James Baldwin: Living in Fire

Bill Mullen’s brief critical biography of the essayist, novelist, and activist James Baldwin (1924–87) is not only an approachable introductory work for students and general readers but also, in several respects, an interesting and noteworthy discussion for Baldwin scholars. However, Mullen’s discussions of Baldwin’s sexuality are at once schematic and imprecise, and they detract significantly from his work’s impact and authority.Mullen writes, for an established Left press, in response to Baldwin’s importance as “an icon of the global Black Lives Matter movement” since 2012 (xii). He covers Baldwin’s life chronologically, in a simple and lucid style, and incorporates new archival work on Baldwin’s political education as a young man and his internationalist and anticolonial activism later in life. Throughout, Mullen presents the author as a “prophetic” (xv) political theorist with a consistent, lifelong revolutionary project (as evidenced across writerly modes), a project activated by Baldwin’s own position as a “queer” (passim) Black working-class intellectual. The “Preface” accurately describes Baldwin as “the first African-American radical to make his sexuality an integral aspect of his public attack [on] racism, sexism, homophobia, and more generally, the matrix of repressive American power both domestically and internationally” (xv). Mullen’s simple and refreshing presentation of biographical material often turns to seldom-quoted personal letters to give the flavor of the times and the man’s personality but largely eschews name-checking and well-worn anecdotes. He discusses important relationships, situations, and events in clear, unburdened terms, as if for readers with little background knowledge, and he often adds telling detail to the received narrative. For example, while describing many of the well-known incidents and confrontations of Baldwin’s decade-plus as an active Civil Rights Movement campaigner, Mullen carefully notes the amounts Baldwin brought in as a speaker, and the fact that on one tour he donated every cent to the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE) (103). Mullen’s discussions of Baldwin’s fiction are more conventional, if not over-solicitous of established literary scholarship in African American literary studies. These discussions, however, do not shy away from Baldwin’s most transgressive subject matter, including subjects that remain troubling to many readers today, such as sexual violence and incest.Mullen’s extensive discussions of the novelist’s nonfictional and extemporized political statements, which draw deeply on his greatest expertise as a scholar of African American radicalism, are the most energetic and original contributions of the book. Mullen is always seeking the origins of Baldwin’s thought, always finding consistency and creativity in that thought, and always locating it in contemporary intellectual and political cultures, and especially in the available evidence of Baldwin’s teenaged and early-twenties, autodidact political education. The second chapter, “Dissidence, Disillusionment, Resistance: 1942–48,” is probably this work’s most important and original scholarly contribution. Working from recently opened Baldwin papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center, Mullen documents the teenage Baldwin’s significant familiarity with socialism, Trotskyism, and anarchism, noting periodicals read and organizations joined, and explicating the sometimes-recherché political tendencies of each with economy and clarity.Such broadened understanding of Baldwin’s early, extra- and counter-institutional education is important in its own right, but it also offers a new and more useful frame for understanding Baldwin’s political writing and activism as a whole. Literary scholarship has hitherto tended to ascribe both specific radical positions, and the fact of Baldwin’s decades of activist commitment, primarily to the man’s character and secondarily (following the novelist’s own description) to the demands of the times, the fabled “Sixties.” This is understandable, both because Baldwin himself tends not to cite theoretical authorities or concepts except in deprecation and because major Baldwin scholars (most notably biographer David Leeming) have been friends or acquaintances of the artist, themselves witnesses to his outsize personal warmth, generosity, and moral certainty. But Mullen demonstrates that Baldwin’s lifelong political engagement is also a complex, continuous response to the marginal Left movements that he knew in his youth. A Trotskyite specter haunts Baldwin’s politics: a compelling image of permanent revolution that returns continually in essays, speeches, interviews, and letters, even after revolution as such fell into question.Hence, Mullen returns fruitfully, again and again, to Baldwin’s early political education and its echoes in later positions and causes. Most interesting to this reviewer was his extensive, iterative discussion