by Azar Nafisi
When I started writing this book all too many years ago, I knew I wanted to begin with Mark Twain and end with James Baldwin. What was it that made me see Baldwin as Twain’s literary kith and kin? He himself never made such a claim; in fact, he largely ignored Twain, preferring that other, altogether more patrician great realist, Henry James. Baldwin liked to cite an uncharacteristically rousing quote from the Master: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” To this he would add, in “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” one of his best essays on literature, “This madness, thank heaven, is still at work among us. . . . It will bring, inexorably, to the light at last the truth about our despairing young, our bewildered lovers, our defeated junkies, our demoralized young executives, our psychiatrists and politicians, cities, towns, suburbs, and interracial housing projects.” Baldwin genuinely believed that literature had a vital role to play as a sort of social glue. He felt there was, as he put it, “a thread . . . which unites every one of us” and saw a deep-rooted and necessary affinity between our everyday lives, anxieties, joys and sorrows and the act of writing.
Writers are truth tellers, and that can sometimes put them in conflict with the state. “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it,” Twain once said in a searing critique of complacent jingoism. “The gospel of monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had: —the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he ( just he, by himself ) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.” If Twain abhorred the smug bombast of self-proclaimed patriots, it was not because he did not love his country. He held it up to a higher standard, that of the ultimate code of honor, courage and decency: the standard of the writer. The writer questions social norms and homes in on uncomfortable truths. He (or she) forces us to admit impulses and yearnings we would prefer to ignore or deny, and to acknowledge the yawning gap between what is and what should be. The American writer does so with a special mandate, Twain suggests, because in a democratic society, far more so than in a monarchical or totalitarian one, the writer speaks for the individual and not for the state. America has always conceived of herself as a country that exalts the individual, and it is not incidental that she has nurtured such exceptional and varied writers. But she has not always made her writers feel altogether at home.
“I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West,” Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son. Time and again in his essays, talks and interviews, he tried to describe what it meant to live as the grandson of a slave, born illegitimate and living in dire poverty. “It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven,” he said, “to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.”
There is such generosity of spirit in Baldwin, despite all the hatred and humiliation piled on him. He recognized in each of us the potential for the best and the worst. “I love America more than any other country in the world,” he said, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done. I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
When he was told by Bobby Kennedy that someday, in thirty years’ time, he could be president, Baldwin said, “What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.” I suggest he would nevertheless have celebrated in his own fashion when America elected Barack Obama; I wish I could have seen that Baldwin smile, half of which would be on his lips and the other half somewhere deep within, reacting to the news. And yet I suggest he would be as anxious now as he was then about the state of his country. Certain victories have been won, major victories, but new problems have arisen, and some of the old ones have resurfaced in new garb. He said, back in 1961, “I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world.”
• • •
As I meandered among the stalls, I returned to the unexpected similarities between Twain and Baldwin, in particular their idea of patriotism, a topic I was going to talk about that day—loyalty to country, or to the act of writing and what many writers call “truth.” Why was it that after the Islamic revolution, when I wanted to make sense of things and examine how much of what our new rulers (or old ones, for that matter) said about Iran was true, I had turned not to political theorists or historians but to writers and poets? And why was I doing the same thing now in America? “Societies are never able to examine, to overhaul themselves,” Baldwin once said. To him, “this effort must be made by that yeast which every society cunningly and unfailingly secretes. This ferment, this disturbance, is the responsibility, and the necessity, of writers.”
I stopped at the tent set up by Red Emma’s bookstore, named after Emma Goldman, the legendary radical anarchist. A little farther, lo and behold, there was the H. L. Mencken Society, a tribute to the brilliant, grouchy inventor of the term “Booboisie,” a very famous critic in the first few decades of the last century whom few people read today. I was sure that many of today’s young would enjoy these eccentric and exceptional characters, committed and utterly unconventional, if only they would be given a chance to discover them. For some reason I found myself imagining a comic book version of their lives—what fun would a comic book Mencken have today, bombarding us with his word inventions! Just imagine what he would have to say of some of our political leaders. He’d give Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a run for their money.
