The books I discover and buy are rarely those displayed on the table-tops of bookstores but very occasionally, among the overstocked dross, a gem catches my eye.  That happened recently in a store in Chelsea Market when I spotted The Last Interview and Other Conversations.  What a find that proved to be.

The book collects four interviews given by James Baldwin between 1961 and 1987, the last one recorded just a few months before he died in Provence. They cover the preoccupations of his life and his work: the state of America, relationships between the races there, and the condition of being an exile.  Along the way, there are some wonderful anecdotes and vignettes, of Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, and Richard Wright among others. The distinctiveness and power of Baldwin’s voice – and the fierce independence of his mind and spirit – shout down through the years in these conversations.  “I don’t see anything in American life to aspire to.  Nothing at all.  It’s all so very false. So shallow, so plastic, so morally and ethically corrupt”.

What comes across so clearly in these transcripts is how passionate, uncompromising, and eloquent a witness he was in the world.  At the end of the interview with Studs Terkel, Baldwin said “I want to be an honest man.  And I want to be a good writer“.  He was both and how lucky we are that he was.