James Baldwin Makes the World Feel Bigger

Here's to 100 years of 1924

You know what I’ve been thinking about lately? 1924. The year that Kafka died, and James Baldwin was born. The Magic Mountain was published. Hitler was sentenced to prison for the Beer Hall Putsch (and released after eight months), and Rudolf Steiner apparently prefigured organic farming by giving lectures in Silesia on biodynamic agriculture. The US passed the Johnson-Reed Act (a Jeff Sessions fave), paving the way for Japanese internment camps; J. Edgar Hoover was named head of what became the FBI.

Meanwhile Lenin died, and Stalin took over, and British people were excavating King Tutankhamun’s tomb, and Tutmania was everywhere; some people characterized Lenin’s embalmment as “mummification” in that Lenin, like the pharaohs, was interred without his vital organs, and his body was revered and displayed in a structure that doesn’t totally not look like a pyramid; the embalmers themselves said they were surpassing Egypt. I actually remember this from a presentation I gave in grad school—that is, I neither remember, nor feel able to reconstruct, the point of the presentation, but I have a clear recollection of quoting the description of the sclerosis of Lenin’s brain arteries—“so calcified they sounded like bone when tapped with a metal instrument”—and suggesting that Lenin “had become a monument to himself,” which was related somehow to “The Stone Guest.”

Guérira ta constipation malgre ses 3000 ans: Tut-themed laxative ad, 1924 (Source)

“The Embalming Team” (Source)

A special institute was founded to study Lenin’s brain, to figure out what enabled him to make such surprising connections. After the funeral, Mayakovsky started writing a long poem, in the effort to fathom the relationship between, on the one hand, a person’s importance, and on the other, the amount of space taken up by their body. I still find this moving.

that “era” 
               cleared doorways
                                             without even bending,

wore jackets
                      no bigger
                                       than average size. 

Meanwhile in Egypt, the nationalist Wafd party had come to power, they were embracing “pharaoanism” (thanks partly to earlier work by Ahmet Kamal, the first Egyptian curator of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo). Despite the best efforts of the British archaeologists, especially Howard Carter, most of the finds did end up in the Egyptian Museum and not the British one.

In April, a ginormous British Empire Exhibition opened in Wembley; exhibits included “native villages” with live humans on display. Obviously they had to have King Tut stuff there (even though Egypt had officially become independent in 1922), so they commissioned replicas. Twenty-seven million people visited the exhibition, among them Virginia Woolf, who was working on Mrs. Dalloway. (See here for an argument that “Woolf's experience of Wembley set the groundwork for the formal innovations of Mrs. Dalloway, which delineates a London at once dominated by and utterly dependent upon imperial landmarks.”) The British Empire Exhibition also plays a key role in P. G. Wodehouse’s 1924 story, “The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy,” an important work in my personal development, and the subject of today’s paid subscriber bonus content, so stay tuned for that.

And all of this is by way of inviting you to join me on Thursday evening (December 12) at the Brooklyn Public Library for the opening of Turkey Saved My Life, an exhibit of Sedat Pakay’s photographs of James Baldwin in Istanbul, in honor of the centennial of Baldwin’s birth. I wrote a short essay for the event that I will read at the opening (registration link here).

In preparation for the essay, I did a certain amount of reading and thinking about Baldwin. I re-watched Sedat Pakay’s short film, From Another Place (1970), and (finally) read James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, by Magdalena Zaborowska, which characterizes Istanbul as a place where Baldwin was finally able to finish certain seemingly unfinishable book projects: not just Another Country, which he had been working on for fourteen years, but also No Name in the Street, which he started and finished in Istanbul. (Actually the publishers wrested it away from him; he didn’t think it was done.) That’s what he was working on at the desk in Pakay’s 1970 film.

No Name in the Street is my favorite Baldwin book, so I decided to reread it—and the reason I started out today with the swirl of 1924 is that it kept making me think of a quote from Oscar Vogt, one of the scientists who analyzed Lenin’s brain:

In the third cortical layer, particularly in its deep portions, of several brain areas, I found pyramidal neurons of extraordinary size and number never previously observed by myself .... The anatomical findings allow us to identify Lenin as a brain athlete and association giant. [Source]

Setting aside the dubious science (and also setting to one side the complex legacy of Lenin’s life and thought), I love this quote, and that’s just how I see James Baldwin—he’s a brain athlete and an association giant, and when you read No Name in the Street, you get to ride on his shoulders and see the whole dazzling view. While I was rereading it, I was in a whirlwind of everything feeling connected, of all the people still feeling alive and present—notwithstanding various extravagantly sinister developments in the US political scene, which would have disrupted my sleep more than they did if it hadn’t been for a cocktail of magnesium gummies (thanks, Mom!) and Henry James audiobooks—so I was basically on an all-night every-night Henry James marathon which made it impossible not to notice, in the daytime, so many stylistic resonances with James Baldwin.

At some point in No Name I was just like “There is no way the person who wrote this wasn’t into Henry James.” On consulting Google, I found this conversation about Henry James, between James Baldwin and David Leeming (Baldwin’s fan/ friend/ secretary/ biographer). Leeming explains that, at his first meeting with Baldwin—in Cevat Çapan’s kitchen in Istanbul, where Baldwin had just written the last sentence of Another Country—the two talked for some time, not about anything Baldwin was writing, but about Henry James, on whom Leeming was writing his dissertation. Baldwin later started, but did not finish, an essay about The Ambassadors called “The Self as a Journey”; over his desk, he kept a photo of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James (signed by Sargent and James), which had been sent to him as fan mail by William James’s grandson (!). In Istanbul, Baldwin visited Leeming’s class at Robert College to give talks on The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors.

