Baldwin, James | Thoughtful letter to filmmaker Stewart Wilensky, offering advice on a Harlem movie project and reflecting on the community

James Baldwin

Typed letter signed (“Jim Baldwin”) to Stewart Wilensky, offering advice on his Harlem movie project.

Four pages (266 x 206 mm). On typewriter paper, written from Case postale, 20, Ile Rousse, Corsica, on 8 February 1957, signed, with air mail envelope with postmarks and manuscript notes in two different hands; foldmarks, envelope a little soiled.

“There are so many Harlems.”

An exceptional letter written from Corsica, where Baldwin had retreated in the mid-1950s to work on Another Country, reflecting his lifelong engagement with Harlem and his deep sensitivity to the social and moral fabric of Black life in America.

Responding to documentary filmmaker Stewart Wilensky’s proposal for a movie about Harlem, Baldwin expresses enthusiasm and characteristic modesty—“I’d like to do anything I can to help, but I’m rather in the dark as to what I could do”—before offering perceptive commentary that reveals both his personal connections to Harlem and his incisive understanding of its complexities.

Baldwin recalls that he himself had long hoped to make a film about Harlem, “mostly of the churches,” and offers practical assistance through his large extended family there (“mother, three brothers, five sisters, thousands of nieces and nephews”). He suggests that Wilensky contact Langston Hughes, “who certainly does” know Harlem, and provides a telephone number for his relatives, noting that his brothers Wilmer or David might be “especially authoritative.”

The letter develops into a meditation on Harlem’s social strata—the “people on the very lowest economic level,” “those pulling themselves up,” the “people in housing projects,” Puerto Ricans, West Indians, and the “battle between generations,” which “can probably only be conveyed in a novel.” His words anticipate the sociological and psychological depth that would characterize The Fire Next Time: “My friends, for example, tended to become religious or jump off bridges or go to Bellevue; my brother’s friends take dope.”

Baldwin concludes by mentioning his own plans to make a Harlem film that summer, dependent on finishing his novel for his publisher, and recommends that Wilensky seek technical advice from Richard Bagley, director of The Quiet One (1948). Baldwin returned to the US in July that year to witness and report on the Civil Rights Movement.

Wilensky himself went on to become an accomplished documentary filmmaker, known for works such as Greenwich Village Sunday and Around My Way, both capturing New York life with the same sensitivity Baldwin evokes here.

An intimate letter, blending the practical and the philosophical, capturing Baldwin’s voice at a pivotal moment.

PROVENANCE

Stewart Wilensky, thence by descent