No Country for Young Men

...These are what Yeats called "disagreeable sentimental sensuality," or, if I may borrow a joke from Randall Jarrell, "real gardens with real toads in them...

...they were like two weary children...

...The sound of his breath filled Eric, heavier than the far-off pounding of the sea...

...Eric...

...The protagonist of Another Country, a young Negro jazz drummer named Rufus Scott, kills himself on page 88, and the rest of the book is taken up with the adventures and misadventures, mainly sexual, of the half dozen people who had been close to him...

...Many of the metaphors and similes have a compulsive sexual tone...

...I would say that he had got the message...

...The flashback-within-flashback organization of the first part is confusing and slipshod...

...The chicken is dismissed in a sentence, although it is the important symbolic act, but their relations in bed occupy seven lurid pages...

...his less charitable feeling is a passionate desire for the extinction of the white race by nuclear bomb...

...Eric...

...Growing just means learning more and more about anguish...

...I believe this to be a tragic error for this talented young writer, and I believe that anyone involved with the book, at Dial or elsewhere, who encouraged or countenanced the decision is a scoundrel, and should be horsewhipped...

...Life is a bitch, baby...

...That consciousness, as this novel shows it, seethes with bitterness and race hate...

...By far the worst writing in the book is in the big sex scenes...

...The part of Another Country that carries absolute conviction is Rufus' neurotic destructiveness and selfdestructiveness, and it is recognizably a warping of race hatred, a turning of it not against true enemies but against friends and against the self...

...The raw bitter scene published in Partisan Review in 1960 is the high point of the book...

...Sometimes it is as glamorous as the Daily Racing Form: "He began to gallop her, whinnying a little with delight...

...Afterwards, when they have a cigarette together, Vivaldo remarks: "You're trying to tell me something...

...Those of us who admire and respect James Baldwin hope that his clear eye will see through the role of cynical bedspring bard as it has seen through so many other imposed and degrading roles...

...She regularly affirms, in language not quotable in this family magazine, the total sexual inadequacy of whites, as well as their moral sickness and physical repulsiveness...

...Ida asks Cass as they drive through Harlem...

...The Silenski boys are beaten up by Negro boys unknown to them out of simple racial hostility, and Richard, their father, automatically comments: "Little black bastards...

...Finally, in the most preposterous scene of all, Vivaldo "surrendered to the luxury, the flaming torpor of passivity, and whispered in Eric's ear a muffled, urgent plea...

...As an enthusiastic admirer of his two earlier novels, I am sorry to find this, his most ambitious effort, a very mixed bundle...

...Displaying Rufus' paranoid suspiciousness and brutal treatment of Leona, the Southern white girl who loves him, and his blind and vicious refusal to be helped by Vivaldo or anyone, it is utterly right and deeply moving, a tribute to the depth of Baldwin's understanding and to his powers as a writer...

...I hope that the hundreds of thousands who read it as pornography will profit from the Negro bitterness and fury to which they are incidentally exposed...

...Powerful it is indeed, in part, and to that extent Schorer, whose critical reputation may not survive his puff for Katherine Anne Porter's novel in the New York Times Book Review, here tells the truth...

...A skyscraper is "blunt like the phallus," a boy's backside "seemed to snarl," a subway train goes through a tunnel "with a phallic abandon...

...Of the important characters, only Rufus and his sister Ida are Negro, but almost everything in the book that is powerful and convincing deals with Negro consciousness...

...The other Negroes in the book share this bitterness and hatred without exception...

...Her conclusion follows logically: "I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder...

...How strange, how strange...

...In her view, the white male has an absolute dependence on Negroes of both sexes as sexual objects, and an inability to recognize them as anything but instruments for that function...

...The first big sex scene is the rape of Leona by Rufus, who has just picked her up, on a friend's terrace during a party...

...Rufus' father, seeing his son's mangled corpse, remarks only: "They don't leave a man much, do they...

...At the end, Ida and Vivaldo forgive each other's rambles and will live happily together...

...But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable...

...she will fry pork chops for him as well as chicken...

...They are no better when not sexual: a garbage truck is "like a gray brainless insect," 42nd street is a "great livid scar," after a marijuana party Vivaldo's mouth feels "like Mississippi in the days when cotton was king...

