In Perspective and Anger

...They are intelligent, stirring, but unnecessarily inflamed by guilt and by the conviction that the Negro's state of mind is incomprehensible to whites...

...In the recollection of Leo's first sexual encounter with a white woman, we feel, despite her rough good will toward him, his tremendous sense of fear and menace, and his overwhelming consciousness of her white body...

...Leo's father is a peasant from Barbados who still dreams of his descent from kings, and is degraded by his life in the ghetto...

...One gets a hint of it occasionally in some Jewish writers, and of course it is most overt in Italian films like 8V2, where the repetition of a lovely song evokes the protective bathing scene out of the hero's childhood...

...And this possibility of creating my language out of my pain, of using my pain to create myself, while cruelly locked in the depths of me, like the beginning of death, yet seemed, for an instant, to be on the tip of my tongue...

...Along amiable stretch of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone takes place outside a small town where Barbara and Leo are summer apprentices in the "Actors' Means Workshop...

...Still, it is pleasant to envision this urban writer out in the open air, living in an old shack that smells of Gorgon-zola cheese, mowing lawns and repairing stage props...

...The book begins with Leo Proudhammer, an actor of renown already in his 40s, recovering from a heart attack...

...There are certain exigencies—war, parenthood, love and race relations—that seem to lure writers down to the most rhetorical depths of their beings...

...Though Leo's family is poor, though the snow is hardly ever shoveled away, this is not the Harlem of whores and pimps and drug addicts that we know from Claude Brown, or the fatherless Harlem of the Moynihan Report, but one of the world's most familial communities...

...WRITERSi°^WRITING In Perspective and Anger By Isa Kapp Now that the sufferings of the American Negro have vaulted into the transforming limelight of journalism and commission reports, a new kind of invisibility has entered Negro-white relations: the block to emotional vision imposed by statistics, sociologizing, and the albatross image of the Negro as a Problem...

...Proudhammer, a woman with amused eyes and skin the color of bright bananas, shrewdly manages the grocer into giving her cornmeal and red beans and chocolate cake even though her bill is running up...

...This kind of rhetoric eats up our energies and our imaginations, and is no substitute, either in art or life, for precision and hard work...

...In Coining Issues GEOFFREY WOLFF on Reynolds Price's 'Love and Work' ASHER BRYNES on Gunnar Myrdal's 'Asian Drama' Some of his strongest, most authentic portraits are of theater people, like Rags Roland, the lady producer "with a face as square and expressive as granite," who wore relentless sack-like printed dresses that "boomed like trumpets...

...Probably that is where the trouble lies—Baldwin has always seemed least at ease in the region of his mind where sex and attitude toward race happen to meet...

...In the stifling room of his pretensions and expectations, we stumbled wretchedly about, stubbing our toes, as it were, on rubies . . . ." One of the father's few satisfactions is to go shopping with his wife and two sons under the bridge at Park Avenue, to pick up a fish and say, " "That fish looks fresh, don't it...

...Partly they are a hammer to batter down the walls of white obtuseness...

...or his description of the many frontiers he has crossed in Europe, though "the most dramatic, the most appalling, remains that invisible frontier which divides American towns, white from black...

...And so the counterpoint of responses proceeds, with Baldwin railing and mourning when he finds alteration, and marveling when his feelings remain the same...

...a little embarrassed, but on the whole pleased that our father was so smart...

...He has found room to plant, among the obscenities, a considerable amount of tenderness, physical pleasure, and charm...

...and then to force us, by his unremitting rudeness, to participate in his anger...

...If this is too close a likeness to Sidney Poitier, it is nevertheless infectious, and Baldwin has a gift for making us feel the physical presence of his relatives...

...Up to this point, in fact, his prose is as clear and unfaltering as a country river...

...We begin to wonder why Baldwin has raised the color curtain in so personal a theater of human behavior, only to discover that when his experience varies, and Leo is on more familiar and natural terms with a woman, skin tone ceases to be a prevaling consideration...

...Leo's brother Caleb, 17 when Leo is 10, "laughed with his whole body, perhaps touching his shoulder against yours, or putting his head on your chest for a moment, and then careening off you halfway across the room or down the block...

...Responses are measured against the impact of time and age, character is held up against its former self, love and sex are estimated against the context in which the hero finds them...

...and of course there is the same lop-sided and stagey quality to his role as celebrity and Negro Spokesman...

...Then his brother Caleb is sent to jail for a crime he did not commit, and the novel turns into a formidable catalogue of racial antagonisms and slights...

...Often philo-European, Baldwin writes admiringly of the Greek who directs Leo in The Corn is Green, contrasting his forthrightness and sophistication on questions of race with the irritating innocent earnestness of Americans...

...the city doorman's snobbishness...

...Perhaps, in addition, he is uncertain on the political level of his sudden passionate approach to the black militants, and of just what his position as Negro spokesman should be today...

...Come on.' And we would walk away, leaving the fish-stand owner staring...

...until my pain became invested with a coherence and an authority which only I, alone, could provide...

...After shifting from the hospital scene, the first part of the novel is about boyhood in Harlem...

...18 The Ne\f Leader Mrs...

...Well that fish ain't as fresh as I am, and I been out of water...

...I also especially enjoyed the section of the novel in which Leo gets a singing job in a Greenwhich Village restaurant called The Island, and works for a stolid and decent West Indian woman who sends all the money she earns back to Trinidad...

...We can see an example, carried almost to apocalypse, in Richard Oilman's recent New Republic articles on Negro writing...

