James Baldwin’s Another Country: An Encounter with Race and Gay Love
How To Create Complex and Nuanced Characters in Your Writing
James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969)
Mastering the art of storytelling is an arduous task, particularly of in a novel which takes so much concentration with all the different characters engaged with one another and, as such, demanding that the writer carefully render each of them. James Agee said that, after writing in the morning, he felt as exhausted as he felt after playing four quarters of football, or even more tired, although, if I remember right, Agee wasn’t of a build or inclination to play football. Part of the task of a fiction writer is to get to the action as quickly as possible and do away with the preliminaries. Football fans don’t want to have football players at midfield giving testimonials about their expertise, their effort and their team profiles. They want the players to get set at either end of the field, for the whistle to blow, for the kicker to the kick the ball, and for the returner to sprint up the field. Game on. Let’s go. The same applies to storytelling. The writer must get the players on the field, each in their place, and let the plot unwind. One of the masters of character development is James Baldwin. He could introduce a main character with a few adept sentences, delve into his or her desires and internal conflicts, put a protagonist to foil them with external conflicts, without losing a beat.
I recently picked up Another Country mostly because I knew he’d written The Fire the Next Time which I also read again that explained as well as anyone why Black Lives Matter isn’t something that recently emerged as a hue and cry after the George Floyd, It was something that’s plagued America since reconstruction in the 1860s. (run-on awkward) The black character Rufus in Another Country notices how white people and police officers particularly heed a black man with a white woman on his arm. Not just notices him with her but disdains the black man, reviles him, makes him feel that he has violated a basic principle that white woman were off-limits, were not allowed to be with black men. Rufus is enraged that, even though he loves his white girlfriend, he risks losing both black and white friends because his life really doesn’t matter, he has no right to love who he loves, to be seen with her—not in the black community, nor in the white world.
The plot of the novel revolves around Rufus who commits suicide. He can’t endure the racism. He vents his rage against it on his girlfriend Leona, beats her, forcing her to leave him, and drives him to leap off a bridge. He leaves his sister Ida, his closest friend Vivaldo, his former lover Eric, and their friends Cassie and Richard devastated and attempting to carry on with their lives as his death. The memory of his passions haunts everything they do while they also reconfigure what his relationship was to each one of them and how it impacts each of their lives and their interaction with one another. (too long)
Proof that Baldwin is a master of prose is how adeptly he introduces characters not just by describing their physical appearance but by delving into them psychologically. In a matter of a few paragraphs, we understand what makes them tick. We know what haunts them, torments them, bothers them, and drives them. Baldwin doesn’t waste words. We are immersed in the characters before we know it.
I wanted to figure out how he does that with each character, using different strategies yet relying on some consistently because they are the most expeditious. They are strategies that any writer can use from leveraging multiple parallel construction to elaborate on the dynamics of a character to using dialogue or self-monologues to show their inner and intra complexities.
Notice how Rufus is introduced with his world fallen into pieces around him:
Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, those towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition. . . .They could scarcely bear their knowledge, nor could they have borne the sight of Rufus, but they know why he was on the streets tonight, why he rode subways all night long, why his stomach growled, why his hair was nappy, his armpits funky, his pants and shoes too thin, and why he did not dare to stop and take a leak. (Ibid, 10)
In one paragraph, we get an overview of men like Rufus, down and out, but we also get in the last sentence a physical description of his condition, the sight, the smell, the agony of him spelled out in two lists—the “why he” adverbial clause and “his” phrases giving us a snapshot of him and one urgent and basic need, his needing to pee and having nowhere to do it.
If Baldwin had used, as many writers do, the journalistic prose style, he’d have had a sentence for every adverbial clause, but he presses them together in a riff, letting each of the why clauses delve deeper into his condition and followed them with absolutes (“his armpits funky,” “his pants and shoes too thin”) streamlining and compacting the information into one culminative sentence. Instead of saying, “He rode the subways all night long. He was hungry and his stomach growled. His hair was nappy.”, he combined them and packs them together so he can get into the story. The art and craft are in his sentences, their tautness and muscularity as finely shaped as a Rodin sculpture. (NICE!)
