Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  This strange episode is difficult to interpret. Despite what Baldwin said, both essays are clearly attacks. He was trying to clear a space for himself as a writer, of course, but he was fiercely, crazily, biting the hand that had fed him. Most writers are competitive, and minority writers can be even more combative—there is less pie to share and more grievances at work. Yet Baldwin was fighting not only Wright, he was fighting himself. When he attacks Wright for being too angry to capture the black experience, he does it so angrily that one suspects he’s attacking his own anger, too.

  Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own that too much anger is bad for literature. Baldwin’s early essays often bear her out. We forget the angry Baldwin because he was later attacked for not being angry enough. Joe LeSueur tells how the black playwright LeRoi Jones was often chided in the 1950s for being too nice. “Why isn’t he more like Jimmy Baldwin?” a white friend asked. Jones later changed his name to Amiri Baraka and outdid Baldwin in righteous rage. Baldwin was friendly and garrulous in public, but the act of writing can tap into anger in the same way that alcohol can. Baldwin could be a charming drinker, but he could also be an angry one. His first essays explore different ways to write with and sometimes around anger. He felt many other emotions, too: tenderness, humor, sorrow, and joy. He himself once referred to “all these strangers called Jimmy Baldwin.”

  Later in 1949 he published another essay in Zero, a companion to “Everybody’s Protest Novel” titled “Preservation of Innocence.” The subject is “the problem of the homosexual.” The piece wasn’t included in his first book of essays or even the collected essays, Price of the Ticket, published in 1985. It didn’t appear in book form until Toni Morrison included it in the Library of America volume of Collected Essays. It’s a curious polemic that addresses sexuality in dry, impersonal terms—one would never guess the speaker was gay. It says smart things about relations between men and women (Baldwin always wrote about women with sympathy and intelligence), but doesn’t fully come to life until it explores the absence of love in recent fiction, first in the heterosexual pulp of Raymond Chandler and James Cain, then in recent books with gay story lines, including The City and the Pillar. Baldwin argues that such books aren’t about homosexual love, but only about the fear of sex between men. Here too he is trying to clear a space for himself, but he closes with a wise statement that could serve as the motto for his future fiction: “A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled.”

  Baldwin lived hand to mouth during his first years in Paris, borrowing money, selling articles, owing rent, and drinking and hanging out with other Americans, including Otto Friedrich and Mary Painter. Talking about writing is often more fun than sitting down and doing it, and Baldwin was a glorious talker. A new acquaintance moved in with him at one point, bringing his own bed linen. The police showed up a few nights later and arrested both men for possessing stolen sheets from a hotel. Baldwin spent eight nights in jail, wondering if he would ever get out. He might be more accepted as a black man in Paris than he was in America, but he was still a foreigner. Shortly after his release, he visited a favorite bar, the Reine Blanche, and met a tall, lean, dark-haired, seventeen-year-old Swiss boy with a receding hairline that made him look much older than he was, Lucien Happersberger. A runaway from Lausanne, Happersberger loved Paris, good times, and sex—with both men and women. He and Baldwin didn’t live together, but they saw each other daily and saw other lovers, too. Happersberger spoke little English and Baldwin’s French was still pretty basic, but their relationship was not about conversation. Baldwin would fall in and out of love with Happersberger over the years, yet their friendship endured.

  His unfinished novel still ate at Baldwin and, in the winter of 1951, Happersberger arranged for them to spend three months in the family cottage in a Swiss village in the mountains so his pal could write one more draft. The village had never seen a black man or a typewriter. During the day Baldwin hammered out fresh chapters while Bessie Smith sang on his portable Victrola, then he read the new pages each night to Happersberger, who could appreciate the sound of the prose if not always the sense. Baldwin later described this winter in one of his finest essays, “A Stranger in the Village,” but without mentioning the novel in his typewriter or friend in his bed. He hit upon a new title for the book: Go Tell It on the Mountain.