...This is something of a mystery, for any kind of love ought to be communicable if the writer is sure of his feelings...

...Partly they are the language of Baldwin's resentment and disabuse, as he becomes cognizant of the unpredictable limitations society was artificially loading upon him for his color...

...Unlike Another Country, which was excited, bitter and immediate, the new work is much concerned with seeing events in perspective, with taking what Baldwin has called "a long look back" before he looks forward...

...Thus, the successful Barbara of the present, with her youthful love for the hero now sedated into camaradierie by mutual concessions to their acting careers and to the social difficulties of remaining together, is decidedly less attractive than the ambitious wholesome Barbara Bel Geddes type he remembers, who lived in the same Lower East Side rooming house he did when he was 20...

...There are several such touching scenes of snatching friendship on the run: In the midst of their isolation, strangers meet and are astonished at how well they get along...

...The novel is brimming with peculiarly American experience: the streets of Harlem, the theater parties, trips to the movies to see Ann Sheridan, the songs that reverberate all the way through?Stormy Weather," "I've Got Those Mad about Him Sad about Him Blues," the traditional folk song of the title: "Never seen the like since I been born,/The people keep a-com-ing, and the train's done gone"—and that is what makes it so contradictory and haunting...

...Successful though it largely is, the novel contains at least one section every bit as distressing as anything in Another Country: the final story of Leo's affair with Christopher, a springy and aggressive young black militant...

...the insidious newspaper reporter who reminds the actor that "No Negro has ever made it as big as you...

...But throughout most of this book Baldwin speaks eloquently for the Negro, as well as for the rest of us, because he speaks with devastating candor for himself...

...All of them could be dealt with more honestly without any rhetoric, or what Aaron Wildavsky calls the "empty-head blues...

...James Baldwin's new novel, uneven in quality, raging and outraged, gives the Negro people back their private dimension, and forces his readers to return to the scene of individual incidents of prejudice, to linger over the indignities visited upon single persons who wince and smolder...

...It must mean a lot—to your people...

...Then he settles down with a book and some Jamaican run until it is time for people to arrive...

...He comes in around five to sweep, scour the pots, soak the black-eyed peas for Hopping John, and set up the tables...

...whereas in his own life, Baldwin is enormously involved, often living in many worlds at the same time...

...Though still wry, loyal and anti-conventional, her middle-aged phrases sound lame and corny, and her friendship is almost oppressive...

...They done doctored that fish...

...I think a great many of them belong there...

...But mainly, they are Baldwin's vehicle for speaking plainly about all aspects of the life he led and the emotions that were brewing in him...

...While Baldwin has now weeded most of the coyness out of his moments of sex (and the book is a regular kaleidoscope of these), all his old embarrassment has crept back into the love story...

...the obscene combination of lust and loathing that foams up in prison guards and country louts...

...He is terrified, jumps on to another train because he sees a black man on it, who befriends him and directs him home...

...In one episode, the 10-year-old Leo suddenly realizes that all the colored people have disappeared from the subway train he is on...

...It gives us an unsentimental re-education in what it means to be a bright, expectant, sensitive Negro in America...

...Yet this only brings to mind Baldwin's confession, in an old essay, that he was never really at home in Europe...

...Even more, I think Baldwin needs to protect his style from the very rhetoric that launched his distinguished essays and caused everybody to know his name, but now has fallen far from its original splendor: "I was beginning to apprehend the unutterable dimensions of the universal trap, and my race was revealed as my pain?my pain—and my rage could have no reason, nor submit to my domination, until my pain was assessed...

...Some of his finest writing here has to do with this complexity, like the scene in which Leo yearns to be approached by two Negroes while he is eating with his white friends in an Italian restaurant...

...His provocation is JAMES BALDWIN clear, his method to some extent effective—yet eventually this torrent of dirty words spoils his writing the way a whole jar of olives, individually pungent and startling, might together ruin a modest pot of chicken tetrazzini...

...Since he is an immensely controlled writer, able to withhold chunks of information as well as changes of outlook from us until they acquire the momentum he demands, I assume he must have intended, by means of his early serene and civil prose, to let us participate in his innocence...

...Many nationalities are too puritanical and flesh-denying to convey so openly the physical attachment and comfort between members of a family...

...Almost every conceivable form of prejudice is described: white policemen frisking a 10-year-old boy in Harlem...

...and the flashback to earlier periods, sometimes a tinselly device, becomes a very logical way to show the wearing down of patience, tolerance, even the capacity for pleasure...

...Acting is not a bad surrogate for Baldwin's real vocation—both call for the same stern discipline and erratic hours...

...The remarkable thing about James Baldwin, however, is that he is not really at the mercy of his rhetoric or his rage...

...Baldwin is straightforward and artless in these family episodes, because his thoughts are on others, not on his self image, and the outside world still fascinates him more than his own role in it...

...Somewhere in the middle of the book, Baldwin's language changes with a vengeance and we are inundated by cascades of four-letter words coming so thick and fast that there is hardly a five-letter word in between...

...Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (Dial, 484 pp., $5.95) is an autobiographical novel, as was Go Tell It on the Mountain, and is based on experiences Baldwin has taken many years to absorb and reconsider...

...Partly they are the true vernacular of the low life to which we consign a significant portion of our population...

...But there is often a certain intellectual vapidity among stage people, and a dismal detachment from normal routines and involvements...

...Baldwin is evidently much taken with the closeness and interdependence of the acting life, and his manner here is over-lyrical...