There was a huge generosity in his nature and a love of company. It is fascinating to trace the roots of Another Country not only in Baldwin’s personal life and the lives of his friends, but also in his own thinking and writing about the interior life of America, the stained soul of his compatriots, in the years before he completed the book. In 1961, in the Introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, he wrote: ‘these essays were written over the last six years, in various places, in many states of mind’. He lived in the guest lodge at William Styron’s house in Connecticut. He worked at the MacDowell retreat for artists. He went to Switzerland and Stockholm and Israel, San Francisco and Chicago and Fire Island. He moved between Paris and New York, but he did not stay for long in either place. Between 1956, when he began to work in earnest on Another Country (there are also some versions and drafts from much earlier) and the end of 1961, when the book was finished, James Baldwin crossed the Atlantic by sea at least six times. The success of his early books allowed his restlessness and his mercurial nature an immense freedom. In 1961 he published a second book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, and the following year his third novel, Another Country, an immediate bestseller in the United States, appeared. Two years later his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, came out, and in 1956 his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, was published. His voice, so stylish, insisted that the language - English - in all its nuance and subtlety belonged to him, just as America in all its cruelty and hatred belonged to him too.īaldwin published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953 when he was twenty-nine. Baldwin’s nation in these essays was emphatically America, his self an American self. His tone did, however, borrow something from his preacher days: it was fearless and urgent, combining a concern about public policy and public attitudes with a probing and oddly intimate concern with the dark and uncharted spaces within the self. His style was not that of the Bible or the pulpit (Baldwin had been a child preacher) but took its bearings from the early sources of English eloquence: Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, William Hazlitt. In the early 1950s, as he was winning fame as a novelist, James Baldwin published a number of essays about the state of his nation which were passionately and elegantly written.
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