James Baldwin and Richard Avedon's divided states

The author’s contempt for the media of his day was excoriating and it continues to sting in an age when a reality TV star is president

Before he rose from bed some mornings, James Baldwin would watch black and white television “to distract myself”. It was a depressing experience, which forms the entry point to Nothing Personal, the novelist and social critic’s 1964 collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon.

The book, republished this week, leaves one feeling Baldwin would have been even more depressed by modern TV. It is a point that has been on my mind since I saw the film I Am Not Your Negro, where, over footage of a game show, Baldwin muses that “to watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality”. Cut 50 years into the future and that sense has thrust a TV star into the White House, who evades accountability to reality, even as he threatens to destroy it for millions by nuclear annihilation.

Baldwin’s words are used in the documentary to assert that “we are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we are”, but they resonate with modern viewers because we live in a moment where the gap between television and reality has, in many ways, collapsed in the US.

Avedon was Baldwin’s classmate at DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx and in Nothing Personal, the two composed a portrait that is as revealing of how mass media shapes present-day racism and delusion, as it is explanatory of the mid-century moment they document. It is both a meditation on Americanness and an indictment of loveless urban life.

Baldwin is appalled by a US in which “we quaintly refer to minorities”, those other than the descendants of the pilgrims, whose arrival at Plymouth Rock meant “death for the Indians, enslavement for blacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans”– just as he is appalled that their “myth tells us that America is full of smiling people” on television. This is illustrated most dramatically when he recalls two plainclothes police officers arresting and separating him and a white friend from Switzerland, whom he was showing around New York. Baldwin is asked “What I was doing around here – ‘around here’ being the city in which I was born,” while his friend was given “a helpful tip: if he wanted to make it in America, it would be better for him not to be seen with niggers.” (The officers justified the stop-and-frisk to Baldwin because “There had been a call out to pick two guys who looked just like us. White and black, you mean?”)

As with the recent Taschen edition of The Fire Next Time – which, long after Baldwin’s death, paired the civil-rights images of photographer Steve Schapiro with the author’s words – a great deal of the power of Nothing Personal is the combination of Baldwin and Avedon. In stark black and white, Avedon documents famous and unknown Americans, some of whom still loom large in our present: the women of the Daughters of the American Revolution (who played such a role in erecting the confederate monuments that are finally beginning to come down); influential evangelical preacher Reverend Billy Graham (whose son Franklin recently tweeted that he’d pray for Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore but not for the women accusing him of sexual advances when they were teenagers).

A foreword has been written for this edition by Hilton Als. Scattered through the essay are outtake images from the 1964 edition with Avedon’s triptych portrait of Malcolm X and his triple portrait of Martin Luther Kings Sr, Jr and III.

As well as a document of its troubled times that speaks to how we live now, Nothing Personal is a work of enormous style and proves, once again, that Baldwin is unparalleled in his construction of American sentences. In a single, magisterial, 317-word sentence he marvels at the ability of television to strip reality of anything real, railing at “teeth gleaming like the grillwork of automobiles”, “all conceivable body odour, under no matter what contingency, prevented for 24 hours of every day, forever and forever and forever”, and “news – news? from where? – dropping into this sea with the alertness and irrelevancy of pebbles”.

Baldwin also contributes posthumously to the recent style wars about the use of long dashes, wielding the long dash with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. He does this as he opens up the sickly American body, poisoned by the alleged medicine of cough syrup ads and soap operas, on the operating table of his essay. He then diagnoses that our national corpus will, within a few decades, become a corpse made stiff with rigor mortis by way of television and our “very curious sense of reality – or rather, perhaps, I should say, a striking addiction to irreality”.

• Nothing Personal by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon is published by Taschen, priced £59.99.

• James Baldwin
• Race
• Roy Moore

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