With Baldwin’s friend and colleague David Adams Leeming, Baldwin discussed the work and influence of Henry James for the Fall 1986 (Volume 8, Number 1) issue of The Henry James Review. The realm of literature may be vast, its substances and strategies multiple, but literature is still a very particular and peculiar-imaginative, intuitive, as well as intelligent-apprehension, or perception, of the world, creative and interpretive, oriented to the emotional and social more than the scientific or structural and Henry James (1843 – 1916) was among the most original and peculiar of writers, an eccentric master, strange to American culture and necessary for it. Henry James was an exemplar of what it meant to be an artist: “ The artist is distinguished from all the other responsible actors in society-the politicians, legislators, educators, scientists, et cetera-by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being,” Baldwin wrote in “The Creative Process” ( The Price of the Ticket page 670). Prominent in Baldwin’s pantheon was Henry James, the author of such fine writing as The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The Tragic Muse, Washington Square, and What Maisie Knew.
The writer James Baldwin (1924 – 1987), who took as his own subject self and society, and the press of personal principles against the constraint of convention, admired many artists, literary, musical, theatrical, and visual: among them, Chinua Achebe, Josephine Baker, Balzac, Ingmar Bergman, Albert Camus, Ray Charles, Chekhov, Bette Davis, Miles Davis, Beauford Delaney, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Malle, Michelangelo, Toni Morrison, Harold Norse, Gordon Parks, Rembrandt, Sidney Poitier, Shakespeare, Nina Simone, Bessie Smith, Francois Truffaut, and Richard Wright. We are just people- human -to ourselves but become other by those who merely watch us, those different from us: and assumptions of elemental difference can lead to conflict, but art can show what we share. In the essay “The Creative Process” (1962), published anew in the massive 1985 collection The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin talks about the experiences and events that recur in every life, the timeless themes, that every artist, intellectual, and writer must consider, birth and the struggle to survive and live and love, and the necessity of facing death, with the key being what is found in silence and solitude, amid the wilderness of the self: there, the artist begins to discover what is true and out of consciousness and craft, with dedication and discipline, he or she pursues the privilege and responsibility of being an artist. Martin’s/Marek, 1985)ĭouglas Field, All Those Strangers : The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (Oxford University Press, 2015) James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948 – 1985 (St.
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