• ANOTHER COUNTRY
• by James Baldwin
• [rated by PBS readers as #90]
• 436 pages

Well, to say that after the Count, I’m going another way with this one is pure understatement! Where Cristo was a streamlined narrative, Mr. Baldwin speaks with poetic imaging, exquisite detail and fabulous rhythm.

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a James Baldwin book before, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t. Both because I don’t remember ever having done so and because as I start to read his words, I know I would have remembered.

Baldwin’s phrases are huge word stews, replete with gorgeous images. They remind me of two things. The first is a Dylan Thomas poem, that can patter on but doesn’t leave you behind amidst a city of strangers. And the second is one of those wonderful impressionist paintings that show a crowd of people and emotion, sometimes capturing a face in the crowd with only two brush strokes. Every word is chosen with deliberate mastery.

I’m 30 pages in and Baldwin already has me underlining the way he captures images…

…Ladies from the big apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, vaguely and desperately elegant…

…And he had fled, so he had thought, from the beat of Harlem, which was simply the beat of his own heart…

I’m really glad I started this on my week off. It will give me a bit of time to get used to this dense language before I go back to being interrupted by life too many times!

11/4/19, The Very Next Day, About 50 pages in…

Man, this is a lovely change up, I must say.

What I’m going to say next is going to sound stupid. But if you’ve read with me for a while, you can testify that I must not be afraid of that!

James Baldwin and his rise to the top of the literary world was just a bit before my time. So my knowledge of him is really in an historical context, rather than literary. I had always seen him as a revolutionary, opening people’s eyes to lives that they didn’t know and speaking often to the fate of our ignorant culture. And he was all of those things, at a time where his voice was desperately needed.

But I had no idea what kind of lyrical writer he was. I saw him to be an eye opener and a critic of the culture and he was those things, but now I see, never at the expense of the literature he was creating.

In this way, he is the inadvertent solution to my favorite whipping boy, Gulliver’s Travels. In the three or four parts of his book, Swift tells a marginal little tale and then interrupts himself to make and belabor his points about the culture ad nauseum.

Baldwin begins to tell the story and what a narrative it is. I’m never sure what part of the story we are in but it all contributes to the storytelling as a whole so it is obviously where it should be. Then the images that he is capable of conjuring!

Five words in Baldwin’s hands and you’ve got a Universe.

And then – and only then – does the commentary on the culture come in. But never at the expense of the truth of his tale.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this story is going to keep going down and down just as Rufus, the lead character does. But I’m game. The language and storytelling make it irresistibly compelling.

Loving this choice after the Count. Man, there are so many ways to write!

12/16/19

Finished it.

I probably should have figured out – and it wouldn’t take that much to do this if my curiosity gets the better of me – how long each of these books have taken me to read.

This one might be the longest, well over a month. But, unlike Little Women or Gulliver, it was for all the right reasons.

From the first page to the last, I was in the hands of a master writer. And not a master by reputation, not a master because he said what he said the way he said it earlier than everybody else, leaving only copiers in his wake, although his reputation and his brave and original point of view could not and would not be denied.

Baldwin is a master because every sentence screams his talent out. He is a maestro – conducting words, images, points of view and style without ceasing. I realized today that I was proud to walk into restaurants to read with his book out, whereas many of my mysteries have sort of left themselves in my purse till I needed them.

I was proud of myself for staying with this. Several times, I opened it and saw the dense prose and thought how long it had been since I had read anything matching this.

Relentlessly hitting the bulls eye of pain located in each of his characters, I do confess that I took a momentary diversion this last week. I was doing a big production with my choir and I needed to read something else for a couple of days. A friend of mine, Larry Peck, gave me a 1920’s book version of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and I read about half of it for a diversion.

But I really did that to stay with this opus. Baldwin is one of the greatest writers I have ever read. So I returned to it and just finished it.

Though hard going at times and damaging – he is a little too good at sharpening his pencil on all of us and our truths!, still Baldwin should be read. I don’t know what they are reading in schools today, but I hope they haven’t abandoned reading this amazing writer.

I imagine that I will return to Baldwin after this project. That makes me wonder if I would be up for reading another one of each of the writers. Probably, but far more eagerly, I would want to reunite with this level of writing.

I won’t forget these characters. Even more, I won’t stop thinking about them. They live, from Baldwin’s keen observation, through his heart and soul and empathy, into his pen and into this reader’s life. And I am grateful to him for having had that experience.

He may not be everyone’s thing, but in a weird way, I think everyone who ever reads him is elevated as a reader and strengthened in their humanity by seeing the world through his eyes. Bravo.