Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin’s 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain as an English undergraduate student in the early 1970s. In John Grimes, the novel’s central protagonist, Tóibín recognized a little bit of himself: a young man struggling to come to terms with his own sexuality and ambivalent feelings about God.
Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island (2024)—a sequel to his novel Brooklyn (2009), which was made into a movie starring Saoirse Ronan in 2015—and The Magician (2021) as well as two story collections and several books of criticism and nonfiction. Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1955. Presently, he divides his time between Dublin; Los Angeles, California; and New York City—where he is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.
In August 2024, to coincide with the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth, Tóibín published On James Baldwin. The book came from a series of public lectures that Tóibín delivered in 2022 at Brandeis University in Boston, Massachusetts, about Baldwin’s life and work, as well as Tóibín’s personal encounters with Baldwin’s writing. The book also contains references to various essays Tóibín has previously published on James Baldwin over the past twenty-five years in the London Review of Books, The Dublin Review, and The New York Review of Books.
The Progressive spoke with Tóibín about Baldwin’s influences and his enduring political and artistic legacy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York. The eldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty and was initially raised by his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, who later married a tyrannical Baptist preacher named David Baldwin, known to be violent and abusive. In what ways did this tough upbringing shape Baldwin and his career?
Colm Tóibín: First, it’s important to note that Baldwin used literacy to emerge from poverty. There is also a missing piece of knowledge in this story: We know nothing about Baldwin’s mother. And yet, everything we can sense about her is that she did the raising, the influencing, and that she mattered to him. Baldwin also liked to remind people that his own father was elsewhere. This gave him this Christ-like narrative, where he could say ‘My father isn’t really my father.’ This towering, violent figure of David Baldwin was his stepfather. As a narrator, this gave Baldwin enormous power. Despite being from a very large family, there was, in Baldwin, a great existential solitude. Baldwin developed a tone for that, even before he went to Paris.
Q: Baldwin first moved to Paris, France, in the winter of 1948. Baldwin spent most of his adult life away from the United States, much of it in France. You also explore the idea that, for any Black writer in America at this time, going to Paris was a rite of passage. Could you put this into a broader historical-cultural context?
Tóibín: Yes. This really started in the 1920s, with figures from the Harlem Renaissance.
Many of these artists from Harlem went to Paris [to live]. This included writers like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and the African American painter Beauford Delaney. Cullen had worked at [Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem] which Baldwin attended in the late 1930s.
From the 1920s onwards, the report back to Harlem was that if you went to Paris as an African American, you were treated like an American. This didn’t mean that if you were Algerian you were treated like an American. The American journalist and novelist William Gardner Smith, who was in Paris during that time, wrote about how the Arab experience was so different from the African American experience. Baldwin, though, was very careful not to get too involved in [the French-Algerian political debates]. In Paris, he generally just tended to have a good time. And, of course, he did some writing too.
Q: Baldwin’s 1953 novel Go Tell it on the Mountain takes place over the course of a single day. This is also the case with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Was Joyce a big influence on Baldwin’s work?
Tóibín: Joyce’s influence was very important. Baldwin had read [Joyce’s 1916 novel] A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. This provided him with the idea that you could write about your own formation, but that you could do it in relation to your own conscience. That was a very big moment for Baldwin. As was his reading, in 1950, of [Joyce’s 1922 book] Ulysses.
Q: In October 2008, you wrote in an essay titled “James Baldwin & Barack Obama” for The New York Review of Books that, “It seemed important, as both men set about making their marks on the world, for them to establish before anything else that their stories began when their fathers died, and that they set out alone without a father’s shadow or a father’s permission.” What inspired you to write this essay?
Tóibín: I wrote it in the white heat of that wonderful election campaign of [2008]. It came out of a casual conversation I had, over lunch, with [the late] Bob Silvers, who was then editor of The New York Review of Books. I remember saying to him, “It’s extraordinary how much Obama is taking from Baldwin, sometimes unconsciously.” And Bob said, “Could you just write that down?”
Q: In that same essay you point out that both Baldwin and Obama experienced intense religious feeling as key elements of their lives. Also, Baldwin and Obama would discover their own Americanness outside of the United States: Baldwin in France, the home of some of his literary ancestors; Obama in Kenya, the home of his father. But in other ways, they differed. Can you talk about those differences?
