James Baldwin's letters to Istanbul

 

In the late 1980s, as part of the research for a biography of James Baldwin, I travelled to Turkey to meet the novelist Yashar Kemal at his home on the outskirts of Istanbul. As we were talking, a long-legged black cat entered the room, padded silently across the floor between us, and exited by the opposite door. Kemal chuckled and said something in Turkish to the interpreter who was facilitating our exchange. The latter turned to me: “Yashar says the cat’s name is Jimmy – named after the other Jimmy”. We all laughed. While he had called succeeding generations of cats “Jimmy”, Kemal’s nickname for Baldwin, the original “tight, tense, lean, abnormally intelligent, abnormally ambitious, hungry black cat” (his own description), was “Arap”, simply Arab. “As far as I was concerned, Baldwin was not black”, Kemal told me, “for there are no blacks in Turkey in that sense. We don’t have the category. There are only people with darker skins.”

Baldwin treated Istanbul as a place of refuge all through the 1960s. He rented various houses in the centre of the city and outside it – one, known as the Pasha’s Library, overlooked the Bosporus – acquiring unexpected and often unrespectable friends, and caring for dependants, such as the painter Beauford Delaney who had been his mentor when an adolescent in the 1940s, and whom he looked after as dementia clouded the older man’s mind. Baldwin’s novel Another Country is datelined “Istanbul, Dec 10, 1961” – the date of its completion – while another, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), was largely composed in the city. Though he postponed his projected visits repeatedly, he was apt to stay longer than planned once he arrived, sometimes for up to a year. He said he felt he could “breathe” in Istanbul.

There are other sides to the equation, of course. Kemal – a big-hearted, humorous man – is a Kurd, and has been imprisoned on at least four occasions for political activities in Turkey. He told me, “Baldwin used to say: Yashar, I feel free in Turkey. To which I would reply: Jimmy, that’s because you’re an American”. (Baldwin was once imprisoned in France, in a case of mistaken identity involving a stolen bedsheet. The farcical episode is related in one of his best essays, “Equal in Paris”.)

The person who conveyed the questions and answers back and forth that morning was Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor, co-dedicatee of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, and the man responsible for providing the troubled writer and civil rights activist with an unlikely hiding place in an Islamic country which had experienced a military coup in 1960, the year before Baldwin’s first visit. The pair met in New York in 1957, a year after publication of Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room. Still a teenager, Cezzar was studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio where a stage version of the novel was given a workshop airing, under Strasberg’s supervision. When it failed to graduate to full production, Baldwin rewrote it, with the help of Cezzar, whom he envisaged in the title role. Giovanni’s Room never did make it to the stage (nor to the screen, despite the existence of at least three screenplays, including a still unpublished one by Baldwin) but the friendships with Cezzar and Kemal were to endure until Baldwin’s death thirty years later.

A small collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar (for which I have written an introduction) is now to be published in Turkey. Coming after the appearance of Sol Stein’s Native Sons, a memoir-cum-scrapbook which included ten Baldwin letters in facsimile (reviewed in the TLS of October 15, 2004), this is a welcome development. In the years since Baldwin’s death, interested individuals have been calling for a fully annotated edition of the correspondence. At a public gathering some years ago, the theatre critic of the New Yorker, Hilton Als, made a plea for the release of “the one great Baldwin masterpiece waiting to be published”.

Whether or not they constitute a masterpiece would be for readers to judge, but letters exist in large quantities, both in public and university libraries and in private hands: to actors such as Gordon Heath, who played Othello in a BBC production directed by Tony Richardson in 1955 and whom Baldwin had in mind for the lead role in his first play The Amen Corner; to writers such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; to his trusted publicist at Knopf in the early 1950s, William Cole (including letters about his quarrel with Wright); to critics such as Alfred Kazin and the editors of Partisan Review, Philip Rahv and William Phillips; and to agents, publishers and civil rights workers, not to mention family members and lovers. During the writing of my book, published as Talking at the Gates in 1991, I gathered about 300 pages of Baldwin letters in Xerox form, with roughly a hundred added since, including despatches to those mentioned, dating from the early 1940s, when he was a precocious teenager trying to negotiate the hazardous passage from Harlem downtown to Greenwich Village, to the mid-1970s, by which time he had found a more permanent retreat than Turkey on the Côte d’Azur. In the first of his letters to Cezzar (November 22, 1957), he writes: “One of these days, I’m going to build myself a place to live and work at the side of a mountain or at the edge of the sea”. Succeeding letters are written from New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Dakar, “in the air, where I seem to be most of the time these present days” (1962), and finally from his house outside Saint-Paul-de- Vence, near Nice, “at the side of a mountain . . . at the edge of the sea”.

