The Style of Solidarity: On Colm Tóibín’s “On James Baldwin”
Colm Tóibín | On James Baldwin | Brandeis University Press | August 2024 | 168 Pages
In his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin offered a searing critique of the “virtuous sentimentality” of novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The virtuous reader of such novels gets to feel good about feeling bad about a character’s suffering. How might a novel bear witness to suffering without simply congratulating a reader for the depth of their feeling? What can fiction do to inspire solidarity across identity groups—a political solidarity informed by coalitional action, not just an emotional solidarity of feeling bad for others?
These are questions Colm Tóibín takes up in On James Baldwin, published in this centenary year of Baldwin’s birth and originally presented in 2022 as part of the Mandel Lectures at Brandeis University. Tóibín has been thinking on Baldwin for some time, and some of the ideas in the book were tested as early as a 2001 essay in the London Review of Books. As a novelist, he is a careful reader of Baldwin’s craft. As a gay man, and a man from a former British colony, he is interested in how far he can understand the queerness and Blackness of Baldwin—or whether empathy is the right aim of fiction at all.
In 1973, when Tóibín first read Baldwin by picking up a copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain, “the only other book I had read about race in America” was John Howard Griffin’s 1961 Black Like Me, in which the white journalist exposed racism in the Deep South (exposed to whom?) by recording his experiences when he darkened his skin to appear Black himself. The book was widely read in Ireland, where Tóibín says it informed their sense of race relations in the States. “But surely,” Tóibín now protests of this blackface attempt to experience racism, Griffin “would get a more accurate version of this by asking people and listening to their answers?” And surely, we might add, if we wanted to know the experience of a Black gay man, it would be better to read an interview than to read a novel.
But in a novel, an author offers not just their experience, but their style. At a time when Baldwin is sometimes mined for public-facing soundbites, Tóibín finds Baldwin’s politics more intimately and consistently in his style:“well-made sentences, cadences sonorous and shaped, command of competing tones.” In his more thesis-driven essays, Baldwin could waver between slackness and didacticism, as is sometimes required by political genres. Tóibín compares the autobiographical modes of Baldwin and Obama—two Black men who both begin their stories with the deaths of their fathers and who grew up in the rhythms and thrall of preaching—and contrasts Obama’s “readiness to use soft rhetoric, language that would strain to console and make things easy” with Baldwin’s “greater complexity” and ability to “make his own life, his own experience, become political, public. He did this by finding a style that would match his intelligence.”
Tóibín is a sensitive reader and teacher of Baldwin’s sentences. In the “plain, placid style” that begins Go Tell It on the Mountain, he finds the aphoristic comfort of a folktale. But then Baldwin soars with the diction of a King James bible and the improvisational repetition of Miles Davis and Charles Ray and the elongated complexity of Charles Dickens or Henry James. All of these artists Baldwin has called inspirations for his rhetoric. For Tóibín:
“By also appropriating the heritage of English prose, Baldwin was adapting and using not only a style but also a system of thinking that used qualification, the aside, and subsequent subordinate clauses to suggest that the way towards truth was slippery, ambiguous and easily undermined.”
Baldwin thought of himself as continuing a project begun by James: both wanted to understand their nation through the psychological form of the novel, and both discovered that what linked the personal and the political is sexuality. “For the question which he raised,” Baldwin wrote, “ricocheting it, so to speak, off the backs of his heroines, is the question which so torments us now. The question is this: How is an American to become a man? And this is precisely the same thing as asking; how is America to become a nation?” In Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s gayest novel—though not his most queer—the narrator, David, approaches American manhood from Paris, where Baldwin himself had retreated. And this problematic discovery of both himself and his nation is lived in the style of the novel. When David “tells of a boyhood homosexual affair,” Tóibín finds, “the prose becomes more dense, with more adjectives and adverbs, and longer sentences.” This “complex music of remembering” eventually “grows in fervor as it examines danger and panic.” And David’s language itself comes in and out of American vernacular: when he says, of his fiancé returned from Spain, “I was terribly glad to see her,” Tóibín notes he sounds “more English than American, making clear that David is an actor, a performer.”
This is because his heterosexuality is a performance, an act that David is at times desperate to become permanent. So, too, the gay author’s gayness is often outed by his style. Tóibín has collected some of the most hysterical reads of Baldwin’s style, from Lionel Trilling’s worrying about Baldwin’s “extravagant publicness” to Norman Mailer’s sense that “even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume” to Ralph Ellison’s likening of Baldwin’s to “Jamesian prose,” by which he also meant, lest the reference to Henry James be too subtle, that Baldwin “doesn’t know the difference between getting religion and going homo.”
