Razia Iqbal: Hello, my name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to Episode 6 of our new podcast, Notes on a Native Son, about James Baldwin. Because 2024 is the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters. Novelist, essayist, activist, the list is long, and for Baldwin, probably meaningless. Who and what James Baldwin was and what is his legacy? It can't really be listed, but it can and perhaps should be found in his work. He refused any attempt to box him in. This podcast tries to get close to the idea of getting to know James Baldwin through his work and those who love his words and return to them. We've called it Notes on a Native Son after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. That essay clarifies with profound power what he is and what America is on his terms.

In each episode of Notes on a Native Son, we invite a well-known figure to choose a special or significant James Baldwin passage. The conversation that ensues tells us as much about Baldwin's story as it does about the person who loves Jimmy, as he was known to all who loved him. Our guest on this episode of Notes on a Native Son is the writer Caryl Phillips, or Caz as he's often known. Caz not only loved Jimmy but knew him, regarded him as a friend and perhaps a mentor too. Caryl Phillips was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and moved to Leeds in northern England when he was just four months old. It was as a student at Oxford where he first encountered the work of James Baldwin, and their actual first meeting was the first time Phillips had met a writer, something he knew he wanted to be.

Caryl Phillips was on the 1993 Granter List of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently teaches English at Yale.

Caryl Phillips: My name is Caryl Phillips. The James Baldwin quote I've chosen is from The Fire Next Time: "Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color."

Razia Iqbal: Caryl Phillips, thank you so much for agreeing to be part of this podcast. Why did you choose that quote? It's from the second essay in The Fire Next Time. Tell me why you chose it.

Caryl Phillips: I think because it speaks really clearly to the dilemma, I suspect all Black writers in the 20th century, but Baldwin specifically. Embedded in the quote is the assumption that some people can risk assuming the humanity of white people. You have to ask yourself, who are those people that can risk assuming the humanity of white people? I think it has to be every single Black writer going right back to the beginning of the 20th century. Ward McKay, right through to Toni Morrison. People who wouldn't be able to do their job unless they suspended some of their disbelief about the way in which Black people have been treated in America in the way in which they had been treated.

In other words, they have to live a kind of double life. A life as a citizen, knowing that they're subject to all sorts of difficulties and discriminations. At the same time, a life as a professional, as a novelist, where your job is to imagine yourself into the lives of other people, irrespective of their race or their gender or their class. So you have to suspend all of your perhaps personal feelings and experiences, put them to one side, and approach it with openness. I think this troubled many, many writers in the 20th century. I think it lay at the heart of perhaps one of the central dilemmas that affected Baldwin.

Razia Iqbal: You knew Baldwin. When did you first meet him?

Caryl Phillips: July 1983.

Razia Iqbal: How did that come about?

Caryl Phillips: It came about because I went to the south of France to meet him in St. Paul de Vence. Earlier that year, BBC 2 in England, the TV station, had done a documentary called Mailer at 60. Looking at Norman Mailer's life and it struck me that the next year, 1984, Baldwin would be 60. It was probably likely that the BBC were not going to do anything about him. I wrote to his publishers, and I said, "Would Mr. Baldwin be interested in having a program made about him called Baldwin at 60? Not really knowing if he would respond, but even more pertinently, not knowing anything about TV. I wasn't in TV. I wasn't a producer. I wasn't in that world, but I figured if you didn't ask, it wasn't going to happen.

He wrote back, and he said, "Call me." I called him. I telephoned him from London at his house. He said, "Come down, and we'll talk about it." I did. I went down, and I met him. We talked for a couple of days about the idea. I still didn't admit to him that I wasn't a producer and I wasn't in the business, but I was basically a fan who was then-- once he said yes, I flew back to London. I was then left with the problem of trying to contact somebody who knew something about making programs, but that's how it began.

Razia Iqbal: I have so many questions about this first encounter with him. I want to go back to the thing that you just said about you being a fan. Two things. First of all, when did you first start reading Baldwin? When did you become a fan? When did you first encounter his writing? Then how did that feel, being a fan and then sitting in front of him in his house?

Caryl Phillips: I first read him in 1978, when I was a student at the university.

Razia Iqbal: You were doing English at Oxford at the time?

