Another Country (1962) - James Baldwin

It was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making life bearable – only love, and love itself mostly failed.

Upon completing my reading of Another Country, I had read four Baldwin novels and five of his essay collections. I think it bears highlighting that Another Country is Baldwin at his most ambitious and, in many ways, his most sprawling. It’s Baldwin’s third novel and, at over 450 pages, it’s longer than his first two put together. And this ambition is both one of the book’s strengths and one of its weaknesses. I started to realize this very early in the book, as Baldwin is sketching the backstory and character of one of the book’s central characters, Rufus Scott, an angry, destitute jazz musician lost in the shadows of New York City. In the other eight books I read prior to Another Country, one of the most astounding things about Baldwin was the sense of absolute control, total discipline, to the prose. This isn’t to say that the prose isn’t startlingly alive and raw in those books because it always is with Baldwin; but there is also the sense that every single word has been chosen for maximum impact. This was also true in interviews sometimes. When you watch Baldwin, you get the sense that he never misspoke, never used one word when another would do better, always said exactly what he meant in exactly the way he meant to, never left a hint of ambiguity unless he intended it. Well, in Another Country, a different Baldwin is on display.

In Another Country, Baldwin’s reach, in my opinion, somewhat exceeds his grasp. Whether he was consciously striving for this or not, Another Country can be read as a stab at that mythical Great American Novel and, like most books that take a stab at that status, it finds itself unable to reach the pinnacles of its ambitions. For the first time, Baldwin seems a little out of control. You can feel the characters and the story slipping through his fingers at times, pulling him away from points he seemed about to make and into disjointed detours. I think it’s just a symptom of Baldwin working at a scale he hasn’t really worked at before. But I don’t mean to imply that this is some kind of utter failure. It is a more challenging book than Baldwin’s other novel; Baldwin’s writing is often quite dense, but here it meanders in a way that it doesn’t typically and is, in some ways, a bit more challenging to get through.

It will also be very challenging emotionally for some readers. This is, of all of the Baldwins I’ve read, by far the angriest book. Given that anger is an emotion that runs through a lot of Baldwin’s work, that’s really saying something. There’s a barely suppressed rage trembling through a lot of this book, perhaps not surprisingly given how much of the book is taken up with interracial relationships. Rufus Scott, the jazz musician I mentioned before, takes up with a mentally unstable white woman from the South, and Rufus’ sister Ida finds herself in a tumultuous relationship with Rufus’ best friend Vivaldo. Even though Ida and Vivaldo do their best to see each other as full human beings, when the stresses come, as they do with any relationship, they start to fracture along racial lines. When they want to hurt each other, it’s all too easy to do; the racial ammunition is already loaded. But the book isn’t entirely taken up with racial issues. It has things to say about class and success and the things that drive people to seek companionship with each other. It has no shortage of great characters. Rufus’ mentor, Richard, is a writer who, because of his obsession with success, has left his wife, Cass, isolated. Eric is an American actor that has been living in Europe and is now in the process of returning to the United States. All of these people are, in some way or another, very broken and they’re seeking a measure of healing for their brokenness in the arms of someone else and, for Baldwin, it’s both an admirable thing and a doomed thing to seek redemption through human connection. We are, after all, seeking redemption from our essential human brokenness, so how do we expect to receive that redemption from another human, who is essentially broken themselves?     

So, Another Country is not an easy book to read. It’s dense and thorny and messy, sometimes purposely, sometimes not. This is probably overall the most flawed of Baldwin’s fiction that I’ve read, but its flaws are part and parcel of its great ambitions and I find it hard to ultimately hold those flaws against it. It is a book that is singular among Baldwin’s output (at least what I’ve read) and the prose is rich, the themes are compelling and the characters are beautifully sketched and fascinating. It’s a book well worth engaging with. It may be a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece it ultimately is because I simply can’t deny the incredible richness of the journey it took me on. 4 stars.

tl;dr – Baldwin’s most ambitious early novel is also his most flawed, but it’s still a rich, compelling and fascinating tragedy that moved me deeply; a challenging, but very rewarding, read. 4 stars.  

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Giovanni's Room (1956) - James Baldwin

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

James Baldwin took quite a few risks with his second novel. In contrast to his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, which took place entirely in the context of an African American church in Harlem, Giovanni’s Room takes place entirely in Europe and all of the main characters are white. The book also deals very explicitly with both homosexuality and bisexuality with, again, almost all of the main characters being one or both of those and almost the entire book taking place in what we would now call “queer spaces.” Baldwin’s American publisher, Knopf, reportedly told him that he should burn the book rather than publishing it. According to Baldwin, they told him, “This new book will ruin your career, because you’re not writing about the same things and in the same manner as you were before.” That phrasing, however, seems almost specifically designed to excite Baldwin and really any great artist. The book was well received at the time and, I think, has only grown in its reputation since.

The narrator of the story is white, blonde, American and his name is David. In case you couldn’t tell, he’s an icon of masculinity and all of its most beautiful strengths. He’s also bisexual and he hates himself for it more than anyone else ever could. He’s a deeply broken man, crippled by the shame he feels over his past dalliances into homosexuality and the deeply toxic relationship he had with his hyper-masculine father. David is engaged to a woman, and her name is Hella after, one supposes, the Goddess of Death. She has left him in Paris for a time on his own, and he has found himself drawn into the world of a small gay bar and it is there that he meets Giovanni, the bartender. The two young men will fall into an often awkward and uncomfortable sexual affair and through this affair, their characters will be vivisected in harsh detail until we feel that we understand them too well, that we have seen too far into their deep wounds and their gnarled scar tissue. The book delves deeply into some of the supporting characters as well. Jacques is an aging bon vivant who preys on young men by using his wealth to seduce them into relationships with him. Once Hella returns to Paris, Baldwin breathes enough life into her to make her feel like a real character, not just a plot device. At one point in the novel, David, in a panic to reassert his masculinity after his affair with Giovanni has reached new heights, picks up a woman named Sue in a bar in order to have sex with her and, though she’s only in a couple of scenes, she comes to life as a troubled character, unfairly drawn into David’s world through no fault of her own.

The book is ultimately a tragedy of men undone by their fatal flaws. David’s fatal flaw is his deep self-loathing and, while it’s easy to create a character with self-loathing, it’s not easy to write them well and Baldwin has done maybe as good a job as has ever been done with the archetype. To say the book is tragic perhaps doesn’t explicate it well enough; the book is also just crushingly sad and the ending is utterly bleak. It’s also a book that’s unbelievably thematically rich. Even as the characters feel achingly human, the themes that the book stirs up are gripping. It’s a book that I feel I could read again and again and notice something new every time. That’s how deep it feels, how rich. And the book is, if not quite a novella, a shockingly short novel. The Penguin Modern Classics edition clocks in at almost exactly 150 pages, which makes the entire thing all the more incredible an achievement. Of the four Baldwin novels I’ve read, I think Giovanni’s Room is the best, the richest, the most emotionally moving. If I had some small reservations about Go Tell It On the Mountain, I have absolutely none about Giovanni’s Room. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece of literature, one of the greatest novels of its time or any other. 4 stars.

tl;dr – boasting incredibly rich themes and multi-layered characters, this short novel about the queer experience of a self-loathing American expat packs a devastating emotional punch. 4 stars.

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