Wright blew up at Baldwin when they ran into each other at the Brasserie Lipp, but Baldwin did not back down. And he was more dangerous, perpetuating the “monstrous legend” of the black killer which Wright had meant to destroy.
Wright helped him find a room, and while it is true that the two writers were not close friends-Baldwin later noted the difference in their ages, and the fact that he had never even visited the brutal American South where Wright was formed-one can appreciate Wright’s shock when Baldwin’s first article for Zero was an attack on “the protest novel,” and, in particular, on “Native Son.” The central problem with the book, as Baldwin saw it, was that Wright’s criminal hero was “defined by his hatred and his fear,” and represented not a man but a social category as a literary figure, he was no better than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Baldwin had forty dollars, spoke no French, and knew hardly anyone else. Wright moved to Paris in 1947 and, the following year, greeted Baldwin at the café Les Deux Magots on the day that he arrived, introducing him to editors of a new publication, called Zero, who were eager for his contributions. Although the publisher ultimately turned the book down, Wright gave Baldwin the confidence to continue, and the wisdom to do it somewhere else. Wright, sixteen years Baldwin’s senior, was more than sympathetic he read Baldwin’s pages, found him a publisher, and got him a fellowship to give him time to write. Wright was the most successful black author in history when Baldwin-twenty years old, hungry and scared-got himself invited to Wright’s Brooklyn home, where, over a generously proffered bottle of bourbon, he explained the novel that he was trying to write. In the swell of national self-congratulation over the fact that such a book could be published, it became a big best-seller. Equally striking for a young writer, it would seem, was Wright’s success: “Native Son,” published in 1940, had been greeted as a revelation about the cruelties of a racist culture and its vicious human costs. He knew those far from bittersweet tenements, he knew the rats inside the walls. Reading “Native Son,” Wright’s novel about a Negro rapist and murderer, Baldwin was stunned to recognize the world that he saw around him. It was Wright’s unabating fury that hit him hard. Although Baldwin seemed a natural heir to the Harlem Renaissance-he was born right there, in 1924, and Countee Cullen was one of his schoolteachers-the bittersweet poetry of writers like Cullen and Langston Hughes held no appeal for him. The answer to both questions came from Richard Wright. Still, who really believed that he could make it as a writer? In America? Within a few years, he was publishing regularly in magazines book reviews, mostly, but finally an essay and even a short story. He began his first novel, about himself and his father, around the time he left the church, at seventeen. Baldwin had also sought refuge in the church, becoming a boy preacher when he was fourteen, but had soon realized that he was hiding from everything he wanted and feared he could never achieve. Devastation was all around: his contemporaries, out on Lenox Avenue, were steadily going to jail or else were on “the needle.” His father, a factory worker and a preacher-“he was righteous in the pulpit,” Baldwin said, “and a monster in the house”-had died insane, poisoned with racial bitterness.
There was, of course, no shortage of reasons for a young black man to leave the country in 1948.
His father was dead by then, and his mother had eight younger children whom it tortured him to be deserting he didn’t have the courage to tell her he was going until the afternoon he left. He was barely out of his teens when he left his Harlem home for Greenwich Village, in the early forties, and he had escaped altogether at twenty-four, in 1948, buying a one-way ticket to Paris, with no intention of coming back. Baldwin had been fleeing from place to place for much of his adult life.
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