Caryl Phillips: Yes. It was unusual because, literally, you weren't really supposed to read people who were still alive. They were not on the syllabus. The only way you could do anybody contemporary was by doing the American option or doing the drama option. I did the American option, and I read him. I read Richard Wright. I read a couple of other people. That was how I met him, through the books and through having to think about him, not just as a writer who was articulating a lot of the things that were worrying people of my generation in England at the time. Obviously, representation, discrimination, problems with the police, intergenerational problems with parents, all of these things. You found them in Baldwin's work. You found them in the work of African American writers. At that time, there really wasn't much been produced in terms of British literature that was dealing with this subject. He was important that way.

Meeting him was very strange because obviously you're meeting somebody whose work you admire. You're also meeting somebody who, five years or four years earlier, you were writing exact questions about. Also, I was in the very lowest slope trying to become a writer myself, but I've never met a writer. He was also the first writer that I ever met. For all of these reasons, it was important to demythologize the idea that all writers are dead. To also demythologize the idea that there was no connection whatsoever between literary studies at university in the real world, because suddenly there was. Then meeting somebody who, in the old adage, if you don't see it, you can't be it. I saw it, so I realized I could be it because I saw it.

Razia Iqbal: Did you behave like a fanboy, or would you say that you were just talking to him in a way that perhaps you're talking to me now? How was that? I'm just so curious about that encounter.

Caryl Phillips: Well, I behaved exactly as I'm kind of talking to you now because he allowed that. You know what it's like. Some people, not just writers, some people who are, quote-unquote, "famous," whether they're politicians or sportspeople or celebrities of whatever time, put up a barrier that make you do a certain dance around their celebrity or the force field of their fame, is something you have to navigate. With him, there's none of that. He made it clear that it was very easy to talk to him one on one, beginning with the fact that I probably said, "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Baldwin." He immediately said, "Jimmy." Basically, who is this, Mr. Baldwin? That lowers the barrier between you immediately. Totally prepared to behave like a fanboy, but wasn't allowed to behave like one.

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Razia Iqbal: In the program that you did make about that encounter with him, or about Baldwin at 60, the program starts with a recognition that the person who saved Baldwin from becoming a preacher was Richard Wright. Wright made it possible for Baldwin to think about himself as a writer. I wonder how true that is for you that you said that if you can't see it, you can't be it, or it's harder to think about being it if you can't see it. In meeting Baldwin, even though you had wanted to be a writer when you were at university, did you feel, "Yes, this feels like something that I can definitely commit my life to"?

Caryl Phillips: I think I'd already done that in the sense that I was able to give him two plays of mine that had already been published. I think I was able to actually suggest that I was on the second-to-bottom rung of the ladder, not quite at the bottom, but sort of I'd made some steps along the way. I think the more important thing was, in terms of what you're asking to imagine yourself as a writer happened at university, when I was reading Wright and Baldwin and Ellison and others, people who didn't come from privileged backgrounds, who came from the margins, but had something to say. That was the key to it.

I think before I met him, he'd been incredibly useful by virtue of just being an example and somebody who, unlike a lot of the other writers who I was studying or reading certainly and thinking about, they tended to come from backgrounds with very few exceptions of privilege, backgrounds which enabled them to travel, which enabled them to follow in parental footsteps, which enabled them to not in any way be put off or embarrassed at the ideas, thinking that they wanted to do something, something that didn't necessarily equate into a solid salary for life.

I had a little understanding of that, being a northerner, I've been from Leeds, because there'd been a whole generation of working-class writers in the '50s and in the '60s England who'd already paved the way and shown you that it was possible geographically to come from the north. It was possible to come from a working-class background and articulate themselves. The bit that was missing was none of them were Black. Here was the sort of jack boy. He was essentially working class. He came from the margin, and he was Black. He was a very strong influence in terms of enabling me to think that it was possible. Meeting him was a privilege, obviously, but was some sort of affirmation in a sense that there was more to learn, and he was obviously prepared to be patient with me and help me to understand more.

Razia Iqbal: That first meeting went on to become more meetings. You became friends. I wonder how you would characterize the relationship that you had with him.

Caryl Phillips: Friends. He didn't have any reason to keep in touch with me. He didn't have any reasons to be like, make himself available. If I showed up in New York or if I showed up in France, or if he showed up in London, we would see each other. I would call him, or he would call me, and we would go out and have dinner or have a drink, or I would stay with him at his house. The question is, what was in it for him? Obviously, I wasn't able to do anything for his career or enhance his reputation in any way. Certainly he liked to help people because he was also a very good teacher. The last couple of years of his life he taught at the University of Massachusetts, and by all accounts was a good teacher and was very good with young wannabe writers. The American playwright Susan Laurie Parks was a student of his, and she speaks very eloquently about what an important influence he was. He enjoyed, I think, being around the next generation.

