This Is Love

James Baldwin’s sharp, rhythmic and tender prose. It seems only right to begin an appreciation of ‘The Devil Finds Work’, Baldwin’s book-length essay about the cinema, with an homage to its opening sentence: “Joan Crawford’s straight, narrow, and lonely back.” Baldwin’s words evoke a memory, of a first conscious encounter, at age seven, with the movie screen. Mine, by contrast, are studied emulation of a writer who I consider among the all-time greats. The flattery is sincere, but let’s get serious.

My first encounter with Baldwin was deep into adulthood, though the experience had the force of youthful revelation. It was via the 2010 documentary Public Speaking, about that irascible New York wit Fran Lebowitz. In one scene, director Martin Scorsese incorporates footage of a 1963 chat show Lebowitz saw as a girl, on which the African-American Baldwin appeared after a dispiriting meeting about Civil Rights with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. “There are days – this is one of them – when you wonder what your role is in this country, and what your future is in it,” he sighs, with deep exhaustion, if still some evident fire (the embers need stoking, as, throughout his life, they often would). “I never heard anyone talk like that,” says Lebowitz. And neither had I.

Baldwin’s voice (his literal speaking voice) is singular. A gentle