The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity by James Baldwin

Words that are anchoring me in this moment

Dec 24, 2023

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Dear Reader,

For much of my life, when I didn’t know how to approach the gravity of the task of living, I turned to the words of others. The mentors in my head. The artists and writers whose words have anchored and accompanied me. These days, I’ve been feeling this familiar way and James Baldwin has been one of those artists. His words have been keeping me hopeful. Have been a guiding light.

In this letter, I share The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity, one of my favorite speeches of his that really grounds me in what the role of the artist should be in the world. That reminds me of what kind of world making I need to orient myself towards when I turn to the page. I hope it stirs you as much as it does me.

Below you can find some of my favorite excerpts and a video with the full recording.

All these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words.

I want to suggest two propositions. The first one is that the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets. That’s my first proposition.
The second proposition is really what I want to get at tonight. And it sounds mystical, I think, in a country like ours, and at a time like this when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make.

The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.

Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

When I was very young (and I am sure this is true of everybody here), I assumed that no one… had ever suffered the way I suffered. Then you discover, and I discovered this through Dostoevsky, that it is common…It’s a fantastic and terrifying liberation.

You must remember that most people live in almost total darkness. It is true, said this friend, that we drink too much, we suffer from stage fright and you may get an ulcer or die of cancer, and it is true that it is all very, very hard and gets harder all the time. And yet people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which—if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define—you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope—because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don’t do this, churches really cannot do it.

I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I’ve not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do—and I have a weapon which most people don’t have—then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.