James Baldwin has made a reputation by exploiting social paradoxes, so it should not be surprising to trace his literary antecedents to neither Richard Wright nor Harriet B. Stowe, but to that Brahmin, Henry James…. The amphibian elegance of [Baldwin's] syntax comes naturally to an artist obsessed by dualities, paradox. The Atlantic Ocean separated James's mind into opposed hemispheres, and the gulf of color so cleaves Baldwin. The antipodes of their worlds propose a dialectical art. (p. 52)

Baldwin's characters suffer no more from their color than James's suffer from their money—these are only the peculiar conditions of their suffering. The problem for both is more universal—the opacity of their culture and the question of their identity within it. For Baldwin assumes, in the consequences of his culture, the crisis of his identity, the reflective burden of Western Man. His color is his metaphor, his vantage. But in his despair, he is closer to Henry Adams than John Henry.

Both Baldwin and James were victims of a "mysterious childhood accident." Only their society's different reaction to puberty sets them apart. It is not so much a question of how it happened, but the consequences. "I'm the reaction against the mistake," says Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, and Baldwin certifies this most finally for his contemporaries. "They were so other," James elaborates in A Small Boy and Others, "that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window" (emphasis mine).

Their hurts are obscure only because such wounds are generally ignored by those enamored of the big candy in the window. The pose necessitated is that of the powerless, feeling young man. The psychological consequence is self-imposed exile; to be "other almost anyhow." The literary consequence is the novel of "manners" (read prejudice); this being the drama of how personal histories conflict with the public history of the time. Personal action can only be understood in terms of its public consequences. Morality, in this sense, may not be relative, but it is always comparative. (pp. 52-3)

Baldwin's first paradox is that he uses the Negro, uses him ruthlessly, to show the White Man what the White Man is. Repeatedly in his work, he returns to that image of a Negro hung from a fine Southern tree with his sex cut out. We confront the Negro, we cannot miss him. But we know little about him except that he suffered. We know more, implicitly, about the White Man who left him there. The insights and blind spots of such a technique are illustrated in Baldwin's most ambitious work, Another Country.

This novel is populated by a series of characters, or rather couples, as geometrically entangled as Far Eastern erotic sculpture, the only undocumented relationship being that unlovely norm—monogamous, heterosexual marriage…. [In the novel the attempt of the characters Rufus and Leona] to confront, transcend, their past results in her madness and his suicide. This couple is removed from the action relatively early. Subsequent relationships embellish this dazzling affair from other sexual and moral perspectives, through the use of ficelles—James's word for characters who, while not self-sustaining, provide relief or depth by their juxtaposition to the primary figures of the work….

Tempered, perhaps, by the knowledge that their respective talents may gain them escape from the ghetto, Ida and Vivaldo seem one generation removed from the heat of Rufus and Leona. They are reincarnations; history is personalized for them through the primary disastrous affair. (p. 54)

What Cass comes to resent in her husband [Richard] is not clear—he is disciplined rather than talented perhaps—he does not indulge in the other's frenetic search for a large identity—he actually finishes a book and gets it published. In any case, Cass has an affair with Eric, ex-Alabama actor, formerly a lover of Rufus and later involved with Vivaldo, then in an interlude awaiting the arrival of his present lover, Yves, French, ex-male prostitute…. Cass and Eric arrange their Te Deum in the Museum of Modern Art. The scene is crucial and among the best in the book…. [They] move through the unending anterooms of the modern world—all glass and steel, no texture there—rooms emblazoned with incomprehensible abstractions, cold walls ogled by triumphant myopics, "… like tourists in a foreign graveyard." Before an enormous red canvas, stand a boy and girl holding hands, American Gothic against the Apocalypse.

Here, in one scene, is all that distance between Christopher Newman, James's American, and more contemporary stuff. For despite Newman's inability to accept his own culture or to fathom a foreign atmosphere no less stifling, he could find solace in the red doors of Notre Dame, as James did in the Galerie d'Appallon…. Newman could construe the nature of his rebuff; that it was his part to pay his absentee rent and return home.

