Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin’s best-known book, was published in 1955 by Beacon Press. Baldwin’s editor then was Sol Stein, whom he’d known since high school. This essay is an excerpt from Stein’s Introduction to Native Sons by Baldwin and Stein, which will be published by One World, an imprint of Random House, next month. The book includes correspondence between Stein and Baldwin that produced Notes of a Native Son.

I am remembering five thousand people crowded into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for James Baldwin’s funeral, and I imagine my lifelong friend Jimmy and me watching that event, an elbow poking the other’s rib for attention, as in the old days when our lives intersected.

I knew James Baldwin first in our early teenage years, when I was 13 and he was 15. It all began in the tower of DeWitt Clinton High School in the North Bronx at a time when students anywhere in the five boroughs of New York City didn’t need to be bused anywhere but could elect to go to a high school of their choice. Baldwin, known then and since as Jimmy, went the distance by subway, bus, and foot from Harlem, in Manhattan, to DeWitt Clinton, at the far northern edge of New York City, an exceptional school, where his last formal education took place. In this day of failed busing, it is hard to imagine that in 1939 a poor boy could travel many miles to a different borough to seize an education he could not get locally.

When DeWitt Clinton first opened the doors at its present site in May of 1929, it claimed to be the largest secondary school for boys in the world. The three-story building and its athletic field and stadium occupied about 26 acres, and had a single-session capacity of over five thousand students. A recently remodeled room just off its library displays a picture gallery of onetime Clinton students that includes such luminaries as Paddy Chayefsky, Countee Cullen, Burt Lancaster, Ralph Lauren, Jan Peerce, Richard Rodgers, A.M. Rosenthal, Daniel Schorr, Neil Simon, and Lionel Trilling. Clinton was a garden in which black and white teenagers could become fast friends, an environment that a few years later made possible Notes of a Native Son, which in 1999 was selected by a distinguished panel as one of “the 100 best nonfiction books of the century.”

Our home away from home was in what we called the Magpie Tower, the place where DeWitt Clinton’s award-winning literary magazine, the Magpie, was edited by students as young as 13 and 14. Our core group, besides Baldwin and me, included Richard Avedon and Emile Capouya, working under the tutelage of a faculty member, Wilmer Stone. Avedon was then a poet and shy. When we were called upon to sell the issue of January 1941, Avedon and I would stand in front of each classroom in succession, Avedon silent, his hands clasped in front of him, while I recited a poem of his from memory. America was not yet at war, but London was burning. Avedon’s poem that lingers still in my memory is about the loss of a childhood friend in the bombing of London. What we all wrote is today mostly embarrassing, but the learning process was remarkable. On Friday afternoons, after classes officially let out, the Magpie gang would assemble in the tower of the school building to hear our faculty adviser, Wilmer Stone, read our stories aloud to us in the most boring monotone imaginable. Painful, yes, but also instructive, for we learned then what all writers must eventually learn, that the reader has to be moved by the words alone, without help from the histrionic talents of their author.

Stone’s private critiques of our work could be withering. Avedon told me a couple of years ago that on one occasion Stone asked him what kind of reading matter his parents had lying around the house. Avedon mentioned some magazines like Good Housekeeping and McCall’s. Stone told him, “That’s what is wrong with your writing.” At that moment, Avedon said, he decided to give up writing and turned, brilliantly, to photography.

More than 40 years later, in the Preface to the 1984 edition of Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin begins, “It was Sol Stein, high school buddy, editor, novelist, playwright, who first suggested this book. My reaction was not enthusiastic: as I remember, I told him that I was too young to publish my memoirs. I had never thought of these essays as a possible book.... Sol’s suggestion had the startling and unkind effect of causing me to realize that time had passed. It was as though he had dashed cold water in my face. Sol persisted, however....”

I don’t remember Baldwin’s resistance to doing the book. I do remember the editorial process, helped by recently finding my line-by-line editorial notes and Baldwin’s responses. Writers can be wary of editors they don’t know well. By the time Baldwin and I had to deal with Notes of a Native Son, the overlay of a friendship of a dozen years made the process easier.

A friendship that endures might reasonably be defined as a house in which disagreements are confined to an attic that can be opened for memoirs but never for continuation of a former argument. Baldwin and I came to our friendship with differences. He was black and I was white, he loved men and I loved women, he assumed his ancestors came to America in chains and I assumed my parents, who slipped over the border separately and illegally, came here because they had nowhere else to go. Despite the differences—we lived many miles apart—because of our friendship, our families took a liking to each other. There are surviving photographs of Jimmy bouncing two of my pajama-clad children on his knee. I loved and admired Baldwin’s mother, Berdis, and believed it was reciprocal, even at our last warm meeting after Jimmy’s death. Berdis visited with my family when Jimmy was abroad. I was welcome in Berdis’s apartment on 131st Street in Harlem, but not by the policeman who stopped me outside and wanted to know what my white face was doing in that neighborhood.

