Razia Iqbal: Hello, my name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to episode eight of Notes on a Native Son, a podcast about the writer James Baldwin. This year, 2024, marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters. He was many things to many people. Novelist, essayist, activist, sincere icon. For James Baldwin, though, such lists were meaningless, who and what he was and what is his legacy 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 Jimmy Baldwin through his work and for those who love his words to 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 powerfully clarifies what he is and what America is on his terms. In each episode, 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 Irish award-winning writer Colm Toibin. He is the author of 11 novels, including The Master, Brooklyn, and Nora Webster. He's also written essays, journalism, and a book of poetry. His work's been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times and he has won the Costa Novel Award and the Impack Award. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and many other publications.

None of this really tells you what Colm Toibin really is. A polymath, a Renaissance man, as at ease writing about art as he is about politics or literature and spinning a story that keeps you glued to the page or in person, agog or in stitches with laughter. Toibin has long admired James Baldwin ever since he read Go Tell It on the Mountain as a teenager and has now written a book about him called simply, On James Baldwin. Jimmy is a writer he has long admired and engaged with. Colm Toibin is the Irene and Sydney B. Silverman professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in New York, where we sat with him in his teaming office.

Colm Toibin: My name is Colm Toibin and the passage I have chosen is the opening paragraph of James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it. By then, it was already too late.

Razia Iqbal: Colm, thank you so much for taking part in this podcast. Why have you chosen that passage?

Colm Toibin: Because it does a lot of work using very little, and because it goes against the general idea that Baldwin was a grand stylist, that he took his bearings from jazz, as he says himself. In other words, sometimes he does from the Old Testament, from what he calls the bravura style of Charles Dickens, from what he calls something ironic in Negro speech, what he calls Negro speech. What I want to show is that actually there are times when he brings the level down to almost zero and he writes in very plain sentences. If you look at this first paragraph, they're mainly words of one syllable, and it is as though someone is telling a story that's already been told.

He loves this ominous ending, "By then it was already too late." That first paragraph really interests me for the way in which it is so effective, which may be one of the important things about writing fiction is you need to be sometimes very effective.

Razia Iqbal: Was it the first novel of his that you had read?

Colm Toibin: I bought it on my 18th birthday, and I got a book token, which was popular at the time from some aunt or uncle, and I went into a place called the Paperback Center in Dublin, and I bought three or four books. One of the others was Stevie Smith's thing called A Novel on Yellow Paper but that really didn't mean anything to me. This book, Go Tell It on the Mountain, it was a cheap paperback, and for whatever reason I bought it, I knew there was something I was interested in, which was mainly the Civil Rights movement. I thought it was just something, but tell me something.

This business of what was happening in America was really fascinating at the time because the television images were so powerful that people-- We Shall Overcome and Nonviolence and Crossing the Bridge and Dr. King. I read the book, and of course, with that opening paragraph, I certainly didn't notice it. I merely read it and carried on to the next paragraph, which may be one of the purposes of a paragraph is if you don't stop for a second and say, What a great paragraph," you simply know something and move on.

I found, of course, the religion extremely interesting because I was brought up as a Catholic in Ireland in a small town where the church, the cathedral in the town was really a place of immense importance. It was a place where not the hymn singing and the tambourines that he talks about, but nonetheless a sense of worship that was high and soaring and serious and a relationship with the Lord that for that hour on a Sunday seemed to matter enormously and lift the weak in some way. All of that was there.

There's a sense of the kid in the book trying to find out all the time what exactly happened? Did his father-- no, that's not his father. It's his stepfather. Did his stepfather marry before? What was she called? What did she do? How did his Aunt Florence, how did she get out of the South? What day did she go? What did she say to her mother when she went? All of that becomes an important background. At the front of the novel is the growing consciousness of a sensitive boy.

You realize a few times that this sensitive boy is homosexual. It's very subtly done. I'm not sure I noticed it the first time, but noticing is not the point as much as it's there in the book. It's richly there when another young fellow comes up from the south and is very handsome. We find our character, John, really noticing him and noticing him for his clothes, maybe, and for his religious fervor, but actually also for his body, for the sexual aura that he gives off. There are many things in the book that interested me, and not least the sexual.

