The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (31 page)

There is a moment, a brief flash of universal comprehension, in which he is awed by seeing himself as part of the whole of humanity. “The silence in the room was deep as the night itself. Biff stood transfixed, lost in his meditations. Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended. . . . And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.”

Biff calls for his assistant, but there is no answer. He then tries to calm down and reason away the terror he feels. “Somehow he remembered that the awning had not yet been raised. As he went to the door his walk gained steadiness. And when at last he was inside again he composed himself soberly to await the morning sun.”

The story ends, and no matter how many years go by, it will remain the same: we continue to wait with Biff for the rising sun as a new generation of readers discovers these characters and gives them a new life. What good is it for us, seventy-four years later, in the second decade of the twenty-first century? The realities of our lives have changed a great deal since the publication of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
in 1940, on the eve of America’s involvement in a war not of its own making—its last “good” war, followed by Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The inarticulate feeling of rage that stalked Dr. Copeland has been articulated, leading to a real march on Washington and many more confrontations before an African American could be elected president of the United States. And yet the poverty and inequality that Jake railed against, the savage daily threats to individual integrity and liberty, still exist and are justified in far more sophisticated ways. The labor movement has moved beyond Jake’s dreams, and yet many of the same questions he had then could be asked today. The miniature radios Mick dreamed of that were small enough to fit into your ear have been invented, along with so many other unimaginable gadgets and innovations. And the creative urges that made Mick roam the streets are as potent and neglected today as they were then. My conversations with Mike and Joanna have remained with me all these years, as well as the questions, carrying the seeds of their own answers, and the resolution inviting and implying new questions.

I wonder what I would have done differently had I known how easy it is to lose people, how someone who has been an intense part of your life can suddenly vanish, leaving their traces only in a few selective memories. That is what happened to Joanna. I went away for the summer, and on my return she was not there. A few times, people from my past life have called, e-mailed or appeared out of the blue at a talk or a book signing, saying, “Do you remember me?” This happened most recently during a talk at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, when I ran into my friend Joan Frederick, with whom I had fled into the National Gallery when we were teargassed during a demonstration in Washington. Maybe Joanna will appear similarly unannounced, and we will continue our discussion and she will tell me how wrong I still am. I am not sure I will concede, but I will always be grateful to her for the gift of the southern sun.

Some of the facts have changed, but the South has the same climate, with the same sun shining over its small towns. It has become more prosperous in parts, with its own skyscrapers now home to Fortune 500 companies in cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, Dallas and Birmingham, and yet the hankering of isolated human souls, the urge to articulate, to connect, to belong, still remains. The creative urge has not changed any of the old verities and truths Faulkner wrote about—nor will they fundamentally change for as long as the beating of the human heart remains the same. Some attention must be paid to things that endure.

In “Loneliness . . . An American Malady,” McCullers argued that America has been caught in a protracted adolescence, searching for an identity and wanting desperately to belong. In the twenties and thirties, right until it entered the Second World War, America was undergoing a process of questioning and self-questioning, wondering how to define itself and relate to the rest of the world. And like all younger siblings, it seems it will never completely lose the sense of being the youngest, with all its privileges and burdens. Perhaps this is the main reason why McCullers’s novel still reads as if it were written yesterday.

But each new generation must discover its own response to its own specific form of loneliness. What we do know is that loneliness, in and of itself, is not a positive attribute. Even the lone cowboy who rides into town needs a few good guys to defend and bad guys to defeat before he can move on to the next town.

What if today we have finally reached the point of technological progress at which we can eliminate solitariness? What if the efficiency that we so worship, rather than paving the way for the actualization of passions, has become a tool for easy escapes, inviting less thinking, less confrontation with real pain and actual impediment? What if in our search for elsewhere, we have managed to destroy this place, this home we live in, pillaging our natural resources and turning all reality into virtual reality? What if, gradually losing our ability to be childlike, we have remained childish and infantile? What if that prized individualism, the one that was worth risking life and property to secure, that found its apotheosis in a kind of universal empathy, is being transformed into a narcissistic self-indulgence or greedy selfishness? The world of McCullers’s characters is inherently in opposition to that of Babbitt and his mates, but in the history of America and American fiction, there has been a constant battle between the two mind-sets. Can we afford to let Babbitt win?

Last September I gave a talk at the Baltimore Book Festival. I should have stayed at home—I had work to do—but I can seldom avoid the temptation of a book festival, with its transient sense of festivity and community: all those strangers sharing the same interest, if not exactly the same passions. Add to this the fact that I was hosted by one of my favorite independent bookstores, the Ivy, and my university, Johns Hopkins, and the lure was inescapable.

