'There are so many Harlems' – A Revealing Baldwin Letter
Typed Letter, signed ("Jim Baldwin"), writing about Harlem to filmmaker Stewart Wilensky.
Ile Rousse, Corsica: Feb 8, 1957.
Price: $15,000.00
About the item
4 pp. 4to. Old folds, near fine, with typed envelope. Boggs, Nicholas, Baldwin: A Love Story, 2025.
Item #376838
A lengthy and telling letter from Baldwin to the filmmaker, Stewart Wilensky, who has written in the hopes that Baldwin might help him make a film about Harlem. Baldwin admits that he delayed his response because he in fact, was hoping to make a film about Harlem, when he returns later that Spring, "though we hadn't got beyond the note-taking stage, and, of course, the money problem had scarcely been considered."
"Oddly enough, the movie you want to make now is a movie I've wanted to make for ten years and, in fact, went so far, ten years ago, as to do a photographic study of Harlem – mostly of the churches – which effort, along with so many others, is in my trunk."
In fact Baldwin had also been deeply occupied in his solitude while he was staying in Corsica, at the house of the American painter, Mario Garcia. His novel Giovanni's Room, which spoke frankly and beautifully about homoerotic relationships, had only just been published at the end of 1956, and had sold all six thousand copies of the first printing in the first six weeks. Baldwin made back his advance and then some, and though he'd left Paris heartbroken again, after the dissolution of his relationship with a jazz musician named Arnold, he overcame suicidal misery through work: banging away all night at his typewriter on the book that would become Another Country. In short, he was preoccupied, and lonely, and the letter has the practiced, sharply observed, at times suggestive, at times confessional tone that he would hone over the years, as he reminisces about the various Harlems that could tell stories, and suggests to Wilensky that Langston Hughes would have other Harlems to show him, or his "mother, three brothers, five sisters, thousands of nieces and nephews” might be able to provide some practical help.
"There are so many Harlems...There are the poeple on the very lowest economic level, the people who are pulling themselves up, the people in housing projects (that phenomenon deserves a movie to itself) the people on what was once called the Hill; there are the Puerto-Ricans, and that tension; there are the West Indians. There is the battle between generations, which can probably only be conveyed in a novel, there are the literally innumerable and, given the context, special ways in which the members of each generation survive, or are destroyed. (My friends, for example, tended to become religious or jump off bridges or go to Bellevue; my brother's friends take dope, by which I don't mean an occasional stick of marijuana"
Instead of a film on Harlem, Baldwin returned to the US that summer and began his participation in and reporting on the Civil Rights Movement. Wilensky never made the film about Harlem, but he's best known for his slice of life documentaries: Greenwich Village Sunday and Around My Way, that capture life downtown with the same sensitivity that Baldwin evinces in this reverie.