A few paragraphs later, we get a picture of Rufus as he was before, when he was with it, a drummer with a career, again with the snapshot coming in a few, tightly packed sentences:
It made him remember days and nights, days and nights, when he had been inside, on the stand or in the crowd, sharp, beloved, making it with any chick he wanted, making it to parties and getting high and getting drunk and fooling around with musicians, who were his friends, who respected him. Then, going home to his own pad, locking his door and taking off his shoes, maybe making himself a drink, maybe listening to some records, stretching out on the bed, maybe calling up some girl. And changing his underwear and socks and his shirt, shaving, and taking a shower, and making it to Harlem to the barber shop, then seeing his mother and his father and teasing his sister, Ida, and eating. . . .(Ibid11)
He pulls the details of his life out by a series of linked participle phrases (“making it. . .,” “getting. . .,” and “fooling. . .,”) and then extends them in the next sentence showing him getting undressed, showered, and taking off to get a haircut. In two paragraphs, we are given his two extremes, the down-and-out and the successful Rufus. Baldwin never fails in giving each character a nuanced inner and outer life. What makes his characters believable is that they’re complex, not paper cut outs. As he is creating Rufus’ inner life, he has Rufus remember the city, the policeman who “taught him how to hate,” and “the stickball games in the street,” and “the numbers they played,” setting Rufus in the city with all its legal and illegal activities, all the world he has to negotiate to reach manhood. As Baldwin brings each character into the novel, we discover that each of them, as with Rufus, dwells in a world where she or he has some inner torment, some unfulfilled promised as well as some secret longing for something that eludes them, something from their past, something in their relationship with a friend or lover, something unnamed yet hinted at that will lead them to act in ways both unpredictable and expected.
Baldwin not only enters into the life of each character—he knows them well, they have told him much about themselves, and he understands them—but he can capture what the big questions of the book are about in one vividly described scene, using a saxophone player doing a solo to ask the question many of us have asked one time or another, or, if we are real with ourselves, continue to ask. Here is how Baldwin does it when Rufus remembers when a saxophonist plays. Notice how the fourth sentence, the one coming after the riff of “Do you love me?”, unfolds, pulling in details of the jazz bar along with its clientele. And in the last sentence, how it draws in the larger cityscape with another riff, mimicking the saxophone in its picking up a theme and rendering and shaping it to his liking.
He was a kid about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rages of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And, again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind the marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he has received the blow from which he would never recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? (Ibid, 13-14)
From this brief description of a lone saxophonist, we know this isn’t suburbia, this isn’t a Disney movie or a silly comedy with Doris Day and Rock Hudson with love being almost as silly as the characters. This is a tough story about the cry for love. The blare of the sax is pleading for love in a loveless world where gangs fight, where lonely men sleep on sperm-stiffened blankets, where the cry for love may be unanswered, as it was for Rufus, who would stand on the Washington Bridge railing over the mighty Hudson and hear no reply and plunge to his death. But for other characters that sax plays on, calling to each of them, Do you love me? We meet each of them and find, as we did with Rufus, who they are and what makes them tick. Baldwin spills out innards of their lives with the same efficiency as he did with Rufus. He also had the ability to create mood using weather, having it—be it the light coming in a room or rain pouring down—set up a scene. A number of times, torrential rain signals for Baldwin something dangerous. When Rufus goes out with his white friend and best friend Vivaldo who has his girlfriend Jane in tow, the violent scene is set up by the rain:
It had been a terrible night, with the rain pouring down like a great tin bucket, filling the air with a roaring, whining clatter, and making the lights and streets and buildings as fluid as itself. It battered and streamed against the windows of the fetid, poor-man’s bar Jane had brought them to, a bar where they knew no one. It was filled with shapeless, filthy women with whom Jane drank, apparently, sometimes, during the day; and pale, untidy, sullen men, who worked on the docks, and resented seeing him (Rufus) there. He wanted to go, but he was trying to wait for the rain to let up a little. He was bored speechless with Jane’s chatter about her paintings, and he was ashamed of Vivaldo for putting up with it. (Ibid, 32)
A fight starts soon after this description, but it’s expected. Rufus feels trapped by Jane’s monologues and by the rain. The regulars who see that Jane, a white woman, is with a black man and his buddy in a bar that’s reserved for whites only, want to defend her from Rufus’s criticism. So when Rufus raises his voice, the dock workers turn on Rufus and his friend. The violent weather outside enters the bar and drenches it in blood and mayhem.
