Letter to Jimmy (5 page)

It would be an understatement to say that your admiration for Wright's journey knows no bounds. You have read and re-read
Native Son
to the point that is serves as inspiration for the title of your collection of essays,
Notes of a Native Son.
You dream of being like him because he had overcome the prevailing fatalism of his surroundings: “I had identified with him long before we met: [. . .] his example had helped me to survive. He was black, he was young, he had come out of the Mississippi nightmare and the Chicago slums, and he was a writer. He proved it could be done—proved it to me and gave me an arm against all those others who assured me it could
not
be done.”
³⁸

You want to meet him, talk with him; learn from your elder the meaning behind the effort, the discipline, and the demands of writing. And, while you are at it, how to achieve the same success.

Around this time, you knock on the door to his house in Brooklyn. The writer welcomes you with open arms, much to your great surprise, you who expected to find yourself face to face with an emotionally distant author, walled off by his fame. You are impressed, intimidated.
He puts you at ease. And while you are enjoying some bourbon, you announce, in the euphoria of the conversation, that you have written fifty or sixty pages, a novel entitled
In My Father's House—
which will become
Go Tell It On the Mountain.
You cannot gauge the level of excitement you have just stirred up in the mentor. He encourages you, and expresses a desire to read the pages that you had not brought with you. Do they exist, or had you made them up?

Leeming reports: “After a few days of furious writing, Baldwin sent the sixty pages to Brooklyn. Within a week Wright had read the manuscript, reacted positively to it, and, by way of Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper & Brothers, had recommended Baldwin for a Eugene F. Saxton Foundation Fellowship . . .”
³⁹

In 1945, you receive the fellowship of five hundred dollars in order to finish the book. It is a major step forward. And because the same prestigious Harper publishing house that publishes Wright supplies the funds, he speaks of you to his editor. A reading panel reviews your work. It is judged to be unpublishable, and, in the end, rejected both by that publisher and by Doubleday: “. . . when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant . . .”
⁴⁰

It is of course a painful disappointment, but you do not give up trying to emulate your mentor. You ask yourself what, in the end, makes
Native Son
have such a profound effect? Is it the shock of a white woman's murder by a black man?

You begin writing a new work,
Ignorant Armies,
which, as in Wright's book, tells a tale of murder with the issue of race at the heart of it: Wayne Lonergan, a bisexual, kills his rich wife for reasons related to their sexual problems. The voice of the narrative is unclear: although the story does gather its strength and truth from your life in Greenwich Village, marked by the “problem” of a sexuality that was more and more turned toward men, you speak in the place of your characters. What is more, this book contained two novels in one! The proof? Out of this “rough draft,” two of your most well-known works of fiction would emerge:
Giovanni's Room
and
Another Country,
two novels that portray sexuality, even homosexuality, in the most tragic light.
⁴¹

Following in your mentor's footsteps is not your only source of inspiration for the “failure,”
Ignorant Armies.
Your own existence prior to your arrival in France is its own series of tragedies. As James Campbell relates to us about your life: “His father, crippled with madness, had died in a psychiatric ward. Baldwin had lost his Christian faith, which had plunged him deep into crisis, and helped him, one could say, accept the awakenings
of his homosexuality—something very little accepted in Harlem, where he lived, and accepted even less in Church, where he had been preaching as a young minister.”
⁴²

•
  
•
  
•

In New York you continue all the while to have meetings with your mentor. He takes off for Paris in 1946.

France will be the stage for your confrontation. Wright is as yet unaware that the pupil who had knocked on his front door had grown up, and, to survive, would need to trace his own path. Everything can perhaps be summed up with terrifying clarity in the following words: “His work was a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself. [. . .] Richard was hurt because I had not given him credit for any human feelings or failings. And indeed I had not, he had never really been a human being for me, he had been an idol. And idols are created in order to be destroyed.”
⁴³

4.

the destruction of idols: from
Uncle Tom's Cabin to Native Son

I
n 1948 your friends George Salamos and Hasa Benveniste, also living in France, prepare to launch the journal
Zero
and call upon you to submit an article. The directors of
Zero
do not suspect that the text you will submit will ring in the era of hostilities between you and Wright.

The title itself has an agenda: “Everybody's Protest Novel” (translated into French as “Une opposition complice”).
⁴⁴
The article is simultaneously published in the
Partisan Review
.

The article begins by attacking works of fiction of the time, which, in your opinion, favor moral stories over art. In the “protest novel,” as you call it, the author is indignant and cries out against what is supposed to be
an abomination: slavery, racism, and general injustice. You think that this outrage is insincere, nothing more than a showing off of emotions. And it is a known fact that good literature cannot be created on good intentions alone. A very famous novel will serve as your primary target:
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In your childhood, you read this book several times. It moved you, touched you.

First published in 1851, the novel takes place in antebellum America. Mr. Selby, a prosperous plantation owner somewhere in Kentucky, prides himself in treating his slaves with a certain degree of charity. Alas, drowning in debt, Mr. and Mrs. Selby must resign themselves to selling two of their slaves: Tom, the “good” old slave, and a child, Harry. Upon meeting Uncle Tom, the young Evangeline St. Clare is touched by the goodness of this man of color, and begs her father to buy him. Is this the end of the tender-hearted slave's peregrinations? Already weary, he must endure another separation. The novel follows his odyssey with a blend of emotion, sentimentality, and, above all, a clear conscience.

