . be considered the connecting link between Africa and the West, the most real and certainly the most shocking of all the African contributions to Western life."24 Although American blacks were alienated from African and Western cultures, they were also connected to both cultures in ways that neither Africans nor Europeans could quite imagine. The alienation of black Americans could thus provide a starting point for new cultural and historical insights. "This alienation [of black Americans from Africans] causes the N egro to recognize that he is a hybrid, " Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son. "Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the impact of the happy

23. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name , p. 36; see Baldwin's extended commentary on the conference and his disagreements with Wright about the postcolonial African states, in ibid., pp. 23-37, 46-47.

24. Ibid., p. 21.

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James Baldwin in Paris 41

ending."25 The "hybrid" position of African-Americans meant that the black experience could not be separated from a complex white/black relationship that had shaped every era of American history.

Baldwin stressed this intricate white/black interaction in essays that might now be called multicultural, postcolonial narratives of American history (the themes clearly resemble theories in the accounts of multicultural nations that Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists have developed over the last decade). According to Baldwin, the history of black Americans went beyond the story of loss and pain and violence to become also a story of endless interactions with white Americans - all of which had produced a unique culture that was neither European nor African. It was precisely this long-developing, complex fusion of Europe and Africa that made American culture different from every other culture in the world.

In white Americans he [the African-American] finds reflected - repeated, as it were, in a higher key - his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness. Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soul. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced.26

Drawing on his encounters with Europeans and Africans in Paris and recognizing the "hybridity" of his own cultural position, Baldwin extended the historical explanations of his personal outsider status into a new account of the inescapable "hybridity" of the wider American culture. America became for Baldwin a complex, postcolonial society in which previously separate cultures from Europe and Africa had long since become linked through a permanent process of dialectical exchange, conflict and synthesis. Baldwin saw in himself the same cross-cultural connections and tensions that he saw in all of American history, though this hybridity in the self and the society only became comprehensible from the perspective of his expatriate position in Europe.

Baldwin thus developed a new narrative of American cultural history, stressing always that "even as a slave" the black person "was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could

25. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son , pp. 122-23.

26. Ibid., p. 123.

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42 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

escape having an attitude toward him."27 To be sure, white Americans attempted to turn black people into abstractions, yet a profound black presence had entered every sphere of American culture to produce a distinctive, hybrid national identity. Although America's interracial historical experience had been marked by racism and painful conflicts, it had also given the United States a unique advantage in the emerging multicultural, postcolonial world of the twentieth century.

One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, ... it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.28

The interracial, multicultural history of America thus pointed to a future world that neither Europeans nor Africans could yet envision, though Americans could imagine this multiracial future by looking carefully at their multiracial past. American society had of course never achieved equality for its races or cultures, yet it had produced the modern hybrid world in which all people must now live. "Whether I like it or not," Baldwin explained to white Americans, "or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other. . . . There is no way around this."29

This entanglement of different races and cultural experiences might seem dangerous to both Europeans and Africans because it denied all hopes for cultural purity (whether one aspired to a pure European or a pure African identity). At the same time, however, this inevitable mixing

27. Ibid., p. 170.

28. Ibid., p. 175.

29. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name , p. 136. It is important to note that Baldwin's conception of cultural and racial interactions in this text stressed the deep, difficult connections between cultural groups rather than the profound differences or separations that have often been emphasized in recent descriptions of multicultural histories and societies. The notion of "hybridity" points toward complex cultural syncretisms or fusions, whereas many theorists of multiculturalism have stressed the separate, almost inescapable identities of cultural and racial differences.

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James Baldwin in Paris 43

of cultural histories and experiences opened the way to new forms of personal and cultural creativity. Comparing America to the alternatives of Europe and Africa, Baldwin decided that America was a place "in which nothing was fixed and we had therefore been born to a greater number of possibilities, wretched as these possibilities seemed at the instant of our birth."30 For all its obvious flaws and exclusions, there was a fluidity in American society that could be creatively exploited by those who understood the complex, multicultural fusions of its history. Unfortunately, Americans who never left home often failed to recognize the rich possibilities of this history, but the prevailing historical blindness also gave American exiles an important public role. Perhaps the literary outsider could describe what neither the Americans, Europeans nor Africans could see in the United States: the multicultural history that had "created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and individual past."31 It would of course be wrong to say that Baldwin's Parisian life transformed him into a happy American nationalist, but I think it would be accurate to say that his Parisian perspectives helped him develop new historical insights that he could bring to his emerging public role as an American writer. He would become the truthful narrator of America's past and present history.