I think the other aspect of his life, which I think people miss out and don't fully comprehend, is that he was quite lonely. I think he enjoyed the company, particularly when we were in France, because he was quite isolated down there. He was never isolated in New York, of course, or in London, which are more social worlds and surrounded by a lot of people. He was in the import-export business. When he came to France, people had to come to him.

Most of the people that came to him were people from his past, his generation. William Styron, Harry Belafonte, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones. Lots of people came to visit him when they were in Provence or they were at the Cannes Film Festival. Once that season was over, he was living in the south of France by himself, in a place where there were few Americans and even fewer Black Americans and even fewer Black people. A young fan who has read his work and who likes talking to him, who would show up from time to time, who would have a few drinks with him, was probably a relief.

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Razia Iqbal: It's so interesting to hear you talk about his desire to be connected to the next generation. In that documentary that you made with him, you talked about the relationship between Baldwin and Wright could be compared with a dominant father and a gifted, impatient son. In the context of the kind of next generation, would it be pushing it to suggest that he was, in some ways, your literary father?

Caryl Phillips: I never saw him as that. Wright was a bigger influence on me, to be honest, as a student. I read Wright before I read Baldwin. He never behaved as a literary father in some respects. A couple of guys I got to know later were much more paternalistic. Derek Walcott was much more paternalistic, and Achebe, very much. Not literally, but very much. Come and sit at my feet, young man, and let me tell you about my journey. Jimmy was never like that. He was more anecdotal about stuff that was happening and would ask you questions.

He'd ask me, "What do you think of this? Have you seen the films of Fassbinder?" He asked me once. What's he asking me that for? It's because there was a possibility that Fassbinder would make a movie of Giovanni. He wanted to know what I thought. He was very much like that. The other two geezers who I met later on, Walcott and Achebe, they never really wanted to know what you thought.

Razia Iqbal: Because they knew everything, right?

Caryl Phillips: Yes, they did. I was there to sit around the bonfire, listen to them singing ballads about their lives. Jimmy was never like that. He was much more a kind of, we're in this together. What do you think?

Razia Iqbal: We'll take a short break. More from Caryl Phillips when we come back. This is Notes on a Native Son with me, Razia Iqbal. You're listening to Notes on a Native Son with Razia Iqbal.

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Caryl Phillips: Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color.

Razia Iqbal: I'm intrigued that you chose a passage from one of his essays. One of the things that Baldwin really wanted was to be acknowledged as a great novelist. You write novels; you've written essays. I wonder what you make about the fact that his reputation is much more, or at least what resonates for people even to this day, is his writing of the essays much more than the novels. Do you read his novels and think they're not as great as his essays or that they bring something different? How do you feel about the relationship between those two forms?

Caryl Phillips: I think one of the reasons I chose this quote is because I think it sits perfectly at the point at which it became increasingly difficult for him to be as successful a novelist. The thing about writing novels is that you're off stage, you're in the wings, you're not visible, you're hiding behind your characters. The way in which his life opened up after 1957, when he came back to the United States, was a move into visibility. It was TV interviews. It was the COVID of Time magazine. It was the lecture circuit. It was meetings with Robert Kennedy, breakfast with him as the Attorney General, his advice been sought. It was a whole whirlwind of visibility. That's not a very good place from which to find the solitude and the quiet to imagine in the background.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that you put your life as a novelist in terminal jeopardy by living that kind of visible life. But you do certainly risk losing some of the interiority, some of the quiet that I think is necessary to reflect and gestate because it takes a long time to write a novel. A lot of that work he's done in quietude. He didn't really have much peace in the 1960s.

In some senses, it was a perfect storm for him as a preacher to be given a platform and to be given a podium during the Civil Rights movement because he was brilliant, a brilliant speaker, and he had much to say. He was tremendous articulator of the disenfranchisement of African Americans during this period, the civil rights period. He was the literary voice of the civil rights movement. It wasn't his fault that it coincided with his literary career, but did it have an effect upon his literary career as a novelist? Absolutely, it did.

Razia Iqbal: There was certainly the last time you and I spoke in a kind of formal way about your work. You were talking about how you had rejected the call on you as a Black writer in the UK to comment on the slightest thing that affected Black people and that you'd be called by national newspapers to write comment columns, et cetera, and that you didn't want to do that. I wonder in some ways if Baldwin taught you how not to be that kind of writer too, to kind of remove yourself from that a little bit.

