The Dangerous Divide
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Dangerous Divide The much heralded television program about the childhood of Senator Hubert Humphrey and James Baldwin made its appearance a few weeks ago...
...And Mary Tyler Moore is a suburban cutie, the McCaU's archetype—the kind who gets elected PTA president and yet maintains a certain girlish coquetishness...
...To be sure, the musical background was somewhat folksy...
...He grew up in a small town, in a rambling frame house with a capacious porch...
...we just heard their voices and saw the childhood world they inhabited...
...He is forever the polemicist...
...Leave it to television to lag miles behind the historical precession...
...He loved his father—he kept insisting throughout his recital—and it was his father, a nice, genial populist, who implanted in the boy his taste for politics and his appetite for work...
...Anger suffused everything...
...There are the handsome, slightly impertinent children and the house in the suburbs...
...The gags spill fast, the show is nicely-paced—this is nonsense with a glossy patina...
...Interestingly enough, they are almost always female and light-skinned...
...They struggled to maintain the tremulous pose of the aboutto-be-married, and there was some interplay with an old couple there to witness the ceremony...
...The idea was fairly promising...
...Actually, Baldwin did not tell the story of his childhood...
...They turned up, in a state of high irritability, at a justice of the peace who was reluctant to marry "two such obviously mismated souls...
...But in the executive suites high above the turmoil below, it is business as usual...
...He recollected his childhood in Doland, South Dakota, and as he remembered his house, his father, the pleasures of open country, the camera moved sparely, without tricks, over the landscape he described...
...he believed he was a nigger...
...And there were the faces of Harlem's people —the sullen, suspicious men, the tired women, the marvelous vitality of Harlem at its prayers...
...The church was for him a way of getting back at white people...
...He sounded a good deal like Eisenhower, another walking delegate from Squaresville, and like Humphrey, an honest, earnest man...
...The key symbols were squalid piles of cast-off tires and a discarded car lifted by a derrick about to become scrap metal—Harlem as a vast junkyard...
...Occasionally, there was an unpretentious and fragmented pantomime of what they described...
...An uncommon measure of patience and understanding and tact will be required during the next year or so if we are to survive...
...God would kill them...
...Baldwin as a child and his father are both abstract figures in some searing morality tale...
...Baldwin did, after all, escape, but he insisted nonetheless on making his childhood a dour unsuccess story...
...He was grumpily matter of fact...
...But this did not mean," Baldwin added, "that I loved black people...
...I watched the school the way I watched the streets...
...In the meantime, how does t? try to narrow this dangerous divide...
...It was an interesting revelation of how much TV adheres to a simpleminded middle-class mythology...
...He played at the edge of town in what was then—and still is, one gathers —a genuine prairie...
...For it provided a disturbing counterpoint to Humphrey's recital...
...This tormented man felt betrayed by his children who "reached toward a world which despised him...
...But in all fairness, Humphrey's childhood was an authentic American pastorale...
...he asked...
...This was James Baldwin's childhood—the hate and fear and self-contempt which were his father's legacy to him...
...The point is that television is uniquely equipped to do something about the racial crisis in America...
...Baldwin, too, is a success, but that was not what the viewer was made to see or feel...
...A proud, hardworking man, he was "every day emasculated by white men...
...This is what is happening in all those barber shops in Harlem—people trying to look more white or more black...
...She underwent hymeneal flutters and excitement...
...He told of listening to his father read Whitman, Longfellow and Edgar Guest...
...On the contrary, I despised them and the ghetto from which they could not escape...
...And when young Humphrey was stricken with influenza during the epidemic of the '20s, a neighbor drove 300 miles for a serum which saved the boy's life...
...And pervading everything like some dread smog was the hatred of the white man...
...If Humphrey is pietistic and mellow, Baldwin is unappeasably angry, bitter, irreconcilable...
...He was smart in school and was the high school valedictorian...
...In the end, the marriage took place, and the bridegroom rushed off to take his 10-year-old son to the movies...
...Downtown meant danger, but the Harlem ghetto provided neither assurance of his worth nor hope for the future...