Razia Iqbal: You were 18 when you first read it, and coming from rural Ireland and a Catholic background, did this feel like something that felt transformative as you were reading it, or did you feel changed by the end of it? Do you look back on it now in that way, or did you feel it at the time?

Colm Toibin: No one then was looking for a book that would describe their own lives. I was then always looking for something different. It wasn't as I wanted my own experience narrated back to me. I wasn't looking for a mirror. It was completely strange, the idea of what happened in this church. What wasn't strange was an individual consciousness of a very sensitive, raw figure who's susceptible, who's open to anything that's happening around, who's dead curious. That certainly stayed with me. Those things made a difference because there were very few of them.

Razia Iqbal: The subtle nature of inserting the sexuality in the novel too clearly resonated with you. At that time, were you certain that you were gay or not?

Colm Toibin: certainly by 18, I was certain I was gay, but trying to find a mirror. The problem was there was no one on television. There was no one anywhere. There was no book, there was no movie. There was no pornography. There was no anything. You and two friends could be gay all you wanted, but there was only one dimension to that. Finding a book that even had a hint of it or a suggestion of it, but also that integrated sexuality, homosexuality, into a religious life, into that sense of fervor of lifting the spirit as a way almost of avoiding ordinary days.

This is not a good novel about ordinary days or domestic life or what life was really like in Harlem in those days. Where you bought the bread, how did you buy bread? What exactly are they living on? Those details don't interest Baldwin. Of course, it's vitally important that the young man here, that it isn't after the age of 14, because, of course, you realize that someone like him in Harlem at this time, to try and make him into a young adult, to make him into a young man, to make him into a figure in the community later, is going to be very difficult for any novelist.

This is a big argument that Baldwin is having with Richard Wright, but with other writers, too, that if you make an African American character, must you give him his doom? Baldwin's point was that he wanted his characters to live. Henry James' character lived because, of course, Baldwin had really paid attention to James, especially to novels like The Ambassadors. He wanted his characters to be able to confront their destiny with as much freedom as anyone else in fiction. To have the police being involved or to have a moment where he is alone in a prison cell, having somehow been undermined or captured by the police, that Baldwin didn't want that.

He wanted to give him a drama. The drama was not a Black-white drama. The drama was an interior drama about the saving of his own soul. Now, this is something-- in 1950 in Paris, Baldwin reads Joyce. The important thing that Joyce did for Ireland, he did things for the novel, he did things for many other things but was that in the novel Ulysses, almost no one English gets to speak. The drama is not a drama between Ireland and England, even though that's the raging drama in the newspapers. If you looked at historians, this is 1904 in Dublin.

It's a novel being written in about 1916 in Trieste, that it should be, surely the British soldiers marching through arguments about nationalism. In fact, it's that all these Irish people just get to talk to each other about the dramas that interest them. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, hardly anyone white gets to speak. It isn't as though they're excluded. They're just absent, because why should they be there? This is a drama about a young man confronting his destiny with his family and his church and his own conscience.

If you start bringing in big dramas from the newspapers, from history, you'll do this. Suddenly a white group is going to arrive with the Klux Klan. This is not to be that. It's to be intimate. In being intimate, it is intensely political because it suggests that the drama of the future will be an interior one. That a young man in Harlem in these years could have such an intense interior drama about his soul that this would be the thing that would matter to his life. It's a blueprint, in a way, for a certain freedom.

[MUSIC - Gary Washington]

Razia Iqbal: Colm, you've dedicated your life to literature, not just as a writer, but as a teacher. All of the things that you're saying now about your reflections of this novel are informed by those years of experience. I wonder, to take you back to being 18, and in reading it, did it resonate with you that it was this very literary novel that dealt with the interiority of a character? Was that something that you were aware of? You yourself must have been having all of those interior dialogues with yourself.