of Baldwin’s strong public and private solidarity with Palestinians (90–91, 146–47, 169–71), while most salutary for students and nonacademic readers is his serious and detailed discussion (146–151 et passim) of the woefully under-read, crackling essay collection No Name in the Street (1972). Mullen also argues that Baldwin’s political imagination was prospective as well as retrospective. In chapter 5, “Baldwin and Black Power, 1963–68,” he asserts that Baldwin did not merely respond or offer allegiance to the Black Power concept developed by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, but in important respects anticipated it. The point is a compelling prompt for future analysis. Certainly Baldwin shared Ture’s sense of the rhetorical character of Black political thought, the way its concepts’ value derives from their address, their capacity to reach out to diverse audiences and move them.Mullen also develops a convincing case that Baldwin moved away from the organized Left out of a sense that its cultures forbid gayness and impinged on the prerogatives of the artist (30–33). His analysis of Baldwin’s political education, in other words, always includes the caveat that Baldwin himself, for his sexual and gender nonconformity, was excluded from many progressive and revolutionary political spaces. This is salutary, as is Mullen’s detailed discussion of the impact of homophobia on King, Rustin, and the major phase of the Civil Rights Movement (109–10). Less useful, though, is Mullen’s attempt to designate Baldwin’s unique intellectual contribution—his political homelessness and expansive ethical creativity—as constitutively “queer,” a term he uses ubiquitously, yet loosely. Mullen’s intention is likely positive and affirming, both of Baldwin’s lived experience and of his intellectual contribution. But his discussion betrays a lack of critical acuity in queer studies and LGBTQ cultures and histories. At times, Mullen uses “queer” merely as a reductive catchall for the unstable and mutable sexual identity that Baldwin himself preferred not to name until late in life (when he grudgingly accepted “gay”). At other times—and even in the same paragraph! (see 53)—he deploys “queer,” “queered,” or “queering” as adjectives and adverbs, qualifying Baldwin’s works and praxis. This is an attempt to have it both ways—Mullen tries to retain the analytic authority to label the writer’s essential self while still presenting Baldwin’s thought as fundamentally informed by the queer sensibility that fundamentally discounts essence. It’s incoherent and unsustainable.For a work aimed at students and scholars, such inexpertise is culpable. It seems, moreover, to derive from thin and timid reading in related areas, all the more noticeable given Mullen’s boldness and creativity elsewhere. He cites only well-known philosophical and literary queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and established gay historians such as Jonathan Ned Katz and George Chauncey. Except for Audre Lorde, cited as part of a discussion of Baldwin and Black feminism (177–79), he names no LGBTQ political thinkers proper, either contemporaries of the author or active today. None of the eminent blurb-writers who endorse James Baldwin: Living in Fire work in any queer-theoretical or LGBTQ-related field. Nor does Mullen even acknowledge the frequent rejection of “queer” as an identity term among African American and working-class gay men and trans people today, a well-known reality in many anti-racist and antihomophobic activist cultures.Readers are thus left with the impression that the concept of “queerness” is valuable to Mullen primarily as a Left shibboleth and not its own right. This is unfortunate, for it gives this work an aura of tokenism that detracts from its real value both as an introductory text and as scholarship on Baldwin and the twentieth-century Left. In fact, every other person profiled in Pluto Press’s series “Revolutionary Lives . . . short, critical biographies of radical figures from throughout history” (221) is apparently straight.Rather than tabulate and weigh the work’s merits and demerits, however, I would close by challenging its premise, that Baldwin is “a revolutionary for our time,” as Mullen’s preface dubs him (ix), a newly relevant figure. In some places, James Baldwin never left. US universities, certainly, have seen Baldwin’s reputation rising steeply for a decade or so after a long eclipse. His works’ currency has been likewise exploding among the middlebrow sectors of the culture industry that depend on academic discourse for novelty and legitimation. But Baldwin’s work, fiction and nonfiction, remains an unbroken tradition among African American and gay common readers. Fully beyond the regime of the credit-hour, people pass the work around among friends and across generations. Academics would do well, in expounding a radical Baldwin, to learn what his work has meant and continues to mean for communities and cultures most like Baldwin’s own.