![]() It happened to be the Queen Mother’s birthday, so we stood on the pavement outside the grounds, waiting for her to come out on the balcony, which she eventually did, wearing a hat and waving. The film rights would be acquired by a British production company two years later.īefore we left London for Istanbul that summer, Mom and I visited Buckingham Palace. In a matter of months, he reworked the book completely, finishing it, polishing it, and producing a novel that was ambitious, experimental, acclaimed critically. Settled at Cezzar’s place, fed and clothed and shown the spare bedroom in the back, he began writing again. He’d been hammering away at Another Country for years by then, and the story’s failure had taken a toll on him, depressing him, pushing him to consider suicide.īut once in Istanbul, Baldwin steadied. The suitcase contained his troubled manuscript. ![]() Baldwin came inside, took a bath, and eventually fell asleep in the lap of an actress.Īccording to Cezzar, Baldwin was in crisis when he arrived: sick, and in danger of losing his sanity. He told guests Baldwin was an important novelist from America, and there was great buzz. Welcome home, Jimmy, Cezzar recalls saying. Cezzar was hosting a party, and was surprised to find Baldwin standing on the welcome mat, holding a beat-up suitcase, his eyes tired, face drawn. If you’re ever in town, he said, so one night in October, 1961, Baldwin showed up unannounced at the door of Cezzar’s modest Taksim Square apartment. Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor Baldwin met and befriended in New York, once offered him a place to stay in Istanbul. Baldwin was in crisis when he arrived: sick, and in danger of losing his sanity.Īt the time, he was trying to write his third novel, Another Country, but it wasn’t going well. The only way Baldwin believed he could survive, he said, was by leaving America behind, and so he went to France and, 13 years later, Istanbul. His close friend Eugene Worth, a black socialist, had recently killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge, a death that devastated Baldwin, haunting him for years. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” “I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger,” he said, “and I knew what was going to happen to me. He would say he left not to go to France, but to get away from New York. It was Armistice Day, 1948, when he sailed from New York to Paris, 40 bucks in his pocket. When James Baldwin left home for Europe, he was broke. My hamburger arrived hidden under a metal warming dome, and I remember thinking: this burger costs five times as much as a Big Mac, but does it taste five times as good? ![]() I remember how different the taxidermy hotel was, how there were fresh flowers near the elevators, how Mom and I ordered room service for dinner. ![]() My parents-immigrants, frugal-generally favored off-the-highway establishments, with buzzy neon signs, and wood-paneled rooms that open directly onto a parking lot. We stayed overnight at a hotel near London’s Hyde Park: its lobby floors a polished wood, the terrifying taxidermy head of a wild cat affixed to the wall. My mom and I boarded a plane from Canada to England, our first time in Europe. For me, it happened the summer after I turned eight. You spend your whole life being told some place is home, only to get there and realize you don’t really belong. ![]()
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