...A musician who had been Rufus' friend, finding Ida out with a white man, calls her "black white man's whore" and threatens to mutilate her genitals twice, once for himself and once for Rufus...

...Ida is even fiercer...

...Only Richard does not forgive Cass her fling, as we could have guessed from his remark about "black bastards.' True, Rufus is dead, and Leona, back South, is probably in a madhouse, but they are the sacrifices who manure this crop of happiness...

...When Eric returns to America, while waiting for Yves to follow he takes up with Cass...

...Many other parts of the book are weak and unconvincing, as though some lesser writer had done them...

...Other parts of Another Country are weaker and less convincing than anything Baldwin has yet published...

...At the end, it is pure McCall's: Ida looked "very much like a woman and very much like a shy, little girl...

...A few quotations are in order...

...To Cass Silenski, a sympathetic white woman, Ida describes Central Park at night as a great sexual jungle, but in truth that is her vision of New York, of the whole United States...

...Let the liberal white bastard squirm" is Rufus' most charitable feeling toward Vivaldo, his best friend...

...Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under before your very eyes...

...One could not call Another Country a success (even Schorer did not) but it has considerable successes in it, along with the peepshows...

...before robbing Vivaldo, he stares at him "with a calm, steady hatred, as remote and unanswerable as madness...

...The lyrics of blues songs that fill the book, as characters play the phonograph, sing, or recall them, bear no organic relation to the action...

...Relations between Eric Jones, a homosexual actor, and Yves, a French youth with whom he cohabits, are McCall's all through...

...Soon, Yves whispered, sounding insistent, like a child, and with a terrible regret...

...We leave them tearfully clutched in each other's arms: "nothing erotic in it...

...They are merely decorative, and when a character follows a blues line with a comment, "Oh, sing it, Bessie," the reader feels that Baldwin is cheating him, and that he is being asked to believe that the inexpressible has just been expressed...

...We have to take Rufus' talents as a jazz musician on faith, since Baldwin never shows him at work in any believable fashion...

...Eric...

...It is a shy little request to be rectally violated, and Baldwin cheerfully does that scene too: "He moaned and his thighs, like the thighs of a woman, loosed, he thrust upward as Eric thrust down...

...Eventually, Another Country turns out to be a parable of reconciliation, of sin and forgiveness...

...It can be borne, everything can be borne.' Some of the writing is bad by any standard, and exceptionally bad by Baldwin's own high standard...

...And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations...

...Another Country is full of bits of stoic philosophy of the same spurious profundity: "Nobody's willing to pay their dues...

...A big Negro pimp who lives by beating up and robbing the white customers of his Negro whore clearly does it out of principle...

...Having titillated the reader with Negro man and white woman, white man and Negro woman, pederast and youth, Baldwin now gets to do bisexual and friend's wife: "He took her like a boy, with that singlemindedness, and with a boy's passion to please: and she had awakened something in him, an animal long caged, which came pounding out of its captivity now with a fury which astounded and transfigured them both...

...Eric's hands and mouth opened and closed on his lover's body, their bodies strained yet closer together, and Yves' body shook and he called Eric's name as no one had ever called this name before...

...In the book's final sentence, Yves strides happily toward Eric at the airport...

...Here is a sentence that would not disgrace a Toffenetti menu: "He got hung up on her breasts, standing out like mounds of yellow cream, and the tough, brown, tasty nipples, playing and nuzzling and nibbling while she moaned and whimpered and her knees sagged...

...Soon...

...Since Giovanni's Room was distinguished by the delicacy and taste of its erotic scenes, I can only conclude that Baldwin has changed his ways in order to achieve a best-seller, as he surely will...

...The scene of Eric shampooing Yves' hair is my favorite, but here is a typical paragraph from their big sex scene: "And they moaned...

...In the next pairing, Ida goes home with Vivaldo, fries him a chicken, and pops into bed with him...

...Sometimes it is prettily "poetic": "She opened up before him, yet fell back before him, too, he felt that he was traveling up a savage, jungle river, looking for the source which remained hidden just beyond the black, dangerous, dripping foliage...

...Wouldn't you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here...