Intercourse (11 page)

In the novel
Another Country
by James Baldwin, a talented, tormented, violent black musician named Rufus has committed suicide. He is tortured by the memory of a white woman he loved and destroyed. Nothing can assuage his self-hatred for what he has done to her; he knows what he has done and what it means to have done it. Those around him tell him not to know or encourage him to forget. But what he did to her— because she was a white Southern woman—is too close to what this country does to him every day—because he is a black man; he cannot not know. Those at his funeral service are bitter, because they had great hope that the promise of his life would redeem something of the cost of theirs. They are sad and angry, inexpressibly so, because their brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, live on the verge of madness and suicide, self-destruction, as Rufus did; and like him, they die from the anguish of being alive. “
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If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks, ”’ the preacher tells them, with a passion that tries to make sense of this death added to all the others, ‘“maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad. ’”
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Being “dead folks, ” in Baldwin’s world, is nothing so simple as being white. Being dead is being ignorant, refusing to know the truth, especially about oneself. Remaining ignorant about oneself through a life of inevitable experience is hard; it requires that one refuse to know anything about the world around one, especially who is dying there and why and when and how. White people especially do not want to know, and do not have to know to survive; but if they want to know, they have to find out; and to find out, they have to be willing to pay the price of knowing, which is the pain and responsibility of self-knowledge. Black people are unable to refuse to know, because their chances for survival depend on knowing every incidental sign of white will and white power; but knowing without power of one’s own to put one’s knowledge to use in the world with some dignity and honor is a curse, not a blessing, a burden of consciousness without any means of action adequate to enable one to bear it. Self-destruction is a great and morbid bitterness in which one destroys what one knows by destroying oneself; and the preacher, hating this self-destruction, finds an ethic that repudiates it:
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“The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world. ’”
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Being “better than the world ” for the oppressed, is the nearly impossible prerequisite for compassion, the only means of staying whole as human beings; what the powerless must somehow manage to become, to remain, while carrying a knowledge of cruelty and indifference that kills with a momentum of its own.

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more—also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth. For Baldwin, in his fiction and in his essays,
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 being human means that one pays for everything one knows and for everything that one refuses to know; that

you have to, in order to live, finally, make so many difficult and dangerous choices that the one thing you’re really trying to save is what you lose. And what you’re trying to save is your ability to touch another human being or be touched by that person.
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This ability to touch and be touched is at stake always, in every choice toward or away from knowing anything at all about the world or oneself; and this ability to touch or be touched is the simple ability to love, so hard to save because hope is so hard to save, especially when it must coexist with knowledge:

Yet, hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows the hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are wretched.
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*The values in the fiction and the essays are very much the same— though the subject of the essays is not fucking—and I have quoted from both throughout using the essays to illuminate the world-view in the novels.

Inside an unjust, embittering social universe where there are moral possibilities, however imperiled, of self-esteem and empathy, fucking is the universal event, the point of connection, where love is possible if self-knowledge is real; it is also the place where the price paid, both for ignorance and truth, is devastating, and no lie lessens or covers up the devastation. In Baldwin’s fiction, fucking is also a bridge from ignorance to truth—to the hardest truths about who one is and why. And crossing on that high and rotting and shaking bridge to identity, with whatever degree or quality of fear or courage, is the ordeal that makes empathy possible: not a false sympathy of abstract self-indulgence, a liberal condescension; but a way of seeing others for who they are by seeing what their own lives have cost them.

In fucking, one’s insides are on the line; and the fragile and unique intimacy of going for broke makes communion possible, in human reach—not transcendental and otherworldly, but an experience in flesh of love. Those broken too much by the world’s disdain can become for each other, as Eric and Yves do in
Another Country, “the dwelling place that each had despaired of finding. ”
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For Yves, a French street boy, the first time with Eric had been redemptive: “in some marvelous way, for Yves, this moment in this bed obliterated, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, all the sordid beds and squalid grappling which had led him here. ”
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This forgetfulness is not ignorance; it is redemption, being wiped clean of hurt and despair by “the lover who would not betray him”
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—not betray what he had learned and what he had paid, what he had become out of that hard and lonely life, not betray his truth, which was his capacity to love, with the demand for lies. Yves’s fear was the fear no self-knowledge could overcome:

There also appeared in his face a certain fear. It was this fear which Eric sometimes despaired of conquering, in Yves, or in himself. It was the fear of making a total commitment, a vow: it was the fear of being loved.
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Yves’s fear, and Eric’s too, is not neurotic or psychological, nor is it personal, rooted in family history. It is a fear based on the recognition of life’s impermanence; fear of being known, being seen and known in all one’s awful trouble and shabby dignity, having a witness to what one is and why, then to lose that astonishing grace. Life does not tolerate stasis; and there is no way of protecting love. In fucking, the deepest emotions one has about life as a whole are expressed, even with a stranger, however random or impersonal the encounter. Rage, hatred, bitterness, joy, tenderness, even mercy, all have their home in this passion, in this act; and to accept truly another person within those bounds requires that one must live with, if not conquer, the fear of being abandoned, thrown back alone:

On the day that Yves no longer needed him, Eric would drop back into chaos. He remembered that army of lonely men who had used him, who had wrestled with him, caressed him, submitted to him, in a darkness deeper than the darkest night.
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There is no safety, no permanence, says Baldwin, even though it is our dearest illusion that we can make life stand still for us by arranging permanent relationships, by pursuing comfort and status, by turning our backs on the world of pain all around us, by focusing all attention on one tiny spot—where we are—to keep it, as if by force of concentration, from changing. But human emotions force change. Human emotions are huge: turbulent and deep. One swims or one drowns, and there is little respite and no rest. Fucking is where, how, why, when, these emotions become accessible as both self-knowledge and truth. For Eric, fucking is

a confession. One lies about the body but the body does not lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force which drives it. And Eric had discovered, inevitably, the truth about many men, who then wished to drive Eric and the truth together out of the world.
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In these many men, Eric saw “an anguish which he could scarcely believe was in the world. ”
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One can bear the truth, however, if it carries one toward love. What is unbearable, what cannot be survived, is the long, merciless act of hating, what hating does to the one who hates. More than other contemporary writers, Baldwin understands the cost of hating: “Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law. ”
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This moral absolute is the underpinning of his work, joined by one other immutable law, again a law of morality: “People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. ”
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This morality is unsentimental, harsh. It is also detached, a neutral, observed reality. And it is strangely innocent in its faith that there is justice. Baldwin’s use of fucking to explicate this morality is astonishing in that it necessarily precludes any simplistic interpretation of fucking as good or bad, simple pleasure, simple sin. Cheap, propagandistic views of fucking—religious, political, or media originated—are repudiated by the presence of a whole human life with all its worth in the act and at stake; the meaning of this life and its passage is illuminated by the act; the intercourse itself essentially reveals who one is and has been, what one has lost or found, what one is willing to know, whether with cruelty or grace. This is a morality rooted in passion, in flesh, in a human intimacy in which anguish and possibility are each a part of the other and willful ignorance of the world is the basest sin. And in this morality, when fucking is hatred, when fucking is revenge, then fucking is hell: a destruction in violence and suffering of self-knowledge and self-esteem; the destruction of a human being, someone else perhaps, certainly oneself.

Rufus died that way, of hate, self-hate and the hate that had led inevitably to that self-hate, a hate expressed in sex, in fucking, first with Eric, then with Leona, both white Southerners; a hate that grew too when he sold himself to white men on the street for “the bleakly physical exchange, ”
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the sex of having nothing. Eric had loved Rufus, but for Rufus Eric’s devotion had been an invitation to the slaughter, and sex the way of showing his contempt for Eric’s origins and masculinity. Rufus “despised him because he came from Alabama; perhaps he had allowed Eric to make love to him in order to despise him more completely. ”
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The abuse of Eric’s inner dignity in sex was an assault on Eric’s right to exist in the world as himself at all; an assault on his identity, his sense of worth, not predetermined by his privileged white skin because his homosexuality exiled him from that circle of well-being and self-satisfaction. Rufus had tried to destroy him through sexual contempt; he had “despised Eric’s manhood by treating him as a woman, by telling him how inferior he was to a woman, by treating him as nothing more than a hideous sexual deformity. ”
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Eric ran away to Paris, from Rufus, from his sexual hostility and hate. Near his own death, Rufus, on the street and trading his ass for food, knowing he would rather kill than keep the bargain ('“I don’t want no more hands on me, no more, no more, no more. ’”
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), remembered Eric and saw his real life, his real condition, its humanity, the terms of its despair: “He glimpsed, for the first time, the extent, the nature, of Eric’s loneliness, and the danger in which this placed him; and wished he had been nicer to him. ”
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He remembered that Eric had loved him, then Leona had; and that he had done to Leona what he had done to Eric: “But Leona had not been a deformity. And he had used against her the very epithets he had used against Eric, and in the very same way, with the same roaring in his head and the same intolerable pressure in his chest. ”
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With Leona, the sex had first been forced, at a party; they were strangers but she had gone there with him after hearing him play his saxophone with a band in a bar; and she stayed with him, determined to love him, convinced that her love could heal him of his hate; perhaps having found someone with whose suffering she identified. Her husband had battered her and then taken her child from her, convincing her family and a court that she was an unfit mother because she drank. Especially, Leona understood what it meant to feel worthless.

The sex that began in force had some tenderness, some hate:

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.... Her breath came with moaning and short cries, with words he couldn’t understand, and in spite of himself he began moving faster and thrusting deeper. He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived.... A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies.
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But once he knew she loved him, would stay with him, wanted his love back, he beat her, battered her, tortured and terrorized her, used her in the ways he thought would humiliate her most: “It was not love he felt during these acts of love: drained and shaking, utterly unsatisfied, he fled from the raped white woman into the bars. ”
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The fuck existed only to humiliate and hurt her; his passion was hate, the violence was hate; she thought he was sick, hurt, needed help, would stop, would get better, thought badly of himself, would understand that she loved him, would love, not hate her, once he understood. She saw that he thought he was worthless; and she thought she could love him enough by showing him what he was worth to her—more than herself. Her family came north to get her away from the black man and could, because she was beaten and hurt and like an abused animal, cowering in fear and filth; and they had her committed to an asylum in the South, where she would stay locked up forever. It was this, her being committed to an eternity in a bare room because of what he had done to her, that he could not live with. He saw his hatred destroy her; and he learned that “[i]t’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed. ”
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Later, Eric asks Cass, a woman of deep empathy and insight, “
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Did she like to be beaten up? I mean— did something in her like it, did she like to be—debased? ”’
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