LOVE AND HATE
Johnson, Lucy
Love and Hate Another Country, by James Baldwin. Dial Press. 436 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson James Baldwin's third novel (he has also written two books of essays) is a very personal...
...Baldwin's struggle to pacify this barrel of snakes ends up as a ragged novel, in part fascinating, strong, and tremendously moving...
...Ida, his sister, and three whites—Vivaldo, his best friend, Eric, a homosexual, and Cass, a wise mother-figure—form various sexual relationships among themselves and with others...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson James Baldwin's third novel (he has also written two books of essays) is a very personal statement...
...His conclusion: "It was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making life bearable—only love, and love itself mostly failed...
...They have strong scenes and statements, but there is little drama of continual development and growth of character...
...Rufus Scott, a talented young Negro jazz drummer, torn by racial hatred and sexual conflicts, in utter despair jumps off the George Washington Bridge...
...He seems to be trying to reach a synthesis of all the various elements in himself which he has expressed a few at a time in his other work—trying to impose his secrets on the world and make them "a part of the world's experience...
...How can his closest friends, tormented by their own versions of his problems, face these horrors and still not take the jump themselves...
...At the same time none of his five major characters is really complete, perhaps because each represents conflicting elements of one man and one society...
...The chaos upon which he tries to impose order is "a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male or female," and where violence, hatred, and terror were always present...
...And the writing is uneven...
...There are equally thorough, but less convincing, descriptions of a number of forms of sexual activity—less convincing in that they bring only the reaction of so-</m<'.s-the-way-that's-done...
...without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness...
...More convincing is the examination of the reasons for performing the sexual acts involved, the intricate interplay of love and hate...
...Without this effort," Baldwin has one of his characters continue, "the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished...
...Although the two books could hardly be less alike, Another Country reminded me of Clancy Sigal's Going Away—both in the importance each has for its author as a summing up and for the validity and vitality each has in spite of roughness of execution...
...they hate, love, experiment, and finally work out some kind of temporary balance for themselves...
...The variety of racial feelings is explored in all its violence and cruelty, climaxed by Ida's triumphant humiliation and the reverse irony of Vival-do's cry: "You want to hate me because I'm white, because it's easier for you that way...
Vol. 26 • August 1962 • No. 8
