James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

2. The Celebrity’s Return: Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

The Celebrity's Return: Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone All I can do is work out the terms on which I can work, and for me that means being a transatlantic commuter. -James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin A t the end of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone James Baldwin signs his work by listing the places and dates where it was written: "New York, Istanbul, San Francisco, 1965-1967." This journalistic signature draws attention to the autobiographical element of the novel and invites readers to understand it in its historical and political context as the most recent chapter of Baldwin's ongoing chronicle of his experience in a racially divided American landscape. The list of cities suggests the author's status as an international celebrity, but it also suggests his displacement and the difficulty he had finding time to work and a place to call home. Baldwin's political activism, his celebrity, and his final breakup with his lover, Lucien Happersberger, both interrupted and informed this novel.1 The dates 1965-1967 correspond to the increasing polarization of American society over race, the radicalization of the Civil Rights movement , and the increased repression of activists by local and federal authorities . The novel's closing signature authenticates the crisis in the life of the 20 WITNESS TO THE JOURNEY protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, with the author's own experience of personally and politically turbulent times. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone was released in 1968 about two months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, a fact which added credence to Leo Proudhammer's apocalyptic prophecy at the end of the novel. Yet Leo's story suffered the fate of prophecies of old. One of Baldwin's biographers finds a "morbid congruity" in the death of King and the release of Baldwin's fourth novel, stating that "the novel's publication signaled the second assassination of the year."2 With few exceptions the novel received negative reviews, including hostile reviews from prominent critics and writers Granville Hicks, Irving Howe, Nelson Algren, and Mario Puzo.3 Each claimed that the novel was an "artistic failure," yet the real animus of these early reviews, as well as some of the later critiques, was directed at the novel's racial and sexual politics. Several critics eschewed what they perceived to be Baldwin's turn to militancy and charged Train with being outdated protest realism at best and propaganda at worst. Nelson Algren complained that all the good guys were white and all the bad guys were black. Irving Howe accused Baldwin of "whipping himself into postures of militancy and declarations of racial metaphysics." Mario Puzo advised Baldwin "to forget the black revolution and start worrying about himself as an artist." The argument put forth by mostly white male critics was that Baldwin's racial anger (which they had a hard time taking seriously) compromised his artistic talent.4 In fact, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is about, among other things, the problem and uses of racial anger rather than the unmediated expression of anger that these critics interpreted it to be. The complete breakdown in understanding between Baldwin and the majority of his critics was, indeed, a sign of the times. It corresponded to sharply differing views on the state of America and the gains of the Civil Rights movement. Baldwin often referred to the Civil Rights movement as the "latest slave rebellion," not only to emphasize the historical continuity of the conditions of American blacks, but to deconstruct the myth that "civil rights" had made blacks and whites equal. The physical conditions and lack of opportunities for young blacks in Harlem, where Baldwin had grown up some The Celebrity's Return 21 thirty years before, were certainly not better and were, in many respects, worse by the late sixties.S An addition to the problems of continuing discrimination and poverty was the ongoing destruction of black leadership. Baldwin, an active participant and public speaker in the Civil Rights movement , had met and worked with Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. When King was murdered, Baldwin experienced a severe depression, believing that he could also be a target for an assassin's bullet.6 Baldwin was also friendly with the Black Panthers, who were being systematically targeted by the FBI and the local police...