![]() ![]() ![]() These were sometimes by telegram - I remember the typically dramatic announcement, "I fear you have an essay I cannot do justice in the length proposed Have been trying to call you Please call me JAMES BALDWIN STPAULDEVENCE" - or, more commonly, by phone, often twice a week. I telephoned him at his home in St-Paul de Vence and we agreed a date and a very small fee, and he said, "I'd better get to work, baby." It read, in part: "Would love to arrange to do a long piece: but cannot do it within the dead-line." This was a cue for celebration. Baldwin's reply was scrawled at the foot of my own neatly typed letter. It arrived in response to a letter I had sent, three months before, asking if he would consider writing a review of a new history of jazz for the quarterly magazine of which I was then editor, the New Edinburgh Review. ![]() I received only one handwritten note from James Baldwin in the course of our acquaintance, which began in 1979 and came to an end with his death eight years later. ![]()
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