[News] Why James Baldwin's FBI File Was 1,884 Pages

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http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/65641-why-james-baldwin-s-fbi-file-was-1-884-pages.html


  Why James Baldwin's FBI File Was 1,884 Pages

By William J. Maxwell |
Feb 20, 2015

/William J. Maxwell's provocative/ F.B. Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover's 
Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature 
<http://publishersweekly.com/978-0-691-13020-0> /probes the FBI’s 
“institutionalized fascination” with black authors like Langston Hughes 
and Amiri Baraka. Here, Maxwell delves into the FBI's dossier on James 
Baldwin--at 1,884 pages, it was the largest one on file--and the 
unlikely FBI literary criticism that emerged from studying Baldwin's books./

J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director synonymous with his crime-fighting 
organization for nearly fifty years, once returned a Bureau memo on 
James Baldwin with a leering, handwritten challenge. “Isn’t Baldwin a 
well-known pervert?,” Hoover scrawled in his distinctive blue ink. 
Despite the career-threatening context, M. A. Jones, an officer of the 
FBI Crime Records Section, answered Hoover’s marginal question by 
carefully distinguishing between fictional and personal testimonies. “It 
is not a matter of official record that [Baldwin] is a pervert,” Jones 
specified, even though “the theme of homosexuality has figured 
prominently in two of his three published novels. Baldwin has stated 
that it is also ‘implicit’ in his first novel, /Go Tell It on the 
Mountain. /In the past, he has not disputed the description of 
‘autobiographical’ being attached to the first book.” “While it is not 
possible to state that he is pervert,” Jones bravely concluded, Baldwin 
“has expressed a sympathetic viewpoint about homosexuality on several 
occasions, and a very definite hostility toward the revulsion of the 
American public regarding it.”

Hoover did not glide gently into agreement with Jones's subtle 
distinctions among sexual acts, sympathies, and representations. He and 
less enlightened FBI informants continued to protest higher education’s 
embrace of a Baldwin novel they mistakenly called /Another World/, 
remarkable for its depiction of “a Negro male making love to a white 
female.” (The 1962 novel Baldwin actually titled /Another Country 
/was—with some justice—recast by these informants as a bohemian soap 
opera.) The Bureau director thus continued to explore ways to ban 
Baldwin’s book under the Interstate Transportation of Obscene Matter 
statute—this despite the report of the Justice Department’s General 
Crimes Section that “/Another Country/ by James Baldwin has been 
reviewed…and it has been concluded that the book contains literary merit 
and may be of value to students of psychology and social behavior.” With 
rival units in the federal government discovering the novel’s redeeming 
social importance, it was left to Hoover and likeminded Bureau sticklers 
to contemplate /Another Country/’s resemblance to the landmarks of 
modernist obscenity. “In many aspects it is similar to the /Tropics/ 
books by [Henry] MILLER,” wrote Washington, D.C.’s Special Agent in 
Charge, or SAC. For this reason, perhaps, the SAC conspicuously 
instructed that his borrowed copy “need not be returned” to his office.

Blurb-worthy praise is not the norm in the 1,884-page Baldwin dossier 
and the rest of the fifty-one FBI files on African American writers I 
have collected since 2006, submitting more than a hundred Freedom of 
Information Act requests along the way. The General Crimes Section looks 
to be a better source of pull quotes applauding “literary merit” and 
“value to students of psychology and social behavior.” Yet the 
surprising thoughtfulness of Jones’s reply to Hoover’s question, its 
outstripping of the need to label, discipline, and punish, illustrates 
the grudging respect Bureau readers felt for the writers they spied on. 
Hoover himself possessed an inflated fear and regard for the authors who 
doubled as “thought-control relay stations,” as he liked to imagine 
them. Authors/relay stations of prominence, W. E. B. Du Bois included, 
were sometimes spared in-person interviews by Bureau agents because of 
their “access to the subversive press,” a megaphone whose range the FBI 
valued and exaggerated. Despite Hoover’s notorious hostility to Dr. 
Martin Luther King and the rest of the black freedom movement, the 
encounters of his FBI with African American writing could not, in fact, 
always resist the pleasures of the enemy text.

Recently liberated FBI author files disclose that Bureau Special Agents 
succumbed to the spell of black literature in several genres. Lorraine 
Hansberry’s 1,020-page Bureau opus, for example, reveals that an 
anonymous Philadelphia G-Man sent to appraise /A Raisin in the Sun/ even 
before it reached Broadway discovered a drama worthy of first-rate 
character analysis. The receptive insight of this agent’s detailed 
review—it would receive a non-inflated “A” in many college English 
classes—flowed from inspiration beyond the call of police duty. With its 
swelling existential vocabulary, his sketch of Beneatha Younger, an 
articulately dissatisfied Hansberry character searching for “a means of 
self-expression and self-identification,” doubles as a confession of his 
own frustrated literary need. Identifying with Hansberry’s unfulfilled 
heroine and acting as a kind of G-Man Gustave Flaubert, this reviewer 
might as well have admitted that Mademoiselle Younger, /c’est moi/.

The similarly thick FBI file of Amiri Baraka, a founder of the militant 
Black Arts movement and the most influential black author of the 1960s, 
contains a frankly titled “Book Review” of /Black Fire/, the 
agenda-setting anthology he co-edited with Larry Neal in 1968. G. C. 
Moore, an FBI Associate Director and designated critic of the 
collection, accepted the principle of racially distinct modes of art 
appreciation, the first rule of Black Arts criticism. /Black Fire/ 
“obviously was…not written for the minds of white critics,” he admitted. 
But racial distance could not prevent this stimulated white reviewer 
from issuing both praise and damnation. Moore excitedly describes a 
“flaming indictment of American prejudice” paired with a “love of all 
things black—black people, black traditions, black voices, black art, 
and black futures.” The anthology’s “ample servings of filth” and “‘far 
out’…method of presentation,” he judges, are balanced by a handful of 
“works [which] tend to have an energy that succeeds in impressing one 
with the violence and passion of the author’s emotions.” Moore ends with 
his finger on the scale, emphasizing /Black Fire/’s ultimate failure: 
“the expression never achieves the precision and control which are the 
hallmarks of successful art.” Even this attack, however, rests on 
aesthetic grounds, not criminological ones. In the end, /Black Fire/’s 
contributors are cleared of tight-knit plans for urban violence and 
convicted of emotionally sloppy romanticism.

More literary evaluations and surrenders on the part of FBI agents could 
be listed, but the point has been made: the Bureau’s extensive files on 
African American authors are, among other things, weird but unmistakable 
works of literary criticism. The mixed bag of memos, letters, and 
clippings that composed the typical FBI author file included more than 
espionage reports and the less interesting paperwork of a massive police 
bureaucracy. It also included outbursts of literary critical prose, a 
type of writing judgmental in nature, but always indebted to the prior 
writing it describes. FBI author files thus qualify as recognizable 
works of literary commentary, as state-subsidized assessments and 
interpretations quietly warring with those produced by English 
professors and less stuffy book reviewers. By the same token, the FBI 
agents who supplied these files with literary notes and queries qualify 
as genuine critic-spies. In my book, the “G” in the FBI’s iconic G-Man 
rightfully stands not just for “government,” but also for 
“ghostreading,” a secretive literary business that, like ghostwriting, 
can be measured after the fact if not always caught in the act.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org


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