Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy Haze

Early Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America.  970 pp.

In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book[1]), I’ve gone to writers who have survived the test of time, first the great Toni Morrison, whose work I read in it’s entirety, and now James Baldwin, whose non-fiction I read when I was young (with almost no comprehension) but whose fiction I never got to.

Go Tell It on the Mountain reads like apprentice work; it apparently took Baldwin ten years to write, and is obviously autobiographical; it concerns a brand of evangelical fundamentalism that Baldwin later rejected and that I find hard to take.  Giovanni’s Room, in comparison, is novella-length, a heartbreaking story about a man trying to make up his mind about his sexuality in the midst of a repressive culture, though he was in France, not the United States.  He loved both an Italian man named Giovanni and a woman named Hella whom he thought he might marry, but his love for the woman seemed dutiful; it was Giovanni he was passionate about.  The story does not end well.  But the writing in Giovanni’s Room is much stronger and surer of itself than in the first novel.  A major pleasure of Baldwin’s fiction is the writing itself.

Another Country, published in 1962, is a book that was around my house when I was young, and the idea that my father—who was an avid reader of fiction and an Eisenhower Republican (though he voted for Johnson in ’64), actually read this novel, with its complicated and angry race relations and its portrait of gay relationships—is stunning to me.  He died when I was sixteen, and among the many things I wish I’d been able to talk to him about, this book would now be at the top of the list.

I’ve always thought the title came from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (though at this point I’m not sure); Mephistopheles says to Faustus, “Thou hast committed . . .” and Faustus replies, “Fornication?  But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”  I’ve always loved that line.  Come on, man, she’s dead.

The novel opens with a hair-raisingly erotic scene between a jazz musician and a woman who had just heard him play, and that scene—they’ve gone to a party at some wealthy New Yorker’s apartment, and they accomplish the act out on a balcony, with the party going on inside—was one I read a number of times when I was young and trying to learn about sex.  They’re high on booze and pot, and the act proceeds if in slow motion.  I found it astounding.  Is this, I asked myself, really what people do?  Drink whiskey and smoke pot, and fuck on the cement floor of a balcony while a party is going on a few feet away?

In this novel they do.  The jacket copy says Another Country concerns a jazz musician who commits suicide, and it does, but the astonishing thing is that he does so about a hundred pages into the book, and the novel is about the aftermath of the act.  He is not, himself, all that well-developed a character.

Rufus is his name, and he is a drummer, who until the novel begins seems to have been reasonably successful.  But the affair that begins with that stormy opening, with a white woman from Alabama, seems to be his undoing; before long they do nothing but argue, and he beats her up, and somehow lost all his work as a musician.  The reality for an interracial couple in the late fifties, even in a sophisticated place like Greenwich Village, was that you couldn’t go anywhere without being noticed; half the people hated you for what you’re doing, a number of others admire you, but expressed that in a way that was condescending; others envied you.  You couldn’t just be a couple.  And somehow, with that as a background, along with the problems he had finding work, Rufus wound up jumping off the George Washington Bridge.  The people surrounding him are left to make sense of it.

One of them is a white man named Vivaldo, an aspiring novelist who was Rufus’s best friend.  A couple of Vivaldo’s friends, Richard and Cass, also knew Rufus; Richard has been a mentor to Vivaldo, and is about to publish his first novel.  Rufus’s sister Ida, who was looking for him frantically just before the suicide, also figures in the mix.

A major factor in this book is that it includes as much drinking as in Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck put together.  I actually tried to think of a scene where people weren’t drinking and couldn’t come up with one.  They’re all creative types; Rufus was a musician, his sister Ida is a promising singer, Richard and Vivaldo are novelists, and a character who emerges later, a bisexual man named Eric, is an actor.  They’re the people we always thought of as romantic, artists in Greenwich Village.

So Rufus was seeing Leona, physically and psychologically abusing her, to the point where her family took her back to Alabama and put her in a mental institution.  Vivaldo had a girlfriend named Jane, but also had a thing for Harlem prostitutes, and eventually began going out with Rufus’s sister Ida.  Cass felt her husband Richard had sold out by writing and publishing the novel he did and believed Vivaldo to be the real artist, even though he can’t seem to finish his book.  When Eric comes back from Europe we discover that he had also been Rufus’s lover, but then he starts an affair with Cass, and on one drunken night winds up having sex with Vivaldo.  And Ida, in order to further her career, is screwing an agent names Ellis.

Ah, the bohemian life.

The writing in Another Country is beautiful and sophisticated, but in an era when the famous novelists were Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron—all men whom Baldwin knew—he seems to be trying to write on their scale, and the book can seem verbose, especially in comparison to a slight but perfectly-formed book like Giovanni’s Room.  No character seems entirely comfortable with their sex life and sexual orientation.  And Ida’s anger against white people, even as she mingles with them and dates a white man and tries to create a career, is palpable, and vicious.  She’s angry because things are stacked against her, as a person and as an artist.

Here, for instance, is her response to Vivaldo when he suggests she might attend a gathering with his family.

“’What do you mean, you white motherfucker! . . . I’ve been living in this house for over a month and you still think it would be a big joke to take me home to see your mother!  Goddammit, you think  she’s a better woman than I am, you big, white, liberal asshole? . . . Or do you think it would serve your whore of a mother right to bring your nigger whore home for her to see.  Answer me, goddammit! . . .

‘Can’t none of you white boys help it.  Every damn one of your sad-ass white chicks think they got a cunt for peeing through, and they don’t piss nothing but the best ginger ale, and if it wasn’t for the spooks wouldn’t a damn one of you white cock suckers ever get laid.  That’s right!  You are a fucked-up group of people.  You hear me?  A fucked-up group of people.’”

And here’s what a black jazz musician says to Ida on a night when she has she has shown up at the club with Ellis, and the group lets her sing a number.

“’You black white man’s whore, don’t you never let me catch you on Seventh Avenue, you hear?  I’ll tear your little black pussy up.’  And the other musicians could hear him, and they were grinning.  ‘I’m going to do it twice, once for every black man you castrate every time you walk, and once for your poor brother, because I loved that stud.  And he’s going to thank me for it, too, you can bet on that, black girl.’”

So I admired the writing in this book, and I suppose I learned from it (though how much do you learn from a speech like Ida’s?  You learn that she’s angry, that’s for sure), but I can’t really say I enjoyed it.  I was glad when I finished.  These creative types worry too much about their careers instead of just getting on with the work.  And they’d get a lot more done if they’d go easy on the booze and drugs.  Those things don’t make them happy.  Nobody’s happy here.  Not even the reader.

[1] In a recent By the Books column, the interviewer asked Ibram X. Kendi how to “approach books like ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ books with conflicted or hard-to-parse racial attitudes” and Kendi listed fifteen books that one ought to read.  Really?  Just to read Huckleberry Finn?  I must say, I don’t find the book’s racial attitude “conflicted or hard to parse.”  It’s as clear as a bell.