The literary critic D. A. Miller once wrote that queer sexuality is “the secret of style”: a spinster author like Jane Austen, who could never show up in any of the marriage plots that drive her novels, shows up instead in her style, which is more fabulous than heterosexual marriage anyways. But style has another secret, as Tóibín found in Obama’s speechmaking: a lack of substance. David is not a very likable character because he cannot get outside his Americanness, or a particularly American tendency to imagine himself the center of the world.
The novel begins and ends with reference to the execution of Giovanni, the “peasant” immigrant from Italy who can only make it day to day through the patronage of the wealthier and handsier queens of Paris. This includes Guillaume, the owner of a gay bar who, shortly after firing Giovanni, presumably for not putting out, is found murdered. The slain main’s internalized homophobia is sometimes alleviated by the grandness of his class, as Baldwin writes: “When something has happened to humiliate him and make him see, even for a moment, how disgusting he is, and how alone, then he remembered that he is a member of one of the best and oldest families in France.” The press, too, is inclined to turn a blind eye to sexuality in order to glory in the bloodlines of aristocracy, and Giovanni is sentenced to death not just for the crime of murder but for the crime of sullying the name of France (“It was fortunate, therefore, that Giovanni was a foreigner”).
David, as an American, is more aligned with Guillaume, whom he detests as much as Guillaume detests himself and for the same reasons, than Giovanni, with whom he had a passionate affair. As he explains to his fiancé Hella, for whom he abandons Giovanni, “I can’t do anything to help him and I can’t stand having him watch me–as though–I’m an American, Hella, he thinks I’m rich.” In the final pages of Giovanni’s Room, David, alone in a “great house in the south of France,” looks in a mirror and imagines himself to be Giovanni:
“And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror and it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.”
Soon, he imagines the execution itself:
“And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.”
These are some of the most vacuous lines in Baldwin’s writing, but they sound good, and Baldwin has given them to David to warn us about the hellish narcissism that sounding good can hide. The repetition has the cadence of a sermon, and the language, too, of “revelation.” But mired in abstraction, the revelation is hidden from us. The grammar strains: undoubtedly, “what the body is searching” ought to be followed not with a period, but with a prepositional phrase telling us what such a search will yield, what the body is searching for. And then, when France murders this penniless sexual deviant, it is the “sky” that shrieks and the “earth” that tilts, there is something worse than the passive voice so often used to pay reverence to the legitimacy of state violence. By transposing the literal question of life and death into a soul-searching contemplation, hungover at dawn, it is possible for David to imagine that he is the victim here, because of the depth of his feeling.
What Giovanni’s Room narrates for us is a failed solidarity. Rather than bear witness to Giovanni’s execution, David fantasizes it from afar. He appropriates state violence against the migrant poor as his own problem, because of a shared identification through sexuality. And he elevates this appropriation, indulging himself in the language and patterns of the sacred so that what is at base a political matter of class becomes a spiritual matter of his individual soul. Style, here, is not the lover of politics but its enemy.
When Tóibín reads Giovanni’s Room as primarily a story about love and the illusion of agency that love provides in a world where some love is more acceptable than others, he might be seen to repeat David’s errors of reducing political allegory to a matter of what the soul wants and of allowing a shared sexuality to flatten all other social distinctions. But a more reliable refrain throughout On James Baldwin is Tóibín’s sensitive attempt to understand what he, as a gay man from colonized Ireland, can and cannot understand in Baldwin’s experience as a gay Black man from the United States. He offers analogous Irish case studies not to say they are the same but to understand what the differences are that really matter: “Both Baldwin and [James] Joyce, despite their exile and also because of it, wrote intense first novels about the places they came from”; alongside the Obama/Baldwin pairing is that of the Irish president Mary Robinson and Irish poet Eaavan Boland; and coupled with David’s ruminations on Giovanni in Baldwin’s novel is Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, the lover Wilde blames for putting him in the prison from which he writes.
From his own personal experience, Tóibín not only understands the Paris of Giovanni’s Room because of, for instance, his own time in 1975 in Barcelona, another “modern European city, where homosexuals were plenty but images of gay life where scarce,” but also understands the Harlem more often a setting for Baldwin’s novels, because both it and Tóibín’s Irish towns are haunted by violence—failed Irish revolutions, the Great Famine—but also offer textures of ordinary life. “In the background of the town’s life was a notion that some great catastrophe had once occurred. We were alert to its powerful and flowing aftermath, but not all the time. Mostly, things were ordinary.” And “while Harlem was a powder keg, it had its own stability, its own ordinariness.”
