The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (32 page)

In 1946, Eugene Worth, a close friend with whom Baldwin was in love but never had a physical relationship, threw himself off the George Washington Bridge. Worth was the model for Rufus, who, in
Another Country,
commits suicide in the same manner and whose death is the central event that links the other characters and becomes a source of revelation for them. Baldwin later said that the same fate would have awaited him had he stayed in New York and not become a writer
. In Another Country,
after Rufus’s suicide, Cass, a young white woman, says, “Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness.” Baldwin went to Paris to cleanse himself of his secrets, and to learn to write not out of rage but for the ages.

“All art,” Baldwin said, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.” His participation in the civil rights movement, his sympathy for the Algerians’ suffering in France, were acts of witnessing, but it was only in his writing—his fiction and his essays—that he became the true witness. “I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.” And this was what distinguished him from many other progressive writers at the time.

One of the confounding things about writing about great literature is that there is really nothing to say: everything is already there in the work itself. It is a little like trying to describe the act of falling unconditionally in love. But still we need to talk about the experience, actual and imagined; we need to share something of the anguish and the joy of having experienced something unique and universal. In this manner, the act of reading and responding is in itself an act of witnessing.

• • •

In one of the first classes I taught at SAIS in the late nineties (I think it was called Politics and Culture), I printed two articles for my students. The first was by the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; it was the title essay in his book
Making Waves,
on the importance of literature in a global world. The other was a report published in
The
Washington Post
on why J. D. Salinger was increasingly being removed from high school curriculums. My interest in the article principally had to do with the arguments voiced by several of the teachers who supported dropping
The Catcher in the Rye,
and their students’ responses. The teachers pointed out that since Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, was a privileged white male, minority students in their classes would not relate to him. While the students conceded that Holden Caulfield was indeed not at all like them, they went on to say that this was exactly why they wanted to read the book. They were curious about this other world and enjoyed the glimpse the novel offered into his thoughts and anxieties.

These students were instinctively expressing a point some teachers and academic theoreticians have altogether missed; namely, that literature is in essence an investigation of the “other,” a term used in such a stale and rigid manner, it has lost its original meaning and is no longer about actual difference so much as identifying subcultures and ethnicities and placing people within increasingly confining categories. Even when we put aside the current stultifying obsession with political correctness, a doctrine of comfortable questions and easy, ready-made answers, the fact remains that for most people it is simply boring to constantly read, write and talk about themselves. Shouldn’t the point of books be not to affirm our views and prejudices but to question and confront them? Why read about things you already know? I asked my students. While it is fine and good to discover our differences and accept them—and at times celebrate them—the real surprise comes from the discovery of how alike we are, how much we all have in common. No great work of art or literature would survive the test of time if it were not in some deep sense universal.

My students at SAIS, who came from such vastly different countries and backgrounds, mostly welcomed this notion. A majority of them were not English literature majors; the course was an elective, and thus they were there because they wanted to be. I remember one student, a German as I recall, who wrote in her journal something to the effect that she found exhilarating the thought of so many strangers like Holden Caulfield, Gatsby and even Daisy and Tom residing within her. I remember that word, “exhilarating,” so breathless, so full of possibilities.

Salinger published his first novel,
The Catcher in the Rye,
in 1951, Baldwin’s first novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, followed two years later. Baldwin’s novel won much acclaim, but Salinger’s trumped his and was welcomed as the latest kid in the Great American Novel’s hall of fame, a testament to the newly articulated angst of the American teenager. If by “Great American Novel” we mean one that is representative of its era and sheds light on certain essential aspects of American life, then I think Baldwin’s novel should be right up there with Salinger’s.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
is a different kind of coming-of-age story, that of a young African American boy, and as such it complements
The Catcher in the Rye
. John Grimes is as American as Holden Caulfield and their mutual ancestor Huckleberry Finn. Both Caulfield and Grimes are “bothered” about the meaning of life; what differentiates them is their deeply contrasting experiences and attitudes. It is as if they come from another country—in fact, another world.

The seventeen-year-old Holden, like so many other American protagonists, is trying to escape the suffocating conformity and hypocrisy of his life, and despite his charm he is a bit irritating at times. In the course of one day, Holden, who a few days before Christmas has been expelled from his posh prep school in Pennsylvania but does not want to go home to New York before the holidays, lest his parents find out, checks into a hotel in another part of the city and moves from place to place searching for some way to appease and nourish his vague dissatisfaction with the state of things, complaining about his conformist school, where he is “surrounded by phonies;” his encounter with girls who are dumb and have nothing intelligent to say; his lousy sex life or absence thereof; his older brother, a sellout to Hollywood; the prostitute he meets over the course of his wanderings, with whom he is unable to have sex and who, although he pays her, returns with her pimp and forces more money out of him; and the overall mess that he believes has become his life. He likes his old schoolteacher, Spencer, who seems not to have much to live for but at the same time gets a “big bang” out of buying an old Navajo blanket. It is a beautifully written book and constantly veers toward cynicism, but in the end there is a glimmer of hope because Holden has a heart, and that heart beats for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe. His decision to leave home is set aside because Phoebe wants to go with him and he knows he can’t take her. Instead he takes her to a ride on her favorite carousel, although it is winter, and while they are there “it began to rain like a bastard. In
buckets.
” But unlike others, he doesn’t take refuge under the roof of the carousel, preferring to get soaked because he feels “damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy. . . . I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”

