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 two Baldwin and “the American Confusion” colm tóibín In December 1962 the New York Times asked some of the year’s best-selling authors to write a piece describing “what they believe there is about their book or the climate of the times that has made [their book] so popular.” In reply, Vance Packard, for example, explained that his book The Pyramid Climbers had been a best-seller, because, he believed, “there is a growing uneasiness among Americans about the terms of their existence, and many tell me that I often articulate their own apprehensions.” Patrick Dennis, whose book Genius had also been a best-seller, wrote: “I can’t imagine what it is that makes my books sell and any author who claims to know is a fool, or a liar or both.” This did not deter Allen Drury, whose book A Shade of Difference was on the list. “I hope,” he wrote, “those readers who like what I have to say like it because it is honest, well-expressed and pertinent to the world in which we live.” James Baldwin’s Another Country had also been a best-seller, and Baldwin used the occasion to position himself ambiguously in two of the central pantheons of American beauty. “I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,” he wrote, “Miles Davis and Ray Charles—but I would like to think that some of the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists in their very different ways, sing a kind of universal blues. . . . They are telling us something of what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity which one hears in them but compassion. . . . I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way 53 they sound. . . . I am aiming at what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion.’” Baldwin was claiming for his prose style and the structure of his novels something of the soaring, melancholy beauty of Davis and Charles; he was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their bearings from the solitary pain, the uncompromising glamour that these two American musicians offered the world. But just in case anyone reading him wanted thus to place him as a primitive, a writer who did not plan his work but merely let it soar, a writer not steeped in a writerly tradition, Baldwin needed to invoke as well the high priest of American re‹nement, an author known not for his passion, however pitched, but for the rigor of his controlling imagination. Baldwin the best-seller in 1962 wanted to have it both ways. This need was ‹rst of all a way of unloosening him from any easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist that he carried in his temperament a sense of James’s interest in consciousness as something glittering and also as something hidden and secretive, a concern with language as both mask and pure revelation. But Baldwin also had a fascination with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence. The list of what had made him such an interesting stylist would be long. Over the years he would vary its ingredients. Sometimes, he would do so to distract the reader from his own artistry and sophistication; other times, he would do so because he liked the list for its sound and variation, as in the list he provided in Notes of a Native Son: “The King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech—and something of Dickens’s love for bravura.” But the style itself did not come simply; it could not be easily de‹ned because it varied and shifted. It had real bravura moments, like a set of famous riffs, or an encore, such as this passage in part 1 of Another Country when Rufus and Vivaldo arrive at Benno’s Bar in the Village: The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there, drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet ‹ngers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in the corners watching the drifting women. The college boys, gleaming with...

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