  When they returned to Paris, Baldwin mailed the manuscript to New York. While he waited to hear back, Happersberger’s girlfriend announced she was pregnant. Baldwin encouraged the boy to marry her, insisting it was the right thing to do. When Knopf expressed interest in his novel, Baldwin borrowed money from a visiting American acquaintance, Marlon Brando (they had met when he briefly studied acting), and took a boat home. He talked with the editors and revised the book, incorporating some but not all their ideas. He stayed in New York long enough to be best man at his brother David’s wedding and sailed back to Europe. He was in Paris when the book was published in May 1953.

  Go Tell It on the Mountain is a remarkable novel, beautifully written and richly observed. The structure is deceptively simple: twenty-four hours in the life of the Grimes family in Harlem in 1935. It opens and closes with the eldest son, fourteen-year-old John, who hates his stepfather and has not yet found God. But most of the novel takes place inside the minds of his stepfather, mother, and aunt during a Saturday night prayer meeting. This extended sequence is a literary tour de force worthy of Virginia Woolf, although rawer, more emotional, and physical. Baldwin shifts back and forth in time, presenting the pasts of the three adults, their sins and sorrows. Not only did they suffer the restrictions of white America, they suffered their own inner wars between religious belief and sexual desire. In their community, heterosexuality is only slightly less sinful than homosexuality.

  We return to the outer world of the prayer meeting when John falls into a swoon and suffers a series of hallucinations. “Then John saw the Lord—for a moment only; and the darkness for a moment only, was filled with a light he could not bear…. Then he cried, ‘Oh, blessed Jesus! Oh Lord Jesus! Take me through!’ ” The presence of an older teenager in the congregation, a saved boy named Elisha, is as important to him as God. “ ‘Oh yes!’ cried the voice of Elisha. ‘Bless our God forever.’ And a sweetness filled John as he heard this voice.” When he comes to, he finds himself surrounded by the congregation, all glad he has found God.

  It’s daylight now and everyone walks home through the empty Sunday morning streets. The adults confront each other over past crimes, but the most moving encounter is between John and Elisha. John thanks the older boy for praying him through and asks Elisha to continue to pray for him. “ ‘For me,’ persisted John, his tears falling. ‘For me.’ ” He wants not just Elisha’s Christian love, but his personal love. Elisha says good-bye by planting a “soul kiss” on the younger boy’s forehead. John can’t help smiling at his stepfather afterward, suddenly able to love the man—yet his stepfather won’t smile back.

  It is a phenomenal first novel, not just deeply felt but expertly crafted. Baldwin worked on it off and on for nine years, but it is all of a piece. People often call it Baldwin’s best novel, but that’s not quite true. It might be consistently better written—its prose a hybrid of King James Bible and Henry James—but it’s not always a better novel than his other books. The war between the three grown-ups is sometimes muddled; long sections of the middle run out of steam; there is often more flash than sense in John’s hallucinations. One can’t help suspecting that mainstream critics prefer this novel simply because there are fewer gay elements. But Baldwin’s later accounts of gay desire are no more lurid than the accounts here of straight desire. And John’s love for Elisha is one of the book’s most human and touching parts.

  An equally memorable scene comes in the opening. John goes to the movies on Forty-second Street—his stepfather forbids both movies and jazz—and sees Of Human Bondage with Bette Davis. Sitting in the exciting hell of a crowd
ed theater, John knows the nasty woman on the screen is damned, and he loves her for it. Baldwin himself adored Davis. Gore Vidal later described Baldwin as a cross between Bette Davis and Martin Luther King, but he wasn’t the only person to see the electric actress in the electric writer. In The Devil Finds Work, his later book about Hollywood, Baldwin tells how he was transfixed from an early age by Davis: “the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she moved, she moved just like a nigger.” He describes her as if he were describing himself, and the words aren’t always pretty.

