THE SON OF A PREACHER MAN: RACE, SEXUALITY AND RELIGION IN THE WORK OF JAMES BALDWIN DOUGLAS J. R. FIELD SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE JULY 2002 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements v Abbreviations vi of Baldwin Texts Abstract vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 "Looking For Jimmy:" Sex, 22 Privacy and Black Nationalist Fervour 1. Black Nationalism, Homophobia 37 and the Role of the Artist 2. "The Sexual Question Comes After 55 the Question of Color* 3. Three Essays on Homosexuality: 84 Baldwin's Holy Trinity 4. Unlocking the Male Prison: 100 Baldwin's Essay on Gide and on Himself Ill CHAPTER 2 Can You Really Tell? Whiteness, 112 Boundaries and Miscegenation in Giovanni's Room 1. Relocating Giovanni's Room: 116 "Race" 2. Relocating Giovanni's Room: 133 Homo s exua1i ty 3. What is African-American 153 Literature? 4. Locating Boundaries in 174 Giovanni's Room Conclusion 200 CHAPTER 3 "Race," Illegibility and 207 Chaos in Another Country 1. B(l)ack to Basics: the 214 Blackness of Blackness 2. Baldwin's Views on 223 Blackness 3. Re-Viewing Another Country 240 4. Islands, Bridges and 258 Communication in Another Country Conclusion 284 iv CHAPTER 4 What's Love Got To Do With It? 296 Tracing the Religious in Baldwin's Work 1. Baldwin's Pentecostal 309 Past 2. Baldwin's Personal Theology 322 3. In the Beginning Was the Word 345 4. And The Word Became Flesh 358 5. Love is in the Air 372 Conclusion 387 CONCLUSION 394 BIBLIOGRAPHY 397 V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor, Jonathan Dollimore, for his thought-provoking comments, discussions and reading of this work. I would also like to thank Hugh Stevens for his insightful contributions. James Campbell and David Leeming were extremely generous and helpful. Not only did they allow me to pester them with questions but they kindly lent me unpublished Baldwin material. I would also like to thank Caryl Phillips, who not only freely discussed his film script of Giovanni's Room, but shared many useful insights into Baldwin's personal life. Thank you also to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding this thesis, a conference on Baldwin at Howard University, and a research trip to America. Finally, thank you to my family, and in particular, to Marie, whose support throughout has been invaluable and inspirational. ABBREVIATIONS OF BALDWIN TEXTS "PI" "The Preservation of Innocence" GTM Go Tell it on the Mountain NNS Notes of a Native Son "AN" "Autobiographical Notes" w pp n "Princes and Powers" GR Giovanni's Room "MP" "The Male Prison" AC Another Country FNT The Fire Next Time TMHL Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone Rap A Rap on Race NNOS No Name on the Street IBSCT If Beale Street Could Talk D A Dialogue JAMH Just Above My Head Price The Price of the Ticket Vll ABSTRACT This thesis explores the three most persistent and interconnected themes in the work of James Baldwin: race, sexuality, and religion. Central to my thesis is an examination of the ways in which Baldwin's work has troubled readers and critics alike in his refusal both to adhere to a single coherent ideology, and to be labelled or categorised, which I argue has problematised his place in both the American and African-American canons. This thesis argues for the importance of placing Baldwin in the political and historical climates that his four decades of writing came out of. By examining the ways in which he responded to and wrote from a variegated climate of Protest fiction, Integration and Assimilation, Civil Rights, pre and post-Stonewall, and the emergence of gay studies, this thesis argues that Baldwin presciently foregrounds many of cultural theory's largest debates. Baldwin's work repeatedly questions not only the boundaries of black literature, but how blackness itself might be constituted. How is the canon formed? What, Baldwin's work demands, is whiteness? What is homosexuality and homosexual literature? Introduction Some people considered me a faggot, for some I was a hero, for some I was a whore, for some I was a devious cocks- man, for some I was an Uncle Tom. James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone One of the reasons I came flying over here [Paris] was that at home I'd worked myself into such a state that I didn't know where I was or where I was going or what I wanted. The best I can say is that what with race, sex, Calvinism, housing, the kind of violent, anarchic, hostility--breeding pattern of all my life--a pattern which, immediately one discovers that it has turned inward and become uncontrollable, then seems invested with the powers to kill--I did not know who I was and could not even be resigned because I had nothing to be resigned to. James Baldwin, Letter to Bill