I love the chaos of book festivals, the way different characters, cultures, stories and times all jumble together to the accompaniment of music, food and art, all the good things in life shared with gusto, but not too seriously. It is as if the abundant variety of human existence contained in the thousands of books under consideration spills over onto the sidewalks and streets of the host city. This particular festival was sunny and celebratory. I couldn’t help but smile as I made my way through various book pavilions, from mystery tales and romance to “literary” fiction, poetry, science fiction and comic books. From time to time I felt I’d spotted a comic book character walking around or waiting in line at the food vendors, but mostly it was couples holding hands and browsing while their children squealed and fought or found distractions of their own.

Each city lends something of its character to these events. With Baltimore, home of Omar Little and at one point Edgar Allan Poe, its grittiness gives it an edge, different from the more formal arrangements of the National Book Festival, in Washington, which was held on the National Mall and attended by well over a hundred thousand people until 2014, when it was exiled to the ungainly convention center—a move that was more a reflection of the city’s “guardians” than of its citizens. Baltimore’s festival had a feel of the mass gatherings of the sixties and seventies, where people doing their own thing were tuned in to one another and appeared to be conspicuously enjoying themselves, a conspiracy of smiles that seemed to be a sort of protest against the harsh reality of the city. But of course the resemblance was, on some level, skin-deep: here the dominant attitude was one of giving in and having fun, rather than protesting and having fun.

I had about an hour and a half to spare before my talk. I like to walk or roam around a place as I fashion my thoughts. Browsing in the sun, I tried to focus on my topic that day. I carried two quotes with me, one by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the other by James Baldwin, and wondered if I should insert one or both into my speech. It wasn’t that they were necessary, but I liked them, having come across them the day before while thinking of what I had taken to calling “my Baldwin chapter,” though my editor would only say, “Let’s see.”

I strolled in a state of mind I would define as “alert absentmindedness,” taking in the sights and sounds while busily weaving ideas into words. These times of aimless wandering are some of my most lucid moments, before the painful process of combining and shaping the exuberant jumble of thought into a coherent form and structure begins. Thoughts flowed freely as I earnestly poured out words to my imaginary interlocutors; I was seemingly as oblivious of the world around me as it was of me. That’s the thing about books, I thought. They’re like children: enthralling, exasperating and not quite so predictable as you might have imagined. You believe you are in control, but a serious give-and-take is really in operation, and in some mysterious way they are equally in charge of you, dragging you to new places, bringing strangers into your house and questioning your ways and habits. So there I was, having initially wanted to write about twenty-four books but now focusing on three, wanting to concentrate on the text but constantly being pulled away by the facts of life and the world around me. Unlikely places, events and people kept tempting me with new revelations, flashing like fireflies and demanding my attention. In the Metro, in the middle of a conversation, even while watching a film, I would take out my pen and paper and jot down notes, some of which I could not decipher when I turned to them later at home.

When I started writing this book all too many years ago, I knew I wanted to begin with Mark Twain and end with James Baldwin. What was it that made me see Baldwin as Twain’s literary kith and kin? He himself never made such a claim; in fact, he largely ignored Twain, preferring that other, altogether more patrician great realist, Henry James. Baldwin liked to cite an uncharacteristically rousing quote from the Master: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” To this he would add, in “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” one of his best essays on literature, “This madness, thank heaven, is still at work among us. . . . It will bring, inexorably, to the light at last the truth about our despairing young, our bewildered lovers, our defeated junkies, our demoralized young executives, our psychiatrists and politicians, cities, towns, suburbs, and interracial housing projects.” Baldwin genuinely believed that literature had a vital role to play as a sort of social glue. He felt there was, as he put it, “a thread . . . which unites every one of us” and saw a deep-rooted and necessary affinity between our everyday lives, anxieties, joys and sorrows and the act of writing.

Writers are truth tellers, and that can sometimes put them in conflict with the state. “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it,” Twain once said in a searing critique of complacent jingoism. “The gospel of monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had: —the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he ( just
he,
by himself ) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.” If Twain abhorred the smug bombast of self-proclaimed patriots, it was not because he did not love his country. He held it up to a higher standard, that of the ultimate code of honor, courage and decency: the standard of the writer. The writer questions social norms and homes in on uncomfortable truths. He (or she) forces us to admit impulses and yearnings we would prefer to ignore or deny, and to acknowledge the yawning gap between what is and what should be. The American writer does so with a special mandate, Twain suggests, because in a democratic society, far more so than in a monarchical or totalitarian one, the writer speaks for the individual and not for the state. America has always conceived of herself as a country that exalts the individual, and it is not incidental that she has nurtured such exceptional and varied writers. But she has not always made her writers feel altogether at home.

