James Baldwin's Writing Routine

James Baldwin is usually written about as a public figure first and a working novelist second, which has the odd effect of hiding the practice that made the public figure possible. For the last seventeen years of his life, from 1970 until his death in 1987, Baldwin lived in a rambling stone house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a medieval village perched in the hills above the Côte d'Azur. He entertained almost continuously. Nina Simone came. Miles Davis came. Maya Angelou stayed for weeks. And every night, after the last friend had gone to bed or left in a taxi down the hill, Baldwin went to his writing table with a glass of Johnnie Walker and worked until the sky over the Mediterranean started to turn pale.

The routine is interesting because it solves a problem almost no writing-advice blog ever addresses: how to be a public person who is also a serious writer. The two roles contradict each other. One demands availability. The other demands solitude. Baldwin ran both, simultaneously, for decades, by putting them on different clocks.

The House in Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Baldwin bought, or really rented and eventually occupied in a loose legal arrangement that became permanent, an old farmhouse on the edge of Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1970. The house had a terrace looking out toward the sea, several guest rooms, a long wooden table where meals and conversations happened around the clock, and a quieter study where Baldwin worked. David Leeming, who was Baldwin's assistant for years before becoming his biographer, describes the place in his 1994 book James Baldwin: A Biography as half writing retreat and half open house for anyone in the Black American artistic world who happened to be passing through the south of France.

The choice of location is worth thinking about. Baldwin had left the United States in 1948, at twenty-four, because he didn't believe he could write honestly about his own country while living inside it. Paris in the fifties, Istanbul in the sixties, then the stone house on the hill in Saint-Paul. Each move put more distance between him and the America he was writing about, and the distance seems to have been necessary for the prose. He once said he could see his country more clearly from across an ocean than from inside it. The house in Saint-Paul was the furthest point he reached, and the late essays are also among the most exacting work he ever did about America. The geographical distance and the clarity of the writing seem to have been directly connected.

What the house also gave him was a space where his two lives, the public one and the working one, could share walls without colliding. The guests came during the day and evening. The study was his at night. The building absorbed the contradiction by being big enough to hold it, and the routine was built around the architecture.

Night Writing

Baldwin's choice to write between midnight and dawn was partly temperamental and partly strategic. He'd always been a night person. His early Paris years had been lived on the schedule of cafes and bars, which meant writing at two or three in the morning by default because that was when the bars closed. By the time he got to Saint-Paul-de-Vence he'd had more than twenty years of practice working in those hours, and his prose had taken on a quality that belongs specifically to night writing. The late essays in The Devil Finds Work, published in 1976, have a meditative, slow-building rhythm that reads like something written by a man alone in a room with nothing urgent waiting for him in the morning.

The strategic part is the interesting one. By writing at night Baldwin made sure his working hours couldn't be interrupted by the phone, by visitors, by the dozen social and political demands his fame had put on him. Nobody called at two in the morning. Nobody knocked at the door. The village was asleep. The only interruption possible was the one he chose, which was a refill from the bottle or a step outside to smoke on the terrace and look at the dark sea below. The night hours were, in effect, the version of Woolf's locked garden lodge that worked for a man who couldn't get through the day without people around him.

There's a general principle here for any writer whose life is crowded. The hours in which nobody can reach you are the hours in which you can write. If your days are full of obligations you can't get out of, your writing time is the time those obligations don't exist, which usually means early in the morning before the world wakes up or late at night after it goes to sleep. Baldwin picked night because night suited him. Morning works for other writers for the same reason. The specific end of the day matters less than the fact that it's the end, one or the other, where the phone stops ringing and the work can begin.

The Visitor and the Recluse

The contradiction inside Baldwin's routine is the thing most people miss when they romanticize his Saint-Paul-de-Vence years. The image of the brooding expatriate writing alone in a dark study has it backwards. Baldwin's house was full of people constantly. He ate lunches that ran into dinners that ran into long arguments on the terrace about Marx, Malcolm X, cinema, jazz, Henry James, and whatever the French newspapers had said that morning. He loved company. He needed it. He had built the welcome table at Saint-Paul specifically so that friends could come from anywhere and always find a seat, and by many accounts it was the warmest literary household in Europe during the seventies.