Tóibín is not suggesting his identities are homologous to Baldwin’s. Much more subtle in the comparison here is a homology of atmosphere, of mood, of a disposition toward history and an incredulity toward the idea that daily life can be dictated by or explained solely according to some sclerotic social structure. Tóibín does not replicate the moment of failed political solidarity when Robert F. Kennedy met with Baldwin and other Black cultural figures in 1963 and claimed, as Tóibín paraphrases, “that as a descendent of Irish immigrants he too knew about discrimination.” Lorraine Hansberry, incensed, walked out of the meeting. Baldwin later said: ‘I’ve only met one person Lorraine could not get through to, and that was the late Bobby Kennedy.’”
But at times, Tóibín seems to think the novelist has special rights to the imagination denied a crass politician blessed and cursed with Kennedy as a last name. He ruminates that “an Irish novelist can make a German; a straight novelist can make a homosexual; an African American novelist can make a White American. … It is called freedom or what James Baldwin, in another context, calls ‘the common history—ours.’” I am not sure it is fair to call in Baldwin for a lay-up here, not least because “a straight novelist can make a homosexual” and “an African American novelist can make a White American” are not equivalent from the point of view of social power. Tóibín also leaves out what that other context was, when Baldwin defended his friend William Styron’s enslaved first person narration in The Confessions of Nat Turner. Despite many protests from Black writers, Baldwin never changed his mind about the white writer. As late as a 1984 Paris Review interview, Baldwin said he admired Styron because the novel “brought in the whole enormity of the issue of history versus fiction, fiction versus history, and which is which.”
It is telling the Baldwin trades in the question of racial authenticity, and who has a right to whose stories, for the formal question of fictionality. What Baldwin wanted to know was what Styron could teach him about craft, about the limits and affordances of his medium. And so perhaps the fairest way to judge Tóibín’s success in On James Baldwin is by the same metric he used to judge Baldwin himself, which is style. There is an eloquence to this book that began as a speech, and Tóibín is a patient and generous teacher. But at moments his own style falters as he reaches for the political. Reflecting on how well Baldwin prophesied the present, Tóibín remarks there is “only one fresh hell Baldwin did not foresee,” which is mass incarceration. Riffing on Baldwin’s misplaced optimism that “black people hold the trump… I say it: Patience and shuffle the cards,” Tóibín remarks, “The cards were shuffled all right. Indeed, the word ‘trump’ took on a new meaning. And the idea that there was a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison became a joker.”
The mention of something Baldwin didn’t seems an obligatory, but not fully realized, gesture toward the abolitionism highlighted in the wake of the 2020 police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The easy punning on “trump” is cheap and beneath a writer of Tóibín’s ability. And the slide into empty cliches (“fresh hell”) and folksy-cheesy rhythms (“The cards were shuffled all right”) is perhaps the opposite in form, but the same in effect, of David’s straining for new heights in the face of an execution he did nothing to prevent.
What would be a more natural extension of the reflections on style and solidarity today is the resurgent question of solidarity highlighted by the Palestinian genocide. In the wake of October 7, a quote from James Baldwin circulated widely on social media: “But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews,” Baldwin first wrote in The Nation in 1979, “it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me).” In fact, this was not always clear to Baldwin, who had earlier written considered the Israeli project an analogue to Black nationalism. The year Israel was established, 1948, was also the year Baldwin left the United States disgusted by its racism, and rather than flee to Paris, he had at first “seriously considered” working on a kibbutz.
But by the 1970s, the global mindedness of the Black Power movement had aligned instead with the Palestinians as common subjects of an imperial order. As Baldwin wrote earlier in the decade in his nonfiction book No Name in the Street, to be serious about Black freedom, “we should be supporting Black freedom fighters in South Africa and Angola, and would not be allied with Portugal, would be closer to Cuba than we are to Spain, would be supporting the Arab nations instead of Israel, and would never have felt compelled to follow the French into Southeast Asia.” Baldwin here gives us a global map of solidarity. And at a time when gays are used as pawns by the pro-Israel lobby, Baldwin gives us a warning through David, who uses his sexuality as an excuse to make Giovanni’s suffering about himself. We are called into solidarity not because of how it makes us feel but because it is just. And, as Tóibín teaches us about Baldwin, we are called to find a style adequate to the suffering at hand.