That is the nostalgic quality of James's characters—they divine their atmosphere, their responses are equal to the situation. They make their peace with a precise if unhappy destiny. But the atmosphere is more opaque for Baldwin's characters, it elicits no response, they simply suffer from it…. [Their] sensitivity, their culture, their very cosmopolitanism is turned against them. (pp. 54-5)

Cass is pithy as any Jamesian interlocutor. "He can suffer, after all," she says of Richard. "I told him because … that if we were going to—continue together—we could begin on a new basis with everything clear between us. But I was wrong—some things cannot be clear … or perhaps some things are clear, only one won't face those things."

In that parallelism hangs the book. Tolstoy would have used those last sentences as his first. The story would have unfolded from their dichotomy. It is characteristic of modern art that the thesis is not hung until we have been dragged kicking through every conceivable blind alley—the self being the sum of the destruction of all false selves.

Echoes of these three relationships [Rufus and Leona, Ida and Vivaldo, and Cass and Richard] reverberate through another series of ficelles…. Baldwin once accused Richard Wright of substituting violence for sex. He has come full circle.

In the end, things are magnificently unresolved, save for Rufus's death and Leona's madness. (p. 56)

The irresolution of these destinies … has brought some critics down hard on Baldwin. The charge is formlessness. But if Another Country is formless, it has that in common with this nation's greatest literature….

[The language of the novel's final scene] is not the language of Henry James, the understated snippet of dialogue or restrained image which brings things to a close. It is the language of Gatsby and the Green Light, Huck Finn, "striking out for the territory," Ishmael, picked up, alone, to tell the tale—the picaresque open-end of American Literature….

[In] this ecstatic scene, no one is fleeing injustice with high hopes …; this is no rendezvous with destiny, but a discomforting liaison. The visionary rhetoric is utterly undercut.

So the legend of America as refuge for the oppressed, opportunity for the pure in heart, is invoked only to be exposed. From the very first, he is saying, our vision has been parochial. We have not accounted for the variety of man's motives, the underside of our settlers, the cost of a new life. The plague has come over as part of the baggage, and we will be sick until we isolate that cargo and deal with it…. If Another Country is formless, it is so because it rejects the theories of history available to it. (p. 57)

[What about the] characters that set Another Country in motion, Leona and Rufus? It is what Baldwin does not know, or say, about them which is interesting, for they must bear the primary burden, they are the myth which the other couples mime. As myths, Baldwin tends to monumentalize them, give them stature by arresting their development. Like Greek royalty, their personality is gradually subsumed by the enormity of the crime which killed them.

But who are they? Rufus Scott has that ethereal sensitivity of the modern hero, half-adolescent, half-prophet, that powerless, feeling young man celebrated, apparently, because he rejects a success already denied him—the man who in Norman Mailer's words would "affect history by the sheer force of his sentiments." Or so the logic goes. But really, he is a monument from the very first, he is that Negro hanging from the tree with his sex cut out.

The fact is, that Rufus is nothing but his own potential, and the world is simply what thwarts it. He is a brilliantly rendered testament. But he is not a character. What he can't do and why they won't let him, is more vague than mysterious. He is, if you will, the Seymour Glass of his class, his virtue postulated by his lesser apostles. It is significant that although Rufus is a musician, we never hear him play. As with Seymour's alleged poetry, we await the aria that never comes.

And Leona? Poor white trash Isolde? Significantly, the only character in the book not devoted in some way to the arts. Symbols, representation, mean nothing to her. It is commerce, communication in the most direct sense, that she lives. "Do you love me?" everyman's saxophone asks. Leona says, "Don't hurt me." The pale white liberal; impotent (I ain't gonna have no more babies), platitudinous (it don't matter what two people's color is so long as they love each other), ineradicably guilty. She tries to love Rufus because she needs him, and he won't let her because it smacks of retribution. Her effort, pathetic, styleless, is for nothing. She is committed to an institution. But that is only the legal acknowledgment. If Baldwin does not see what Rufus might become, he does not see what Leona is. She does not go crazy; she has been mad from the beginning. As characters, they go nowhere; they die of nothing more than their own abstraction.