When Ida, Rufus’s sister, comes on the scene and Vivaldo falls in love with her, we see her set against her own family’s history:
She moved with the wonderful, long-legged stride and she carried her head high, as though it had borne, but only yesterday, the weight of an African water jar. Her mother’s head had borne the weight of white folks’ washing, and it was because Ida never had known what to make of this act –should she be ashamed of it, or proud?—that there mingled in her regal beauty something of the too quick, diffident, plebian disdain. (Ibid, 124)
Even minor characters are introduced to show, right off, their complexity, the face behind the face, the inner self driving the man. Steven Ellis is such a man who woos Ida, which later causes Vivaldo, who has fallen in love with her, to feel jealous rage. When Ellis comes to a cocktail party, his winner-take-all nature is revealed by careful description of his appearance:
The doorbell rang. This time it was Steve Ellis, who had come with his wife. Ellis was a short, square man with curly hair and a boyish face. The face was just beginning, as it is the way with boyish faces, not so much to harden as to congeal. He had the reputation as the champion of doomed causes, reaction’s intrepid foe; and he walked into the drawing rooms of the world as though he expected to find the enemy ambushed there. (Ibid, 138)
But the stunning quality of Baldwin’s characters is how complex their emotional reactions in the most intimate, passionate moments of a relationship. When making love to Ida, Vivaldo experiences a range of feelings, each one emerging out of nowhere to contradict and erase another feeling. Baldwin’s ability to render a character’s range of feelings is startling yet comforting. Who hasn’t at some intimate moment, when a lover reaches out to touch, recoiled for some strange reason, gone cold, suddenly remembering another lover, a failed relationship, and wondered what had happened to spark that memory? Baldwin renders these moments beautifully:
Then he began again. He had never been so patient, so determined, or so cruel before. Last light night she has watched him; this morning he watched her; he was determined to bring her over the edge and into his possession, even, if at any moment she finally called his name, the heart within him burst. This, anyway, seemed more imminent than the spilling of his seed. He was aching in a way he had never ached before, was congested in a new way, and wherever her hand had touched him and then fled, he was cold. (Ibid, 152)
To have a person patient, determined, and cruel, to be filled with passion and yet to be cold, is to allow a character to hold within him the contradictions and conflicts that also exist outside him in society with the struggles of whites and blacks, of attraction and repulsion, of poor and wealthy, none of them reconciled inside him any more than they are in society.
Later Vivaldo, distraught, worried Ida was having an affair with Steve Ellis (and she was), searches for a woman to pick up and, again, the countercurrents of emotions rush over him:
He looked at his face in the mirror behind the bar. He still had all his hair, there was no gray in it yet; his face had not begun to fall at the bottom and shrivel at the top; and he wasn’t yet all ass and belly. But still—and soon: and he stole a look at the blonde again. He wondered about her odor, juices, sounds; for a night, only a night; then abruptly, with no warning, he found himself wondering how Rufus would have looked at this girl, and an odd thing happened: all desire left him, he turned absolutely cold, and then then desire came roaring back with legions. (Ibid, 255)
In scene after scene, he keeps the tension humming with characters shifting emotionally, being at once attracted to another, then repulsed; happy to be somewhere and horrified that they had succumbed to being there. Professional writers warn novices to build suspense, to create tension, to have an emotional arc in a scene. But every scene cannot have a major dramatic turn like some murder mystery novels do or the Bourne chronicles where every scene leads to an escape or challenge. But if a writer can give characters enough emotional nuance, as Baldwin does, the scenes can dramatically pull us along as we watch a character determine which feeling will win out, how a character has to reconcile what it is that they want or don’t want, who they love but don’t love, where they want to be yet fear going.
Any writer would be well-schooled by paying attention to how Baldwin pushes his descriptions beyond a simple one-word label of what a character is feeling. Baldwin wants to show the tension in his characters by adding another word, and another, building up a complexity almost as a good composer will take a melody and complicate it or as a jazz musician riffs off a chord, let it spin out, before coming back to it. That willingness to nuance a description adds a resonance to his prose and depth to his characters.
