Another Country

Introduction

In the early 1950s, as he was winning fame as a novelist, James Baldwin published a number of essays about the state of his nation which were passionately and elegantly written. His style was not that of the Bible or the pulpit (Baldwin had been a child preacher) but took its bearings from the early sources of English eloquence: Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, William Hazlitt. His tone did, however, borrow something from his preacher days: it was fearless and urgent, combining a concern about public policy and public attitudes with a probing and oddly intimate concern with the dark and uncharted spaces within the self. Baldwin’s nation in these essays was emphatically America, his self an American self. His voice, so stylish, insisted that the language — English — in all its nuance and subtlety belonged to him, just as America in all its cruelty and hatred belonged to him too.

Baldwin published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1953 when he was twenty-nine. Two years later his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, came out, and in 1956 his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, was published. In 1961 he published a second book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, and the following year his third novel, Another Country, an immediate bestseller in the United States, appeared. The success of his early books allowed his restlessness and his mercurial nature an immense freedom. Between 1956, when he began to work in earnest on Another Country (there are also some versions and drafts from much earlier) and the end of 1961, when the book was finished, James Baldwin crossed the Atlantic by sea at least six times. He moved between Paris and New York, but he did not stay for long in either place. He went to Switzerland and Stockholm and Israel, San Francisco and Chicago and Fire Island. He worked at the MacDowell retreat for artists. He lived in the guest lodge at William Styron’s house in Connecticut. He lived in a village in Corsica.

In 1961, in the Introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, he wrote: ‘these essays were written over the last six years, in various places, in many states of mind’. It is fascinating to trace the roots of Another Country not only in Baldwin’s personal life and the lives of his friends, but also in his own thinking and writing about the interior life of America, the stained soul of his compatriots, in the years before he completed the book.

There was a huge generosity in his nature and a love of company. In those years he gave interviews and went to parties; he had love affairs and many friends; he kept in close touch with his family. He also worked hard. He travelled to report on the American South. He made speeches. He wrote plays and screen-plays, essays and articles and short stories. Finally, he went to Istanbul. And all this time he carried the story of Another Country in his head and versions and drafts of the book in his luggage. All this time he sought ease and peace and time to finish the book.

Early in the first essay he wrote, James Baldwin tried to list his influences and he included ‘something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech’. In the early pages of Another Country, as we watch Rufus and Leona seducing each other, Baldwin’s ear for that speech offers him great possibilities for expression and drama. Rufus is cool and sexy and understated, his speech is full of sharp irony and street-wise self-confidence. But in the background all the time there is violence and doom. The opening pages let us know how close to the end Rufus is, but even in the passages where Rufus is high on life, there are always snatches of doom-laden memory or images of doom and darkness. Rufus’s self-invention, his joy at the night and the party and the company and the sex, are all thin and will not last. He is a tragic hero caught between the time when men such as him had no possibility of freedom and the time to come. The city has opened its doors to him, not enough for him to feel free, but just enough for him to feel danger and threat. This offers an astonishing edge and intensity to the pleasure he takes in his own speech, the music, the night, like someone who has been briefly released from solitary confinement.

It is Baldwin’s genius to have thought so carefully and deeply about what to do with such a figure in fiction, to resist the temptation to have Rufus, who is so lovable, so innocent and so full of rage, made into a public martyr. Baldwin looked to Henry James rather than Richard Wright. He wanted the danger to come from within. He knew, in any case, that for Rufus and people like him this was where the danger lay. In his meditation on the work of Richard Wright, Baldwin wrote about the root of the violence in Wright’s fiction. ‘The root is rage,’ Baldwin wrote. In another essay on Wright, he wrote

And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt briefly and for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees or to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled; no Negro, finally, who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment to the ‘nigger’ who surrounds him and to the ‘nigger’ in himself.

Rufus has felt this hatred, he has been brushed by its wings, but this is not enough for a novelist. In 1960, in ‘Notes for a Hypothetical Novel’ Baldwin began to muse about how little essential difference there was between the races in the United States, and this idea — that the other characters in Another Country, the white people, suffer too, and are confused, and that their suffering and confusion mirrors the suffering and confusion of Rufus — helped him to write this original and complex novel. ‘Anyway, in the beginning,’ Baldwin wrote,

I thought that the white world was very different from the world I was moving out of and I turned out to be entirely wrong. It seemed different. It seemed safer, at least the white people seemed safer. It seemed cleaner, it seemed more polite, and, of course, it seemed much richer from the material point of view. But I didn’t meet anyone in that world who didn’t suffer from the same affliction that all the people I had fled from suffered from and that was that they didn’t know who they were. They wanted to be something that they were not.

Baldwin began with the characters of Ida and Vivaldo (Vivaldo in earlier drafts had been black), ‘but I couldn’t find a way to make you understand Ida’, he told the Paris Review. ‘Then Rufus came along and the entire action made sense.’ Baldwin had been thinking enough about how other novelists would present the fate of Rufus to know not to follow them; he knew to make Rufus bad as well as brilliant, to place a violence and a self-destructive charm at the core of him. He made Rufus into a version of himself, but he also made Rufus a version of his friend Eugene Worth, whom he met in 1943 (when Baldwin was nineteen) and who committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge in December 1946. Two years later Baldwin moved to Paris. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France,’ he told the Paris Review, ‘but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge.’ Rufus becomes a way of briefly bringing his friend back to life, while at the same time dramatizing and imagining a road Baldwin himself could have taken. He used the city he knew, especially in his late teens, the years after his father’s death, when he moved from job to job and moved between jobs at the edge of poverty and despair. He used small events, such as his brother’s teeth being knocked out by a white officer in the Navy, such as himself and some friends being beaten up in a bar. He also used things which had nothing to do with his own background or his own experiences but to do with certain tones and atmospheres he was soaking up: Another Country is full of the sort of darkness and sense of gloom you get in French fiction and philosophy of the period, and it is also full of the pessimism and claustrophobia of Ingmar Bergman’s films. Baldwin admired Bergman, he went to Stockholm to interview him and became friends with him.