...She became indignant and accused him of "wanting to call off the marriage.-' "Which one...
...Humphrey's universe was the cheerful, smiling domain of smalltown America—constricted, perhaps, hopelessly provincial, even unlovely, but a place where copybook maxims worked...
...His father's Harlem became his own...
...Nobody—neither school, nor church, nor the political establishment—has so much of our ears and eyes and minds...
...It was Humphrey's turn first...
...True, there was the library ("I read books like they were some weird kind of food"), but there were also the police, "perfectly aware of this dark need for vengeance...
...Dick Van Dyke plays the part of a young man in the communications industry...
...But that was quite enough...
...I feared and hated the world...
...And the virtue of the program was that we saw the fugitive charm of that way of life...
...My father is dead," he started, "and he had a terrible life...
...He believed what people said about him...
...Here again was that uncharitable American humor about the aged...
...We never saw the narrators...
...The old people are fatuous, romantically preening, totally imperceptive...
...But what does all this have to do with America in crisis...
...There was little privacy in Doland but lots of friendliness...
...A predictable American boy, Humphrey went to church but liked being liberated for play...
...And all around him were Negroes who did not quite know what they were...
...I therefore caught an episode before it retired for the summer...
...It was the Harlem ghetto, of course, that provided the visual backdrop of Baldwin's bleak autobiography...
...Throughout the narration, Humphrey's voice carried a firm note of conviction...
...Part of the answer was there...
...Van Dyke is an artful comic, rubberfaced and loose-limbed...
...As a father he was cold and distant and told his son all his life that he was the ugliest child he had ever seen...
...It is so impeccably and drearily AilAmerican...
...Humphrey's boyhood was perhaps the last time when the small town had relevance and impact in American life...
...What one felt was the opposition of these two worlds and how great an imaginative leap the Humphreys of America have to make to grasp the experience of the Baldwins...
...The Dick Van Dyke show is a sleek piece of merchandise...
...The couple have their share of marital contretemps— punctuated by humor—but underneath they are as much in love as the day they were married...
...The family drug store failed, the Humphreys lost their home, but the boy went on to success, and can now talk of his childhood in a spirit of recollected innocence and tranquil joy...
...As a matter of fact, the Humphrey family was itself forced out of house and town by the Depression and had to move to the city...
...I had been virtually unaware of the Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS) until it ran off with many of the Emmy awards this spring...
...And this gave the world an altogether murderous power over me...
...For what was immediately apparent—and the recognition was almost frightening—was the incommensurability of the two childhoods...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The Dangerous Divide The much heralded television program about the childhood of Senator Hubert Humphrey and James Baldwin made its appearance a few weeks ago (WABC), and it was a triumph of simplicity...
...Humphrey is Squaresville incarnate, the real thing...
...In fact, in the episode I saw they had to take their nuptial vows once more...
...I wanted school to save me from Harlem," Baldwin said ruefully, "but I knew it couldn't...
...It has just gotten around, as a result of God knows how much pressure, to including Negro models in some of the commercials...
...But what gave Humphrey's account of his childhood special force was its juxtaposition (without any phony transitions) to Baldwin's growing-up years...
...Laura, it appears, had lied about her age when she married, and since there is some illegality about all this, they were advised to undergo the ceremony once more...
...A religious man, his religious faith was only a mask for his hatred...
...By itself, the Humphrey boyhood would be merely another slice of Americana, given special poignance, perhaps, by the thought that small towns today are full of pizza places and television sets—little more than rural suburbs...
...The camera followed an old touring car of the '20s as it rattled along a country road by night, and this evoked, as nothing else could, something of the terror and loneliness which were part of that life...
...His spouse, played by Mary Tyler Moore, is the classical American housewife with that American vivacity—verging on nerves—which is both the joy and despair of visiting Europeans...
...Vaguely uneasy about having included Guest in that roster, he added without apology: "He was sort of a people's poet...
...His conclusion was infinitely sad: "I was forced to admit something that I had always hidden from myself: that I hated and feared white people...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 13