It was so exciting to me that, at the time he wrote No Name in the Street, Baldwin was not only in Istanbul, but was lecturing with some regularity on Henry James. And here’s another exciting thing: the BPL event on Thursday features a panel discussion with both Magdalena Zaborowska and David Leeming, so come and ask them all your Robert College / Henry James questions! Here again is the registration link.)

Still from From Another Place

This brings one to a somehow recurring question about Henry James: what is the radical or progressive or political content of these potentially fussy novels,¹ and, specifically, what was the appeal for Baldwin. And Leeming suggests that, whereas other critics have explained the Baldwin-James connection with recourse to troubled American identities, the literature of exile, and a tension between social mores and individual integrity, there may be something more specific at play:

When Baldwin talks of Henry James, he does not talk only of a comradeship of expatriates or of the struggle between manners and self; he speaks of James as the writer who shares with him the one essential theme, that of the failure of Americans to see through to “the reality of others”—the same failure that is apparent in America's “race problem” and in the struggles of Lambert Strether [in The Ambassadors] to free himself from “innocence.”

I found this really exciting, so I’m going to quote/ recap that part of their interview:

Leeming: [W]hat do you suppose you, who have always been deeply involved in contemporary social issues with political and ethnic overtones, would have to tell us about a writer who, after all, wrote about people who were for the most part free of the need to be political or to worry about Black as opposed to White—even in the days just after the Civil War?

Baldwin: It strikes me that what started me on that article was some critic's comment that James had stayed in Europe describing, in effect, tea parties, while ignoring the most important event of the twentieth century, which was the American rise to dominance in world power.

Baldwin adds that, for him, “James was the only American writer—literally, for me, the only American writer—who seemed to have some sense of what was later to be called the American Dilemma” (another name for “the American rise to dominance in world power”).

Baldwin: [Americans] have tremendous sincerity—I mean sincerity about everything from Disneyland to football games. They’re even sincere, I suppose, about the Russians. They are certainly sincere about what they call the “negro problem” and about the Indians; they're sincere, in fact, about everything. And they understand nothing.

Leeming: Like Lambert Strether coming to Paris.

Baldwin: Like Lambert Strether coming to Paris—you know, from Woollett, Massachusetts, or wherever he comes from, armed with the sincerity of his assignment. And he really does (he could hardly know any better), he really does think that he is under the obligation to rescue the widow’s son from—what?

Leeming: The fallen woman, the fallen city or…

Baldwin: Yes, the fallen woman who exists in the imagination of Woollett, Massachusetts. In fact it turns out to be a woman, fallen or not, and it turns out to be a real relationship. It turns out to be something which has devastated the woman's life, too, because Chad Newsome has also, without knowing it, come with a certain assignment…

To me this exchange felt like a mysterious flash of light onto Baldwin, and Henry James, and also “the novel.” So OK, Lambert Strether is determined to do a great job protecting his friend’s son from adventuresses—and then he gets to France and realizes, not only, “this is way bigger than I realized,” but also, “this is an actual human relationship: a thing, somehow, that still eludes me”… and Baldwin is connecting Lambert Strether’s situation (and Chad Newsome’s) to US foreign policy. That connection, that kind of connection, is the core of No Name in the Street. This is my favorite passage:

I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This is what makes them so baffling, so moving, so exasperating, and so untrustworthy. “Only connect,” Henry James has said. Perhaps only an American writer would have been driven to say it, his very existence being so threatened by the failure, in most American lives, of the most elementary and crucial connections.²

Quick pause here to note that “Only connect” is actually from Howards End, so it wasn’t written by an American, but whatevs, stuff like that can happen when brain athletes are doing a lot of heavy lifting. (I do think Baldwin occasionally overstates how uniquely terrible the US is, compared to Europe… but I mean, I can think of a few reasons why he might do this.) And Howards End is (also) all about imaginatively undoing the disconnect between what happens “at home” and what happens elsewhere—whether that means in public, on the national stage, or in other countries.

This is something I understood way more clearly after reading Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. That is, I already got that Howards End was a book about private and public—about the Schlegels and “the personal,” and the Wilcoxes’ insistence on “impersonal forces.” But when Said points out that the power of the Wilcoxes’ worldview—its power to crush the other worldviews—derives, like their wealth, from colonial rubber-related activities in Nigeria… this makes it so clear that Howards End is also, in different ways, about “domestic life” and foreign policy, and that, in a colonial or post-colonial or “global” world, “domestic life” is always also international. And, weird as it seems, novels are among the best and most advanced technologies to make those connections—between the house and the world. (For me, that’s actually the main takeaway from Culture and Imperialism.) Because of course “Howards End” is the name of a house, families live in it, they use it to store fateful furniture (like that murderous bookcase).

This now reminds me that an earlier title for Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical and terrifying first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, was In My Father’s House; according to Leeming, “in my father’s house” meant Baldwin’s “family’s apartment on one level, Harlem on another, America on still another, and the ‘deep heart’s core’ on another.” Baldwin was in his twenties when he wrote Go Tell It On the Mountain, and later the house had more levels (more mansions?): not just America but the world.

But by this point I am realizing I have a lot more thoughts about how novels make the associative jump between domestic life and “the world,” and I am realizing also that this subject needs its own post… so that’s for next time.

In the meantime, coming up, for paid subscribers: a discussion of the portrayal of the 1924 British Exposition in “The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy,” and what it (and the Jeeves books more broadly) taught me about humor writing when I was 12.

Thank you for reading!