A full edition of the correspondence would display Baldwin’s concerns, eventually knitted into novels, essays and plays, in their first form. In a letter to Gordon Heath on the effort to find a theatre to stage The Amen Corner in 1955, Baldwin suggests that it might be better “to attack London” first, before exploring New York:

         "Without for an instant supposing the English . . . to be free of prejudice, I yet suspect that they have fewer misapprehensions concerning Negroes . . . . This is not because they are more intelligent, or more moral, but simply because they have not had, until very recently, anything resembling a Negro problem on that island."

Such a collection might also create renewed interest in a writer who has had less attention in recent years from the common reader than the cultural theorist – Baldwin’s race and sexuality having provided a double dose of “difference” – ironically so, considering that all his life he sought freedom from the confinements of colour and sexual categorization. He particularly disliked the term “gay”, and refused to identify himself as such. Until recently, however, the Baldwin estate, headed by the writer’s sister Gloria Karefa-Smart-Baldwin, forbade the publication of any letters, on the grounds – from one point of view quite reasonable – that sentiments expressed in private, for private consumption, should remain so.

Cezzar’s book, Dost Mektuplarå (Letters to a Friend), published by the Istanbul house Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, is made out of roughly a hundred pages of Baldwin’s letters, complemented by Engin’s replies and by Baldwin’s notes for their work together in the theatre. The earliest communication is written from the MacDowell writers’ colony, New Hampshire, in late 1957, where Baldwin went to work on the dramatized version of Giovanni’s Room and on the early drafts of Another Country. “The moment I found myself among these old New England hills and trees and breathed some genuine air, I began to feel human and operative again.” In New York, Engin was toiling in a record shop, awaiting news about the script, being passed round various theatre directors. “Bad news from [Josh] Logan”, Baldwin writes on July 29, 1958. “He feels ‘let down’ by the play, does not find the ‘electricity of the novel’ in it, does not ‘care at all’ about the boy and girl”. Since Giovanni’s Room is principally a boy-meets-boy affair, we can imagine Baldwin’s puzzlement over Logan’s concluding remark: “Also I found the ending very inconclusive and somehow the tragedy of the boy’s death invaded the possible happiness of the girl and boy”. Baldwin: “It sounds as though he has rather misread the play”. Still, there were other directors and other stars: “One good thing, we’re not likely to get a rejection from Brando, simply because he never answers anybody”.

Cezzar was hopeful of remaining in America and of being excused military duty back home, and a full-scale production of Giovanni’s Room might have converted his wishes to reality. By the summer of 1959, however, hopes were thinning. “At least we’ve started at the top, having eliminated – or been eliminated by – both Gadg [Elia Kazan] and Josh”. Four months later: “How would you feel about an off-B’way production of Giovanni?” Eventually, Engin returned to Turkey, where he met his wife Gulriz Sururi, an actress, and did his military service. The later letters faithfully conclude with “kisses” towards Gulriz.

To trace the correspondence from start to finish is to follow a route of lost innocence. The early exchanges between writer and actor are full of high spirits. “Must do something about my finances before March, when the current shoestring breaks”, he wrote in January 1958. A month before, he had dashed off a note with no other purpose than to quote a poem by Marianne Moore, which he kept pinned above his desk. It was too good, too inspiring, not to be passed on:
        
         What is there like fortitude!
         What sap went through this little thread 
          To make the cherry red!

Baldwin was basically a religious man. At the age of fourteen, he became a boy preacher in the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, a storefront church in Harlem. (His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, offers a fictionalized account, in the Temple of the Fire Baptised.) Disillusionment with the church set in before he was out of his teens. “I always wanted to work in the theater”, he would say later, “not realizing I had been in one all along.” While doctrine failed him, his spiritual faith remained untarnished, a belief that people “can” – thumping the table – “be better than they are”. It is the essential Baldwin tenet, the one that redeems white supremacy and the New World suffering drifting in its wake. Throughout his life, in writing, in speeches, in conversation, Baldwin reiterated his simple teaching: “There is one race, and we are all part of it”. In a letter written in 1959 from Paris to Cezzar, who was still in New York, he makes a typical, preacher-like reference to a “healing” place in which “the muck of the Nile, the plane trees of Athens, and the Roman cross will come together and be transfigured and give us a new morality”.

