On James Baldwin

Colm Tibns personal account of encountering James Baldwins work, published in Baldwins centenary year. Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tibn first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. He had even considered entering a seminary and was searching for literature that would offer illumination and insight. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tibn found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar. Tibn appreciates Baldwin, writer to writer: Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. All art, he wrote, is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. On James Baldwin is a magnificent contemporary authors tribute to one of his most consequential literary progenitors.