Tóibín: When I began that essay, I could see that Baldwin and Obama had much in common. But as I [started looking at their personalities] in depth, I could see that they operated in very different worlds. Of course, there is always a big difference between a politician and a writer. A politician eventually has to try and make connections and to strive towards light and hope. A writer doesn’t have that duty. Instead, they often look for disconnections. They often offer images of pure, dark despair, when there isn’t any way out.
Q: In your new book On James Baldwin, you point out that Baldwin did not, at least publicly, fully address the matter of his own homosexuality until “Freaks and the American Idea of Manhood,” an essay he published in Playboy in 1985. Remarkably, this was just two years before his death at the age of sixty-three in 1987.
“The word gay has always rubbed me the wrong way. I never understood exactly what is meant by it. I simply feel it’s a word that had very little to do with me,” Baldwin once said, in a 1984 interview with Richard Goldstein, in The Village Voice. There seemed to be an ambivalence, or even a kind of nonchalance, whenever Baldwin spoke about his sexual identity in public.
Tóibín: In that [Playboy] essay Baldwin wrote about how he was called a “f––t”while he was in school. So people presumed he was gay. Although the word gay wasn’t actually there at that time. But in those years, it’s not as though there was an open avenue for an African American gay man to emerge out of the closet and into the light. Being white and being gay had its own problems. But being Black and gay had its own added pressures.
Q: Could you elaborate on that?
Tóibín: Well, because figures [in the Black militant movement] did not accept the idea that a Black man could be homosexual. Many militant Black leaders thought homosexuality was a white man’s disease. Or they said so at least. Take, for example, a figure like Bayard Rustin. Now, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and others were aware that Rustin was homosexual. But it was always [viewed] as dangerous. Rustin, for instance, wasn’t asked to speak at the [1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that he had helped to organize].
If you march for one thing, it’s very hard to start marching for something else that seems so personal, and almost silly, compared to the large questions of race and civil rights. It didn’t seem silly later. But I remember the writer Edmund White once saying to me: Did you ever think being gay was sort of silly? And I said, oh yeah, I did. And I meant here against these larger questions.
Q: Presumably, the threat of physical violence might have been another factor for Baldwin in not speaking about his own homosexuality in public. Especially early in his career.
Tóibín: It wasn’t the violence as much as the general business of categorization. Baldwin was uneasy about coming out of the closet because he really had it in for categorization. Baldwin resisted the very concept of gay and straight, even male and female. Baldwin’s idea was that we are here as Americans. The idea of categorization emerged in the United States much more strongly after Stonewall [the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village in New York City]. Baldwin wasn’t really there for that movement. But in any case, it wouldn’t really have interested him. By the 1970s he wasn’t coming back to the United States very much. And when he did come back, it was to see his mother.
Q: In your new book, you explore how Baldwin’s novels combine a criticism of life that is essentially political with one that is philosophical. You also point out that Baldwin saw how racism in America had maimed private life and had entered into the spirit of people. In your view, is this why Baldwin believed so much in the novel as an artform and that perhaps it could teach us things about the human condition that politics never can?
Tóibín: Yes, that’s exactly right. Baldwin saw the interior life—the idea of the self—as being in need of reform. There was no point in Baldwin trying to preach politics, because he wasn’t running for election, and he wasn’t looking for compromise or the language of legislation. He was much more interested in a larger question that was, in a way, a deeply religious question, which moved into a secular space. And the novel—and later the essay— became a way of trying to explore that space, where he could say to people: ‘Don’t tell me about a piece of legislation that you want to get through Congress, tell me about your soul, and tell me what is in you that allows such hate to take place.’ To that extent, Baldwin was working as a prophet rather than a politician. As an artist, that gave him a real edge.
Q: What did writing this book teach you about Baldwin the man and Baldwin the artist?
Tóibín: I should say that I limited myself to a small portion of Baldwin’s work. Namely: three novels and three books of essays Baldwin published between about 1952 and 1962. I wasn’t making an effort to be comprehensive or to discover any new biographical work. But after writing this book I suppose I ended up admiring him even more.
Q: Is there any remaining unpublished work of Baldwin’s that might provide us with a new angle from which to read his fiction, essays, and biography?
Tóibín: We don’t yet have a book of letters. The Baldwin family has been uneasy about publishing a book of letters so far. But he did write a vast number of letters. And that part of his work is missing. But we will have it [at some point] in the future. Which means we’ll have a much different sort of biography about Baldwin.