The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin

  The example afforded by the later development, if one can call it that, of John Dos Passos is at least equally disturbing. And I suppose that there is no longer anything to say about Fitzgerald, at least not by me, and not now. Each of these men in his own way dramatizes for me the extraordinary hazards an American artist must run. Particularly, I must say, an American artist, whose tool is the common penny of language: who must try to deal with what words hide and what they reveal.

  We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up; and therefore, it seems to me, the adulation so cruelly proffered our elders has nothing to do with their achievement—which, I repeat, was mighty—but has to do with our impulse to look back on what we now imagine to have been a happier time. It is an adulation which has panic at the root.

  I think that it is true, but I am willing to be corrected, that the previously mentioned giants have at least one thing in common: their simplicity. I do not refer to their styles (though, indeed, flying in the face of both critic and layman, I might be) but to their way of looking on the world. It is the American way of looking on the world, as a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost. It is this almost inexpressible pain which lends such force to some of the early Hemingway stories—including “The Killers” and to the marvelous fishing sequence in The Sun Also Rises; and it is also the reason that Hemingway’s heroines seem so peculiarly sexless and manufactured.

  It is the sorrow of Gatsby, who searches for the green light, which continually recedes before him; and he never understands that the green light is there precisely in order to recede. Ben and Charley and Moorehouse and the entire cast of U.S.A. are tricked by life in just this way; nor is there any intimation in the book that we have, all, always, lived in a world in which dreams betray and are betrayed, where love dies or, more unbearably, fails to die, and where innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward the greater innocence called wisdom.

  As for the work of Faulkner, which would seem, superficially, to escape these strictures, one has only to consider his vision, running throughout his work, of the gallant South. Even when he is most appalled by the crimes of his region—by which I do not so much mean the crimes committed against Negroes as the crimes his forebears and contemporaries have committed, and do commit, against themselves—he is testing it against the vision of a failed possibility.

  One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then, to which I have referred comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed. How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and so desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?

  Writers are extremely important people in a country, whether or not the country knows it. The multiple truths about a people are revealed by that people’s artists—that is what the artists are for. Whoever, for example, attempts to understand the French will be forced, sooner or later, to read Balzac. And Balzac himself, in his own personality, illustrates all those vices, conundrums, delusions, ambitions, joys, all that recklessness, caution, patience, cunning, and revenge which activate his people. For, of course, he is those people; being French, like them, they operate as his mirror and he operates as theirs. And this is also entirely true of American writers, from James Fenimore Cooper to Henry James to William Faulkner.

  Is it not possible to discern, in the features of Faulkner’s Lucas, the lineaments of Fenimore Cooper’s Uncas? And does not Lambert Strether of James’s The Ambassadors come out of the loins of men who conquered a continent, destroying Uncas and enslaving Lucas, in order to build a factory which produces “unmentionable” articles—and which, in the absence of any stronger force, is now ruled by a strong-minded widow? What is the moral dilemma of Lambert Strether if not that, at the midnight hour, he realizes that he has, somehow, inexplicably, failed his manhood: that the “masculine sensibility,” as James puts it, has failed in him? This “masculine sensibility” does not refer to erotic activity but to the responsibility that men must take upon themselves of facing and reordering reality.

  Strether’s triumph is that he is able to realize this, even though he knows it is too late for him to act on it. And it is James’s perception of this peculiar impossibility which makes him, until today, the greatest of our novelists. For the question which he raised, ricocheting it, so to speak, off the backs of his heroines, is the question which so torments us now. The question is this: How is an American to become a man? And this is precisely the same thing as asking: How is America to become a nation? By contrast with him, the giants who came to the fore between the two world wars merely lamented the necessity.

  These two strains in American fiction—nostalgia for the loss of innocence as opposed to an ironical apprehension of what such nostalgia means—have been described, not very helpfully, as the Redskin tradition as opposed to the Paleface. This has never made any sense to me. I have never read an American writer in whom the Redskin and the Paleface were not inextricably intertwined, usually, to be sure, in dreadful battle. Consider, for example, the tormented career of the author of Tom Sawyer. Or, for that matter, the beautiful ambiguity of the author of Leaves of Grass. And what was Hart Crane attempting to celebrate, in his indisputably Paleface fashion, in that magnificent failure which he called The Bridge?

  It seems to me that the truth about us, as individual men and women and as a nation, has been and is being recorded, whether we wish to read it or not. Perhaps we cannot read it now, but the day is coming when we will have nothing else to read. The younger writers, so relentlessly and unfavorably compared to their elders, are nevertheless their descendants and are under the obligation to go further than their elders went. It is the only way to keep faith with them. The real difficulty is that those very same questions, that same anguish, must now be expressed in a way that more closely corresponds to our actual condition.