  The new novel was reviewed widely and well. Baldwin did not want to be treated as “a Negro novelist,” but he inevitably was. He was often compared to Ralph Ellison, who had published Invisible Man only the year before. Our old acquaintance Orville Prescott praised Go Tell It on the Mountain in the daily New York Times, but he also called it “an odd and special book” whose “story seems almost as remote as a historical novel about Hebrew patriarchs and prophets.” (It doesn’t seem so remote in our current age of evangelical Christianity.) Sales figures were good if not great. Baldwin was able to pay back some of the people he owed money to, including his agent and editor. Knopf immediately pressed him for a new book.

  He had a hard time starting it. First he wrote a play, The Amen Corner, a companion piece to Go Tell It about a religious family where the wife was the preacher. But Knopf didn’t want a play, they wanted another novel. Eventually he began work on a story set in the American colony in Paris that would address both race and love. He soon dropped race from the project. He warned his editor and agent that the new novel was a love story between two white people. He did not tell them that they were both men.

  The novel was Giovanni’s Room, and it’s difficult to say when its love story became a gay love story. At one point it was about a divorced woman and a younger man, an actor. Baldwin had several reasons for writing a novel with all-white characters. He wanted to escape the label of “Negro novelist,” which was not only artistically limiting, it was commercially restrictive. Two other African-American novelists, Frank Yerby and Willard Motley, had produced best sellers with white protagonists. Changing the race also enabled Baldwin to put distance between himself and his story: he wasn’t writing about his life, he was writing about other lives. It gave his imagination more breathing room. In addition, there must have been bitter pleasure in putting himself inside a privileged white skin.

  He had made a solid start on the new novel when he left Paris for New York in 1954. Lucien Happersberger followed him a few months later after leaving his wife and his child. Baldwin began to think they might become a couple. He was more in love with Happersberger now than when they had first known each other. But nothing went according to plan in America.

  The details are sketchy about what happened between the two men. They were together, apart, then together again. Baldwin worked steadily on the new novel while staying with friends in New York and at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire. He finished the book that spring and showed it to Helen Strauss, his agent at William Morris. She did not like what she read. Years later Baldwin reported, “My agent told me to burn it.” Strauss denied she said such a thing: “I just thought he could do better.” Nevertheless, she submitted the manuscript to Knopf, and after much in-house discussion Knopf rejected it. They claimed they were doing Baldwin a favor, that the book would ruin his career. Their chief argument among themselves was that they could be prosecuted for obscenity. It was only an excuse, of course—there’s nothing obscene in Giovanni’s Room.

  The cold fact is that the big houses almost completely stopped publishing gay fiction in the years after City and the Pillar and Other Voices. It wasn’t because of money—those books had done well. It wasn’t because of censorship, either—the patchwork of state and local obscenity laws didn’t prevent the distribution of adult novels by John O’Hara or James Jones. No, the change was due to the return of old attitudes about homosexuality. It was no longer exotic, it was just nasty. The numbers in the Kinsey Report made homosexuality seem both common and dangerous. Dr. Kinsey himself was under attack after 1950 and needed to struggle for funds in the years before his premature death in 1956. The gay scapegoating of the McCarthy years infected editorial offices, too, and genteel editors kept their distance from fiction with story lines about forbidden love.

  There was now a readership for such books, however—a gay readership. The vacuum in the market was filled by small houses like Greenberg Press, which put out Quatrefoil by James Barr (1950) and The Homosexual in America by Donald Webster Cory (1951), or the growing paperback trade, which specialized in racy work with racy covers sold in drugstores. The paperback houses found a goldmine in lesbian titles like Beebo Brinker or Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon and occasional gay male titles. (Marijane Meeker, who wrote both lesbian and gay pulp under various pseudonyms, reports that her publisher let her write almost anything so long as there was no graphic sex and the story ended unhappily—to make it “moral.”) But these books were rarely promoted and never reviewed. Serious attention was given only to work published by mainstream houses like Knopf and Dutton. Gay fiction in effect went underground in these years. That underground was enlarged in 1953 by the appearence of two small gay magazines, ONE and Mattachine Review, but their circulation remained limited.