And yet he also needed solitude, in long uninterrupted stretches, or the work didn't happen. The reconciliation of these two needs is the most underrated part of his daily practice. Rather than choosing between being social and being productive, which is the trap most writers fall into, Baldwin put the two modes on different shifts. Day belonged to the friends. Night belonged to the page. Neither mode had to apologize to the other, because they never had to share a clock. The apparent contradiction turned out to be a schedule problem, and once the schedule was solved the contradiction dissolved.

This is, I think, the most useful thing his routine offers to working writers today, most of whom have been told they need to protect their solitude as if it's a fragile thing that social life will destroy. Baldwin's example suggests the opposite. A rich, loud, demanding social life can feed the writing as long as it happens on different hours. The page gets the quiet version of you. The friends get the loud one. Both are real. Neither one has to win.

"Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say."

The Paris Years

Before Saint-Paul-de-Vence there was Paris, where Baldwin had lived on and off since 1948. The Paris years were different in almost every practical sense. He was broke for most of them. He wrote in cafes and rented rooms because his apartments were usually too cold, too small, or too noisy to work in. He finished Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, in a Swiss mountain village called Loèche-les-Bains during the winter of 1951, while staying in a borrowed chalet owned by his then-lover Lucien Happersberger. The finishing of that book is an important piece of the story because it was done under conditions that had almost nothing in common with the welcome table in Saint-Paul.

The Paris years taught Baldwin what his routine actually required. He needed solitude. He needed long hours. And he needed enough emotional safety to face the material he was writing about, which was often the most painful parts of his own life. He learned in Paris, and later refined in Istanbul, that he could carry almost any external condition as long as those three things were in place. The Saint-Paul house, when he finally had it, was the first time he'd arranged for all three conditions to be available to him at will, every night, indefinitely. The late work is the product of that arrangement.

It's useful to remember this when reading about the Saint-Paul years. The beautiful house and the famous guests were the result of a practice Baldwin had already built in much worse conditions. He didn't become a serious writer because he'd found the right location. He'd become a serious writer first, in cold Paris rooms and borrowed Swiss chalets, and then arranged his life to protect the practice once he could afford to. The order matters. The house serves the routine, not the other way around.

Sources

The primary biographical source is David Leeming's James Baldwin: A Biography, published by Knopf in 1994, written by someone who'd been Baldwin's personal assistant during parts of the sixties and had direct access to the household. Baldwin's own essays, particularly Notes of a Native Son (1955), The Fire Next Time (1963), and The Devil Finds Work (1976), contain scattered descriptions of his working life. His Paris Review Art of Fiction interview, No. 78, conducted by Jordan Elgrably and published in 1984, is the most detailed account Baldwin gave of his own process in his own words. Raoul Peck's 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, built from Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House, includes footage of the Saint-Paul-de-Vence house and testimony from people who spent time there.

What You Can Steal

Baldwin's routine is specific to his temperament in some ways, but the core principles transfer:

Schedule your solitude instead of hoping for it. If you need three hours alone to work and your days are full of people, pick the part of the twenty-four-hour cycle where the people stop. Protect it the way Baldwin protected his midnight-to-dawn window, and treat everything else as available.
Let the social life feed the work. Long conversations, arguments, meals with friends who think differently than you: these are raw material, not distractions from it. Baldwin wrote some of his best essays the morning after nights of argument. The talk loosened the ideas, and the late hours gave him a place to catch them.
Find the distance you need from your subject. Baldwin had to leave America to write about it clearly. Your version might be a different city, a different neighborhood, or just a room that doesn't remind you of the thing you're trying to see. The distance is sometimes physical. It's almost always necessary.
Build the routine before you build the house. The Saint-Paul years worked because Baldwin had already figured out, in much harder conditions, what he needed to write. Don't wait for the perfect space. Make the practice work in a bad space first, then upgrade the space when you can.
Don't apologize for the hours that suit you. Baldwin wasn't a morning person and stopped pretending he could be. If your best writing happens at eleven at night or five in the morning or on a Tuesday afternoon, treat that as a fact about your body and schedule around it, rather than fighting it into a shape that looks more respectable.

The Routine at a Glance