As Baldwin introduced the gay character Eric and his French lover—this in 1962, well before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement, this in a time being gay would land a person in jail—he describes the scene so beautifully yet with reserve that it passed the editorial red pen of the times and made it into the book. What he does again is let us see the nuanced lives of the two men, one American, one French. He’s taking Eric’s point of view in this moment:
There was a terrifying innocence in Yves’s face, a beautiful yielding: in some marvelous way, for Yves, the moment in this bed obliterated, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, all the sordid beds and squalid grappling which had led him here. He was turning to the lover who would not betray him, to his first lover. Eric crossed the room and sat down on the bed and began to undress. Again, he heard the murmur of the stream. (Ibid, 189)
Baldwin allows the past, the squalid and sordid, to enter the scene. He also invites the stream, which Eric had noticed earlier, to soften the moment with its sound. Later in the love scene, Eric finds himself wanting and not-wanting Yves, feeling torn by the realization that if, indeed, he loves him and wants him that any pretense that he was straight, that he could fool himself, and others, into believing he was not homosexual, would be lost, and, with it, any hope that he would be a normal guy. Giving Eric permission to waffle in a love scene defies what’s normally allowed in such a scene that, at least in conventional romantic movies, has background music with violins playing and close-up camera shots of the lovers blissed out and happy. Baldwin’s rendition of such a scene, and in many love scenes in this novel, if they were cinematically portrayed, would show terror and shame, furrowed eyebrows, wincing lips, averted eyes, letting the character’s range of emotions establish it’s not Disneyland but reality that he’s interested in portraying.
Near the end of the novel, Cassie, who is married to Richard, a successful novelist, has an affair with Eric who, after coming back from France, is still wanting to prove he is a man’s man. For Cassie, the affair allows her to open up to her long-suppressed sensuality and need to be independent, not a housewife and mother dependent on Richard. In this scene, Richard has found out about the affair and confronts his wife. We get a picture of Cassie not just in this moment but of her throughout her life as scene after scene comes back to her. At this moment, Richard insists that they talk about what has happened. He thinks that she has been having an affair with Vivaldo.
He walked around the room—in order, she sensed, not to come to close to her, not to touch her; he did not know what would happen if he did. She covered her face with one hand. She thought of the ginger-colored boy and the Puerto Rican, Eric blazed up in her mind for a moment, like salvation. She thought of the field of flowers. Then she thought of the children, and her stomach contracted again. And the pain in her stomach somehow defeated lucidity. She said, and knew, obscurely, as she said it, that she was making a mistake, was delivering herself up, “Stop torturing yourself about Vivaldo—we have not been sleeping together.” (Ibid, 312)
Cassie’s uncertainty, his ambivalence, her yearning, her guilt, and her lust come out in this short portrait. None of Baldwin’s characters are one-dimensional. They have nuance. But that’s not something easily done. He knows how to let the sentences weave and bob, moving from one feeling, one image, one thought to another. Out of that maze of images comes an in-depth character who is believable because she isn’t caught up in rage and only rage, yelling at her husband; or shamed and left dumb and silent. She carries the weight of all her emotional life into the moment.
As the twists and turns of the plot unravel, Vivaldo and Eric are told to spend some time together by Ida and Cassie who want to spend time together, having just realized that they were both having extramarital affairs with men other than their loved ones ( Cassie with Eric, Ida with Steven Ellis). As Eric and Vivaldo end up in Eric’s room, they discover, much to their surprise, that they love each other. But this love isn’t without ambivalence. They are in bed holding onto one another in what, to me, is one of the most lovely, heartbreaking, and tender love scenes ever written.
. . . Eric’s breath trembled against Vivaldo’s chest. This childish and trustful tremor returns to Vivaldo a sense of his own power. He held Eric very tightly and covered Eric’s body with his own, as though he were shielding him from the falling heavens. But it was also as though he were, at the same instant, being shielded—by Eric’s love. It was strangely and insistently double-edged, it was like making love in the midst of mirrors, or it was like death by drowning. But it was also like music, the highest, sweetest, loneliest reeds, and it was like rain. He kissed Eric again and again, wondering how they would finally come together. (Ibid 324)
Mirrors, death, and music join together in a chorus of love. It is a powerful river of images that come together from different streams, building to the final love making scene. Baldwin knew how to raise the stakes, to build a scene to its climax, with the blending of crosscurrents coming together in four forceful sentences. Later in the scene, Vivaldo wavers back and forth, realizing that, indeed, he loves Eric and that, indeed, his making love with him was one of the most powerful moments of his life, but he is also committed to Ida and loves her, and feels drawn to her, to a woman, and, as such, tries to reconcile these two powerful urges in himself and finally comes to accept them both, each of equal value. The interplay of those tidal forces makes this love scene powerful because Eric, too, has his conflicts over his feelings for Cassie and for Yves. For me, this interplay of past and present, of competing loves, is part of what makes life interesting and real. When we are making love with someone, even if we want to be with them totally, we are often at odd moments cast back to another lover in another time who encroaches on our imagination, and, just as quickly, vanishes yet not without, an old yearning to sting us with an old love. We are complex beings. Baldwin wants us to see that, to know that, to affirm that.
