James Baldwin Boards a Plane to Paris with $40 in His Pocket

November 8, 2021 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

November 7, 2021 (lithub@lithub.com)

James Baldwin boards a plane to Paris with $40 in his pocket.

On November 11, 1948, frustrated by the relentless racism of life in New York City, a 24-year-old and hardly published James Baldwin boarded a plane bound for Paris. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America,” Baldwin told The Paris Review’s Jordan Elgrably in 1984. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under.”

After “rain, fatigue, panic, the absolute certainty of being dashed to death on the vindictive tooth of the Eiffel Tower,” Baldwin landed. “I had a few ‘friends’ in Paris, and $40 in my pocket, and expected a little less from my friends than I did from the $40,” he later wrote. “I was wrong, I must tell you at once, as to my friends, who were far more present than I would have dared allow myself to hope—my first lesson, perhaps, in humility; perhaps the first opening of a certain door . . . On the other hand, I was right about the $40, which melted in a day, and there I was, in Paris, on my ass.”

But as you probably know, he made it work. Famously, he wrote much of his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel Go Tell It on the Mountain upstairs at the Café de Flore, and published “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in the French journal Zero, which led to a shouting match between Baldwin and Richard Wright on the streets of Paris; though he would eventually return to the States, where he would explore the Deep South, get involved in the civil rights movement, and earn himself a 1,884-page FBI file, he would live in France for most of the rest of his life, spending his last 17 years in St.-Paul-de-Vence in a house that, despite attempts to save it, has for years been a semi-anonymous ruin and is now at least partially demolished.

James Baldwin is, by any measure, one of the most important and influential figures of the 20th century, a radical literary (and sartorial) icon and public intellectual cited as inspirational by everyone from David Bowie to Ocean Vuong to Jacqueline Woodson to President Obama; his work and legacy continue to be essential today. “We live in an age in which everybody’s for sale, everything is for sale,” Cornel West told Christopher Lydon in 2017. “Baldwin would never have sold out. He was true to himself. He was true to his soul. This is in many ways the Baldwin moment, and it’s primarily because we know here’s somebody who’s committed to intellectual integrity, committed to a moral honesty.” Not for nothing, he was also pretty great at writing about sex. The man could do it all.

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