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<h1> Why James Baldwin's FBI File Was 1,884 Pages </h1>
<div class="article-byline"> By William J. Maxwell | </div>
<div class="article-date"> Feb 20, 2015 </div>
<div class="article-body">
<p class="article"><em><span class="document-body-qa-question">William
J. Maxwell's provocative</span></em> <a
href="http://publishersweekly.com/978-0-691-13020-0"
target="_blank">F.B. Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders
Framed African American Literature</a> <span
class="document-body-qa-question"><em>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.</em></span></p>
<p class="article">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, <em>Go Tell It on the
Mountain. </em>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.” </p>
<p class="article">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 <em>Another World</em>,
remarkable for its depiction of “a Negro male making love to a
white female.” (The 1962 novel Baldwin actually titled <em>Another
Country </em>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 “<em>Another Country</em> 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 <em>Another Country</em>’s
resemblance to the landmarks of modernist obscenity. “In many
aspects it is similar to the <em>Tropics</em> 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. </p>
<p class="article">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.</p>
<p class="article">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 <em>A Raisin in the Sun</em>
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, <em>c’est moi</em>. </p>
<p class="article">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 <em>Black Fire</em>, 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. <em>Black Fire</em> “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 <em>Black Fire</em>’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, <em>Black Fire</em>’s
contributors are cleared of tight-knit plans for urban
violence and convicted of emotionally sloppy romanticism.</p>
<p class="article">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.</p>
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Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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