Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  This, said Donleavy, is an infallible rule: “What is original, vital and offered will be rejected. Everyone is searching for what is new and original, while they’re handing over a check to an agent for some imitation of last year’s big success.”

  But then “word gets around that the author looks well in a bathing costume.… A girl from Radcliffe said so.” And “sex gets whispered about and gets translated into a contract.… And then the wind is blowing through the author’s hair, making the sound of fresh banknotes.” He discovers after publication that someone wants to film the book, he looks at his contract and finds that 75 percent of such money goes to the publisher, and the author says to himself: “Those dirty rats.”

  Then the author discovers “the last tool of the writing trade—a lawyer.” He also finds that the critics are always his enemy, except through the years they take more and more space to condemn him.” And he finds that as he goes along as a published author, he still needs money.

  Said Donleavy: “It is a victory to reach the age of forty, be solvent and still love your trade.”

  The hero smiled, stopped talking and while the audience applauded he took his rather British accent (born in Brooklyn, he now divides his time between London and the Isle of Man) and strode off into the wings. Odd, but this well-behaved fellow seemed not at all like Sebastian Dangerfield. So tidy, so calm, so tailored. Certainly a closer look was in order, a few questions on life-style were in order, a bit of probing beneath this façade was in order.

  And so this visiting gawker joined several other visiting gawkers at the stage door and rapped for admittance. A man with a bald head opened the door four inches and said Mr. Donleavy wasn’t granting any interviews. Later? he was asked. The man shrugged just as a lovely girl in a purple dress arrived, looking wifely and acting proprietary when she heard Mr. Donleavy being discussed.

  “Oh no,” said the lovely lady. “He’s especially said he didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “Would you inquire again, please? We’ve come a great distance to see him.”

  The lovely lady smiled, the bald man grimaced and closed the door and the gawkers waited, and waited. Then the bald man reappeared shaking his head. Mr. Donleavy did not feel well.

  “No interview later either?”

  “Not back here. When he leaves here it’s up to him.”

  And so all gawkers reseated themselves when the lights flickered the end of intermission and the hero reappeared on stage and read from his works—“The Saddest Summer of Samuel S.,” “Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule,” “A Singular Man” and two passages from a novel in progress: The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. He read the final paragraph of The Ginger Man and the audience broke into prolonged applause, double the heartiness they gave his other readings.

  Outraged

  And captivated

  By ginger.

  The audience asked him two questions. How does a writer continue after he dries up or loses his vision? Donleavy said that was a very American question. He said when troubles pile on, you worry about the troubles and have no time to worry about the impetus to write. So you just write. And a mustached man asked him: you write so much about money, how are you doing financially? And Donleavy said, like an old Irish saying, “I’m like a dog at its father’s funeral, neither sad nor glad. So I’d be described as being comfortably off.”

  And that was the end of the program, and once again the gawkers lined up, with their books and pencils at the ready for autographs, so many of them feeling what J. D. Salinger wrote in Catcher in the Rye: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

  Touch the Ginger fellow when he comes. Get him to write his name. Take it home and look at it. He’s so droll. So witty. Here he comes. With his collar up. In his tweeds. With the lovely. And another fellow who looks like an editor. Who read Proust one summer on the Cape. Taking the pencil. Signing his name as the girlies look.

  “Where do you get the money to buy all these expensive books?”

  “From my youth,” says a girlie.

  He moves on. Must keep moving or never get to the street. Remember George Smith, the Singular Man. Remember his philosophy: “Show people you’re in command of the situation by not saying much, don’t let them get in close, keep everyone at arm’s length, stop smiling kindly.” And Donleavy moves along, while a young man with Hitler’s mustache and thin rims bulls through to say his piece. Mr. Donleavy, he says, I read The Ginger Man in law school, but I passed anyway. Hee hee. Smiles all around.

  “Excuse me, sir, but would you be available at any time for an interview? Tonight? Tomorrow for a little while? Leisurely interview. Over a few cold beers? At lunch? Any time at all?”

  Head down, Donleavy. Look indifferent. Give them the message you’re self-contained. But he talks to his chest. He seems terrified by scenes. Won’t look. Smiles into his vest.

  “Possibly next time. Can’t really. Write me in England.”

  Another pencil, another book. It’s over now. All over. No interview. No conversation with the hero. Too bad. Could have told gamy Irish stories. Stayed up till dawn. Strode through the streets in search of additional beer and rashers of bacon. Ah, what might have been. If only the Ginger Man were a terrific friend of ours. But he isn’t. So all we can say is.

  Ding

  Dong.

  For Donleavy wrote it himself:

  If

  There’s a bell

  In Dingle

  And you want to say

  How sorry you are

  I’m gone

  Ring it

  And make it go

  Ding dong.

  1968

  James Baldwin:

  The Distractions of Fame

  “‘Be careful what you set your heart upon,’ someone once said to me, ‘for it will surely be yours.’ Well, I had said that I was going to be a writer, God, Satan, and Mississippi notwithstanding, and that color did not matter, and that I was going to be free.”

