New Ways to Kill Your Mother (40 page)

Moving from Russia with careful, youthful deliberation and delight, Baldwin in August 1948 did something close to many serious novelists’ hearts. He took on a popular writer much praised for his terse style and pace, in this case poor James M. Cain, author of
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. Baldwin considered Cain’s body of work: ‘Not only did he have nothing to say,’ he wrote,

but he drooled, so to speak, as he said it … He writes with the stolid, humorless assurance of the American self-made man. Rather a great deal has been written concerning his breathless staccato ‘pace,’ his terse, corner-of-the-mouth ‘style,’ his significance as a recorder of the seamier side of American life. This is nonsense: Mr Cain writes fantasies and fantasies of the most unendurably mawkish and sentimental sort.

In January 1949 in an essay in
Commentary
, Baldwin formulated what would become his characteristic battle cry, which would so puzzle and irritate white liberals and reformers in the 1960s when they found they had reason to listen to him – the problem in America, he believed, lay in each individual American soul, black as much as white; and the black population was not seeking equality with a white world that had so significantly failed to understand itself, let alone those whom it had oppressed. ‘In a very real sense,’ he wrote in that essay,

the Negro problem has become anachronistic; we ourselves are the only problem, it is our hearts that we must search. It is neither a politic nor a popular thing to say, but a black man facing a white man becomes at once contemptuous and resentful when he finds himself looked upon as a moral problem for that white man’s conscience.

In March 1950 Baldwin published a short story in
Commentary
called ‘Death of a Prophet’, which he did not collect in
Going to Meet the Man
. It was, as far as I can make out, his second piece of published fiction. The first – also published in
Commentary
, in October 1948 – called ‘Previous Condition’, was included in
Going to Meet the Man
and contained a few of the elements that went into
Another Country
. It is easy to see why Baldwin did not want to publish ‘Death of a Prophet’ in a collection, as it too obviously contained the seeds of
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, being the story of a boy in Harlem whose father
was a preacher. The subject of a father and his son, Baldwin knew, was an interesting one. In 1967, in a review in the
New York Review of Books
, he wrote: ‘The father–son relationship is one of the most crucial and dangerous on earth, and to pretend that it can be otherwise really amounts to an exceedingly dangerous heresy.’

Although the story of the father and son told in ‘Death of a Prophet’ and
Go Tell It on the Mountain
was, to a large extent, his own story, recounted also in some autobiographical essays, Baldwin understood that the tension between the generations of men was a quintessential American story. It was, he believed, not only what set America apart, but what disfigured his country – the shame, the lack of pride sons in a society moving onwards and upwards felt at their fathers.

Thus his work in his fiction, and even in a novel like
Another Country
, notable for the absence of fathers, dealt with a most public and pressing matter in the most private and personal way. In an essay in 1964 Baldwin formulated the theory of this:

And what happens to a person, however odd this may sound, also happens to a nation … The Italian immigrant arriving from Italy, for example, or the sons of parents who were born in Sicily, makes a great point of not speaking Italian because he’s going to become an American. And he can’t bear his parents because they are backward. This may seem a trivial matter. But it is of the utmost importance when a father is despised by his son, and this is one of the facts of American life, and this is what we are really referring to, in oblique and terrible fashion, when we talk about upward mobility.

The writing in ‘Death of a Prophet’ is high-toned, almost overwrought at times, but pitched with zeal and serious ambition and great tenderness. The story is what Baldwin himself called in a review in the
New Leader
in September 1947 ‘a study of human helplessness’; it sees the character of Johnnie, whose father is
dying, and who has become a stranger in his father’s eyes, not ‘in relation to oppression’, as Baldwin put it in another piece on Gorky in 1947, but in relation to the character’s own fear and inadequacy. Baldwin, even as he began, and despite his deep awareness of the relationship between the political and the personal, was determined that his characters should not be confined by a narrow political agenda; he sought to ensure that the behaviour and the failure of his characters should be seen first as particular and private and then only as part of some general malaise that took its bearings from the Fall of Man as much as the creation of slavery, and emphatically not from a predetermined role as black men oppressed by bad laws. He also wanted to follow the example of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose novels and stories he reviewed in January 1948; he wanted to write, as Baldwin put it, ‘superbly well’ and know that this would be, as with Stevenson, ‘the most enduring delight’. Baldwin wished to create and live as an American and as a man, and had much to say about the state of his nation and about its masculinity. (In April 1966 he wrote: ‘Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man.’) He was helped by his insistence that he did not belong to anyone’s margin and his ability in the same moment to take possession of the margin when it suited his purpose. He relished the ambiguity of his position and was skilled at covering his tracks.

When it came to the matter of boxing, for example, a subject that would thrill many of his heterosexual colleagues, he claimed to know nothing. Instead, using the full force of his homosexuality, he wrote beautifully about Floyd Patterson and his fight with Sonny Liston in 1963, studying the state of the two men’s souls and the intricacies of their auras with an erotic intensity. Of Patterson, he wrote:

And I think part of the resentment he arouses is due to the fact that he brings to what is thought of – quite erroneously – as a simple activity a terrible note of complexity. This is his personal style, a style which strongly suggests that most un-American of attributes, privacy, the will to privacy; and my own guess is that he is still relentlessly, painfully shy – he still lives gallantly with his scars, but not all of them have healed – and while he has found a way to master this, he has found no way to hide it; as, for example, another miraculously tough and tender man, Miles Davis, has managed to do.

