Why Jimmy is everywhere

During the nineteenth century Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man in America, a mantle passed on to James Baldwin, whose striking gap teeth and world-absorbing eyes are emblazoned on T-shirts, caps and posters, as well as across social media. Films about Baldwin and his work, including I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), have brought the writer to mainstream audiences. And if film and television cameos are barometers of fame, then the recent depictions of the writer in The French Dispatch (2021) and Feud: Capote vs the Swans (2024) corroborate the claim of James Campbell – one of Baldwin’s biographers – that “Jimmy is everywhere”.

God Made My Face: A collective portrait of James Baldwin builds on the exhibition of the same name that was on display at the David Zwirner gallery in New York City in 2019. Curated by the critic and essayist Hilton Als, the exhibition featured works by the painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin described as his “spiritual father”, alongside photographs by Richard Avedon, a high-school classmate of the writer. Also present were works by an eclectic range of artists, among them Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker and Marlene Dumas. The majority of the artists featured, however, did not know Baldwin; rather, as Als explains, the exhibition was “about his relationship to artists that he didn’t know and the conversations he never had”.

Edited by Als, God Made My Face is a collection of twelve essays written by nine writers and artists, including the writers Jamaica Kincaid and Darryl Pinckney, the biographer David Leeming, the film-maker Barry Jenkins and the writer and photographer Teju Cole, whose essay on Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” is one of several republished pieces. The most compelling essays, including three by Als, reflect on the authors’ intimate relationship to Baldwin and his work. “In reading Baldwin then”, Als tells us, “I was listening to my secret voice, the voice of someone who wasn’t afraid to describe who he was and where he’d come from and what he’d seen.” Barry Jenkins, who adapted If Beale Street Could Talk, posits that “all readers, filmmakers or not, receive Baldwin in images”, in one of several essays that underscores the importance of visuality in the writer’s work.

Baldwin’s oeuvre includes Nothing Personal (1964), a collaboration with Avedon, where the writer’s gnomic text is accompanied by his friend’s striking photographs of American culture, from Marilyn Monroe to the boxer Joe Louis, and from Allen Ginsberg to George Wallace, the governor of Alabama. Baldwin and Avedon, Als writes, shared “an imagination that was not so much informed by reality as inseparable from it: they saw the exceptional in the real”. This was not a view shared by the critic Richard Brustein in the New York Review of Books when the book was first published. He wrote that “the participation of James Baldwin signifies the further degeneration of a once courageous and beautiful dissent”, one of many claims that the writer’s talents had declined by the time he turned forty.

Published to mark the centenary of Baldwin’s birth, this volume extends the writer’s reach beyond the tired debates about whether he excelled as an essayist or a novelist. As Als puts it: “Baldwin wrote in arias of feeling and thought, and when he’d get bored with one idea, he’d go on to another”. In a reading of Giovanni’s Room (1956), Als points to how the slender novel “explores a different aspect of Baldwin’s voice – that of Baldwin the playwright, whose characters are often too emphatic in their discussion of the self”. The academic Stephen Best explores the sounds of Baldwin’s work, and reflects on the challenge of locating “the material traces of breath” in the writer’s essays, while Daphne A. Brooks, in a reading of his most famous short story, reminds us that “Baldwin is so often linked to Richard Wright, the literary figure he had to ‘kill’ to become his own man of letters, that we forget how central Ralph Ellison is to ‘Sonny’s Blues’”.

God Made My Face succeeds in keeping fresh an author who, as Cole puts it, “is one of the people just on the cusp of escaping the contemporary and slipping into the historical”.

Douglas Field teaches at the University of Manchester. His new book, Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, my father, and me, will be published this year

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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