Holden tells us that at one point he hears a kid singing, “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye,” which in reality is a poem by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. But he mistakes its meaning: “‘Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and
catch
them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.’”

Near the end of the story, when Holden finds graffiti in various places (on two of his school staircases, and on a mummy tomb in a museum) saying simply “Fuck you,” it makes him sick and angry. “That’s the whole trouble,” he informs us. “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.” You might think you have a peaceful place, but then “somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose.”

Holden is driven crazy by this and wants to kill the person who wrote it, because Phoebe or some other child might see the graffiti and wonder about its meaning and then “finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all
think
about it and maybe even
worry
about it for a couple of days.” So we can conclude that Holden, who seems unable to sustain meaningful relationships with adults, even kids his own age, connects only to children, whose innocence he is eager to protect. Their differing attitude toward innocence is in fact what sets John Grimes, Baldwin’s protagonist, apart from Holden Caulfield.

• • •

Go Tell It on the Mountain
is a semi-autobiographical novel that focuses on the coming of age of a young African American boy while narrating his emotions, reflections and reminiscences over the course of twenty-four hours, from the morning of his fourteenth birthday to the next morning, and his spiritual rebirth on the threshing floor of his community’s storefront church. Between those two mornings, we follow John’s movements—at home, around the city and finally at his church—and discover stories about him, his family and his community; each one becomes part of the puzzle that is John. Holden Caulfield might have felt the past and his personal background are “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” Not for John. “Go back to where you started,” James Baldwin advised his nephew, “or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.”

The similarities between John Grimes’s life and Baldwin’s are quite obvious. Both were illegitimate. In John’s case, he is the only character in the book who is a child born of love. His parents have eloped to New York City, where his father, Richard, would commit suicide after a brutal and humiliating incarceration on a trumped-up charge. Richard is a self-made man. When Elizabeth, John’s mother, discovering he has barely had any schooling, asks him, “‘Then how come you got to be so smart? How come you got to know so much?’” Richard tells her, “‘I just decided me one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew.’” Then he adds, “‘I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch
nowhere
never talk
me
down, and never make me feel like
I
was dirt.’” The irony, of course, is that he commits suicide because those sons of bitches, by framing him, make him feel like dirt. All his books and learning could do nothing to protect him from that pervasive sense of shame. John’s mother then marries a fanatical and abusive preacher who promises to take care of her son like their own and whom John calls father, but instead he self-righteously attempts to humiliate and destroy the boy. Gabriel, John’s stepfather, says he is going “‘to beat the sin out of him.’” A reformed womanizer, he is a reminder of Baldwin’s claim that “nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”

Baldwin and John Grimes share something that goes beyond the facts of their lives: their stories begin with a fundamental crisis of faith. “It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once,” Baldwin wrote. “I date it—the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress—from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.”
Go Tell It on the Mountain
is a meditation on John Grimes’s “crumbling of faith” and all the forces of authority that have held him back, that have kept him in darkness: racism, religious fanaticism, blind faith. “John’s heart was hardened against the Lord. His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven, and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.” He promises himself that “he would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers. He would have another life.” That new life would offer him a new spirituality, no longer tethered to a rejection of his own body and his body’s desire for love.

Sensuality, as Baldwin saw it, was the essence of life; to be deprived of it would mean missing out on living. “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be
present
in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” For Baldwin this was a serious matter, one that he would make the main topic of his second book,
Giovanni’s Room
. Anyone who has lived like I did for eighteen years under fundamentalist rule, or in a secular totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, can testify to the truth of a statement he made in an interview with the
Village Voice
late in life: that “terror of the flesh . . . is a doctrine which has led to untold horrors.”

When I reread
Go Tell It on the Mountain
after almost thirty years, I was surprised by how much I had missed: its cadences that capture the rhythms of Negro spirituals, moving with such physical and emotional force, its light and dark imagery and its theme of death and rebirth. John Grimes, like Huck, obeys the dictates of his heart, turning away from the false gods, and is reborn on the threshing floor of the very church that had suffocated him with its unforgiving rigidity. What could be closer to the cherished ideal of American individualism than to stand up to obstacles regardless of the consequences, to say no to stifling authority and face the darkness with no safety net, mastering one’s fear?