James Baldwin Told Dick Cavett Something About America That Took the Studio a Moment to Process D

James Baldwin said something on Dick Cavett show about what it means to tell the truth about America from inside it that the studio needed a moment to process. By the time Baldwin appeared on Cavett’s show across multiple appearances in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was the most important essayist in the English language and had been by most critical assessments for the better part of a decade.

Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Nobody Knows My Name, essays that named things about American racial life with a precision and a moral clarity that had not been achieved before and has rarely been achieved since. He was also, by every account of those who knew him, an exhausting person to interview in the best possible way.

Someone who took every question seriously and answered it as fully and exactly as he could, which meant that conversations with Baldwin tended to go places that the interviewer had not planned for and that television formats did not always accommodate. Cavett accommodated. He asked Baldwin about something Baldwin had written about the specific cost to the person doing the work of naming things that a culture would prefer unnamed.

And Baldwin gave an answer that the studio received in stages. “The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible,” he said, “is to examine society and try to change it and to know that it is very nearly impossible to change it and to keep trying anyway.” Paris did what Baldwin said it did and also what he hadn’t said.

It gave him distance. It gave him a context in which he was not first and most immediately, a black American man, which meant he could write about being a black American man in ways that America’s immediate pressure on that identity had made difficult. In Paris, in a small hotel in the Latin Quarter, he wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain, the novel based on his stepfather and his own Harlem childhood, which was published in 1953, and which established him as a novelist of the first rank. He wrote essays for magazines, Partisan Review, Commentary, Harper’s, that were, from the beginning, unlike what anyone else was writing. Precise, personal, morally serious, unwilling to perform either optimism or despair, committed to saying exactly what was true,

regardless of whether the truth was comfortable. He returned to America in the late 1950s for the Civil Rights Movement. The movement needed writers who could articulate what was happening and why, and Baldwin was the most gifted writer of that generation, and he understood, without being asked, that his gifts were not his alone to use.

He traveled in the South. He met Martin Luther King, Jr. He met Medgar Evers, who would be murdered in 1963. He met Malcolm X, with whom he had a complicated relationship that was never fully resolved before Malcolm’s murder in 1965. He wrote The Fire Next Time in 1963, two essays addressed to his nephew and to the larger country about what race meant in America, and what America would have to do to survive it.

It appeared on the cover of The New Yorker and was read by more people than any piece of literary journalism had been read in America in a generation. To understand the weight of that sentence, the specific gravity of very nearly impossible followed by keep trying anyway, you have to understand where Baldwin had come from and what keeping trying had actually cost him.

James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem in August 1924, the eldest of nine children. His stepfather, David Baldwin, was a storefront preacher, a man of genuine religious conviction and significant emotional violence who regarded his stepson’s gifts with a suspicion that his stepson would spend his adult life trying to understand.

Baldwin began writing early at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he edited the school magazine and wrote poems and stories with a fluency that made his English teachers aware that something unusual was happening. He read everything. He went to libraries when his home was difficult, which was often.

He discovered Henry James and Dickens and the King James Bible and the specific quality of English prose at its most precise and absorbed all of it into a style that was, by the time he published his first essays, entirely his own. He left America in 1948 at 24 for Paris. The reasons he gave later were multiple. The atmosphere of Harlem was stifling his writing.

He needed distance from the American racial situation to write about it. He could not be simultaneously the thing he was trying to describe and the person describing it. The reason he did not give in those early years was the one that was also true, that he was afraid of what would happen to him if he stayed.

The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it. And to know that it is very nearly impossible to change it and to keep trying anyway. The sentence is constructed with care. It begins with a condition, thinking of oneself as responsible, that is itself a kind of test.

Not everyone does. Not everyone is willing to. The obligation applies only to those who accept the condition, which means the sentence is also a description of who Baldwin understood himself to be and what it required of him. The middle of the sentence, try to change it, is followed immediately by the qualification that makes it honest, to know that it is very nearly impossible.

