New Ways to Kill Your Mother (43 page)

This passage displays the difference between Baldwin’s sensibility and that of Obama. Whereas Baldwin sought to make distinctions, Obama always wants to make connections; his urge is to close circles even when they don’t need to be closed or the closure is too neat to be fully trusted. Whereas Baldwin longed to disturb the peace, create untidy truths, Obama was slowly becoming a politician.

Despite his best effort to reconcile his own life at home with that of his Kenyan father, the chapters about Kenya in
Dreams from My Father
show Obama puzzled and ill at ease. Later, in his book
The Audacity of Hope
, he moved closer to the truth when he described his wife’s admission on a flight back from Kenya to Chicago that ‘she was looking forward to getting home. “I never realized just how American I was,” she said. She hadn’t realized just how free she was – or how much she cherished that freedom.’

Just as Obama, in his increasing urge to inspire, a necessary aspect of his calling perhaps, often seeks a rhetoric free of bitterness and high on healing, Baldwin, in his urge to speak difficult truths, to tell white people what they least wished to hear, sometimes moved towards a tone that was almost shrill. In his great good humour, however, he would perhaps enjoy more than anyone else reading this passage now from an essay written by him in 1965:

I remember when the ex-Attorney General, Mr Robert Kennedy, said it was conceivable that in 40 years in America we might have a Negro President. That sounded like a very emancipated statement to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear the laughter and bitterness and scorn with which this statement was greeted … We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become President.

Obama, running for President forty-three years later, just three years too late to fulfil what Robert Kennedy saw as conceivable, and Baldwin saw as far too late, ends
Dreams from My Father
with the phrase, ‘I felt like the luckiest man alive.’ Later, when he won his first election to the US Senate, he wrote: ‘Still, there was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune. I was an outlier, a freak; to political insiders, my victory proved nothing.’

Similarly, Baldwin in 1985 wrote about his own unique position and attitude in the formative years in Greenwich Village: ‘there were very few black people in the Village in those years, and of that handful, I was decidedly the most improbable.’ More than twenty years earlier he had written: ‘To become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneself up as one went along … My revenge, I decided very early, would be to achieve a power which outlasts kingdoms.’

Both men set about establishing their authority by exploring themselves and how they came to make it up as they went along, as much as by exploring the world around them. In Obama’s own mixed background he saw America; out of his own success, he saw hope and a new set of values. Out of his own childhood Baldwin produced a number of enduring literary masterpieces and out of his efforts to make sense of his own complex, playful personality and his own unique place in history he produced some of the best essays written in the twentieth century. Reading these essays and Obama’s speeches, especially the ones that are filled with inspiration but short on policy, one is struck by the
connection between them, two men remaking the world against all the odds in their own likeness, not afraid to ask, when faced with the future of America as represented by its children, using Baldwin’s wonderful phrase, questions that are alien to most politicians: ‘What will happen to all that beauty?’

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Acknowledgements

‘Jane Austen and the Death of the Mother’ was given as the Troy Lecture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in December 2010 and a version of it later published in the
London Review of Books
; ‘W. B. Yeats: New Ways to Kill Your Father’ was first given as a lecture at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 2004 and subsequently published in the
Dublin Review
; ‘Willie and George’ was first published in the
London Review of Books
; ‘New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Synge and his Family’ was first published in
Synge: A Celebration
, edited by Colm Tóibín; ‘Beckett Meets His Afflicted Mother’ and ‘Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I Come, Great Hatred, Little Room’ were first published in the
London Review of Books
; ‘Sebastian Barry’s Fatherland’ was first published in
Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry
, edited by Christina Hunt Mahony; ‘Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton: The Dialect of the Tribe’ was first published in the
New York Review of Books
; ‘Thomas Mann: New Ways to Spoil Your Children’ and ‘Borges: A Father in his Shadow’ were first published in the
London Review of Books
; ‘Hart Crane: Escape from Home’ and ‘Tennessee Williams and the Ghost of Rose’ were first published in the
New York Review of Books
; ‘John Cheever: New Ways to Make Your Family’s Life a Misery’ was first published in the
London Review of Books
; ‘Baldwin and “the American Confusion” was given as a lecture at Queen Mary University of London in June 2007 and later published in the
Dublin Review
; ‘Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers’ was first published in the
New York Review of Books
.

I am grateful to the editors who published these pieces – especially
to Mary Kay Wilmers and Daniel Soar at the
London Review of Books
; to Robert Silvers, and the late Barbara Epstein, at the
New York Review of Books
; and to Brendan Barrington at the
Dublin Review
. Also thanks to Angela Rohan for her work as an editor on the manuscript; and to Mary Mount, Ben Brusey and Keith Taylor at Penguin in London; to Nan Graham, Susan Muldow and Paul Whitlatch at Scribner in New York; and to Ellen Seligman at McClelland and Stewart in Toronto; also to my agent Peter Straus, and to Aidan Dunne, Catriona Crowe, Peggy O’Brien, Joseph Bartholomeo, Christina Hunt Mahony, Jonathan Allison, Cora Kaplan, Bill Schwartz, Lilian Chambers and Garry Hynes. I am especially grateful to the late Professor William Murphy for his kindness and encouragement when I worked on the letters of John Butler Yeats, which he had so painstakingly assembled, and which are kept in the Special Collections in the Library of Union College in Schenectady.