I had always read James Baldwin’s declaration "I want to be an honest man and a good writer" as a statement of artistic ambition—the kind of thing a young person, defining themselves for the world, says in order to be taken seriously. It comes at the end of "Autobiographical Notes," the introduction to his first essay collection Notes of a Native Son, where he declares that he has no hobbies, no interest in anything else that is not his work. Total dedication, at the expense of everything else that makes a life.
Perhaps I’ve grown more jaded over the years, but I read it differently now. I see it as a confession, an acknowledgment of his, our, limitations: One can aspire to be a good writer because there is no such thing as a good man. A cynical outlook, but it’s difficult to turn away from the evidence of the past decade: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Pete Hegseth, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, R. Kelly, 4chan, the "manosphere," the eager correspondents of the Epstein files, on and on and on. Call it toxic masculinity, male supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, whatever you like, at the end of it is a picture of manhood that appears incompatible with the idea of "goodness." Even the men who have appeared good, who haven’t done what Trump or Cosby or Weinstein have done to earn our disdain, have failed at goodness in other ways—they, we, have failed at being honest.
