As I might have mentioned already, I’m teaching an online course next month on James Baldwin’s Another Country, I think Baldwin’s greatest and most ambitious novel—and one I just taught in my NYU graduate seminar on writing sex. (We broke it up over two classes; for the online course, we’ll have the luxury of even more time.) The online course starts on Sunday, April 7th and runs weekly from 4-5pm ET for four weeks. (I’ll extend things until about 5:30pm, if people have questions.) Sessions are recorded, so if you can’t attend synchronously you can watch the videos—and you can also email in a question you’d like me to address in the next class. I’d love to have you join us. We’ll be using the Vintage edition of the novel; it will be useful to have that on hand so we’ll all have the same page numbers.
There are lots of ways to think about Another Country; one is as a story of bohemian artists, a kind of La Bohème set in 1950s New York. It follows a group of friends: there’s Rufus, a jazz drummer; Vivaldo and Richard, writers; Jane, a painter; Ida, Rufus’s sister, a singer; and Eric, an actor. (The only major character who’s not an artist is Richard’s wife, Cass.) They stand in various relations to success: Rufus, Vivaldo, and Ida are engaged in genuine artistic struggles without much, or any, recognition so far; Richard has written a bad novel that will be a runaway bestseller; Eric seems at once genuinely striving and on the precipice of real fame.
The book is filled with descriptions of art, much of it bad or failed or morally compromised art. I think we only see moments of successful art—all of them performances, and so ephemeral—three times in the book. The first of them, and maybe the most emphatic, comes very early on, just five or so pages in; it both shows what excellent artmaking looks like in the world of the novel, and also makes clear what’s at stake in the endeavor. The novel’s first chapter—what we’re reading for the first class—is utterly wild in its use of time (and also POV): it all takes place in a single night; it ranges freely, wildly, over the preceding seven months. We’ll spend a lot of time in our first session talking about how Baldwin makes these shifts through time and character: it’s utterly breathtaking, and also breaks all the supposed rules. (The only rule is what you can get away with; Baldwin gets away with a lot.)
The vision of artistic success—artistic apotheosis, really—comes in the first of the section’s switchbacks, taking us to what is, maybe, the novel’s inciting incident: the night Rufus meets Leona, a white woman with whom he will have a relationship that’s tempestuous from the start and eventually disastrous for them both. Rufus is playing what the book tells us will be his last gig as a musician, in Harlem, to a mixed audience, racially and otherwise (“white and black, high and low, people who came for the music and people who spent their lives in joints for other reasons”). Everybody’s having an unusually good time. Part of this is due to the “pot on the scene,” and part of it, in the last set, has to do with an amazing solo from a saxophonist. Here’s how the passage starts:
And, during the last set, [Rufus] came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say.
I’m fascinated by the claim for art embedded in the first sentence: that it gives Rufus a way to be “doubly alive”; there’s something consoling in that idea, given all that this first chapter will put him through. There’s also an ambiguity, for me, in the phrase “way out all night”—does this mean the saxophonist has been playing well until this point, or badly? Way out as in way out ahead, egging the rest of the ensemble on, provoking everybody to play their best; or way out as in lost? It doesn’t matter, I guess, except to know whether what comes now is a crowning moment or a revelation. This opening salvo ends with another claim for art: that it’s about saying something, that it’s finally a form of red-hot communication; and Baldwin’s fascination with music and theater, throughout his career, lies in what I think is basically a Socratic conviction that something can happen in ephemeral communication, in the give-and-take chemical reaction between performer and audience, that can’t happen in the more settled medium of the page.
We learn what he’s saying in what comes next:
He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had.
That striding first sentence, with its right-branching modifiers; after the kernel of “he stood,” we have the adverbs “there” and “wide-legged,” then a series of participial phrases (the sentence is wide-legged, too): “humping,” “filling,” “shivering,” “screaming.” Artmaking is physical in Baldwin, always—in his books even writers sweat as they compose (Philip Roth said that when he was writing well he sweated buckets); it’s also sexual. I love that the saxophonist is “humping the air”; assertive sexuality is part of what he makes his art out of. But against that assertiveness, confidence, there’s the vulnerability of “shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years.” What a tremendous image—it feels Yeatsian to me, recalling “Sailing to Byzantium”:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence…
I don’t think Baldwin would agree, quite, with that last sentiment—you learn art by doing your art, and by watching others do theirs, for sure; but this young man hasn’t had a purely aesthetic education—or, rather, his aesthetic education hasn’t only involved art. “Somewhere along the line he had discovered,” Baldwin says earlier; one of Baldwin’s convictions is that you make art out of your whole life—that being a great artist means getting the entirety of your life into your art, including those aspects of your life you’re most enraged or ashamed by. It’s that line, that road that has brought him to art and that he brings into art, that has left his youth in “rags.”
