Book Bound #44 - Another Country

Some books are unpleasant, disquieting, even painful. But maybe they should be read, anyway. Another Country, by James Baldwin (1924-1987), fits that description. It was a selection of my book club that I would have otherwise missed. I had heard of Baldwin, but had not read anything by him. So, wow, Another Countrywas a lot to take in. Cover blurbs are a necessary evil of book-selling. However, the one on the front of Another Country by the Washington Post is accurate, perhaps even understated: “An almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience.” 

For sure, Another Country was hard reading. I had to put the book down for a day or two more than once to come up for air. It is not difficult in language or structure, but brutally honest in perhaps the only way possible to convey another person’s reality. Baldwin’s soul-searching narrative stirred up many thoughts and questions while I read:

·      The city is foreign to me. A life of grinding poverty, also [though I did grow up relatively poor]. A life as a persecuted minority, also foreign.

·      (When) or is it necessary to reveal our darkest selves? When does that process devolve into a voyeuristic competition?

·      I have been to a funeral as a rare white mourner in a black church.

·      Is passion the surest way of knowing another? Or is it a temporary deception?

·      What is the place of sacrifice and giving in relationship?

·      The chasm between: Black <-> White; Gay <-> Straight; Male <-> Female

·      What IS love?

·      Where is trust/loyalty?

·      Freedom versus commitment.

·      Where is grace and forgiveness?

Another Country opens in Times Square in New York city, where Rufus, a young, destitute, black man is trying to figure out how to get a meal. The opening paragraph is dark, desperate. Rufus, his experience, his fate, cascades into the lives of the other characters linked to him:

Leona – a white woman from the South who becomes Rufus’ lover.

Vivaldo – Rufus’ closest friend.

Ida – Rufus’ sister who forms a relationship with Vivaldo.

Richard – a writer who is Vivaldo’s mentor.

Cass – Richard’s wife  (Richard and Cass have two young sons and also know Rufus).

Eric – An actor friend of Rufus who returns to New York from France.

Ellis – Music promoter who begins to direct Ida’s singing career.

 With the exception of Ida, these characters are white. Much of the narrative grapples with the white-black power disparity in 1960’s America and how difficult it was for even the most well-intentioned white person to understand the experience of their black counterpart; how that dynamic alters every relationship, how trust and love and friendship feel the duress of a system that choses winners and losers based on skin color.

Another Country is not a book to pick up lightly. I don’t even know if I can recommend it, exactly. The collection of flawed characters, their often cynical, often self-serving actions, the arc of the story, show momentary glimpses of human connection interspersed with tortured misunderstanding, deceit, despair. Yes, it is a novel. Yet it feels so truthful, as if James Baldwin has bared his soul. I don’t think he was asking for understanding as much as acceptance of a reality, a reality that both shocked and shamed this white, heterosexual man living in suburbia.

Maybe that was the hope of Another Country, as expressed by the character Eric:

“I mean, I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want…”

After finishing the book, I considered how little seems changed some sixty years later, how human beings continue to struggle to understand one another, to give each other grace, to trust the intentions of another, flawed though their actions may be. But, I was also hopeful that as I risk the truth, I will find fellow travellers willing to do the same. 

A few more excerpts from Another Country:

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom… Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist. 

…how many small lies had gone into the making of their one, particular truth: this love, which bound them to one another.

The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life.

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.

It was the fear of making a total commitment, a vow; it was the fear of being loved.

This note of despair, of buried despair, was insistently, constantly struck. It stalked all the New York avenues, roamed all the New York streets…

Perhaps she loved him, perhaps she did: but if she did, how was it, then, that they remained so locked away from one another? Perhaps it was he who did not know how to give, did not know how to love. Love was a country he knew nothing about.

Until next time…