Berdis had a secret that, to my knowledge and Jimmy’s say-so, was never divulged: the identity of Jimmy’s father. The now-legendary stepfather Jimmy wrote about was the preacher who married Berdis, presumably legitimized her son, and gave her eight more children. My mother, Zelda Zam, enjoyed Jimmy’s brightness, his dancing hands. Like Berdis Baldwin, she had her secret. According to family legend, in the old country, hiding in the cellar during a pogrom, through a crack in the door she saw her first fiancé killed by one of Petlyura’s Cossacks. In America she had another secret I discovered as a child during the Great Depression. In the old country, my mother at a young age was the head of secondary evening schools in Kiev, the largest city in the Ukraine. To make a living in America, she sold Compton’s Encyclopedia door to door, and one day, when the Depression bottomed, I opened the heavy sample case she took to work every day and found the knee pads she wore when cleaning other people’s floors. Baldwin’s mother may also have done the same.

Jimmy Baldwin and I, both Depression Era kids, responded differently to food. At my mother’s table, Jimmy would eat like a bird, one small piece at a time, taking two hours over a simple meal, while I devoured all of it in the first few minutes. One might suppose that Jimmy was stretching out the pleasure of food, while I was gulping it down before it vanished. One of my few memories of Depression eating was the time my mother and father planted the single orange my father had brought home on the table and said, “You eat. We’ll watch.”

Though both of my parents came from Russia, I had trouble identifying with my mother’s motherland, just as Jimmy later had trouble identifying with Africa. For better, not for worse, we were here, native Americans, charged up, yearning to make it as Americans while trying to shake up America to make it a more congenial nest for the likes of us. Before each of us was a lover of specific people, we were lovers of language, which, if delivered well, can have even more power than print. Franklin Roosevelt read Sam Rosenman’s words with a mesmerizing authority that helped lift the sagging spirits of Americans in a bad time. Churchill’s rhetoric, drafted by himself, defied Hitler and defeat. Martin Luther King, in his preacher’s delivery, announced his dream. Much has been made of Baldwin’s having been a teenage preacher, an influence that is evident in his incantatory prose and his ability to address readers as if they were his congregation. Not enough has been made of his early mastery of the writer’s main task, putting to paper what other people only think. He becomes, de facto, a whistle blower, a snitch, a fink, a rat, a teacher.

Laymen speak of a writer’s style. Writers and editors speak of a writer’s voice, a distinguishing way with words that is recognizable and consistent. As an editor I was attracted to Baldwin’s writing both because of his voice and his writerly intelligence, his use of visual particularity to make us see the places and people he was writing about. Once his reader was lured into experiencing the events Baldwin was picturing, he would let candid insights loose that were sometimes startling in their originality. At the behest of the publisher, I wrote a Prefatory Note for Notes of a Native Son, in which I said, “In the jargon of writers, pieces is the word used to describe articles, essays, and the uncategorizable writings that constitute the writer’s baggage while he is traveling between major works. Yet of Lord Acton, for instance, such pieces are all we have; fortunately, they inform each other as well as us and constitute a whole. That is also the virtue of James Baldwin’s pieces, a frightening virtue in one so young.” (I was two years younger than Baldwin.) When I saw the Prefatory Note in galley proof, I ordered it stricken on the grounds that Baldwin’s work didn’t need my introduction.

Toward the end of his life, Baldwin said Notes of a Native Son was of crucial importance in his struggle to define himself in relation to his society. “I was trying to decipher my own situation, to spring my trap, and it seemed to me the only way I could address it was not take the tone of the victim. As long as I saw myself as a victim, complaining about my wretched state as a black man in a white man’s country, it was hopeless. Everybody knows who the victim is as long as he’s howling. So I shifted the point of view to ‘we.’ Who is the ‘we’? I’m talking about we, the American people.”

In the world of publishing and bookselling, it was believed that books of essays did not sell. Part of the problem was that putting a binding around random essays made for a random reading experience. A book demanded cohesiveness. The reader had to feel he was on a discernible path from the first page to the last, which meant a lot of attention had to be paid to the order of the essays. In addition, the first and last essays had to be chosen carefully, for the mission of the first was to get the reader to read on, and the mission of the last was to leave the reader with a strong impression of the book.

If memory serves me, the autobiographical and justly famous first chapter of Notes had its origin in Knopf’s publicity department’s asking Baldwin to fill in a lengthy questionnaire in connection with the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin was less than comfortable with the idea of any questionnaire, much less one about his life. He turned the questionnaire over and on its blank sides wrote, “I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read.” That became the first essay in Notes of a Native Son.