Colm Toibin: I think I read the book without thinking. In other words, I picked it up without knowing anything about it. I'd read nothing else by Baldwin. It was that lovely, innocent reading experience that you can maybe have then in a way you couldn't now because now you'd check him out online, you'd look at him on videos, you'd get to know loads of things about him. I certainly knew nothing about him. I knew he was African American, but I hadn't read any of his other books. He wasn't on a course. He certainly wasn't on the university.

I think the big change for me was I came to New York in September of 2000 to spend a year at the New York Public Library. What I decided as one of my projects would be that I was going to read everything by Baldwin. It was the essays then that I read, not having read them before. And I read them as the thousand-page book, which is the Library of America book, which is basically his big book, called The Price of the Ticket. There's a level of eloquence in those essays. There's a level of seeing things from many perspectives, but it's essentially one that isn't ready to have an easy argument with you.

That the argument will always be thrown back into redefine the argument and we can have the argument, but we can't have it on the terms of now. He does this all the time in possession of a glittering mind and of an extraordinary prose style so that it's very unusual from this period that anyone who wrote essays that their essays survive. Joan Didion born a decade later, her essays survive, but it's not true with Norman Mailer and it's not true with Vs Naipaul, I think, but it's true with Baldwin that those thousand pages, it isn't just that they give you a knowledge or this question of race in America at this time, they give you a cast of mind, they give you a way of approaching a question.

The problem is to do with the private life. If you have such ugly public attitudes, what is your heart like? What is your soul like? What are you like? It's not a Black problem, it's a white problem. You sort it out because we're fine. We don't have a problem with ourselves or with you, but you're the one with the problem, sort it out. Sometimes the television appearances in the 50s and 60s are sensational because he's above all the fray. He's saying things that are so wise, so sensible in such a lofty way. He stops at certain moments. He's an old-fashioned preacher sometimes, but he is a great essayist.

I think there are people who think he's a better essayist than he's a novelist, better short story writer. It's lovely the way the argument we're still having about what's his best work, what's his great talent. The discovery of those essays was not merely the discovery of the terms of an argument. It was the discovery of a cast of mind, and that cast of mind seems to me to be from that period. The greatest American essayist of that period of those 30, 40 years is Baldwin.

[MUSIC - Gary Washington]

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

[MUSIC - Gary Washington]

Colm Toibin: Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then, it was already too late.

Razia Iqbal: It is so interesting hearing you talk about the deep engagement that you've had with Baldwin. Would you say that he has been a close companion, a close intellectual companion for you for decades?

Colm Toibin: I think it was October 2000, I think that's right, that there was a symposium about Baldwin in the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center in New York, and there were many speakers and each of them had a very different thing to say about Baldwin. It was amazing to hear someone like Chinua Achebe come out on the stage and just talk about the radiance, the prose. It was amazing to hear Hilton Als having an entirely different view on him. Almost everyone who came out onto the stage was reading a different Baldwin.

What was more amazing was that there was a full house. It had been booked out for ages, and the Baldwin family were in the front row. Then as you went back and back and back, you found a lot of young men, maybe from Harlem, but African American on their own, maybe with a book in their hands, looking intensely interested in this, as though this had inspired them. I couldn't believe this, that this writer had created this sort of audience. There were people of every type in the audience. It wasn't the Harlem audience, it wasn't this Upper West Side audience. That in some way he was managing to speak to the world.

It was as though each person was reading a different book because he wrote many different books. It's an extraordinary moment in fiction where this young writer who had produced the Harlem book, the book that everyone was waiting for, which would describe the inner life, the thing that Obama wanted everyone to know about our lives on Sundays, separate, but our lives as African Americans, our secret lives. Baldwin gave an inner knowledge to this in Go Tell It on the Mountain. It was clear the career he might then go on to have. He wrote Giovanni's Room, and his agent told him to burn that book.

Anyone, again, coming from, I suppose, a traditional community who wants to write a novel which is explicitly gay is in trouble as to how do you go about it? Who's going to read it? Is your mother going to read it? Is your grandmother going to read it? Giovanni's Room, then, is a very big break on that. It's a absolutely fascinating idea that the big gay novel becomes the most moral novel.

