18 June 1974: The acclaimed US author was in London to promote If Beale Street Could Talk,his first book in six years
James Baldwin had quite a morning yesterday. Flew in from the US at 0700, talked on Radio 4’s Today Programme at 0835, or helped Richard Baker Start the Week half an hour later,and at some time after 1300 hours and the longest shower in history, faced the Guardian over the lunch table. And when you half apologise for arriving with questions after such a day’s beginning, and he shrugs and smiles absent the tiredness and,perhaps, the huge irrelevance of such questions to a man on whom a lot of the pride and the anguish of a whole nation’s black people enjoy sometimes rested. No; I’m game, or I’m game,he says; and he is.
His new novel – the first for six years – is called If Beale Street Could Talk, and Start the Week has played him in with a snatch of that broken-down blues, and music recalling where jazz and with it a vital part of the Negro consciousness in America began. And yet somehow you feel we are lost the irony of that title for his book,and perhaps he can clarify it. Those renowned eyes reach for the ceiling, for all the corners of it, and the shoulders twist as he gropes for the words that will clarify it to a white Englishman. But it never quite comes within reach. “The older I get,” he says, “the more I work, and the less I understand approximately words.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com