You no longer look at this book in the same light as you did in your childhood. From this point on you consider it to be a “very bad novel,” which you criticize for its “dishonesty,” “sentimentality,” and its “inability to feel.”
⁴⁵
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, in your opinion the crown jewel of protest novels, nevertheless inspired other noteworthy writers, especially several of your African-American
colleagues, as Amanda Claybaugh confirms: “. . . many African-American authors from the first part of the 20th century were tempted, at a certain point in their career, to rewrite
Uncle Tom's Cabin
.”
⁴⁶

On the list of these epigones, parodists, and imitators, some of whom have more talent than others, is Richard Wright, who publishes
Uncle Tom's Children
in 1938. Later, in 1973, there is Amiri Baraka with
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Alternate Ending
. Closer to our era, Amanda Claybaugh also mentions
Beloved,
Toni Morrison's novel, published in 1987. Faced with this flood of protest novels born under the influence of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
your judgment is harsh: “It is indeed considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style of characterization. [. . .] [Protest novels] are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that such movies as
The Best Years of Our Lives
or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies.”
⁴⁷

As Benoît Depardieu judiciously points out, “While African-American writers in days past had emphasized the social origins of black paranoia, such as Richard Wright drawing inspiration from the Chicago school, Baldwin tackles its psychological roots, holding blacks responsible in some part for their own paranoia.”
⁴⁸

•
  
•
  
•

By leading a crusade against protest novels, you earn your admission into the literary arena and create a reputation for yourself of being a Young Turk.

It must be remembered that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, marketed as one of the first works of anti-slavery fiction, sold more than 300,000 copies in less than two years. The work becomes the only American novel to sell more than a million copies, following closely behind sales of the Bible. Amanda Claybaugh underlines what a great feat this is; at the time, novels were something akin to “public property”: passed from one hand to the next, borrowed from traveling libraries, read out loud to the whole family, meaning that for each copy of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, there were at least five readers . . .
⁴⁹

What sparks the success of this novel? It arrives without a doubt at the right moment, at a time when an ever-growing feeling of guilt was clouding the collective memory of white Americans. Beecher Stowe had moreover written her novel in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, declaring the return of all runaway slaves. The reception of the book is such that its characters become representatives of a part of the nation that considers itself open, enamored with liberty. At last, the reassuring, redemptive conversation that condemns and criticizes an entire system is in the open. Even better, these
attacks and charges against the slavery of blacks come from a white woman, she herself a descendant of slave-owners. Based on this, the hasty conclusion is drawn that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
inspired the anti-slavery movement, a notion reinforced when President Abraham Lincoln, who had just signed the Emancipation Proclamation, invites this illustrious writer to the White House . . .
⁵⁰

Uncle Tom, the good Negro, enters into the imagination of American society: advertisers latch on. The book is not only a best seller in the United States; its effect reaches international heights, too. In France, for example, George Sand takes up her pen in 1852 to commend the talent of her American female colleague: “The life and death of a child, the life and death of a negro, herein lies the entire book. This negro and this child are two saints from heaven. The friendship that draws them together, the respect these two perfect beings express for one another; it is pure love that fuels the passion of this tragedy. I know not what genius other than saintliness could have imbued this affection and this situation with so sustained or so potent a charm. [. . .] Honor and respect to you, Mrs. Stowe. One day or another, your reward already written in the heavens will also be of this world.”

George Sand may be conscious of the novel's weaknesses, also noted by certain critics, but she is moved by the “long dialogues, the carefully studied portraits” of this book that “mothers, young children and servants
can read and understand, and that men, even the highly-placed, cannot disdain.” Her generosity is in the end one of a fully satisfied reader: “If the best praise we can offer a writer is to love her, the most honest we can be with a book is to love its defects. [. . .] These defects only exist in relation to artistic conventions that have never been absolute.”

Taking the opposite approach to George Sand, you highlight the fact that these so-called protest novels deprive themselves of the demands of truth, and drown the very essence of the novel in a sanctimonious discourse: “Finally, the aim of the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence to slavery. The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe.”
⁵¹

Uncle Tom's Cabin
is a “convenient” work for everyone, although its very creation should awaken the collective consciousness and should not sacrifice historical reality for emotion. The characters in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
wear masks which, when removed, expose the greatest deception. Uncle Tom, for example, represents the stereotype of the black man inherited from the American imagination: he is illiterate, has nappy hair, and his “phenomenal hardiness” always allows him to endure the vicissitudes
of the life of a captive, and, in the end, to “triumph” over them. With regard to the other slaves—George, his wife Eliza and their son—the author cannot escape from platitudes. The son resembles down to the last detail the stereotype of a shoeshine boy. Eliza, for her part, is lighter-skinned. While George is darker-skinned, he nevertheless does not have especially “negroid features,” which allows him to pass. When he “escapes from his master's house disguised as a Spanish gentleman, he can walk through town without arousing anything other than admiration.”
⁵²