What a thing to say, whether I’m right about the Yeatsian echo or not: Yeats’s tatters apply to age; Baldwin reduces youth to rags. The earlier passage refers to both the saxophonist and Rufus as “kids,” but much of the poignancy of Another Country comes from the characters’ peculiar relationship to time. Rufus, Vivaldo, Eric, are all in their twenties, edging toward thirty—and, in their view, this puts them just at the point where the gold of promise threatens to turn to the dross of disappointment. (I hope this isn’t true, having published my first novel at 38.) The book is painfully aware of the contingency of the artist’s life: Greenwich Village, where most of the novel takes place, is littered with failed artists, the ranks of which any of these characters might join. Even Ida, who’s younger than the rest, just starting out, feels like she’s staring down a barrel: nobody has any time to waste; much of the novel’s power comes from their sense that every moment is urgent.
Humping, filling, shivering, screaming: a saxophone can scream, I don’t think Baldwin is being metaphorical here, I think the young man is making a relentless, an implacable sound. As he’s asking a relentless, implacable question, pleading for the minimum necessary to a bearable existence, which also means pleading for everything: Love me. (As I wrote in my last post, about Diane Seuss, maybe this is all we ever say in art.) I don’t know many uses of repetition—and variation-through-italics—more effective than this. Read it aloud; slam the emphases like you mean it; make it sound as relentless as Baldwin suggests it is. Several months ago I wrote a post about the great composer Julius Eastman—the new music ensemble Wild Up had just put on a series of his music at 92NY—and linked, as an illustration of what I think it means to ask a question in music, to a recording of an improvisational performance Eastman did in Zürich:
It’s maybe the best possible introduction to Eastman and his astounding gifts; it’s also one of the most extraordinary musical documents I know. About ten minutes from the end of the piece (this YouTube link should start you there), Eastman presents a new idea: two discordant chords, then a weird, unsettling jangling motif. He repeats the motif obsessively, slightly altering what happens around it. It feels like thinking to me, like discovery; having found a pattern that interests him, he asks what he can do with it, all the different ways he can make it sound, the variations he can make it run; finally, he starts asking how he can escape it. It creates a line of energy that carries the performance to its end, and makes the solemn, single note on which the piece closes feel like—well, I don’t know if it feels like an answer exactly, but it feels like an arrival.
“The same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated”: this performance is what I think of when I read Baldwin’s description of the young saxophonist.
Unbearably, endlessly, variously: like James (this is one of the things he learned from James, his favorite novelist), Baldwin is a writer whose art comes in adverbs, and like James his adverbs are very often negative, like “unbearably” and “endlessly”; but Baldwin’s use of these adverbial constructions often has the opposite effect from James’s. James is seeking ever-greater subtlety, the slightest difference of shade; he’s an impressionist, seeking new shivers of gradation in experience. Baldwin does that sometimes, but more characteristically his adverbs are after not gradation but intensity; it’s as though the volume dial on the English language only goes up to 10, and Baldwin needs it to hit 11 or 12. That’s what this passage is doing, I think, in the pile up of adverbs—which continues to the very end, in the adverbial participial phrase, also expressing extremity: “with all of the force the boy had.” Or part of what he’s doing. It’s the same phrase, unbearable, endless; but it’s not the same: it’s also “various.” Repetition, but repetition with a difference.
The difference lies both in the man making the sound and in the audience receiving it. We have a glimpse of that already in the last sentence I’ve already quoted: “Do you love me?” is the question Rufus hears, maybe the question he needs to hear, the question his own experience demands from the music; now Baldwin turns to everybody else listening:
The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air.
Again I think the action is all in the modifiers. Consider, by contrast, the nouns, which are just stakes planted in the ground, marking out a bit of reality: silence, listeners, attention, cigarettes, drinks, tables, faces, light, saxophonist, love, outrage, pride, air. Or consider the verbs: became, were, stayed, appeared, assaulted, wanted, hurled, humped. It’s not that these aren’t important: we need these solid facts, and the verbs are admirably vigorous (assaulted, hurled, humped). But the brilliance comes with the adverbs and the adjectives. Start with “strict.” What a surprise that word is, especially paired with the adverbial prepositional phrase: “strict with abruptly focused attention.”
What a curious, intricate construction—here we do get some Jamesian modulation; it’s the kind of construction that makes me wonder if I’ve really ever understood the word. As always when that happens, I turn to the OED, where actually there are kind of a bewildering number of definitions for “strict”: four physical meanings, and thirteen figurative senses. (This is leaving aside the entirely different meaning of “swift, rapid,” when applied to water, a sense of which I was I think entirely unaware.) Of the physical senses, two seem pertinent: “tense, not slack or relaxed” (a rather wonderful quotation for this: “This coate of the Testicle..sheweth the nature of a certaine strict, and long Muscle”); and “restricted as to space or extent: narrow, drawn in.” Both of these physical senses draw from the Latin history of the word, strictus, from stringere: to draw or bind tight; and they both apply to what happens to the audience in the club, I think: to be strictly attentive means to draw oneself up, to focus on a restricted space; their attention draws itself to a point, maybe. And then to bring in the figurative senses: “exact, precise”; “rigorously maintained, admitting no relaxation”; “stringent”; “admitting no deviation or abatement.”