  It is inane, for example, to compare the literary harvest of World War II with that of World War I—not only because we do not, after all, fight wars in order to produce literature, but also because the two wars had nothing in common. We did not know, when we fought the first war, what we were forced to discover—though we did not face it, and have not faced it yet—when we fought the second. Between 1917 and 1941, the ocean, inconceivably, had shrunk to the size of a swimming pool.

  In 1917, we had no enemies; 1941 marks our reluctant discovery—which, again, we have not faced—that we had enemies everywhere. During World War I, we were able to be angry at the atrocities committed in the name of the Kaiser; but it was scarcely possible in World War II to be angry over the systematic slaughter of six million Jews; nor did our performance at Nuremberg do anything but muddy the moral and legal waters. In short, by the time of World War II, evil had entered the American Eden, and it had come to stay.

  I am a preacher’s son. I beg you to remember the proper name of that troubling tree in Eden: it is “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” What is meant by the masculine sensibility is the ability to eat the fruit of that tree, and live. What is meant by the “human condition” is that, indeed, one has no choice: eat, or die. And we are slowly discovering that there are many ways to die.

  The younger American writers, then, to whom we shall, one day, be most indebted—and I shall name no names, make no prophecies—are precisely those writers who are compelled to take it upon themselves to describe us to ourselves as we now are. The loneliness of those cities described in Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved. And those panaceas and formulas which have so spectacularly fai
led Dos Passos have also failed this country, and the world. The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation—we will never establish human communities—until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.

  We will never understand what motivates Chinese or Cuban peasants until we ask ourselves who we are, and what we are doing in this lonely place. Faulkner’s South, and grandfather’s slaves, have vanished: the sun will never look on them again. The curtain has come down forever on Gatsby’s career: there will be no more Gatsbys. And the green hills of Africa have come out of the past, and out of the imagination, into the present, the troubling world.

  Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves: 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. It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred. It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.

  One must be willing—indeed, one must be anxious—to locate, precisely, that American morality of which we boast. And one must be willing to ask oneself what the Indian thinks of this morality, what the Cuban or the Chinese thinks of it, what the Negro thinks of it. Our own record must be read. And, finally, the air of this time and place is so heavy with rhetoric, so thick with soothing lies, that one must really do great violence to language, one must somehow disrupt the comforting beat, in order to be heard. Obviously, one must dismiss any hopes one may ever have had of winning a popularity contest. And one must take upon oneself the right to be entirely wrong—and accept penalties, for penalties there will certainly be, even here.

  “We work in the dark,” said Henry James, “we do what we can, our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” This madness, thank heaven, is still at work among us here, and 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. There is a thread which unites them all, and which unites every one of us. We have been both searching and evading the terms of this union for many generations.

  · · ·

  We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be. Without this endeavor, we will perish. However immoral or subversive this may sound to some, it is the writer who must always remember that morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new. He must remember, however powerful the many who would rather forget, that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.

  What the writer is always trying to do is utilize the particular in order to reveal something much larger and heavier than any particular can be. Thus Dostoevsky, in The Possessed, used a small provincial town in order to dramatize the spiritual state of Russia. His particulars were not very attractive, but he did not invent them, he simply used what there was. Our particulars are not very attractive, either, but we must use them. They will not go away because we pretend that they are not there.

  Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.

  (1962)

  Geraldine Page: Bird of Light

  I HAVE BORROWED Kazan’s director’s notes for Sweet Bird of Youth, from its first rehearsal to opening night. When I think back now to those five or six weeks of steadily mounting chaos, those desolate, work-lit stages, the makeshift props, the cardboard-tasting coffee, knocking steam pipes, the New York and, subsequently, the Philadelphia chill, I think of Gerry Page. In my mind’s eye, she is standing perfectly still, upstage left, under the gloom and glare of the work light, intently watching Kazan mime a bit of business for the other actors. And she always seemed to me to be like that—terribly quiet and shy, but always watching.

  The first days of rehearsal are always an utter shambles, at least in the memory; so, for that matter, are the last days; but, luckily for the theater, one’s memory of intolerable nervous strain ends almost as soon as the strain does. I watched Kazan, who presumably knew what he was going to do with this improbable and disparate collection of actors. I certainly could tell nothing from the actors. They slouched or lurched or strode about, holding on to their books as though they were infants and looking as though they wondered what the hell they were doing here in this tiny, drafty theater, of all places. I was much too terrified of them all, of the mystic forces almost visibly clashing above their poor, doomed heads, to do more than mutter the briefest of “good morning”s and “good night”s—which, in those first days, was probably just as well. I was especially afraid of Gerry because, to tell the truth, I was afraid for her. I simply could not imagine her as the aging, desperately predatory, and somehow majestic ex–movie queen that Tennessee Williams had created. And he had written it, as always, somewhat larger and more livid than life. How was this open-faced, quiet midwestern-type girl going to make herself believe in this creation? Or make us believe it? My sense of doom was strengthened when I overheard someone whisper one day, “She’s much too young for the part.” I thought so, too—and insufficiently elegant.

