Freelance

Freelance

Baldwin in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1979

On breaking into James Baldwin's house

DOUGLAS FIELD

Two days before I turned forty, I finally submitted my critical study of James Baldwin to a publisher in New York. I awoke the next morning with a hazy recollection of toasting my favourite writer with a glass or two of Johnnie Walker Black Label, his favourite tipple. Over breakfast my partner revealed that she had organized a birthday trip to St Paul de Vence, the medieval hilltop village in the mountains above Nice where Baldwin lived for almost the last twenty years of his life, and that we were leaving straight away.

By evening, I was installed at the Colombe D'Or, a charming hotel outside the village walls where artists, including Picasso and Braque, had sojourned, sometimes paying off their hotel bill in exchange for their work. In our room, an original Joan Miró hung on the sixteenth-century wall. Today, guests are more likely to bump into George Clooney or Bill Wyman, who has a house nearby – than avant-garde artists – but the Colombe D'Or retains a relaxed bohemian gentility.

On our first night there, I asked the staff if they remembered "Jimmy", as he was known. To my delight, several of his old friends and acquaintances gladly shared their memories of the writer's frequent visits to the hotel bar. One of the waiters I spoke to had lodged with Baldwin for several months in the early 1980s. He spoke of his kindness and generosity, and recalled how he was frequently invited to join Baldwin and his guests for dinner in the garden of his house which sits on the opposite side of a valley outside the village. "We need people like him", said a woman whose mother-in-law had been close to Baldwin. For one of the hotel owners, who first met Baldwin when she was fifteen, it was his charisma that shone through. "He was so charming. He could seduce anything." Others recalled his infectious smile "that always made you want to laugh".

After breakfast on the terrace, I set off to find Baldwin's old house, which eventually I came across nestled in more than two acres of sprawling land downhill from the ramparts. I had been told that it was derelict and vacant; that after Baldwin's death in 1987 there had been legal disputes about who in fact owned the eighteenth-century Provençal building (Baldwin thought he did). The rusty padlock on the austere gates and the broken buzzer confirmed that the house was unoccupied. I glanced furtively around to check that no one was watching and prepared to scale the wall. As I was about to do so, the thought occurred to me that Baldwin had been imprisoned in Paris for stealing a bed sheet in his twenties. Was I going to be arrested for breaking and entering on my fortieth birthday?

I made the jump, hopping almost nimbly over the stone wall and into the overgrown garden. As my feet hit the scorched grass in Baldwin's rambling grounds, I felt exhilaration but also sadness. To my left was the gate house where his assistant, Bernard Hassell, had lived for many years in a two-room apartment with views of the Mediterranean. The door was open and I peered inside, stepping over broken glass and old wiring. I opened a cupboard in the first room and found a row of solitary hooks that once held keys to the three buildings in the grounds. Beneath the gate house was an overgrown terrace, but there was no sign of the "welcome table" where Baldwin had dined with friends including Miles Davis and Josephine Baker. The main house, where Baldwin died, was locked. Peering through the open window, I could see that one room had been recently painted. There were new plywood doors on several of the buildings; "WC" was written in chalk on one crumbling exterior wall with an arrow to another locked door, evidence, it seemed, of a slow renovation project. At the back of the main house I found broken shutters and open windows leading to several downstairs rooms, including an old stable with a stone water trough. As I set foot inside one of the rooms, I recognized the distinctive fireplace from a magazine article I'd seen shortly before Baldwin died. This, I realized with excitement, had been Baldwin's study, or "torture chamber" as he called it. "You don't live where you're happy", he once wrote to an editor, Sol Stein, "you do your best to live where you can work." It was hard to reconcile this bare and derelict room with the pictures I'd seen of Baldwin sitting at a rustic table, surrounded by photographs and personal, homely objects: a painting by his old friend Beauford Delaney; an exhausted looking typewriter; a drink, probably Johnnie Walker Black Label; cigarette packets; and a sheaf of papers – a manuscript – but which? There was little to see in his study except for flaking plaster and a piece of ancient baguette, which had probably been left by some other interloper.

I kept looking for tangible evidence of Baldwin's life in the house, hoping naively to find an old pen or lighter that had been dropped years ago. This, I knew, was unlikely. After Baldwin's death, his brother David moved in, and he and Bernard Hassell stayed here until their respective deaths. A writer friend told me that he'd visited the house a few months after Baldwin died, to find David wearing his brother's Martin Luther King watch and jewellery, and doing his best to sound just like him. Curiously, Baldwin's books and other possessions still remained in the house up to fifteen years after he had died, yet nobody I met knew what happened to them. All I found was a pitchfork in the garden, which I doubt that Baldwin had used. It seemed strangely apt, nonetheless, since he was fond of quoting the closing line in Voltaire's Candide – "il faut cultiver notre jardin". Today, Baldwin's garden, which had been an arcadia of grape arbours, peaches and almonds, was little more than brambles and thorns. Just as I was about to leave, I spotted an orange tree, which, smothered by grass, against the odds still bore fruit. In this grassy wasteland the orange tree seemed both perfectly at ease but also poignantly out of place. I plucked an orange and tore into the sagging peel and bit through the tough white skin. I thought at once of Tony Harrison's poem, "A kumquat for John Keats", hoping, like Harrison's narrator – who is also "a man of doubt at life's mid-way" – that I would taste "how a full life ought to feel". The tired fruit was dried up, leaving a strange, though not bitter taste in my mouth.

As I returned to the Colombe D'Or to toast Baldwin, whose ninetieth birthday would have fallen on August 2, I thanked one of the waiters who had given me directions. He told me that the house had been recently bought by a local man who, as it happened, had been drinking coffee in the courtyard across from us this morning. There had been plans to demolish the house and build more than one luxury hotel, but local hoteliers had objected. Baldwin, I'd heard, wanted to leave the house as a retreat after his death, hoping that artists would find inspiration, as he had done, in the relaxed mountain air. On our last night in the hotel, the barman pointed out that I was sitting in what had been Baldwin's favourite seat. "Nobody bothered him here", he told me with a wink, "but everybody knew his name."