The audience has been called to a standard, I think, that’s what it all amounts to; they’ve been reminded of a certain excellence potential in themselves. They’re roused; they let their usual distractions, cigarettes, alcohols—ways they dull themselves to time—fall to one side; they engage with the music, which is a way too of engaging with their lives. There’s a very slight whiff here of something I sometimes find hard to take in Baldwin, maybe the thing in his work—work as crucial to my sense of myself as a writer as anyone’s—I find least congenial, which is a kind of knowingness he sometimes affects toward his characters, a sense of seeing all the way to the bottom of them, evacuating them of all mystery; I hear it in a phrase like “the most ruined and most dull.” There’s a lot of this in Giovanni’s Room, which we talked about when we read it together in the online class I offered last summer. It’s a knowingness that can amount, as it does often in Giovanni’s Room, to dismissiveness.
But here there’s only the slightest hint of it, and only passing, since the music sweeps it away, replaces dullness and ruin with “a curious, wary light.” More beautiful modulation: the bare affirmation of “light,” which would be too bald on its own, unearned and therefore sentimental, tempered by “curious, wary.” They may be called to strictness, attentiveness, but they’re not sure they want that strictness; they’re wary of being conned—or, worse, of not being conned; they’re wary of what they might be forced to see. And they’re wary of being rejected, too, since the saxophonist who had just been courting them now seems disdainful, “contemptuous”; they seem somehow to have become his enemy. I love the way Baldwin paints the dynamic between performer and audience, the performer’s vulnerability and defiance, the stage a pulpit and an arena; and the audience’s vulnerability, too, the way they can make themselves available to the performer, available to be wounded by him—they might offer their love only to have him refuse it—or seal themselves off in unindividuated disdain. Even as the saxophonist makes the audience his antagonist, as he flings his defiance in their faces, he flays himself, he lays himself bare. What had been terrific becomes terrible, and we’re reminded that both words share their root with terror:
And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?
That last slammed out emphasis—Do you love me?—somehow just devastates me. And that’s true even though I can’t help but hear something just slightly false in the litany of woes that precedes it. One of the reasons I like teaching these Shipman classes is just that I often feel so eager to talk with a bunch of people about a book that excites me, to get other opinions: I wonder if you hear here, or elsewhere in Another Country, something slightly rote in a couple of moments where Baldwin hauls out the bogeymen of the 1950s, something that feels a little intended to shock in things like marijuana (which is treated with more than a pinch of sensationalism in the book) and “gang shags”; “sperm-stiffened blanket,” especially, the spondaic kenning of the adjective, feels a little much to me.
Not that it matters: the force of the passage carries us through it, and the point is made. (Made not least in syntax: the right-branching constructions we had earlier are transposed here; the climactic third clause of the long first sentence is delayed by very elaborate left-branching constructions, forcing a leap of syntactic energy across that long list of degradations, across even a semicolon, to arrive at the verb: “he had received.”) The threat the audience feels from the man is less that of an accusation than of a confession—though the point, really, is that these are one and the same: to show them “the blow from which he never would recover” is to show them some truth about the world they share, to make them face up to it. He wants them to acknowledge that great un-American fact, the irreparable, the thing that puts the lie to all our dreams of renewal, of starting over, of being born again; things happen to people all of the time they never recover from, and often enough those people are ourselves. It’s important that the question—“Do you love me?”—comes back, important for its intensity, drilling down in repetition; and important also because we know it’s Rufus’s question, what the music says to him, and so reminds us that we’re rooted in Rufus’s POV. (Given the wild leaps of POV that will come in the section, the reminder is not a bad idea.)
Here’s how the paragraph ends, withdrawing—maybe—from the intensity it has forced us to bear:
The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery: but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odor and the odor of the men around him and “Well, that’s it,” said the bass man. The crowd was yelling for more but they just did their theme song and the lights came on. And he had played the last set of his last gig.
Great art is made of contraries: the ensemble knows, instinctively, that a kind of ironic reserve is what will show the young man’s desperate rage in the best light. The irony works because finally it’s not at odds with the young man’s earnestness but a different species of it, earnestness in a different key: “each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them.” I love the reminder of the physicality of art making, these men steaming and stinking; I love the terrible thought of a rote “theme song” after the saxophonist’s transformative risk. And then that terrible last line, telling us that, after this revelatory, surely educative experience, Rufus’s own journey with artmaking is over. The question the chapter will explore is what keeps him away from music for the next seven months, and what his fate will be. As I’ve said several times, I think this section might be the greatest thing Baldwin achieved in fiction, one of the greatest things I know. Whether you’re able to take the class or not, you should read this great novel.
But I do hope you’ll take the class. It’s fun to think about Baldwin alone, but it’s more fun to do it with friends. All the info you need is here.
As always, thank you for reading—
G.
I am old enough to remember the 1950’s when “way out” was a beatnik term for great. It got so overused that on the “Dobie Gillis Show” in the early 60’s it was a term that Maynard G. Krebs would use for comic effect.
This was an intense and vivid interpretation if the characters in Baldwin’s novel. Very illuminating.