  As we all now know, I could not possibly have been more wrong. But now I find it nearly impossible to re-create my view of the steps which led to this transformation. The most crucial steps, of course, did not take place in my view at all, and I suppose that all I really saw were the results of a process which had begun long before rehearsals started. She must have had a very definite sense of the part and how to play it, for, as I now reconstruct those first days, she seemed watchfully and patiently waiting to put her conception to the test.

  But her preternatural coolness, in this forest of knitted brows, left me stupefied then. It was almost as though, with her wedding day upon her and the bridegroom drawing nearer by the second, she yet lingered, in some hideously compromising position, with another boy. “Oh,” she said to me one afternoon, “so-and-so is such a worry bird.” So-and-so had vanished, as did nearly all the actors when they were not needed, gloomily, to study his part. Her book was closed, in her lap. “Perhaps I ought to study,” she said, with a smile—a smile meant, probably, to wipe the bewildered and reproving look off my face—“but…” and her voice tinkled helplessly into silence. I felt that she had put me down as another worry bird.

  On the other hand, she was watching everything Kazan was doing up there on the stage with the other actors. During the entire blocking-out period, she impressed me tremendously with her speed and concentration, but I got no hint of what she would do with the part; and whereas Kazan gave me increasingly precise notes for the other actors, the clipboard is strikingly sparse when it comes to instructions for Gerry Page. Moreover, most of the notes for Gerry are extremely laconic. For instance, “Tell Gerry she’s inaudible” or “Tell Gerry I can’t see her face.” There is scarcely ever on the clipboard any suggestion of what she should be thinking or feeling on this or that movement, on this or that line; and the reason is that her role was worked out in an extremely direct, knock-down-and-drag-out way, and she never needed to be told anything twice. There was very little left for the clipboard by the time she and Kazan got through hammering away at a scene until it began to take the shape they wanted. Tiny little explosions occurred all along the way, illuminating, at first, not so much what Gerry was doing with the part as the treacherous difficulty of the part its
elf. It is difficult because this grotesque creature, the Princess, is always standing a little outside herself and commenting, with extreme distaste, on whatever she is doing. It is on this affliction that her precarious dignity depends. The first hint I caught of this was when Gerry, preparing, rather wearily, to listen to her beach-boy lover’s* discourse, sits down at her wardrobe trunk, picks up her mirror, looks into it, and puts it down again. It was electrifying. It was terribly funny. It was terribly sad. And I also remember her achievement of that moment when the boy finishes his monologue and turns to her, saying, “Princess, will you help me?” And she holds out her arms, incurably predatory even as she is incurably lonely, but, also, at that moment, very beautiful and moving, because for that moment, if only in her own mind, she is both wife and mother and has again a human value for someone in the world.

  Acting is (for me, anyway) one of the most mysterious of all the arts—mysterious because the instrument, the actor himself, without changing at all, undergoes such inexplicable transformations before one’s eyes. I think that this sustained and steady tension between the real and the make-believe is healthy for the soul: it forces one to examine reality again. Seeing Gerry around the studio, or on television, had never caused me, really, to look at her, to wonder about her—and by “wonder” I don’t mean the currently prevalent zoological sniffing which lacks even the primary virtue of curiosity—or, for that matter, to listen to her. I saw a girl who was enormously sympathique, not strikingly pretty, with a rather light, agreeable voice. That’s all I saw. How in the world, then, did this girl manage to turn herself into a ruined and desperate harridan, with a voice that made one jump and with a face into which had somehow been burned the defeats, indignities, and agonies of a long and intolerable lifetime? I know that, technically and theatrically speaking, there are a great many answers to this question, although I also know that no one has ever really answered it. And when the same question confronts us, in life, in time, the answers are even more desperately makeshift. My point, anyway, is that all I saw of Gerry is all that most of us, wandering in our grisly isolation through this world, ever see of any other person. Whoever forces this terrible truth once more on our attention has also helped us to bear it and to that extent, at least, has lessened it. It is a small light brought into a vast darkness—but a small light, considering, especially, what everyone is searching for, may be quite enough. As for the light which Gerry holds, may it burn long.