"What they (Negroes) hold in common is their precarious, their unutterably painful relation to the white world," Baldwin says. What the characters of Another Country hold in common is their precarious relation to a world which is defined by little more than its victims' resentment. One by one, we come upon them, hung from their respective trees, but the executioner never appears; like Godot, his name is simply invoked to "explain things." What is explicitly absent in Baldwin's politics—the differentiation between enemies, the priorities and strategies of rebellion—is implicitly absent in his literature.

To structure the dialogue in this way has its dramatic usefulness. The conflicts are elucidated in all their hopeless solipsism. But the consequence is also to make development, in terms of plot, psychology, or character, impossible. He is overwhelmed by the eloquence of his own dialectic. He has reached that moment which defines much of modern fiction—when the characters start to repeat themselves endlessly. Recapitulation of this sort has its irony—upon which the theatre of the absurd had capitalized—but artistically, it is also a dead end.

To understand how an artist can get into this situation, Another Country must be considered the result of a long and certainly uplifting process. Baldwin's progress as an artist has been his ability to articulate, confront, his central problems as a man and a writer…. What began as a crippling disgust with both his race and country, as an American, a Negro, becomes a subtle distinctive pride in each as americanegro. (pp. 59-60)

[Baldwin's] progress is apparent in Another Country, but it is a work of a different order [from the other works]. It is less explicitly therapeutic, more ambitious. It is the very repetition, the surface perversity of the encounters, that gradually makes perversity irrelevant. For this is not at all a book about interracial affairs, homosexual affairs, adulterous affairs, but about affairs—it evolves in the same way that Portrait of a Lady, say, unfolds upon the loom of marriage. The various approaches, styles, perspectives are secondary. They all need the same thing if they face different obstacles, they all pay the same dues. Everyone hits bottom in his own way and that is that. Yves and Eric's liaison is significant on one level of irony, but ultimately it is of no peculiar issue. Their final significance is that they simply carry on the central burden of the book, the frantic attempt to know something of one another. Perversion is no single act; but rather, any unaffecting love.

Baldwin has constructed his terrible dialectic; he has drawn up the battle lines so that we may never be safe again. But what he has done, in scrupulously avoiding everybody's social protest novel, is to write everybody's existential novel. (p. 60)

James's characters have an extraordinary freedom based on money—and it is no accident that Baldwin's characters are similarly unaffected by conventional economic problems. This is not because they are more spiritual, but simply because this is as accurate an index of modern affluent society as James's analysis of the international aristocracy. In short, the economics of both situations are only manifestations of more significant and complex problems. Rufus did not kill himself because he did not have enough to eat when he was a child, but because he understood the dimensions of ignorance and fear, one consequence of which was to affect his diet. Unhampered by the obvious, Baldwin has cut through the pop-sociology of his time to the roots of contemporary frustration—the curse not of slavery, but leisure; not of organization, but alienation; not of social evil, but of individual love. Baldwin's assertion that we are all second-class citizens in our existential dilemma, that the terms of our exclusion are similar, is his greatest achievement. In the end, his protagonists are not black anymore than we are white. (pp. 60-1)

The message of this existentialism is the equality of guilt, the equality of men before no law—but when the rebellion has been justified, then what happens? Experience under these assumptions is predictable, sensibility has but one consequence. To say that the self is not what we commonly thought, even to say it again and again, is not to say what the self is….

Another Country is our country, real, repressed, and envisioned, and Baldwin's return to it does not break down the parallel with James in the least. His point of view remains that of the exile. Under existential assumptions, self-exile, to paraphrase a politician, is not a choice, but a condition. It is the condition of that powerless, feeling young man, an echo of that "reaction against a mistake," that dangling emasculate Negro, that rage to be "other almost anyhow."