This literary task of historical truth-telling emerged from Baldwin's exile, and it gave him a literary identity in the 1 950s. "The truth about that [American] past," he argued in one of his essays from this period, "is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our faces too resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give."32 Challenging those Americans who were blinded by their racial assumptions or their proximity to American social life, the exile writer would bring home the truth of American history - even and especially when that truth disrupted America's image of itself. "From the vantage point of Europe he discovers his own country," Baldwin wrote of the American in Paris. "And this is a discovery which not only brings to an end the alienation of the American from himself, but which also makes clear to him . . . the extent of his involvement with the life of Europe."33 Baldwin's personal struggle to "end the alienation . . . from himself'

30. Ibid., p. 20.

3 1 . Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, p. 1 36.

32. Ibid., pp. 136-37.

33. Ibid., p. 137.

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44 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

appeared in his narratives of America's history and in his evolving desire to re-enter American society with the voice of a critical writer.

Baldwin was in fact unusually successful in bringing his European perspectives back into the American public sphere through his novels and essays. As he explained in the collection of essays that established his reputation for important public commentary ( Notes of a Native Son [1955]), Baldwin wanted to be a writer who told the truth as freely and critically as he could. "I love America more than any other country in the world," he wrote in that book, "and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." This right also carried a responsibility, however, which he summarized succinctly in the goals he had set for himself and his work: "I want to be an honest man and a good writer."34 Such goals would lead to descriptions of racism in New Jersey restaurants, riots in Harlem, and misery in a French jail, but they would also lead to critical assessments of literary friends such as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer, both of whom violated Baldwin's conception of what writers should do in public life.

Baldwin's early contact with Wright in New York evolved into conflicts and estrangement during the years they were both living in Paris. Baldwin wrote a couple of critical essays about Wright's tendency to create stereotypical images of blacks and whites in his "protest novels," and the two men never really held the same views of political activism or Third World internationalism. They mostly circulated in different social and intellectual circles in France, though they both remained aware of what the other was doing. Wright's death in Paris in 1960 thus became the occasion for Baldwin's retrospective reflections on Wright's achievements and failures as a writer and public intellectual. Although Baldwin praised Wright for telling the truth about African-American rage, he pointedly criticized Wright for losing his connections to public life in the United States. Surrounded by French and American admirers who could not help him understand what was happening in America, Wright became for Baldwin the dangerous example of an exiled writer who abandoned his public responsibility to understand and tell the truth. The world changed, but Wright's life in Parisian apartments and cafes prevented him from comprehending the changes. "Strange people indeed crossed oceans, from Africa and America, to come to his door; and he really did not know who these people were, and they very quickly sensed this."35

34. Ibid., p. 9.

35. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name , p. 1 99.

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James Baldwin in Paris 45

According to Baldwin, other writers and political activists eventually concluded that Wright had lost touch with the world from which he had come, and their earlier respect turned into ridicule. Wright's fate (as Baldwin portrayed it) ultimately became a kind of personal warning for Baldwin, who began "to wonder about the uses and hazards of expatriation."36 Wright's symbolic meaning therefore changed as Baldwin developed his own public intellectual identity in the 1 950s. Where Wright had once exemplified the critical, public expression of African-American insights and experiences, he came to represent the dangers of prolonged exile from American life. Alienated from black and white writers in both

France and America, Wright could become a scapegoat for Baldwin's anxieties about the fate of expatriated intellectuals. "I could not help feeling," Baldwin wrote in his reflections on Wright, "Be careful. Time is passing for you, too, and this may be happening to you one day."31

The dangers that Baldwin identified in Wright could of course threaten any author who moved away from the literary obligation to see and tell the truth. In this respect, the white writer Norman Mailer could be compared to Wright because Mailer had also lost his way as a writer when he ran for mayor of New York City. Baldwin criticized Mailer for losing sight of how the writer's public responsibility necessarily differed from the roles of a politician or government official. Unlike politicians, writers must know and speak the truth at all times. "I do not think, if one is a writer, that one escapes it [the writer's responsibility] by trying to become something else. One does not become something else: one becomes nothing. And what is crucial here is that the writer, however unwillingly, always, somewhere, knows this. There is no structure he can build strong enough to keep out this self-knowledge."38 Mailer's political campaign in New York was therefore as reprehensible as Wright's isolation in Parisian cafes because (like Wright) he had given up the public obligations of an honest writer.