Not impossible, very nearly. The space between those two things is where Baldwin had been living for 20 years. And the end, to keep trying anyway, is not optimism. It is not the claim that trying will succeed or that change is inevitable or that history bends toward justice without being pushed. It is the claim that the trying is the obligation, regardless of the outcome, that the responsibility is to the effort, not to the result.

Cavett, listening, did not immediately move to the next question. He let the sentence settle. This was one of Cavett’s gifts. The willingness to let silence exist on television, where silence is normally treated as an emergency. Baldwin had said something that required a moment. Cavett gave it a moment.

The decade between 1963 and 1973 the decade that bracketed most of the Cavett appearances was for Baldwin the most visible and in many ways the most punishing of his life. He was famous in the way that meant he was asked to represent his entire community in every public forum while also being a writer who needed solitude and time to work.

He was everywhere and also trying to be somewhere writing. The tension was not small. He also watched through those years the people he had known and worked with be killed. Medgar Evers in 1963 John Kennedy in 1963 Malcolm X in 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 Robert Kennedy in 1968. The catalog of losses was not abstract.

These were people he had known, had spoken to, had in various ways collaborated with or argued with or simply understood as part of the world he was trying to describe. And they were gone. One after another through violence in the country he had returned from Paris to work on. On Cavett’s show when the question of obligation and impossibility came up when Baldwin said that the obligation was to examine and try to change and to know it was very nearly impossible and to keep trying anyway.

What was visible underneath the answer was this: a man who had spent 20 years keeping trying, and who knew exactly how impossible it was, and who had not stopped. Going back to that Cavett moment, the sentence about obligation and impossibility and keeping trying anyway, what’s visible in it now is not the rhetoric.

The rhetoric was always remarkable. What’s visible is the exhaustion underneath the clarity. A man who has kept trying for 20 years in the face of very nearly impossible knows what very nearly feels like. He knows it from the inside. He knows what it costs to maintain the trying in the face of evidence that the change is not coming as quickly as the urgency demands.

And he said to Cavett on live television that the obligation was to keep anyway. Not because the outcome was guaranteed. Not because the trying would necessarily produce the change, but because the obligation was the thing, the thinking, the examining, the speaking, regardless of what it produced. Cavett asked to follow up eventually, and Baldwin answered it, and the conversation moved on, and the studio exhaled slightly, and returned to the ordinary temperature of a talk show evening.

But that sentence about examination and change and knowing impossibility and trying anyway remained in the the in the way that certain sentences do. The kind that take longer to finish than the time required to say them. Baldwin left America again in the early 1970s, settling eventually in Saint Paul de Vence in the south of France, a small village in the hills above Nice, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, returning to America for visits and lectures and readings, but not for extended periods. The second exile was different from the first. The first exile had been the exile of a young man who was afraid and who needed distance. The second was the exile of a man who had given 20 years to being present in America, to bearing witness,

to naming what he saw, and who had watched the country respond the way it responded, not with change sufficient to justify the cost, not with the reckoning that The Fire Next Time had demanded, with the ongoing, adaptive, resilient capacity of a culture to absorb criticism and continue largely unchanged.

He did not stop writing. The work of the 1970s and 1980s, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, essays and lectures and interviews, was different in tone from the early work. More tired, not defeated, but tired. The man who had kept trying for 20 years from the position of very nearly impossible had accumulated the knowledge of very nearly James Baldwin died in Saint Paul de Vence in December 1987 at the age of 63.

He had been working on a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. that was never finished. He had been, by most accounts of those who saw him in his final years, tired in the way that is different from exhaustion. The tiredness of someone who has done enormous work and seen enormous things and who knows that the work is not complete and is not sure there will be time to complete it.

The essays remain. The novels remain. The interviews remain, including the Cavett appearances, which are among the most valuable recorded documents of Baldwin in conversation, thinking aloud, trying in real time to say what was true about the country he had chosen twice to leave and twice to return to.

What he said to Cavett about obligation and impossibility and keeping trying anyway is a sentence that describes a position. It is also a description of his own life, stated with the precision of someone who had lived it and who understood that living it was the only way to say it accurately. The obligation, the very nearly, the anyway.

He kept all three.