But how do you differentiate when everybody is "other" anyway? Why do Rufus and Richard give up? Why do Ida and Vivaldo persevere? These are ambiguities in the work that cannot be justified by saying that life is ambiguous as well. The underground man is pretty thin fare by this time. Too many of us live there now to be celebrated as either indicative or unique. "There is no structure," Baldwin says, "that he [the artist] can build to keep out self-knowledge." But he has not yet demonstrated, except in his essays, that the artist can build a structure to use self-knowledge. (p. 61)

James refused to be satisfied by the type of the powerless, feeling young man, for he knew how easy it was for him to uphold such a one, and how graciously his audience would accept him. He was too involved in his own cultural adventure to settle for the drama of limited character and obvious dichotomy. His concern can be seen in his notebooks—"the web of consciousness," his own metaphor, replaces the dialectic as a structural principle. Whatever the argument over the convolutions of the later style, the consequences of his continued exile, it is apparent that the later heroes of sensibility are transfigured, and again I use his own words, into "personalities of transcendent value." He is not satisfied simply to doom his characters in his later work, not because they ought not to go down, but because that story was written—those conflicts were charted—and now the problem was to develop the internal relations between the sides he had so artfully chosen. It was a question of creating characters sufficiently complex to sustain them beyond the dialectical conflict which created them. (pp. 62-3)

The remarkable thing about [James's] later characters is that they refuse to draw conclusions that would preclude further investigation on their part, and for that matter, further involvement for the reader. The galling thing about Baldwin's characters—and most "existential" heroes—is that they are so susceptible to conclusions which define them immediately. It is not that their truth is bitter, it is that their truth comes so easily—however hard it may be to shake it. In fact, they are all ficelles.

The quality of the later James lies in the tension between characters. Who is guilty? Who is innocent? Our final knowledge is that Paris, France, and Wollett, Mass., are not knowable without the other, that the categories with which we began the book no longer can apply. Radical innocence and guileless evil are neither opposed nor reconciled—they are intermeshed in a genuine mystery. Baldwin is shocking; not yet terrifying. What he has shown us is that everyone is guilty. This is the true paradox of the existential hero, for in all his hefty insistence that rebellion is justified, he seems to end up lacking the energy to achieve the engagement to which he pays his coffee-house lip-service.

Henry James was able to achieve what his notebooks anticipated: the reclamation of large areas of social experience, the transformation of these abstractions into material for the imagination. Baldwin has yet to progress beyond the initial encounter. He has, most powerfully, given us an opportunity to test our preconceptions, but that ultimately is social science, not literature.

The question remains, why pick on Baldwin when these are questions to be applied to modern fiction generally? Why does he take the burden of the breakthrough?

For one thing, Baldwin has progressed in each of his works, his dialectic has become progressively more refined. He has shown a flexibility and perseverance equal to our most influential artists. Further, and almost alone, he has continued to confront the unmanageable questions of modern society, rather than creating a nuclear family in which semantic fantasies may be enacted with no reference to the larger world except that it stinks. There can be no escape into technique or historiography. It will not do for him to remember something else. He must continue to find out about himself. It is his actual experience, perhaps, even more than the shaping of it, which will be crucial. To bring us to the door in Rufus's name will not be enough next time.

Baldwin's experience is unique among our artists in that his artistic achievements mesh so precisely with his historical circumstances. He is that nostalgic type—an artist speaking for a genuinely visible revolution. He is first in line for that Nirvana of American liberals, a Ministry of Culture. As with James, his problem is to give artistic life to the critical insights of his prefaces, his notebooks, in short, to develop characters which have a subtle and various consciousness equal to the omniscient, cranky narrator of the essays. This particular problem accounts for the failure of both artists as playwrights. Theatrical success depends upon rendering the particulars of a character through bald dialogue. Only rarely can a narrator amplify a character through abstract description; no disembodied voice can bridge the gap between an idea and its personification as in an essay or narrative literature. For those obsessed with the dialectic, for those whose characters are forever battling their own abstraction, the proscenium marks a treacherous zone. (pp. 63-4)

Charles Newman, "The Lesson of the Master: Henry James and James Baldwin," in The Yale Review (© 1966 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), October, 1966 (and reprinted in James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Keneth Kinnamon, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, pp. 52-65).