Baldwin's reflections on other intellectuals suggest how his European exile had given him new self-definitions that extended beyond the discovery of his diasporic, hybrid personal and cultural history. He also

36. Ibid., p. 203.

37. Ibid., pp. 211,213. Historians disagree about Wright's continuing intellectual vitality in Paris and about the accuracy of Baldwin's charges. Campbell ( Exiled in Paris , pp. 205-207) suggests that Wright drifted into a paranoid isolation during the last years of his life, whereas Stovall (Paris Noir , p. 193) argues that Wright's personal anxieties did not destroy his creativity or isolate him from the "changing nature of African American life."

38. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name , pp. 238-39.

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46 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques

came to a new understanding of what the literary participant in public life must tell others about history, culture and the "hidden laws" of American society. Although he did not share Habermas's preoccupation with the Kantian ideal of a rational public sphere (which Habermas was developing at this time in Germany), Baldwin strongly believed (like Habermas) that intellectuals must participate in the public culture of their own era. No honest writer could shun this task, even when the effort to tell historical or cultural truths was painful and the truth-telling forced the intellectual to enter the most controversial public debates. Indeed, the writer must provide the public vision that politicians seemed unable to offer. "In this [ multicultural? ] endeavor to wed the vision of the Old World with that of the New, it is the writer, not the statesman, who is our strongest arm. Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world."39

Baldwin thus returned from his European exile with new claims for the writer's crucial public role in the evolving national history of politics and culture. Writers performed the all-important public work of interpreting the "intangible dreams of people" and connecting the long, multicultural history of the past to those who will live in the future. In other words, writing helped to change or recreate the world whenever it described the world with honesty and clarity and moral responsibility. "I think we do have a responsibility," Baldwin insisted in the conclusion of his essay on Mailer's wrong-headed political campaign, "not only to ourselves and to our own time, but to those who are coming after us. . . . And I suppose that this responsibility can only be discharged by dealing as truthfully as we know how with our present fortunes, these present days."40

This public task remained as challenging for Baldwin as for the other writers he discussed, and he never settled comfortably into a stable public or private niche in American society. Although he repeatedly attempted to live permanently in the United States, Baldwin was forever going off to Paris, Istanbul, London or the house in southern France where he would die in 1987. Meanwhile, as critics of his later writing have often noted, it became increasingly difficult for Baldwin to praise the "hybrid," multicultural American history that he had described so eloquently in his essays of the 1950s. The conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s suggested to him the inescapable racism and intolerance of American society rather than

39. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

40. Ibid., 240-41.

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James Baldwin in Paris 47

the possibilities for hybrid, cultural creativity that he had earlier examined from his expatriate base in Paris.41

Despite and also because of the instabilities and disappointments in his later life, Baldwin's post-World War 11 descriptions of the legacy of the African diaspora, the hybrid cultural construction of America, and the public role of writers continue to offer an intriguing example of the insights that can emerge from the disorienting experience of exile. Several decades before our contemporary critical theorists had developed their influential accounts of diasporic cultures, postcolonialism and the public sphere, Baldwin had already found his way to similar multicultural insights in post-war Paris (these similarities are of course examples of theoretical convergences rather than examples of mutual theoretical influences). The exile experience has often pushed writers and artists toward new creative insights into their personal or cultural histories, but James Baldwin's life and work in Paris show how the same experience can also generate exceptional, creative insights into a personal or cultural future.

4 1 . On Baldwin's later itinerant life, political activism and critiques of America's enduring racism, see Leeming, Baldwin, pp. 207-388. For examples of the evolving critical response to Baldwin's later work, see the commentaries and essays in Fred L. Standley and Nancy V. Burt, eds., Critical Essays on James Baldwin (Boston, 1988), and in Miller, ed., Re-Viewing James Baldwin.

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