Baldwin was born fourteen years after Mark Twain’s death, and yet despite their different backgrounds ( just being black and white was enough to create a chasm between them), they had both in their own ways experienced the worst that human beings can do to one another. It is enough to read Twain’s “United States of Lyncherdom” or “Only a Nigger” to understand his rage and his shame. What he was reticent to write about was his own personal life. “You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it,” he said, in an effort to explain why he was having such a hard time writing his memoirs. “You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting.” But that is exactly what James Baldwin did: he laid bare his private soul and did not shy away from the shame and the guilt. One of his greatest artistic achievements was to seamlessly weave together the private and the public, the personal and the political and the social. Yet his life as a writer was dedicated to the proposition that one should not be defined by one’s biography. His highest achievement was to transcend, rather than succumb to, the limitations imposed on him by the circumstances of his life. “Now, when you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual,” said an interviewer in a clip. “You must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’”
And there is Baldwi
n, with his huge, bulging eyes, looking roguishly both at and beyond his interlocutor, saying, “No, I thought I’d hit the jackpot!” And then, to the accompaniment of the audience’s laughter, he rejoins, “It was so outrageous, you could not go any further. So you had to find a way to use it.” And use it he did.
Baldwin was the grandson of a slave, and he never knew his biological father. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Harlem, the stepson of an abusive preacher whom all his life he called father and whom he loved and hated in equal measure (“righteous in the pulpit and a monster in the house,” he would later say). He would abandon him and his mother along with Harlem, greater New York City, and America and move thousands of miles away across the Atlantic to Paris in order to write, and through his writing he discovered something essential about his stepfather, his race, his city, his people and his country. Perhaps most crucially of all, he discovered James Baldwin, and rescued him from the clutches of racism, poverty and abuse to rewrite his life story all over again. For much of his life he was an outsider even to himself: in one interview he spoke of “all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin.”
Other writers have left America to find themselves and their worldview—Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and later Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bowles and Richard Wright, who was at one time his mentor, having taken him under his wing. But Paris was a different experience for each of them, and Baldwin’s Paris was not Hemingway’s Moveable Feast. It was the bleak and seedy Paris of Giovanni’s Room, usually gray and raining or about to rain. Baldwin said he went to Paris not because it was Paris—it could have been any other place—but because he had to leave New York. In a film made of him by Sedat Pakay in 1970, Baldwin says, “One sees [one’s country] better from a distance . . . from another place, from another country.” David in Giovanni’s Room articulates his creator’s viewpoint when he says, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
In 1946, Eugene Worth, a close friend with whom Baldwin was in love but never had a physical relationship, threw himself off the George Washington Bridge. Worth was the model for Rufus, who, in Another Country, commits suicide in the same manner and whose death is the central event that links the other characters and becomes a source of revelation for them. Baldwin later said that the same fate would have awaited him had he stayed in New York and not become a writer. In Another Country, after Rufus’s suicide, Cass, a young white woman, says, “Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness.” Baldwin went to Paris to cleanse himself of his secrets, and to learn to write not out of rage but for the ages.
“All art,” Baldwin said, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.” His participation in the civil rights movement, his sympathy for the Algerians’ suffering in France, were acts of witnessing, but it was only in his writing—his fiction and his essays—that he became the true witness. “I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness.” And this was what distinguished him from many other progressive writers at the time.
One of the confounding things about writing about great literature is that there is really nothing to say: everything is already there in the work itself. It is a little like trying to describe the act of falling unconditionally in love. But still we need to talk about the experience, actual and imagined; we need to share something of the anguish and the joy of having experienced something unique and universal. In this manner, the act of reading and responding is in itself an act of witnessing.