Another Country is the book where Baldwin’s quixotic temperament meets his fierce intelligence. It is also the book where his two most notable selves meet each other. There seem to be light years between the world of Go Tell It on the Mountain, which is, on the surface, settled and conservative and religious, and the world of Giovanni’s Room, which is Bohemian and wandering and venal. Just as there seemed to be light years between Baldwin’s Harlem childhood and Baldwin’s life in Paris. But his first two novels share a concern with the flesh, with moral questions and dramatic possibilities around carnality and sensuality. In his third novel, he introduces the two worlds to each other, brings Rufus and Ida down from Harlem to a world of Bohemians and writers; he mixes and matches the two worlds he himself lived in and understood. All of his characters suffer from a longing for a purer love, or even the beginning of one, all of them too are desperately weak and capable of destruction.

Baldwin in all these three novels lets two very powerful ideas play against each other. One can be traced in his essays: it suggests that America is seriously deformed as a society because it cannot accept a large minority of its population and therefore cannot accept itself. By its treatment of the black population, it has managed to disable itself. Thus any group of people in any American novel must reflect this. Baldwin’s other idea redeems him from being merely a critic of America in his novels: it suggests that life itself is dark, that relationships are fraught and broken and personalities are destructive because of the way we are made. Thus Baldwin’s novels combine a criticism of life that is essentially political with one that is philosophical. And because he is interested in his characters trapped in the life, rather than the life itself as an abstract or a mere idea, the novels take on a dark, dramatic and engrossing power.

None of this explains the structure of Another Country. Rufus is Baldwin’s Hamlet, and the novel allows Rufus to disappear after less than eighty pages. He is replaced by Ida, his sister. ‘The principle action in the book, for me,’ Baldwin told the Paris Review,

is the journey of Ida and Vivaldo toward some kind of coherence… You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brother’s death — the key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself.

The scene where Ida first appears in the novel, filtered through Cass’s inquiring and sympathetic eye, is Baldwin at his most Jamesian, every moment offering a new angle and a new clue to nuance of character. Baldwin can also replace Rufus with another version of himself, his Laertes back from abroad, in the guise of Eric. And he can dramatize moments from his own life with the Swiss Lucien Happersberger, whom he had met in Paris and who later came to New York, as well as describe the lives of writers and would-be writers in Greenwich Village.

Baldwin’s work, however, always moved beyond the merely autobiographical, or the portrait of a certain time and place. He became, not only through his education and his reading and his experience, but also through his eloquence, the uneasy and melancholy moral conscience of his race. His years in Paris taught him that he was an American before he was anything. And because of the colour of his skin and his own homosexuality, he grew fascinated not only by the drama of black versus white in his country, but also by the drama of masculinity. Thus while the first part of Another Country deals with the erotics of race and its discontents, the novel after the death of Rufus allows Baldwin to deal with the dark confines and conflicts of gender by which all his characters are so disturbed.

In 1985, two years before his death, Baldwin published an essay in Playboy called ‘Freaks and the American Idea of Manhood’ in which he wrote:

The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This appeal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden — as an unpatriotic act — that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

Twenty-five years earlier, he had alluded to the ‘body of sexual myths… around the figure of the American Negro’ who ‘is penalized for the guilty imagination of the white people who invest him with their hates and longings, and is the principal target of their sexual paranoia’. In his story ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon’, published in 1960 and written during the time when he was working on Another Country, he wrote: ‘They want you to feel that you’re not a man, maybe that’s the only way they can feel like men.’

Baldwin’s version of the American dream hangs just as darkly over his other characters as over Rufus and Leona. Masculinity is a nightmare from which his characters cannot awake. The city is a prison-house of desires which cannot be fulfilled. The description of Benno’s Bar in Another Country is Baldwin at his most eloquent:

The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet fingers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in corners, watching the drifting women. The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other. Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women — who wandered incessantly from the juke-box to the bar — and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here — closer together now than they would be later, when they got home. These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke-box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated, synthetic laments for love.

‘Richard and Cass,’ Baldwin told the Paris Review, ‘were part of the décor. From my point of view there was nothing in the least idealistic about Richard. He was modelled on several liberal American careerists from then and now.’ Vivaldo, more than any of the other characters, is locked in the world of Benno’s, pitched between longing and contempt, locked inside an icy masculinity. The second part of the novel dramatizes his efforts of escape from this. The key moment in his slow and uneasy redemption occurs in the scene where he has been watching a blonde woman at the bar ‘And something in him was breaking: he was briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of colour nor of male or female. There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender.’ A similar scene occurs in Baldwin’s story ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon’ where our hero is married to a Swedish woman.

If Harriet had been born in America, it would have taken her a long time, perhaps forever, to look on me as a man like all other men; if I had met her in America, I would never have been able to look on her as a woman like all other women. The habits of public rage and power would also have been our private compulsions, and would have blinded our eyes. We would never have been able to love each other.

In Another Country Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century in which characters desperately seek to escape from the parody of themselves which has been constructed for them, to move towards ‘a region where there were no definitions of any kind’, or fail to do so and move towards self-destruction. It was Baldwin’s peculiar and deeply refined genius to make the most of this drama in his novels.

Colm Tóibín