Thanks Ly, for choosing this letter as well! I think it must be a gem to Baldwin fans-- particularly these early thoughts on what would be come Sonny's Blues. I think the subtle anxiety about publishing etiquette can be helpful too in how we think about Baldwin deals with (or doesn't) homosexuality. (But more on that in a comment I'll be leaving on Bernadette's wonderful post.)
Dear Bill :
Thank you for the letters , for the clippings , etc , etc ( The Crisis seems to take a rather dim view of me ) and thank you for Cam's Christmas Card. Quelle talent , nom de Dieu! Give her a great big hug for me.
Have finished my play , The Amen Corner , and sent it to New York. God knows what will come of that , but , thank heaven , it's done. Now it is done I feel curious kind of exhasution [sic] and have not done very much except think about what I'm to do next. I'm trying to get off my desk at the moment two short stories , one quiete short , one quite long; then there's a long critical article which as been worrying me for a number of years and which maybe I'll try to do now; and then , of course, there's that novel.
( Anything I say to you about this novel is not to be repeated yet to anyone else at Knopf ). To begin with , the play was just completed was the germ of what I thought , when I left NY , was to be my second novel. Didn't turn out that way ,which is one of the reasons I so lapsed in my correspondence with Phil. On the other hand , another novel , a much earlier idea , which I'd written once , came more and more , during this last year , to capture my attention. The more I circled around it , the more exciting it became - its possibilities , I mean; and I began to work on it , hacking at it and refining it , trying to se how much I could do with such a theme. As of today , it is simply a discouraging mass of paper ,which stares grimly up
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at me as I write this letter. Yet , I know this is going to be my second novel , the only question is how soon I will get it done.
It's a great departure for me and it makes me rather nervous. It's not about Negroes , first of all; its locale is the American colony in Paris , a treacherous thing to handle as you certainly know. What is really delicate about it is that , since I want to convey some thing about the kind and intensity - with its various effects - of American loneliness and insecurity ( without being either didactic , affirmative , or despairing )I must use the most ordinary type of American I can find - the good , white PRotestant is the image I want to use . This is precisely the kind of American about whose setting I know the least. All I know about him I know through pain , through involvement , through guessing - through caring. Whether this will be enough to create a real human being only time will tell.
Anyway : I have to do it. If it turns out to be a mistake , well, we can always console ourselves with the notion that I'm young enough as a novelist to afford a couple of mistakes , even to need them. It won't , anyway , be a cheap mistake , or a dis-honorable mistake - it won't be a failure because I've tried to do the same thing over again. It will be a failure because I've tried to do ^[too] much and my belief is that I will , in any case , learn enough from this to be able one day to really do it right.
It's a love story , short , and - wouldn't you know it? - tragic. Our American boy comes to Europe , finds something , loses it ,and in his acceptance of his loss become , to my mind , heroic. It's called ( deep secret ) One For My Baby .
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Now: my hope is to have it drafted within the next three months. This means working like the very devil - I don't mind that , but , even working like the devi , I don't work very fast. What's probably is that within three months I'll have the novel suffic-iently where I want it to be able to scrap it and start allover again. If this sounds precious or complicated it isn't because I want to be , it's the way I work , God help me.
This means : I shall try , if possible , not to come hone in the early spring but in the late summer - say, August. This doesn't depend entirely on me because , for one thing, there's the Guggenheim business; and somebody might even take the play, which would demand my presence in NY very soon. But I would like to finish the novel before I come home and will do my best so to arrange things.
Well. All that so that someone at Knopf will know that I have not forsaken the novel form- am just beginning to get the hang of it as a matter of fact.
A friend of mine , a very fine girl named Mary Painter , will be in NY in a couple of days and will call you. I told her to call Lucy , too, I think they'd like each other. Mary seems at first a little shy , but all she needs is a kind of friendly dry martini to begin , in her quiet way , to sparkle. I think you'll like her.
You can give me a tip, if you will : a friend of mine, working at World Publishing would like me to do for his outfit a kind of handbook on being a Negro in US. This was an idea which he got from my Harper's article and he wanted me to imagine myself as a Negro father and write a letter to my son. But I thought it best to be exactly what I am , a Negro older brother , and write
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a letter to my baby brother , David. It happened that his idea gave me exactly the springboard , or gimmick I needed for a long kind of summing up article on the same subject which I've been working on , off and on , for a couple of years. So far , so good , but , obviously all this depends on Knopf. I don't think they'd be interested in such a book for themselves but they might be still less interested in my doing it for World. I don't know how these things are worked in the publishing racket - perhaps you can let me know. Things between myself and the character at World are still in the it-would-be-nice-if-you could stage. Nor have I mentioned this to anyone else. I don't want to do it if it involves a rupture with Knopf.
In this connection : rumors reach me that I'm on record as being dissatisfied with the way my book was handled at your organization. I do not remember ever having said any such thing to anybody , in letters , or verbally : I don't see how I could have , being , in the first place , in no position to judge the kind of promotion the book got and , even more important , being perfectly aware that the advertising budget was already specified before the book came out. Add to this that ( one of my limitations perhaps ) I'm not a very difficult man to please and that, from my point of view, the book did a great deal for me, for more than most first novels do for their authors and far more than I had hoped. I didn't expect to capture the mantle of M. Mitchell or L.C.Douglass and still don't. The extent of my discontent you know all about this has less to do with Knopf than the entire literary racket.
Well. Amdropping [sic] a bleated not to Harold Strauss. I really wanted to meet him but mounting hotel bills, the difficulty of
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working ,and the resultant depression - forced me out of Paris. My French agent saw him , and gave me glowing reports of him. I suppose we'll meet one day.
I guess that's all my gossip. I'm curious to know what happened to Al Anderson's book? and Welborne's? ( I hope to God you took that! ) Indiscreet question : Who managed to read all of The Marmot Drive ? Or did anyone ? I have not heard from Smith Oliver and am beginning an inquiry among friends in the Village. I'm used to his disappearances but I like to keep a vague idea of where's he's disappeared to.
I'm not , by the way , in Paris but in the south of France , in a house by myself , working and going crazy. Will stay here till April. Book comes out in Paris in April and so I'll go back up and be a lion. Book comes out in London in March.
Happy New Year to all of you and here's hoping that we all make a lot of money !
Love,
Jimmy [signed]
May be moving from the house I'm in to a cheaper house; so ,for the moment : American Express , Cannes.
Thank you for the tip about Marguerite Caetann , will send her my long short story.
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