January 3, 1967 (page 6 of 28).

Londoner’s Diary ‘No Author’

Subtitle: ‘How Baldwin Came Back to Writing’

‘James Baldwin, the American novelist who left New York a year ago to live on a hill in Turkey overlooking the blue Aegean and surrounded by an eight-foot wall has been in London for a brief visit. “I had been under the television lights for two years.” He told my reporter, “and suddenly I realised it had been two years since I had written a line! My whole life was taken up with being a personality, and it was eating me up.” Thus he went to Turkey and he has now almost completed the novel he has been writing — Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. It is about the psychological break-up of a middle-aged actor. Baldwin is small, frail, nervous intense — easily upset, but when amused, heartily amused. When he laughs he throws his head back and shows a full row of widely space teeth. When he is angry his bulgy eyes flash.’

‘He admits he cannot think without a double scotch. He is racked by a throttling cough he has had since childhood. The burden of being a symbol for the American Negro and a famous author is almost too great for him at times, “The terrible moment you realise that never, never, never, never, will you ever be anonymous again…’ he laments. “Even if they pick you out of the gutter some day, it will still be James Baldwin they picked out of the gutter. In the same post I used to get a letter from a white cat who’d accuse me of being a flaming revolutionary, and one from a black cat who’d tell me to go back to my cabin in the South”— meaning he was too submissive to white ideals. Baldwin saw in the New Year in a provincial-type hotel in the Bayswater Road. It was the kind of place where he was not allowed to take friends to his room, which made him feel lonely and miserable’.