  Baldwin was hurt and angered by Knopf’s rejection. He had worked hard to get through the publishing door, but now the door was slammed shut again. He remained scalded by the experience for the rest of his life.

  Luckily he had another project to work on. Sol Stein, his old friend from high school, had been at MacDowell with him the previous fall. Stein was an editor at Beacon Press, where he pioneered a new line of “library-size” quality paperbacks—what was later known as trade paper. He thought a collection of Baldwin’s essays and reviews would make a good book for Beacon. The two friends discussed what to include and Baldwin wrote two new essays, “Equal in Paris,” about his eight nights in jail, and “Notes of a Native Son,” which became the title of the book. It was a provocative title, usurping Richard Wright’s most famous work, but the piece itself might be the best single essay Baldwin ever wrote. This is his account of the summer of 1943, when he was humiliated for his race in New Jersey, his stepfather died, and Harlem erupted in riot. He found a way to use his anger here, giving it to an “I,” then stepping back and watching from a slight distance. The anger is powerfully present, but does not take over the essay. The young man’s private fury with his family is juxtaposed with his anger at white society; the narrator offers no resolution for either. (Baldwin’s anger is different from Ginsberg’s. Ginsberg’s anger is quicker, more immediate, more temporary. One feels Baldwin’s anger can fill his entire emotional life, and understandably so.)

  Stein also read Baldwin’s rejected novel, praised it and gave him detailed notes. Stein had no difficulty with the gay content. The same year he published Notes of a Native Son, he published An End to Innocence by Leslie Fiedler, with Fiedler’s notorious 1948 essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.” But unfortunately Beacon did not publish fiction.

  Baldwin’s year in America ended. Happersberger returned to his wife and child, and Baldwin returned to Paris with a new lover, a black musician known to biographers only as “Arnold.” Soon after his return, Baldwin read the rejected novel aloud to friends in Beauford Delaney’s hotel room—Delaney had moved to Paris a few years before. The reading lasted all night and the guests left at dawn, exhausted but impressed.

  Notes of a Native Son was published at the end of 1955. It was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Langston Hughes, who admired the prose—“The thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates the thought”—but felt Baldwin would not become a major writer until he wrote as a man rather than as a black man. Other reviewers were more complimentary, but the book didn’t find a readership until years later.

  Nowadays it’s commonplace to praise Baldwin’s essays at the
expense of his fiction. But I prefer the fiction. He wrote several great essays, yet many start strongly only to fall apart. The authority of his voice can’t disguise the mess of emotion and ideas he is unable to work out. The same contradictions, however, often produce life and drama in his novels.

  (When the Times Book Review asked Baldwin to review Hughes’s Selected Poems in 1959, Baldwin repaid Hughes for his criticism. The opening sentence reads: “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them.”)

  Meanwhile, on his own, Baldwin found a home for Giovanni’s Room with an English publisher, Michael Joseph. This forced his agent, Helen Strauss, to resume submitting the book in the States, until it was taken by a young editor, Jim Silberman, at a new publishing house, Dial Press. Dial remained Baldwin’s fiction publisher for the rest of his career. He dropped Strauss, however, as soon as the contract was signed, refusing to work with her again.

  Giovanni’s Room was published in October 1956, with only minor changes, none of them sexual. Despite the fears of Knopf and Strauss, there was no prosecution for obscenity. The reviews were excellent. Granville Hicks in the Times Book Review warned that the characters were “as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in Proust’s Cities of the Plain,” but argued, “Mr. Baldwin writes of these matters with an unusual degree of candor and yet with such dignity and intensity that he is saved from sensationalism.” Mark Schorer, a year before he testified at the trial for Howl, called the book “nearly heroic.” In the Nation Nelson Algren wrote, “This novel is more than just another report on homosexuality”—as if the market were flooded—but accurately added, “It is a story of a man who could not make up his mind, who could not say yes to life.” The book sold well, going into a second printing after six weeks. It’s safe to assume that it was primarily gay men who bought it.