New Ways to Kill Your Mother (39 page)

In the next entry, he ends with a remark that is one of the few endearing remarks in his journals and should be the motto of
every writer alive: ‘All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June.’

Cheever enjoyed being famous and dry for the last few years of his life. Since there was something petulant and childish about him when he was a drunk, now merely the child remained. Susan wrote about these years, as he basked in late success.

Wealth and fame and love had an odd effect on my father … He went through a kind of adolescence of celebrity. At times he seemed to be his own number one groupie … In restaurants, he let head waiters know that he was someone important. Since this kind of behaviour was new to him, he wasn’t particularly graceful about it.

Federico, whose remarks on his father are notable for their wisdom and general good humour, has the best line on his father’s fame: ‘When you’re a musician, people can ask you to play, and when you’re a movie star, people can ask for your autograph, but what does it mean to be a famous writer? Well, you get to say pompous things. You get to talk about aesthetics and things like that. That’s the goodies you get.’

As he made an effort to repair the damage he had done to his family, Cheever was aware that his journals, 4,000 pages of them, lay in a drawer like a lovely toy time bomb. Two weeks before he died he phoned his son Ben: ‘What I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘is that your father has had his cock sucked by quite a few disreputable characters. I thought I’d tell you that, because sooner or later somebody’s going to tell you and I’d just as soon it came from me.’ Ben wrote that he was ‘forgiving’. ‘But mostly I was just bewildered, and I remember now that my reply came almost as a whisper: “I don’t mind, Daddy, if you don’t mind.” ’ After his death, when Susan read the diaries, needing to flesh things out for her memoir, she was pretty surprised by the general tone and content, and ‘not only’, as Bailey writes, ‘because of the gloomy, relentless sexual stuff’. The
New Yorker
and Knopf paid
$1.2 million for the rights to publish the diaries and they appeared in 1991. Mary Cheever, who had stayed with him until the end, did not read them. ‘I didn’t have any strong feelings about whether they were published or not. I can’t read them. Snatches of them I’ve read, but I can’t sit down and read that stuff. It isn’t my life at all. It’s him, it’s all him. It’s all inside him.’

Baldwin and ‘the American Confusion’

In December 1962
The New York Times
asked some of the year’s best-selling authors to write a piece describing ‘what they believe there is about their book or the climate of the times that has made [their book] so popular’. In reply, Vance Packard, for example, explained that his book
The Pyramid Climbers
had been successful because, he believed, ‘there is a growing uneasiness among Americans about the terms of their existence, and many tell me that I often articulate their own apprehensions’. Patrick Dennis, author of
Genius
, wrote: ‘I can’t imagine what it is that makes my books sell and any author who claims to know is a fool or a liar or both.’ This did not deter Allen Drury, whose book
A Shade of Difference
was on the list. ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘those readers who like what I have to say like it because it is honest, well-expressed and pertinent to the world in which we live.’

James Baldwin’s
Another Country
had also been a best-seller, and Baldwin used the occasion to position himself ambiguously in two of the central pantheons of American beauty. ‘I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,’ he wrote,

Miles Davis and Ray Charles – but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists, in their very different ways, sing a kind of universal blues … They are telling us something of what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity which one hears in them but compassion … I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound … I am aiming at what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion’.

Baldwin was claiming for his prose style and the structure of his novels something of the heightened, melancholy beauty of Davis and Charles; he was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their bearings from the solitary pain, the uncompromising glamour that these two American musicians offered the world. But just in case anyone reading him wanted thus to place him as a primitive, a writer who did not plan his work but merely let it soar, a writer not steeped in a writerly tradition, Baldwin needed to invoke as well the high priest of American refinement, an author known not for his passion, however pitched, but for the rigour of his controlling imagination.

Baldwin the best-seller in 1962 wanted to have it both ways. This need was first of all a way of unloosening him from any easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist that he carried in his temperament a sense of James’s interest in consciousness as something glittering and also as something hidden and secretive, a concern with language as both mask and pure revelation. But Baldwin also had a fascination with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence. The list of what had made him such an interesting stylist would be long. Over the years he would vary its ingredients. Sometimes, he would do so to distract the reader from his own artistry and sophistication; other times, he would do so because he liked the list for its sound and variation, as in the list he provided in
Notes of a Native Son
: ‘The King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech – and something of Dickens’s love for bravura.’ But the style itself did not come simply; it could not be easily defined because it varied and shifted. It had real bravura moments, like a
set of famous riffs, or an encore, such as this passage in part 1 of
Another Country
when Rufus and Vivaldo arrive at Benno’s Bar in the Village:

The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there, drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet fingers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in the corners watching the drifting women. The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other. Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women – who wandered incessantly from the juke box to the bar – and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here – closer together now than they would be later, when they got home. These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated synthetic laments for love.

It is easy to sense in this passage the rhythms of jazz, but also of the prose writers of an earlier generation, the Fitzgerald of
The Great Gatsby
, the Hemingway of
The Sun Also Rises
. Baldwin was not afraid of repetition (‘some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women’), or setting up patterns of beat and sound (note the constant use of ‘were’), or using punctuation with care and control (note the comma before ‘when they got home’; note the semicolon after ‘rolled through the bar’), and then striking home with a phrase or an observation utterly surprising, and full of delight (note ‘gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity’ or ‘pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt’).

