Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
A Memory of James Baldwin
By Mary McCarthy
'Elegant' is a word that keeps coming to me in connection with Jimmy Baldwin. That was how he struck me the first time I met him, back in the late Forties in a midtown west-side restaurant—The Blue Ribbon, I think it was—and it is the word that came to the lips of a black girl student in a class I'm now teaching when I asked her how she would characterize Baldwin—we were talking of black writers. His voice, I suppose, was part of it—soft, light, slightly breathy, hesitant as if from fastidiousness. But my student cannot have known his voice; elegance (described by Webster as 'refined grace') must have been conveyed to her by his writing. Unless as a child she heard him on radio or saw him on television.
Feature, 1470 words
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