Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [2]
This Northerness was important to Baldwin. It was the world he knew from his childhood and the world he cared most about. He had a feeling for the hopes that were invested in the journey North – ‘North,’ where, as Gabriel’s mother says, ‘wickedness dwelt and Death rode mighty through the streets’. In one of his essays, ‘A Fly in the Buttermilk’, Baldwin wrote of another Southerner’s contempt for the North, a man he tried to interview for a piece on the progress of Civil Rights: ‘He forced me to admit, at once, that I had never been to college; that Northern Negroes lived herded together, like pigs in a pen; that the campus on which we met was a tribute to the industry and determination of Southern Negroes. “Negroes in the South form a community.” ’
Baldwin’s sensibility, his talent for moral ambivalence, his taste for the terrifying patterns of life, the elegant force of his disputatious spirit, as much Henry James as Bessie Smith, was not always to find favour with his black contemporaries. Langston Hughes called Go Tell It to the Mountain ‘a low-down story in a velvet bag’. ‘A Joan of Arc of the cocktail party’ was Amiri Baraka’s comment on Baldwin. Some of this could be constructed as standard resentment – reminiscent of the kind expressed by Gabriel towards John for not hating whites enough – and some was a reaction against Baldwin’s popularity with the white literary establishment. But that wasn’t all. By the time he was writing novels, and writing these essays – works of magical power and directness – Baldwin had come to feel that the black ‘protest’ novel was breathlessly redundant. In a recent essay about Baldwin’s writing, the novelist Darryl Pinckney comments on Baldwin’s rejection of Richard Wright, the author of Native Son:
In retrospect Baldwin praises Wright’s work for its dry, savage folkloric humour and for how deeply it conveys what life was like on Chicago’s South Side. The climate that had once made Wright’s work read like a racial manifesto had gone. Baldwin found when reading Wright again that he did not think of the 1930s or even of Negroes, because Wright’s characters and situations had universal meanings.
In ‘Alas, Poor Richard’, an essay in the collection Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin concludes that Wright was not the polemical firebrand he took himself to be. Many of Baldwin’s black contemporaries hated this view.
Baldwin’s first novel, in respect of all this, demonstrates a remarkable unit of form and content; the style of the novel makes clear the extent to which he was turning away from his literary forefathers. It may be sensible to see the novel as a farewell not only the Harlem of his father, but to the literary influence of Richard Wright and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baldwin was unremitting on this point, and these several goodbyes, offered from his Paris exile, became the creed of his early writing. ‘In most of the novels written by Negroes until today,’ he wrote, ‘there is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence.’
Go Tell It on the Mountain is a very sensual novel, a book soaked in the Bible and the blues. Spiritual song is there in the sentences, at the head of chapters, and it animates the voices on every side during the ‘coming through’ of John Grimes. As he steps up to the altar John is suddenly aware of the sound of his own prayers – ‘trying not to hear the words that he forced outwards from his throat’. Baldwin’s language has the verbal simplicity of the Old Testament, as well as its metaphorical boldness. The rhythms of the blues, a shade of regret, a note of pain rising out of experience, are deeply inscribed in the novel, and they travel freely along the lines of dialogue. There is a kind of metaphorical, liturgical energy in some novels – in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, in