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Calvin Baker '94
Place of Birth
Chicago, IL
Current Home
Saratoga Springs, NY
Education
A.B (magna cum laude)
Why did you choose to come to Amherst?
I wanted the most rigorous possible education, as well as intellectual and creative autonomy. Amherst was one of the few places that seemed to offer those twin virtues, if one was consciously seeking a place to go on an individual journey, while still holding oneself and being held to the first standard. There was a tension between those goals for me, but by the end I’d more or less found the necessary balance.
Most memorable or most influential class at Amherst
Joseph Epstein’s Epistemology class. Joe had one of the most immaculate minds I’ve ever encountered, and he took the time to tutor me as a first-year student in ways that really challenged what I thought I knew, with an uncommon thoroughness and patience. Austin Sarat’s early Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought courses. The area was still newly created, and there was a palpable intellectual energy, Socratic willingness to complicate verities, and abiding concern for teaching. I learned to hold vast amounts of often contradicatory information in my mind and deconstruct the ways society is manufactured. His reputation has only grown since then, of course.
There was also the Advanced Creative Writing course, which I took with Caryl Phillips, as a first-year student and again as a senior. Caz has trained more good writers than nearly anyone I can think of in the field, and we had some very sharp disagreements, which were of real importance in their own way.
Most recently I’ve become friends with Richard Goldsby, of the Biology Department, who is a truly pioneering figure. Richard called me after reading A More Perfect Reunion and said essentially: I admire your book, but I disagree with some of your assertions.
Because the book cuts through so many fields of knowledge, some of which required me to train myself in new ways, I was anxious that I may have gotten something wrong in how I approached the science, as well as the history of science, both the research, as well as surrounding interpretations.
He very generously told me it was clear I’d done my homework, and that my argument would only be strengthened by some of the recent research of leading figures in the field. However he still had points of disagreement. That’s since grown into a very nuanced, enriching conversation. He’s the expert, of course, but what we’re really arguing are different biases, both with an awareness of our own, and an understanding of the conditional nature of some forms of knowledge. His magnificence of spirit has been humbling, so the Amherst community continues to teach me things.
Most memorable or most influential professor
One of the special things about Amherst, which I really came to appreciate later in life, especially when I taught at Yale, is that in many instances you’re having an intergenerational conversation among peers, wherein one generation advances the field and trains the next, which then advances the field and teaches the next, and so on. Ultimately it’s a chain of transmission, not only of knowledge but also the modalities of creation. The professors I really took to were inevitably those involved in very ancient, even esoteric modes of knowing and being, some of which were out of sync with the surrounding society, as well as those who were working on original insights.
Research Interests
Transnationalism, Africana, History of the Novel
Awards and Prizes
Fred D’Aguair, a superb poet and novelist who advised my senior thesis, and now runs the Creative Writing Program at UCLA, was a real champion of my early work. Fred, I suspect, will be a figure of historical import, but he always stressed the inconsequential nature of such things.
A decade ago, when I was teaching in Leipzig, Germany, a colleague gave me a tour of the old town center, ending at the statue of Goethe, who was one of its famous residents. According to local lore, after the triumph of Faust, the Duchess of Saxony sent a courtier to Goethe’s house to offer him the choice of either a title of nobility or a gift of cash in recognition. Goethe took the cash, allegedly commenting, “if I took the title, not only would people know I’m a fool, they’d know whose fool I was.”
So there’s the ancient tradition, which held more or less as the shared understanding among artists until very recently, and then the rise of increasingly corporate cultural production. However the old way suggests that one has to interrogate the intention of such things. They can help ease one’s ways in the world, of course, but they can also quickly transfer authority from art to other realms, so it’s the wrong thing to privilege, especially among young writers.
Favorite Book/Author
I’ve never had a favorite book, or favorite writer. There exists an infinite number of ways a book or writer might be excellent, which might be appealing or interesting for different reasons at different times. I’m interested in literary inflection points, those books by which nations, individuals, aesthetics, moments in history turn.
That said, the summer after sixth grade I had a transformation when I started reading Baldwin and Camus, more or less by accident. I’d broken my arm playing baseball, and spent most of the summer in the library. After I’d read all the grade-appropriate books I began my way through the adult section. I remember my mother being more than a little worried.
In high school the things that stuck were Sophocles, Shakespeare, the English and German Romantics.
By the time I arrived to college the tension between the beautiful, old close readers, the mid-century theoretical experiments, and concerns about identity and diversity were pitched, in ways that prefigured what’s currently happening in society at large. I think the very smartest people in the field have reconciled those things, in a manner that understands the virtue of each. Hopefully that eventually jumps the wall into the world as well.
On holidays I read Garcia Marquez, Morrison, Pynchon, Ishiguro.
After college I read a lot of Russian and French literature.
When I turned thirty I had an irrational fear my brain was going to ossify and atrophy, so I started learning German, then playing around with translating Rilke for fun. A German friend, who worked in the industry, saw them, and suggested they were accomplished enough that I should do a new translation of Höderlin into English. I was briefly tempted, before realizing I’d better get back to my core work: the problems and limitations of representation in Black literature, and concomitant problem of blackness in American literature as a whole, which we all know is the problem of the race line.
Tips for aspiring writers?
There are so few things that are universally true. The things I stress most when I teach are the necessities of reading absolutely everything, and finding sympathetic peers, because many of the traditional divisions of knowledge wall us off from the complexity of the contemporary world.
That’s of course informed by my own experiences as a writer of color in a long moment of cultural shift, which requires me to be keenly aware of what I’m creating, and the society into which it's being produced. For many, of course, those divisions, and the forces they serve, are more aligned with their individual ambition, so the only aspiring writers I feel comfortable offering advice to are those concerned with advancing things beyond the current state, or whose tastes and potential run toward the original. The advice they need is much more specific than anything I might offer here.
Tell us a bit about your path to becoming an author
I began my first book during my junior year at Amherst, and was lucky enough to have it published a couple of years later. In the interim I lived in a house in New Orleans with Ian Mount '92 and William Townsend '94 and one of Ian’s high school roommates, William Jones, now an historian. We spent all of our time reading and debating. They were some of the best years of my life as a reader. But whatever I’ve published I’ve never thought of myself of as someone who has “become” a writer. I still think of myself as someone who is constantly becoming something to which I’m constantly re-devoting myself. Everything else strikes me as an artifact of this intangible process. That’s an anachronistic point of view in a society that wants everything to be linear, but I haven’t met many writers of the first or second choir who thought very differently. This isn’t to mystify it, so much as to hold space for not-knowing, and even the unknowable, which strikes me as important as all the career advice floating around out there.