James Baldwin: Living in Fire by Bill V. Mullen

An understandably and justifiably tight memoir on James Baldwin – quite possibly the greatest American prose writer of the past several hundred years – that never quite loses sight of the man behind the texts, while choosing to focus on his politics and political development rather than the, for want of a better word, “narrative” of his life.

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Honestly, I think that some of the most powerful pieces of writing I’ve ever read have been biographical writing.

Obviously, I love autofiction and GOOD/LITERARY memoir – I am a millennial and, until the Gen Zs gained sentience (i.e. started appearing on social/trad media) we were deemed to be the most solipsistic generation of all time, so I love to see that same self-centred-ness evidenced in other people – and few things have moved me as quickly and as deeply as, for example, the sub-ten-page biography of Doris Lessing’s father included in A Small Personal Voice and – one of the essays I come back to repeatedly – Geoff Dyer’s introduction (a short biography) to the Penguin Classics edition of D.H. Lawrence and Italy.

Both of those (short pieces), though have a striking thing in common: they are both written by “writers” rather than by academics, yes, but that’s not it: they both intentionally and deliberately cite and evoke the lives they are describing as tragedies, finding a flaw (and sometimes) offering a narrative explanation for its source and demonstrating the catastrophic emotional and personal consequences of said flaw, which is usually a lonely death devoid of real and meaningful human interaction. (Sound familiar???)

James Baldwin: Living in Fire, though, is absolutely not a tragedy, and nor is it aiming to be one and failing through lack of tragedy in Baldwin’s life: as with all lives (some more than others!) it is of course possible to find tragedy in Baldwin’s personal history, just as – with most lives – it is possible to find joy and happiness and-

Sorry, the day has got away from me and now I need to sleep –

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Ok it’s now like five days later.

Five busy days.

Lots of driving (to work an event in the countryside), lots of working (four days on site at an event in the countryside), lots of sleepy being in a cinema (I watched the week’s two hottest releases like some kind of mainstreaming rube on my day back from the countryside) and quite a lot of eating many vegetables to catch back up on the nutrient deficit of eating badly while working in the countryside for four days where food is beige and scurvy is a myth and-

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What do I remember of this book I read last week?

What did I learn about Baldwin that I hadn’t already learned by reading his own autobiographical writing, be that the elements of his personal life he fictionalised in his novels or his essays?

Not nothing, but not necessarily a lot…

Mullen had access to Baldwin’s notes and archives that obviously I’ve never seen (and almost certainly will never see, alas, because I haven’t pursued a life where satisfying experience arrives to me often), so there are mentions of proto-novels, of unfinished and unpublished stories and essays, there is an understanding of the books and magazines he owned and definitely/likely read, there is a paper trail of Baldwin’s interests and sympathies that is more filled out, more detailed, than the understanding one gains merely from reading his published works in their chronological order.

As part of Pluto’s series on “revolutionary” lives, the book makes no secret that it will be focused on Baldwin’s politics, and the contexts and consequences of his thoughts, writings/speeches and his actions, so to judge the book negatively for fulfilling its intended and proclaimed purpose would be ignorant and reductive.

It’s not hagiography, and Mullen does point out when Baldwin’s comments veered (knowingly or not) towards the reactionary rather than the progressive, and his book tracks in particular an interesting oscillation of Baldwin’s feminist credentials, a subject where Mullen posits Baldwin was around two thirds of a decade behind prevailing leftist opinion, though he did continue to actively seek out and engage with younger peers throughout his life, so maybe could have caught up by the nineties if he’d outlived the Reagan White House.

Mullen, then, evidences a minimisation of misogyny, rather than an embrace of it, so even when Living In Fire does criticise Baldwin, it’s more of a “could have/should have done better” rather than an “unforgivable and bad”.

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Reading Mullen’s book is a great opportunity to reconnect with and remember Baldwin’s beautiful and – as I’ve said before – bleakly still relevant writing, and it definitely offers a wealth of connective and contextualising discussion for anyone looking at the historicity and contemporary moments of Baldwin’s life.

More to educate than illuminate, more to describe and define rather than to illustrate. And that’s what the book set out to do.

Did this make me weep and scream and cry like most literary biographies do? No, and to dismiss this as “emotionally stunted” – which I would be tempted to do were I in a worse mood/younger – would be an error.

This is a political, not a literary biography: it considers Baldwin as a public, rather than a private, figure primarily, and it does a great job by its own intentions.

But is it as good as reading Baldwin himself? No, of course it’s not, and only an idiot (an idiot like me) would be foolish enough to consider that a possibility.

A very interesting book, and a great reminder I should remember to read the last few books of Baldwin’s still sitting unread in my big boxes of books (it has now been over 12 months since I had enough shelves to bloody unpack).

Order direct from Pluto Press via this link

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