  Today, at the age of thirty-nine, James Baldwin is indeed a writer, one of the nation’s most successful and varied. Already accomplished in the essay, the short story, and the novel, he’s preparing to enter a new medium, the Broadway stage. His first play, Blues for Mr. Charlie, is in the hands of director Frank Corsaro and the Actors Studio Theater.

  The Studio reported last week that the drama will open in late February or early March—exact date still unspecified—as its second production of the season. (June Havoc’s Marathon ’33 is the first.) Rehearsals begin January 15, and Sidney Poitier is likely to head the cast.

  Mr. Baldwin discussed the play in a recent interview conducted in a friend’s apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. He has his own New York apartment, but he was literally “hiding out,” away from the distractions that would ensue if people knew where he was.

  During part of the play’s creation, in fact, he fled to Puerto Rico. In New York, he explained, memories of violence and misery wreak havoc with his mind. “I’m just going to survive it,” he said, “and get out of here. Maybe to Sicily. You could drown in this very quickly.”

  Exhausted from a day’s rewriting of one section of the drama, Mr. Baldwin explained that the play was a year in the creation and five years in the mind. Its genesis occurred when he worked as personal assistant to director Elia Kazan during the Broadway productions of Archibald MacLeish’s J. B., and Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. He began work in earnest after finishing his last novel, Another Country.

  The play, he explained, “pivots on the death of a Negro boy, twenty to twenty-five years old, who left his home in the Deep South, turned into a rock-and-roll singer and a junkie, came home, and was murdered.

  “The play is the reconstruction of the crime. I’m not interested in who did it, but in all the forces of the black and white people in th
e town that made this death inevitable. It is not, I hope, about race at all, but about people in torment who don’t know how to liberate themselves from it.”

  Mr. Baldwin’s thirty-two-year-old brother David, an actor for five years, will play the murdered man. The author calls the role “not a major part, but a crucial part.”

  And after Mr. Charlie, what? Mr. Baldwin has plenty of forthcoming projects: a movie version of Another Country; a film script of Faulkner’s Light in August, to star Marlon Brando; a book of essays, The Beast in the Playground; a book of short stories, Come Once Again and Love Me; a book on Africa; and magazine interviews with Paul Robeson and Ray Charles, the blind singer.

  It’s evident that Mr. Baldwin has come a long way from the day he vowed to be a writer and to be free, color notwithstanding. But his life hasn’t come off entirely as planned. True, he has lost his Harlem chains, and he’s well off financially. But he’s discovered the world can still be hostile.

  “I thought that in becoming a writer I would become safe,” he says, “but now I know better.”

  Further, he is trapped in his status—forced to set up a wall of protective friends to fend off intrusions, forced to keep on the move to insure some measure of privacy. But he moves not merely to keep his life peaceful. He moves to work—the same work he has been doing since the beginning: telling himself (and letting others listen in) what it means to be a highly intelligent Negro in mid-twentieth-century America.

  “I started writing when I left home at seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to become a writer so much as to save my life. And that is the only way I could do it.”

  Though he began his first novel in those years, he didn’t finish it until ten years later. He was sorting out his rage, trying to understand his misery. “I was in a very bad state,” he said. “My whole growing up had been pretty awful and I couldn’t get over my father, either in reality or the imagination, and I figured if I was ever going to grow up I would have to forgive him, get past him.”

  His father was a preacher in Harlem. His son’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, had a sensual and egocentric Harlem preacher as a chief character.

  James Baldwin has written of his early days of struggle: “When I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Greenwich Village restaurant and writing book reviews.” He obtained a Rosenwald Fellowship for a second book, which met the same fate as the first. Then: “By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem … and I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

  The Paris years were the gestation period for Mr. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room. They also were years of escape from a hostile America—and of eventual confrontation with the fact that hostile or not, America was his home. But before that confrontation came the beginning of his essays and a head-on conflict with his hero and early god, the Negro novelist Richard Wright, then a longtime expatriate in Paris.

  Mr. Baldwin’s first essay was a piece called “Harlem Ghetto,” written at the request of the late Commentary magazine editor Robert Warshow. He recalled the experience in the interview: “It was very important discipline. I had to say what I meant, and it was very difficult, for I didn’t know what I meant. I was so full of rage and pain that I had to find some way of chilling it, controlling it, and the essay worked for that, for I had to be clear about it and get at what I really felt.”

  His next essay, which caused the conflict with Mr. Wright, was “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which he says was a regurgitation of all the thoughts he had while reviewing the “Negro problem” novels. The essay’s focus was on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Though that book had been of great importance to him as a writer, he was repelled by the spate of novels of similar design that he had read and reviewed. He found them invariably bad, and described them as “fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental.”

  The protest novel, he felt, was a failure because of “its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”

  He felt that Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Mr. Wright’s Native Son, however powerful, was merely an opposite portrait from Uncle Tom—“the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses”—and that Mr. Wright was guilty of dehumanization in the name of protest.