For the last chapter we settled on “Stranger in the Village,” which has lost none of its power in the half-century since its publication. The village was in Switzerland, high up, detached from the world, “mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach. A white wilderness.” The inhabitants had never seen a typewriter or a Negro. Everyone knew Baldwin came from America but didn’t believe it because they’d long ago learned that black men came from Africa. Baldwin was seen as a living wonder and not a human being. The children who shouted Neger—German for black—at him had no way of knowing how that word echoed. On a second visit, while some of the children made overtures of friendship, those who had been taught that the devil is a black man screamed in fear as Baldwin approached. In that essay Baldwin purposefully creates unease in the reader, just as the experience he is relating created unease in him. In doing that, Baldwin differentiated himself from writers who produce essays to get something off their chests. Baldwin, especially in his early work, concentrated on evoking emotion in the reader, the novelist’s aim and the essayist’s forte. Baldwin’s imagination devises a mirror. When the Swiss villagers are astonished at his color, Baldwin thinks of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, and tries to imagine the astounded populace touching the white men’s hair as the children in the Swiss village touched his. He imagines the Africans marveling at the color of the white man’s skin as the Swiss villagers gape at his. It is Baldwin’s ability to imagine such mirror images, his insight as a writer into the visions that people have of others and otherness, that enables readers who are not black to experience momentarily what a black man feels, and that invites the black reader to grasp the origins of the white man’s desperate clinging to a prejudice that drains both white and black of some of their humanity.

Baldwin was early on a master of resonance. The Swiss village becomes the West to which Baldwin feels so strangely grafted. He says the most illiterate among the villagers is related in a way that he is not to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine. The resonance of that sentence charms the reader to gloss over its falsity. Baldwin in his first book was already part of what we now so reluctantly call Western culture. And many of the Swiss villagers would have had a hard time even identifying Dante or Aeschylus. Baldwin’s theme then was the relatedness of the ingredients in the American bouillabaisse, how interdependent we are. My role as an editor was to help realize his intentions, and in the case of Notes, to make certain that Baldwin’s occasional essays for magazines were not abandoned to wastebaskets but preserved as a book, as they have been now for half a century.

Young and intolerant, I spoke against any essays that fell below a high standard. Baldwin wanted to include some pieces he had written for the New Leader that did not meet that standard. I was fighting on two fronts at the time because I was also editing Leslie Fiedler’s first book of essays, An End to Innocence, and applied the same standards to Fiedler’s very different voice. Friendly arguments with Baldwin ensued mainly when he was traveling somewhere in the world, and I was trying to calm the publisher’s demand for his money back because Baldwin was so late delivering expected material. Lateness was a conspicuous feature in Baldwin’s life, and one had to get used to it. Finally, the book was ready and I arranged to get reviews from Time and Newsweek. The Associated Press chose Notes as its “Book of the Week,” and I was eager to get this news to Baldwin. I ended one letter—probably sent to him c/o American Express somewhere—“I tried to pray for you, but God said he didn’t know where to find you.” I added a P.S. saying my wife sends her love “because women are always forgiving.”

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, seven years before I was to have my own imprint in Stein and Day. Publication of Notes came about as a result of the publishing evolution that brought trade paperbacks into prominence. The publisher of Notes was the Beacon Press in Boston, with which I had a strange contract. It designated me pretentiously as the “Originator and General Editor of Beacon Paperbacks.” The director of the press at the time was one of the remarkable publishers of the century, Melvin Arnold, who later became the president of Harper & Row. The license I received from Melvin Arnold to put writing I admired into a new format, the book-size paperback, turned out to be an advantage to a new essayist like Baldwin. With Notes of a Native Son the young James Baldwin stepped into distinguished company on a small list that included Andre Malraux, Eric Bentley, Leslie Fiedler, Sidney Hook, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Simone Weil, and Bertram D. Wolfe, which likely reinforced Baldwin’s debut as an essayist.

It is commonly agreed that Baldwin’s essays were more successful in their achievement than his fiction, and his first book of essays is certainly the most honored of his accomplishments. His fiction never again attained the level of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. In both his fiction and nonfiction, as time went on Baldwin allowed the preacher in him to overtake the writer. His most popular work at the time of its publication, The Fire Next Time, allowed the intrusion of hyperbole: “...blacks simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.” I heard this as the language of soapbox speech, and thought, “Give me back Baldwin the writer.”

None of this diminishes Baldwin’s accomplishment. Neither Hemingway nor Fitzgerald got better with every book. Notes of a Native Son has not dated the way so many books of its period have. Its insights are relevant today, when separatism sometimes threatens the image of America as harbor and sanctuary. Baldwin the ex-preacher taught best when he preached least.

Sol Stein was publisher and editor in chief of Stein and Day for 27 years. Two of the books he edited and published were chosen for inclusion in the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century. He is the author of nine novels, Stein on Writing, and, forthcoming from Random House next month, the book Native Sons.

“Notes of a Native American,” © 2004 by Sol Stein. Posted here with the author’s permission.