Of Liston, Baldwin wrote:

He reminded me of big, black men I have known who acquired the reputation of being tough in order to conceal the fact that they weren’t hard … Anyway, I liked him, liked him very much. He sat opposite me at the table, sideways, head down, waiting for the blow: for Liston knows, as only the inarticulately suffering can, just how inarticulate he is. But let me clarify that: I say suffering because it seems to me that he has suffered a great deal. It is in his face, in the silence of that face, and in the curiously distant light in his eyes – a light which rarely signals because there have been so few answering signals … I said, ‘I can’t ask you any questions because everything’s been asked. Perhaps I’m only here, really, to say that I wish you well’ … I’m glad I said it because he looked at me then, really for the first time, and he talked to me for a little while.

But in those same years he also spoke and wrote as though he were a founding father, in an unassailable position in his country, one of its central voices. In
The New York Times
in 1959 he wrote:

I think that there is something suspicious about the way we cling to the concept of race, on both sides of the obsolescent racial fence. White men, when they have not entirely succumbed to their panic, wallow in their guilt, and call themselves, usually ‘liberals.’ Black men, when they have not drowned in their bitterness, wallow in their rage, and call themselves, usually ‘militant.’ Both camps have managed to evade the really hideous complexity of our situation on the social and personal level.

In the same year, in reply to a question about whether the 1950s as a decade ‘makes special demands on you as a writer’, he adopted one of his best tones, lofty and idealistic and filled with candour, while remaining sharp and direct and challenging: ‘But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject – his key and ours to his achievement.’ Henry James would have been proud of him.

(The pride worked both ways. In
Playboy
in 1964 Baldwin managed to commandeer James as a member of his tribe, as someone who did not, as the vast majority of Americans did, spend his life ‘in flight from death’. He compared a passage from a letter James wrote to a friend who had lost her husband – ‘Sorrow wears and uses us but we wear and use it too, and it is blind. Whereas we, after a manner, see’ – with these lines from Bessie Smith:

Good mornin’, blues
,

Blues, how do you do?

I’m doin’ all right
.

Good mornin’
,

How are you?

Once more James would have been proud, although it should be added that in his lifetime or in the years after his death he and his followers were not ever fully aware that what he was really doing was singing the blues.)

In 1959 also, in a paper called ‘Mass Culture and the Creative Artist’ given to a symposium, Baldwin concluded:

We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life – and a great transforming energy.

He was, in these years, moving himself carefully to the centre of the debate, refusing a role, offered to him always, as spokesman for a minority, to be listened to only when that minority grew restive or dangerous or newsworthy.

During the 1960s, the voice Baldwin used in his journalism grew less ambiguous, however, more strident, especially when he was addressing a black audience. In a speech he gave to the Student Co-ordinating Committee in November 1963, after the Kennedy assassination, for example, he began:

Part of the price that Americans have paid for delusion, part of what we have done to ourselves, was given to us in Dallas, Texas. This happened in a civilized nation, the country which is the moral leader of the free world, when some lunatic blew off the President’s head. Now, I want to suggest something, and I don’t want to sound rude, but we all know that it has been many generations and it hasn’t stopped yet that black men’s heads have been blown off – and nobody cared. Because, as I said before, it wasn’t happening to a person, it was happening to a ‘nigger.’

Two years later, in an angry essay about black history, he saw no possibility of change, merely excuses for change.

In the meantime ladies and gentlemen, after a brief intermission – time out for one or two committee reports, time out for an antipoverty pep talk, time out to make a Vietnamese child an orphan and then lovingly raise him to love all our works, time out for a White House conference, time out to brief and augment the police forces, time out to buy some Negroes, jail some, club some, and kill some – after a brief intermission, ladies and gentlemen, the show begins again in the auction room. And you will hear the same old piano, playing the blues.

At other times, he seemed to be amusing himself by preaching to the white population, insisting that whites, in fact, were the group most in need of freedom from tyranny. In 1961 he wrote:

There is a great captive Negro population here, which is well publicized, and what is not known at all, is that there is a great captive white population here too. No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

In
Playboy
in January 1964 he wrote: ‘What I’m much more concerned about is what white Americans have done to themselves; what has been done to me is irrelevant because there is nothing more you can do to me. But, in doing it, you’ve done something to yourself. In evading my humanity, you have done something to your own humanity.’

In an essay called ‘The White Problem’, also published in 1964, he sneered at the icons of white America, insisting that the difference between white and black in America was close to the difference between foolishness and seriousness, childhood and maturity:

In this country, for a dangerously long time, there have been two levels of experience. One, to put it cruelly, but, I think, quite truthfully, can be summed up in the images of Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up in the tone and face of Ray Charles. And there never has been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.

In another essay from 1964, ‘Color and American Civilization’, he had more fun at the expense of the neuroses suffered by his white brothers and sisters:

The white man’s unadmitted – and apparently, to him, unspeakable – private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark … I cannot accept that proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilization. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now … expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.