Razia Iqbal: The one that's about love generally, as opposed to not just homosexual love. Isn't it about the idea that you are so damaged that you will not be able to love anybody? That you're too afraid to love anybody?

Colm Toibin: There's a wonderful letter from Lionel Trilling, who was the main critic of the time, just saying, could Baldwin stop with this love business? What's wrong with respect? Baldwin was fascinated by the love business. He's writing about two things in Giovanni's Room. The first one is the failure of our hero as an American in Paris to do anything other than harm. he's coming out of a tradition that includes Hemingway, Henry James, The Sun Also Rises, The Ambassadors, those books. This guy's an American and nothing bothers him. It isn't as though he's going to have any responsibilities. He feels he has many rights.

The second one is a spiritual one. It is that within him somewhere there is badness, and that badness has emerged as a failure to love. There is another context that's barely mentioned in the book, which I think is really present in the book all the more for not being mentioned is that this is a world before any freedoms were given to gay people to make images of one another. They just have a room, and once they go into the room, it seems as though the room diminishes them. There's no city for them to live in. That idea of anyone gay who remembers that time there being no context.

It's not just there's nothing about you in advertising or film, but that there's no bar. There's no big disco world. There's no big, in a way, world in music. There's a loneliness associated with lack of imagery that I think is at the heart of Giovanni's Room. In other words, it's a political matter as well as it being just about this individual or about being an American in Paris.

Razia Iqbal: Did you ever meet Baldwin?

Colm Toibin: No, I had never met Baldwin. I was on a radio program just after he died. One of those Sunday morning programs in Ireland where two people have to read the newspapers and tell you what's in the newspapers. It was a Sunday, it was 1987, and Baldwin had died. This wouldn't have been a big story in Irish, but there was something in the paper. It was an obituary by William Starn and I remember reading out a bit of it and I just loved it so much. That's '87. I couldn't believe how funny it was that all the Kennedy Democrats were up in Connecticut, staying in Stern's house. Not all of them, but some of them.

This is the '60s, and they were talking about civil rights, what to do, what legislation needed to be passed, busing, districting, gerrymandering. They were going through all these things that legislation could solve. Eventually, Starn said Jimmy Baldwin is down in the cottage on the estate. He was staying there. He was meant to be writing a book. Someone said, "Let's send up for him. Let's have him." Baldwin had been drinking, and he came up and looked at all these guys and he just said, "If we do this what will--" Baldwin said, "Hey, guys, you don't understand. We're going to burn your cities down."

They said, "No, no, but what we're saying is, in Montgomery, Alabama, you see, if we did this and if The National Guard--" "Hey, guys, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to burn your cities down." I remember reading this out on the radio. This is the best thing ever. This is the best. There's something else really important about Baldwin that maybe only writers get, which is that he's always not writing a book. Every time you hear about him, look what he's doing. Look at dates. Where's that book that was meant to be written that time? How come there's such a big gap between books?

How come Another Country seems so untidy? How come you realize that he crossed the Atlantic six times during the writing of Another Country? You realize that he was always on the run? I asked Robert Silvers who was editor of the New York Review of Books what was his relationship with Baldwin? He said, "You don't understand." I think Silvers was editor at Harper's, and Baldwin was due to deliver a piece, and they had mentioned it on the cover. In those years, often the cover got printed first. He really needed the piece and he couldn't find Baldwin, and Baldwin didn't deliver. Eventually, he went around to where he thought Baldwin lived, and sure enough, Baldwin was there.

Obviously, any writer knows it's the most shocking idea, the editors appearing. Baldwin just said to him, "You--" This was late at night. "You go to sleep. You just get on that bed and you go to sleep and when you wake up, I will have the piece." Silvers couldn't remember what piece it was, but he said, "It's one of the important essays." it couldn't be more than 4,000 or 5,000 words then, or 3,000 words, but he did it through the night and he had it delivered, and there it was in the morning. Some of those great pieces were delivered in that way.

