Out of all that, you would expect that anger would come. But on the way to that optimism “you have to reach a certain level of despair to deal with your life at all.” And where did that level of despair come, for him? “If you’re black, and short, and ugly, and pop-eyed, and you think maybe you’re homosexual though you don’t know the word, and you’ve got to support a family because your father is dying – that’s a stacked deal.” James Baldwin (far right) with other civil rights activists, 1963. He talks instead of optimism and pessimism: and he is an optimist. And if you feel from reading his books that he is working at a vast tragedy, he would not agree. Baldwin has travelled a long way in 20 years, yet wasn’t it all there, when he wrote his first book? Maybe, he says, but I didn’t know it was there, and you can only say that now. In If Beale Street Could Talk, the story of a pregnant black girl whose lover has been framed for a rape he didn’t commit, the people with religion are the framed man’s mother and sisters, who are cold and despised. That Gospel fever was at the centre of his first novel in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain. And then one day they say, Thanks, baby, goodbye – and they go out into the world.” Which is how the words are bound to come, perhaps, to a man who at 14 was seized by the Word, and became a boy preacher among the Holy Rollers. Then they get you to listen, and maybe you listen to a whole lot of shit. That sentence becomes a refrain, because you see soon that Baldwin is not concerned with the how of his majestic art, only with the what – “Your characters say: Here I am, I got to tell you this and you got to listen.

“The older I get,” he says, “the more I work, the less I understand about words.” Those famous eyes reach for the ceiling, for all the corners of it, and the shoulders twist as he gropes for the words that will explain it to a white Englishman. And yet somehow you feel we are missing the irony of that title for his book, and maybe he can explain it. His new novel – the first for six years – is called If Beale Street Could Talk, and Start the Week has played him in with a snatch of that old blues, music recalling where jazz and with it a vital part of the Negro consciousness in America began.

No I’m game, I’m game, he says and he is. And when you half apologise for arriving with questions after such a day’s beginning, he shrugs and smiles away the tiredness and, perhaps, the huge irrelevance of such questions to a man on whom a lot of the pride and the anguish of a whole nation’s black people have sometimes rested.

Flew in from the US at 0700, talked on Radio 4’s Today Programme at 0835, helped Richard Baker Start the Week half an hour later, and at some time after 1300 hours and the longest shower in history, faced the Guardian over the lunch table.

James Baldwin had quite a morning yesterday.

If beale st could talk book