The Place in Which I’ll Fit Will Not Exist Until I Make It

James Baldwin? Sol Stein? Claudia Roth Pierpont? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: There are powerful pressures to conform and follow the conventions of one’s society. But the renegade does not fit into a pre-existing slot. A prominent literary figure once said:

The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

Essayist and novelist James Baldwin has received credit for this statement. Would you please help me to find a citation?

Reply from Quote Investigator: In 2004 author and editor Sol Stein published a book about his close association with James Baldwin titled “Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the 20th Century: Notes of a Native Son”. Stein reprinted a letter he received from Baldwin near the beginning of 1957. This letter contained the quotation. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:^[1]2004 Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the 20th Century: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and Sol Stein, Section: The Correspondence, Letter From: James … Continue reading

Please get over the notion, Sol, that there’s some place I’ll fit when I’ve made some ‘real peace’ with myself : the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it. You know and I know that the ‘peace’ of most people is nothing but torpor . . .

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In 2009 Claudia Roth Pierpont published the essay “James Baldwin’s flight from America” in “The New Yorker”. Pierpont included the quotation:^[2]Website: The New Yorker, Article title: James Baldwin’s flight from America, Article author: Claudia Roth Pierpont, Date on website: February 9, 2009, Publisher Condé Nast, New York. (Accessed … Continue reading

During his wanderings, Baldwin warned a friend who had urged him to settle down that “the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.” It was, of course, impossible to make such a place alone. But, by the grace of those who have kept on working, as he put it, “to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life,” we have at last the beginnings of a country to which James Baldwin could come home.

In 2015 “The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin” printed a chapter titled “Domesticating Baldwin’s Global Imagination” by Magdalena J. Zaborowska which included the quotation:^[3]2015, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, Edited by Michele Elam (Stanford University), Part 2: Collaborations and Confluences, Chapter 13: Domesticating Baldwin’s Global Imagination by … Continue reading

He beseeches Stein: “Please get over the notion . . .that there’s some place I’ll fit when I’ve made some ‘real peace’ with myself: the place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.” Thirty-three years old at the time, Baldwin casts himself as an eternal nomad “covering the earth,” who believes that the best way to “escape one’s environment is to surrender to it.”

In 2019 the website “Literary Hub” published “James Baldwin Might Have Been Most at Home in Istanbul” by Hilal Isler which contained the following passage:^[4]Website: Literary Hub, Article title: James Baldwin Might Have Been Most at Home in Istanbul, Article author: Hilal Isler, Date on website: March 29, 2019, Website description: Daily source for news … Continue reading

Once, when a friend encouraged James Baldwin to return to America, or at least to pick one place to settle down permanently, Baldwin told him, he couldn’t settle any one place because he didn’t really belong to any one place. “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it,” he said, and I wonder if this holds true for others, too.

In conclusion, James Baldwin deserves credit for this remark. He wrote it in a private letter to Sol Stein circa 1957 which was published in “Native Sons” in 2004.

Image Notes: Illustration of a line of puzzle pieces with one missing piece from geralt at Pixabay. Image has been cropped and resized.

(Great thanks to Luther Mckinnon whose tweet to QI pointed to an article which mentioned this quotation. This led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.)