  In Paris, Mr. Wright accused Mr. Baldwin of betraying him and of pursuing “that art-for-arts-sake crap.” This disagreement split the two men, and later reconciliations never really healed the break. Mr. Baldwin was further disenchanted with Mr. Wright for his long expatriation (“I had the impression that in order to be able to live in Paris he was able to let a great deal go by the board—his indignation, his impulses”) and for what he said was Mr. Wright’s desire to be king of the literary mountain.

  Now, though, Mr. Baldwin feels the writing he did about Mr. Wright in the early days was “wrong through a certain lack of charity.” He made amends, as far as he could, in an essay written after Mr. Wright’s death: “Alas Poor Richard.” But, he added in the interview: “when you’re an idol you’re in great danger. The effort is not to become king of the mountain. You’re supposed to keep on working. I think if you depend on these other things you inevitably dry up. So, uncharitable as it was, I think that what I wrote about Richard was true. I haven’t changed my mind about it.”

  He quickly admits that changing public attitudes will make part of his own work, as they did with Mr. Wright’s, obsolete. But he tried to imbue his writing with the humanity he found lacking in the work of others who wrote about Negroes. He wants his future work, he said, “to be looser, like Don Quixote, and stonier, like Oedipus Rex—artless, so that it moves the way anything that grows moves.

  “At bottom,” he said, “it’s very hard to tell the truth to yourself. But I think that’s the major effort one has got to make. If you do that you are outside the morality you live in, outside the system of values of the people around you. You’re suspect because you’re examining. You are made to be very lonely, and if you’re lonely enough you can perish.”

  These thoughts are ages away from the time when the Baldwin boy worshipped Paul Robeson and Joe Louis and hoped to grow up like Richard Wright and Charles Dickens. He once defined his early purpose: “… To wrest from the world fame and money and love.”

  He was reminded of this and he commented: “Fame and money—that’s always a fantasy. The real drive is to be loved, to be free. I’m not really trying to be famous or even win the Nobel Prize. But I am trying to live.”

  1964

  The Beat Generation:

  Ginsberg’s Albany Pain

  Where Did They Go? Everywhere.

  Ginsberg’s Albany Pain

  I

  Hospital Visitation

  White knees lifting and falling under bedsheet

  Broke-hipped Ginsberg in river of talk

  The words arise

  as from a poet, garrulous spew turning true

  inside nonsense fun exquisitely straying

  out of a stumped body

  II

  Letter to the Poet

  Sent by Mr. Anonymous, A Resident of Thruway Motel.

  “OK Beardo. Let’s see you write one of your filthy poems(?) based on this picture—Pain In Vietnam? No Pain in Jordan? Make a ‘big’ statement on Israeli aggression! You don’t dare.”

  III

  An Elaboration

  The letter came to the poet, Allen Ginsberg, while he was hospitalized at Memorial Hospital in Albany, following a story about him in the newspaper. In the story he talked of his own pain after suffering broken hip in auto accident, then related it to pain suffered by Vietnamese in war being waged by U.S. “We’re mass producing this pain for them,” said
the poet.

  Accompanying beardo letter was photograph from newspaper captioned “A Kiss of Grief.” It showed Jordanian man kissing his dead child, killed by Israeli bombs during raid at Irbid Eara in Northwest Jordan.

  IV

  The Poet’s First Response to the Letter

  “He’s right, up to the point where he wants vengeance like Jehovah. And then he gets in the same bag. He’s quite right. Pain is everywhere.”

  V

  Accumulation

  In the poet’s room, 208, friends and strangers had left a spoor: get-well fruit basket. Merry Christmas card in Chinese, photo reprint of Rimbaud as an adolescent, Pastilles—purple anise-flavored candies with 14th century tradition, magazines with Chicago stories, a bottle of Micrin, a scout knife, and books: the Mahatma Letters. Blake. The Gnostics. Teilhard de Chardin. And daisies in a vase.

  VI

  News of the Poet

  He will be on crutches for six months. His book, Planet News ($2, City Lights Books), has had 25,000 copies issued in first printing, based on 15,000 advance orders. “Planet News,” says Ginsberg-written cover blurb, “collecting seven years Poesy scribed to 1967 begins with electronic politics disassociation & messianic rhapsody TV Baby in New York, continues picaresque around the world globe …”

  In hospital, poet adds: “It’s a chronology. It records all my changes as I went around the world.” He adds: “The publication is a very big event for me.” He adds: “Two of the poems in the book were dictated into a tape recorder, ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ and ‘City Midnight Junk Strains.’” He adds that he changed only about one percent of the dictation in editing. He adds the dictating was made possible through gift of $500 from Bob Dylan. He adds: “Dylan asked me if I needed anything for my work and gave me five hundred dollars to buy the machine. He gave Michael McClure an autoharp and Peter Orlovsky a guitar.”

  VII

  Financial News

  “The hospital bill will wipe out my personal bank account.”