Fine Books & Manuscripts

BALDWIN, James (1924–1987). Typed Letter Signed (“Jimmy”) Featuring an Unpublished Essay and Literary Critique. Paris: March 1956. 5pp. (266 x 203mm) on rice paper with original envelope postmarked “Paris 1956” to his friend and editor, Sol Stein. Includes marginalia in Baldwin’s hand with numerous holograph emendations and corrections in ink; original folds visible. In this letter, written during the publication of “Giovanni’s Room”, Baldwin is relieved that he does not have to write the preface to “The Negro in America” by Arnold Marshall Rose as he does not believe that introducing a sociological work by questioning “especially in the context of the Negro problem” is rational to the sociological work. Baldwin goes on to ask this question of: “what is happening now?” in regard to the “Negro American” and what appears to be the introduction to an unpublished essay “Letter to My Younger Brother” and a critique to Rose’s book: “I am not at all certain that Americans have the good life – their concept of the good life being, for me, too outer… When one reads the history of the Negro in America sociologically the effect can only be to make us feel rather proud of ourselves – God knows that prodigies of good have been accomplished. Now, it’s alright to be proud of what’s been done, and I’m not being sardonic about the good; only this attitude has its dangers, in that, in congratulating ourselves over dangers past, we can fail to be aware of dangers present, in looking at the problem in the mass, one tends to overlook the individual heartbreak and to under estimate the individual will and sensibility – and one fails, above all, to assess the price and the meaning of this progress.” Baldwin later critiques the American Self as having an “insufficient sense of their individual worth” and having a “dangerous tendency to distrust individual effort” and rely on “other people for a sense of their own identity”. He concludes that the good life and inter-racial Utopias were actually obtained by “the Negro in America” who “may have been the only person there who ever really had it…The Negro had at least himself, by which I mean he had some sustaining sense of himself, of his own privacy, of his own ability to outwit and endure, to suffer and rejoice; knowing as I think one must, that life is a black and lonely affair, he could then, as one must, find light in the darkness.” Provenance: from the estate of Baldwin’s friend and editor, Sol Stein. Baldwin’s unpublished essay and notes to a “Letter to My Younger Brother” was to be written for his brother, David. In it, the essay was to be divided into three parts as chronicled in Sol Stein’s “Native Sons…”: the history of the Negro in this country to give his brother a sense of his own history, an evaluation of David’s life until the present moment to rid him of the notion that he is the victim, and speculations of the future and the struggle ahead. (“Native Sons: A Friendship that Created one of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century: Notes of a Native Son”, pp. 75–78).