• • •
In one of the first classes I taught at SAIS in the late nineties (I think it was called Politics and Culture), I printed two articles for my students. The first was by the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; it was the title essay in his book Making Waves, on the importance of literature in a global world. The other was a report published in The Washington Post on why J. D. Salinger was increasingly being removed from high school curriculums. My interest in the article principally had to do with the arguments voiced by several of the teachers who supported dropping The Catcher in the Rye, and their students’ responses. The teachers pointed out that since Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, was a privileged white male, minority students in their classes would not relate to him. While the students conceded that Holden Caulfield was indeed not at all like them, they went on to say that this was exactly why they wanted to read the book. They were curious about this other world and enjoyed the glimpse the novel offered into his thoughts and anxieties.
These students were instinctively expressing a point some teachers and academic theoreticians have altogether missed; namely, that literature is in essence an investigation of the “other,” a term used in such a stale and rigid manner, it has lost its original meaning and is no longer about actual difference so much as identifying subcultures and ethnicities and placing people within increasingly confining categories. Even when we put aside the current stultifying obsession with political correctness, a doctrine of comfortable questions and easy, ready-made answers, the fact remains that for most people it is simply boring to constantly read, write and talk about themselves. Shouldn’t the point of books be not to affirm our views and prejudices but to question and confront them? Why read about things you already know? I asked my students. While it is fine and good to discover our differences and accept them—and at times celebrate them—the real surprise comes from the discovery of how alike we are, how much we all have in common. No great work of art or literature would survive the test of time if it were not in some deep sense universal.
My students at SAIS, who came from such vastly different countries and backgrounds, mostly welcomed this notion. A majority of them were not English literature majors; the course was an elective, and thus they were there because they wanted to be. I remember one student, a German as I recall, who wrote in her journal something to the effect that she found exhilarating the thought of so many strangers like Holden Caulfield, Gatsby and even Daisy and Tom residing within her. I remember that word, “exhilarating,” so breathless, so full of possibilities.
Salinger published his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, in 1951, Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, followed two years later. Baldwin’s novel won much acclaim, but Salinger’s trumped his and was welcomed as the latest kid in the Great American Novel’s hall of fame, a testament to the newly articulated angst of the American teenager. If by “Great American Novel” we mean one that is representative of its era and sheds light on certain essential aspects of American life, then I think Baldwin’s novel should be right up there with Salinger’s. Go Tell It on the Mountain is a different kind of coming-of-age story, that of a young African American boy, and as such it complements The Catcher in the Rye. John Grimes is as American as Holden Caulfield and their mutual ancestor Huckleberry Finn. Both Caulfield and Grimes are “bothered” about the meaning of life; what differentiates them is their deeply contrasting experiences and attitudes. It is as if they come from another country—in fact, another world.
The seventeen-year-old Holden, like so many other American protagonists, is trying to escape the suffocating conformity and hypocrisy of his life, and despite his charm he is a bit irritating at times. In the course of one day, Holden, who a few days before Christmas has been expelled from his posh prep school in Pennsylvania but does not want to go home to New York before the holidays, lest his parents find out, checks into a hotel in another part of the city and moves from place to place searching for some way to appease and nourish his vague dissatisfaction with the state of things, complaining about his conformist school, wh
ere he is “surrounded by phonies;” his encounter with girls who are dumb and have nothing intelligent to say; his lousy sex life or absence thereof; his older brother, a sellout to Hollywood; the prostitute he meets over the course of his wanderings, with whom he is unable to have sex and who, although he pays her, returns with her pimp and forces more money out of him; and the overall mess that he believes has become his life. He likes his old schoolteacher, Spencer, who seems not to have much to live for but at the same time gets a “big bang” out of buying an old Navajo blanket. It is a beautifully written book and constantly veers toward cynicism, but in the end there is a glimmer of hope because Holden has a heart, and that heart beats for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe. His decision to leave home is set aside because Phoebe wants to go with him and he knows he can’t take her. Instead he takes her to a ride on her favorite carousel, although it is winter, and while they are there “it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets.” But unlike others, he doesn’t take refuge under the roof of the carousel, preferring to get soaked because he feels “damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy. . . . I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could’ve been there.”
Holden tells us that at one point he hears a kid singing, “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye,” which in reality is a poem by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. But he mistakes its meaning: “‘Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.’”