[MUSIC - Gary Washington]

Razia Iqbal: I was so interested in hearing parts of the speech that Obama made when he was given a PEN America Award I think. I can't quite remember. It might have been for his autobiography and he mentioned James Baldwin in that speech. He said, "Of course, I would love to be like Jimmy Baldwin, but he didn't have to make any legislation. He didn't have to come up with legislation." In that moment, he was trying to say something about how difficult it is to be a politician and have in your midst, in your historical literary upbringing, a seer, a prophet, but somebody who engaged with politics.

It's almost as though Obama wanted to separate himself from that. I wonder what you make of that as an idea that Baldwin didn't have to make laws and I do.

Colm Toibin: Certainly in that early time, I think when he was in Chicago, Obama was reading everything, but he was certainly reading Baldwin. He mentions him in the autobiography, he mentions him several times in passing as one of the-- obviously, he would read those books, and I think those books mattered to him enormously. I think it's always the case when a writer gets close in some way to a politician, that the paths diverge at a very crucial point. I think that you see the connections between Baldwin and Obama and then you see the ways in which they move apart. In other words, that Obama-- Obama had to order bombings.

Now, there's something really interesting about Baldwin and violence. I have it in for boxing. I just can't understand why we don't see the Harvard boxing team or the Columbia boxing team. It's not like, why don't rich boys box? It'd be good for them. Everyone says American writers write so beautifully about boxing. You should try reading Norman Mailer's writing on boxing. It is some of the worst writing. I don't mean bloated. I mean just some of the sentences are just beyond bad. that extends to anyone else who gets going on boxing in America. It's particularly American vice to say, "He get an uppercut here. Into his soul came a big--" It's like, "Stop. This is off."

Poor old Baldwin. This one moment where I feel really close to him. He gets sent to a boxing match and I can imagine, "Oh my God, this would be my biggest nightmare because I wouldn't know that you'd be an uppercut and a sliced pan." Do you know what I mean? He gets sent to a Sonny Liston vs. Floyd Patterson match and Mailer, of course, is there, like Hemingway, "I know this world." Mailer has just written a really nasty review of another country and they don't really have anything to do with one another again, but much.

They're sitting close. I think there's one seat between them at this match. Baldwin has no idea what to do and the organizers know that Baldwin has no idea what to do. Then they give him private time with the two boxers. You can imagine Baldwin going in and looking at Sonny Liston and he does flirt with him. There is a sexual, but that's not the point. He says he thinks that Patterson has a private life that he's unable to express. That he's one of those men who you can feel a great interior and the pain of it. He writes about it almost as though Henry James is writing about-- it's late James applied to this poor boxer who's about to go out the next day.

It works. You feel Baldwin is actually trying to see if there's a man that he can talk to. Then he goes to see Sonny Liston and he just says to Sonny Liston, in the end, "I don't really have anything to ask you, but I just really came just to wish you well." I don't know why that's so moving that he just-- he writes it beautifully. "I just came just to say I like to wish you well." You see, it's against all the other stuff, all the Mailer and Richard Wright was a big offender in the boxing business as well and all of these studs, Turkle, it just goes on and Baldwin just says to this poor Sonny Liston, "I'd just like to wish you well." I don't know why. It's not his best piece by any means.

[unintelligible 00:27:57] is just to show that gay guys could write bad boxing pieces. It just shows you that you need to be butch and straight and big to write boxing. I don't know why. It's a piece that I just love when Baldwin had a boxing match. He had no interest in violence. Violence didn't excite him in any way.

Razia Iqbal: It wasn't just his sensibility. He was diminutive. He was a small man.

Colm Toibin: I think that's maybe important as well. For all that, he's the patron saint of all the wimps among us.

[laughter]

Razia Iqbal: Colm Toibin, thank you so much-

Colm Toibin: Thank you very much.

Razia Iqbal: -for speaking to us. Thank you. That was wonderful.

[MUSIC - Gary Washington]

This has been Notes on a Native Son, a new podcast about James Baldwin. In the next episode, we'll hear from the writer and poet Nikki Giovanni in conversation with me, Razia Iqbal. 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, Lindsay Foster Thomas. Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer, Axel Kacoutié. Special thanks to Dean Amani Jamal of Princeton University.

[MUSIC - Gary Washington]

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