“I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West,” Baldwin wrote in
Notes of a Native Son
. Time and again in his essays, talks and interviews, he tried to describe what it meant to live as the grandson of a slave, born illegitimate and living in dire poverty. “It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven,” he said, “to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.”

There is such generosity of spirit in Baldwin, despite all the hatred and humiliation piled on him. He recognized in each of us the potential for the best and the worst. “I love America more than any other country in the world,” he said, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”

When he was told by Bobby Kennedy that someday, in thirty years’ time, he could be president, Baldwin said, “What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.” I suggest he would nevertheless have celebrated in his own fashion when America elected Barack Obama; I wish I could have seen that Baldwin smile, half of which would be on his lips and the other half somewhere deep within, reacting to the news. And yet I suggest he would be as anxious now as he was then about the state of his country. Certain victories have been won, major victories, but new problems have arisen, and some of the old ones have resurfaced in new garb. He said, back in 1961, “I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world.”

• • •

As I meandered among the stalls, I returned to the unexpected similarities between Twain and Baldwin, in particular their idea of patriotism, a topic I was going to talk about that day—loyalty to country, or to the act of writing and what many writers call “truth.” Why was it that after the Islamic revolution, when I wanted to make sense of things and examine how much of what our new rulers (or old ones, for that matter) said about Iran was true, I had turned not to political theorists or historians but to writers and poets? And why was I doing the same thing now in America? “Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves,” Baldwin once said. To him, “this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity, of writers.”

I stopped at the tent set up by Red Emma’s bookstore, named after Emma Goldman, the legendary radical anarchist. A little farther, lo and behold, there was the H. L. Mencken Society, a tribute to the brilliant, grouchy inventor of the term “Booboisie,” a very famous critic in the first few decades of the last century whom few people read today. I was sure that many of today’s young would enjoy these eccentric and exceptional characters, committed and utterly unconventional, if only they would be given a chance to discover them. For some reason I found myself imagining a comic book version of their lives—what fun would a comic book Mencken have today, bombarding us with his word inventions! Just imagine what he would have to say of some of our political leaders. He’d give Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a run for their money.

Baldwin was born fourteen years after Mark Twain’s death, and yet despite their different backgrounds ( just being black and white was enough to create a chasm between them), they had both in their own ways experienced the worst that human beings can do to one another. It is enough to read Twain’s “United States of Lyncherdom” or “Only a Nigger” to understand his rage and his shame. What he was reticent to write about was his own personal life. “You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it,” he said, in an effort to explain why he was having such a hard time writing his memoirs. “You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting.” But that is exactly what James Baldwin did: he laid bare his private soul and did not shy away from the shame and the guilt. One of his greatest artistic achievements was to seamlessly weave together the private and the public, the personal and the political and the social. Yet his life as a writer was dedicated to the proposition that one should not be defined by one’s biography. His highest achievement was to transcend, rather than succumb to, the limitations imposed on him by the circumstances of his life. “Now, when you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual,” said an interviewer in a clip. “You must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’”

And there is Baldwin, with his huge, bulging eyes, looking roguishly both at and beyond his interlocutor, saying, “No, I thought I’d hit the jackpot!” And then, to the accompaniment of the audience’s laughter, he rejoins, “It was so outrageous, you could not go any further. So you had to find a way to use it.” And use it he did.

Baldwin was the grandson of a slave, and he never knew his biological father. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Harlem, the stepson of an abusive preacher whom all his life he called father and whom he loved and hated in equal measure (“righteous in the pulpit and a monster in the house,” he would later say). He would abandon him and his mother along with Harlem, greater New York City, and America and move thousands of miles away across the Atlantic to Paris in order to write, and through his writing he discovered something essential about his stepfather, his race, his city, his people and his country. Perhaps most crucially of all, he discovered James Baldwin, and rescued him from the clutches of racism, poverty and abuse to rewrite his life story all over again. For much of his life he was an outsider even to himself: in one interview he spoke of “all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin.”

Other writers have left America to find themselves and their worldview—Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and later Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bowles and Richard Wright, who was at one time his mentor, having taken him under his wing. But Paris was a different experience for each of them, and Baldwin’s Paris was not Hemingway’s
Moveable Feast
. It was the bleak and seedy Paris of
Giovanni’s Room,
usually gray and raining or about to rain. Baldwin said he went to Paris not because it was Paris—it could have been any other place—but because he had to leave New York. In a film made of him by Sedat Pakay in 1970, Baldwin says, “One sees [one’s country] better from a distance . . . from another place, from another country.” David in
Giovanni’s Room
articulates his creator’s viewpoint when he says, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”