Caryl Phillips: Yes, he did.

Razia Iqbal: Or what writer not to be? What kind of writer not to be?

Caryl Phillips: Yes, absolutely he did. He didn't teach me formally. I know you're not suggesting this, but he didn't formally say to me, don't do this or don't do that. Just by the process of osmosis being around him, I was able to soak up the idea of the difficulties and the problems of living in that spotlight, what it gives to you, but what it also takes from you. I was able to witness it very close up, but I'm very lucky. It absolutely changed my attitude because you can be rewarded in all sorts of short-term ways for offering up the quick quote, offering up the quick article, the quick opinion piece on everything from Brixton riot, Broadwater Farm, Stephen Lauren's case.

There's all sorts of ways in which you become the go-to person, but what does it do to what you really want to be? What does it do to thing that you set out to do and the thing that you still want to do? It affects it. In some people's cases, it affects it quite radically, and other people manage to balance it with more finesse. I didn't think that I would be able to do it. I looked at him, and I didn't think he always did it that successfully either.

Razia Iqbal: One of the things that people who go back time and again to Baldwin recognize is this kind of monumental intellect that the man had. I wonder how you reflect on why he continues to resonate for people. You only have to go onto TikTok and Instagram, something that I know that you're completely familiar with, Caz, to see memes and people sharing clips of Baldwin saying this thing and that thing. He continues to be a touchstone not just in this country but well beyond. I wonder what you think the reason for that is.

Caryl Phillips: Well, the primary reason is he was brilliant. He had a brilliant mind, and he had more insight than probably anybody I've ever met and the ability and the language to express it. He understood a tremendous amount about the human soul. He understood a tremendous amount about politics and about the price one pays for living life in certain ways. He was a brilliant mind and a brilliant writer. I think that's the primary reason he's still quoted and the primary reason people go back to him.

I think the difficulty is, or the frustrating thing is, of course, is he's eminently quotable but not as read as he should be. There's a whole generation of people who will quote Baldwin, but if you ask them, what book did that come from? Or what's your favorite book? They actually haven't read one. They've read the quote. He has these constituencies, who quite rightly are seeing him as a spokesperson for a lot of the things that they're advocating. How would he describe himself? How would he want to be described? Not as a spokesperson, but as a writer.

We live in an age of abbreviation and emoji. I don't see no abbreviation or emojis in his work. He cared about language. He cared about sentences, the rise and fall of language. He understood that there's poetry in the line of prose. Most people today are not invested in the language in the way that he was or in the way in which Toni Morrison was too. She came from the church as well. Her language is suffused with the Bible as well. It's a different use of language today in both fiction and nonfiction. It's utilitarian. That's what language is, as opposed to language that should be polished because it has an eloquence and a beauty and an aesthetic of its own. Baldwin came from that world where language mattered. To a lot of people today, language doesn't matter so much. What matters is the message.

Given the rise of the Internet and social media, it doesn't corrode, it certainly doesn't destroy the legacy of Baldwin's work and his monumental achievement. It slightly changes it. The fact that he's still growing, his reputation is still growing, I think, it's testament to his intellect. It's testament to the truth of what he had to say. Even if we might be slightly bypassing in some instances the fact that he did consider himself a writer and he did consider the books the most important thing, more so than, as I said, the message.

Razia Iqbal: We, of course, have all his words. We have his books with us, and we can go back to them time and again, but I wonder if you miss him.

Caryl Phillips: Oh, yes, I miss the jokes. That's what I miss. I miss the laugh. I don't miss the work because I still got that, but I miss the nonsense. I miss the complete ridiculousness of walking into a bar with him and him pretending he doesn't have any money. That's the stuff that I miss.

Razia Iqbal: Caryl Phillips, thank you so much for speaking to us.

Caryl Phillips: Thank you, Razia.

Razia Iqbal: This has been Notes on a Native Son. In the next episode, we'll hear from someone else who knew James Baldwin well and spent many years by his side. David Leeming met Baldwin first in Istanbul in 1961. For some time afterwards, Baldwin would introduce him as My Boswell. Leeming did indeed go on to write a long and riveting biography of Baldwin. That's David Leeming in conversation with me, Razia Iqbal, next time.

This podcast is brought to you by WNYC Studios and sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. It is a sea salt and mango production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher is Navani Rachumallu. The executive producer for WNYC Studios is Lindsay Foster Thomas. Karen Frillmann is our editor. Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer is Axel Kacoutie. Special thanks to Dean Amani Jamal of Princeton University.

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