Phillips (April 1949) 2 In a perceptive article chronicling the tribute to James Baldwin at the Lincoln Center, New York, in February 2001, the Irish novelist Colm Toibin pondered over the contradictory portraits of the honoured artist: It is hard to decide what part of him came first. Was the colour of his skin more important than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearing from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, "a high-faggot style,* or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech?1 Toibin's article neatly highlights the difficulties of defining a prodigious writer whose work spanned four decades, culminating in one hundred and twenty four book reviews, six novels, seven works of non-fiction, two plays, a children's book, a scenario, a collection of short stories and two books of poetry. 3 Despite Toibin's conclusion that the tributes at the Lincoln Center pointed towards a legacy that "is both powerful and fluid," and that his work "fit[s] whatever category each reader requires," Baldwin's reputation, as I examine in this thesis, has suffered from his refusal to adhere to a single coherent ideology and his reluctance and resistance towards labelling and categorisation.1 2 Whilst Baldwin is often included as part of the canonical male African- American triumvirate (along with Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright), much of his work remains neglected.3 Although his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) is often required reading on many university courses, and although his short story "Sonny's Blues" is frequently anthologised, Baldwin's work is noticeably absent from many recent critical works on black literature and culture. As Craig Werner has pointed out, Baldwin is "conspicuous by his absence" from such important critical works as Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey (1988), Robert Stepto's 1 Colm T6ibin, "The Last Witness,* London Review of Books 23, no. 18 (20 September 2001): 15. 2 T6ibin: 15. 3 On a more general level, the popularity of Baldwin, Wright and Ellison has been eclipsed since the early 1970s by the success of female African-American authors, such as Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Walker. Whilst it could be argued that Baldwin's uncertain status is symptomatic of a more general decline in the interest in black American male writing, I want to stress that it is not the only or main reason. See Cora Kaplan, "Keeping the 4 Behind the Veil (1979), Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: a Vernacular Theory (1984) to name but a few.4 For the reader and critic Baldwin's work remains puzzling, enigmatic and inconsistent as a brief overview of his work illustrates. Whilst Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain was hailed as a "passionate identification" with black culture, his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), portrays a homosexual relationship in Paris with no African-American characters. Hailed as a seminal work of homosexual literature, Baldwin, however, repeatedly steered readers away from reading Giovanni's Room as a work of gay fiction. In his first book of essays Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin forcefully distanced himself from the genre of protest fiction, insisting that he was an American, not an African-American writer. Whilst Baldwin's message of love in the face of racial intolerance frustrated and bemused black radical writers of the 1960s, by 1972 Baldwin argued that it may be necessary to kill white people in order to put an end to racial injustice. Sidelined by Civil rights activism on account of his Color in The Color Purple," Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 177-187. 5 sexuality, Baldwin later became heavily involved with the Black Panthers. Baldwin's literary twists and turns have not only puzzled but frustrated literary critics who have sought to place him in one or either category. In particular, as a gay and African-American author, Baldwin's work has suffered from critics who have attempted to privilege his ethnicity or his sexuality. Emmanuel Nelson's pioneering work (notably two articles in 1983 and 1991) in turn acknowledges his debt to the work of Andrea Lowenstein, whose article, published in Gay Community News (1980) , titled "James Baldwin and His Critics" is the first piece of scholarship to fully explore the implications of Baldwin's racial and sexual identities.4 5 "One wonders," Lowenstein writes "whether, if Baldwin were either black or gay, more reviewers might be able to actually address his work itself." Instead, Lowenstein argues, Baldwin's "double minority status" is so 4 See Craig Werner, "James Baldwin: Politics and the Gospel Impulse,* New Politics 2, no.