While Baldwin was in full possession of this bravura tone, he
was also able to write quiet and effective and emotionally charged sentences. The sixty-one words in the opening paragraph of
Go Tell It on the Mountain
have only one word – the first – with more than three syllables and forty-one words with only one syllable.

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

This style seems closer to Hemingway than to jazz or James; it suggests that Baldwin was as comfortable with the tradition he inherited from a generation of writers most of whom were at the height of their fame as he was starting to write. No young writers ever wish to give too much credit to the writers who could have been their father. They prefer to pay homage to grandfathers or to painters or musicians or ballet dancers or acrobats. It is one way of killing your father, to pretend that he made no difference to you while watching his cadences like a hawk.

So, too, in Baldwin’s short stories this plain opening style had not an ounce of James or of jazz. ‘The Rockpile’ opens: ‘Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.’ ‘The Outing’ opens: ‘Each summer the church gave an outing.’ ‘Sonny’s Blues’ opens: ‘I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work.’

Between the publication of
Go Tell It on the Mountain
in 1953 and the volume of stories
Going to Meet the Man
in 1965, Baldwin wrote a piece for
The New York Times
that set about openly killing some of his literary fathers. In January 1962 he wrote:

Since World War II, certain names in recent American literature – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner – have acquired such weight and become so sacrosanct that they have been used as touchstones to reveal the understandable, but lamentable, inadequacy of the younger literary artists … Let one of us, the younger, attempt to create a restless, unhappy, free-wheeling heroine and we are immediately informed that Hemingway or Fitzgerald did the same thing better – infinitely better.

Having made clear, in grudging tone, his immense respect for these writers, Baldwin proceeded to demolish them.

It is useful … to remember in the case of Hemingway that his reputation began to be unassailable at the very instant that his work began that decline from which it never recovered – at about the time of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Hindsight allows us to say that this boyish and romantic and inflated book marks Hemingway’s abdication from the efforts to understand the many-sided evil that is in the world. This is exactly the same thing as saying that he somehow gave up the effort to become a great novelist.

Having also demolished Faulkner (‘such indefensibly muddy work as “Intruder in the Dust” or “Requiem for a Nun”‘) and ‘the later development’ of Dos Passos (‘if one can call it that’) and Fitzgerald (‘there is no longer anything to say about Fitzgerald’), Baldwin considered the matter of America itself as a realm of failed imaginations.

The previously mentioned giants have at least one thing in common: their simplicity … It is the American way of looking on the world as a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost. It is this almost inexpressible pain which lends such force to some of the early Hemingway stories – including ‘The Killers’ – and to the marvelous fishing sequence in ‘The Sun Also Rises’; and it is also the reason that Hemingway’s heroines seem so peculiarly sexless and manufactured.

Baldwin, in his attempt to establish a context for his own work, now invoked the spirit of Henry James by taking the unusual step of claiming James as a novelist who dealt with the matter of failed masculinity in America. In
The Ambassadors
, Baldwin wrote,

What is the moral dilemma of Lambert Strether if not that, at the midnight hour, he realizes that he has, somehow, failed his manhood: that the ‘masculine sensibility’ as James puts it, has failed in him? … Strether’s triumph is that he is able to realize this, even though he knows it is too late for him to act on it. And it is James’ perception of this peculiar impossibility which makes him, until today, the greatest of our novelists. For the question which he raised, ricocheting it, so to speak, off the backs of his heroines, is the question which so torments us now. The question is this: How is an American to become a man? And this is precisely the same thing as asking: How is America to become a nation? By contrast with him, the giants who came to the fore between the two world wars merely lamented the necessity.

Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel in America because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, a poison that began in the individual spirit and only made its way then into politics. His political writing remains as raw and vivid as his fiction because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but through a reimagining of the private realm. Thus, for Baldwin, an examination of the individual soul as dramatized in fiction had immense power. It was, in the end, he saw, a matter of love, and he was not afraid to use the word. In his 1962
New York Times
article he wrote:

The loneliness of the cities described in Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved. And those panaceas and formulas which have so spectacularly failed Dos Passos have also failed this country, and the world. The trouble is deeper than we wish to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation – we will never establish human communities – until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.

Before he began to publish fiction, Baldwin was a reviewer with attitude, a writer with a high sense of aesthetic grandeur, an Edmund Wilson with real poison in his pen. In the
New Leader
in December 1947, for example, the twenty-three-year-old Baldwin employed a triple negative to take a swipe at Erskine Caldwell’s
The Sure Hand of God
: ‘Certainly there is nothing in the book which would not justify the suspicion that Mr Caldwell was concerned with nothing more momentous than getting rid of some of the paper he had lying about the house, resurrecting several of the tired types on which he first made his reputation, and (incidentally) making a few dollars on the deal.’ Earlier that same year, he took on Maxim Gorky: ‘Gorky, not in the habit of describing intermediate colors, even when he suspected their existence, has in
Mother
written a Russian battle hymn which history has so summarily dated that we are almost unwilling to credit it with any reality.’ Gorky, he went on, ‘was the foremost exponent of the maxim that “art is the weapon of the working class.” He is also, probably, the major example of the invalidity of such a doctrine. (It is rather like saying that art is the weapon of the American housewife.)’