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