As Eric and Vivaldo were parting, Baldwin uses a device he used earlier, the pouring rain, to close the love scene. It is morning. Eric has gotten up. Vivaldo is still in the shower. Eric
picked up his clothes, and Vivaldo’s from the floor, piling them on the chair, and straightened the sheet from the bed. He put the cups and milk and sugar on the night stand, discovered there were only five cigarettes left, and searched his pockets for more, and there were none. He was hungry, but the refrigerator was empty. He thought that, perhaps, he could find the energy to dress and run down to the corner delicatessen for something—Vivaldo was probably hungry, too. He walked to the window and peeked out through the blinds. The rain poured down like a wall. It struck the pavement with a vicious sound, and splattered in the swollen gutters with the force of bullets. The asphalt was wide and white and blank with rain. The gray pavement danced and gleamed and sloped. Nothing moved—not a car, not a person, not a cat; the rain was the only sound. He. . . merely watched the rain, comforted by the anonymity and the violence—this violence was also peace. And just as the speeding rain distorted, blurred, blunted all the familiar outlines of walls, windows, doors, parked cars, lamp posts, hydrants, trees, so Eric, now, in his silent watching sought to blue and blunt and flee from all the conundrums which crowded in on him. (Ibid, 336-7)
In one of the last scenes in the book, Baldwin has Ida confess to Vivaldo that, all along in their relationships, she had, as he suspected, been having an affair with Steve Ellis. Yet her confession tells of not only her infidelity but her angst at being black, at being poor, at being an outsider and at resenting how Vivaldo, being white, could never understand what it meant to be black world and want to be successful and know that only way was to make up the white man, Ellis, who could pull strings and get her into a career as a singer. After listening to her and hearing how she did love him, and wanted him to know that, despite the affair, she wanted him, to stay with him, Vivaldo thinks, and I think, captures what I’ve been saying in this essay: that things are just black and white, love and hate, good and bad, hetero and homosexual, wrong or right. These binaries fail to do justice to our complex lives and misrepresent how nuanced human creatures are. Vivaldo has heard Ida’s confessions and realizes that Ida
was waiting, in a despair which steadily chilled and hardened, for some word, some touch of his. And he could not find himself, could not summon or concentrate enough of himself to make any sign at all. He stared into his cup, noting that black coffee was not black, but deep brown. Not many things in the world were really black, not even night, not even the mines. And the light was not white, either, even the palest light held within itself some hint of its origins, in fire. He thought to himself that he at last got he wanted, the truth out of Ida, or the true Ida; and he did not know how he was going to live with it. (Ibid, 361)
Do any of us know how we are going to live with the truth? That is a question we ask ourselves day after day, especially in these troubling times. For a writer who wants to create characters who are not one-dimensional, Baldwin is a model for how an author can let us into the hidden, complex, often contradictory natures of human beings. None of us can be captured by a simple black or white stereotype. We’re shades of brown and pink. We’re never what we appear to be. Great literature allows us to understand that. It allows us to imagine what it is like to be someone of another race, of another sexual orientation, of another time. It gives us the tools to be empathic, to walk in someone else’s shoes, to find the largeness of our hearts to embrace our full humanity. In an era when being black, being gay, being different was antithetical to being American—in the McCarthy era, in the 1950s and early 1960s when the civil rights movement was heating up but the gay rights movement didn’t have a voice—Baldwin dared to ask who we are and how we were going to live with the truth of who we are. His novels will endure because his questions and his characters still challenge to ask that question, to ask if we are as a people and as writers going to accept the complex and nuanced natures of ourselves.