All the aspects of Baldwin’s character are exposed in the letters. He was magnetic, compulsively sociable, elaborately extrovert, darkly introverted, depressive, magnificently generous, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, funny, furious, bubbling with good intentions, seldom hesitating over a breach of promise – capable of exhibiting all these traits between lunch and dinner, and between dinner and the last whisky at 4 am. Plans to reach Istanbul are short-circuited again and again by alternative plans. On a plane to Africa in August 1960, he lets fall that he has “just decided to skip the Edinboro [sic] Festival, where we’re due near the end of August, and come to you . . . by way of Cairo”. By October, he was back in New York. But: “will see you soon”. A few of the numerous artistic projects planted here – novels, essays, movies, plays – sprouted as alien blooms, while others wilted. Inside Baldwin’s study, as well as outside, things were seldom built according to their design.

By the mid-1960s, the tone of the letters has darkened, reflecting the change in Baldwin’s mood and the incendiary atmosphere on the streets of American cities. In 1966, increasingly celebrated, increasingly sought- after, increasingly in despair – “I’ll just go on working. I’ll probably become more and more famous and I’ll manage that way” – Baldwin once again flew to Turkey; not in retreat from the characters in his novel and play (“the kids”, he fondly called them when contentedly cloistered at MacDowell) but from the “disasters”, the race riots spreading across the United States. From the Pasha’s Library in July 1966, he wrote to Cezzar, who still lives near Taksim Square, that he expected to be “hounded” by the American press that day, “with their miserable, cowardly” surveys, and their insistent, wrong-headed question: “What does the Negro want?” On April 12, 1968, on the road again, yet increasingly entrenched (“got into trouble in France, had to fight my way into England”), he wrote: “Between 2 & 3 weeks ago, I had to fly from Hollywood to NY to do a benefit with Martin [Luther King] at Carnegie Hall. I didn’t have a suit, and had one fitted for me that afternoon. I wore the same suit at his funeral”.

The assassination of King in Memphis was the moment on Baldwin’s journey when his eyes were cast out, the stage at which his early innocence and hopes for the future were simultaneously lost from view. “Whatever move I make is, in the eyes of the American government a political move.” The red of Marianne Moore’s cherry had liquefied, as in a cinematic nightmare, and spread across the floor as blood. He had not foreseen, when copying out the line “What is there like fortitude!”, that it would come to this. “I repudiate despair: but the daily necessity for this repudiation contains its own despairing comment.” He continued to try to balance the obligations of writer and spokesman, with diminishing success. Towards the end of 1968, he commented on his lengthy battle with producers at Columbia Pictures, by whom he had been hired to write the script for a film about Malcolm X:

            "I hope that they have finally understood the point of my intransigence and are reconciled to the fact that, in essence, they are merely privileged to pay for a movie which I have been hired to make. I have never encountered among any group of people a more eery sense of reality. The California sun has scrambled their brains, the swimming pools have clogged their ears . . . . They are not wicked: they are simply sublimely incompetent."

The film was never made, though the script was published in 1972 as One Day When I Was Lost (Spike Lee’s 1992 film about Malcolm X included a credit to Baldwin).

Yet there was still the theatre, the arena in which heroic energy could wrestle with tribulation and be vindicated. When Baldwin and Cezzar did finally mount a production together – not of Giovanni’s Room but of the play Fortune and Men’s Eyes by John Herbert, at Cezzar’s Milky Way Theatre in Istanbul, with Baldwin as director and Engin in the leading role – it was, as Baldwin says in the letters, “a hit”, continuing for many months through 1969 and 1970.

Onwards he marched, as he always had, irrepressible, unvanquished; not, by the end, perhaps, because he continued to believe in “a new morality” but because it was the only way his character permitted him to act. In the same letter as that in which he congratulates Engin on the success of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, he already foresees a new project, another play, William Hanley’s Slow Dance on the Killing Ground. “I think that we might make something amusing out of this fable.” Like many others, the plan came to nothing, but the remark could apply equally to Baldwin’s life, which aspired to the quality of fable, providing “amusement”, in the shape of his books, and moral example. “What is there like fortitude!”

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James Campbell is the author of a biography of James Baldwin, Talking at the Gates, 1991, and more recently This Is the Beat Generation, 1999. His new book, Through the Grapevine: Essays and portraits, will be published next year.