I’m always surprised that they shrink at reading Baldwin’s descriptions of interracial and gay desire out loud. “He seemed to have fallen through a great hole in time,” Baldwin writes, “back to his innocence, he felt clear, washed, and empty, waiting to be filled…he felt fantastically protected, liberated, by the knowledge that, no matter where, once the clawing day descended, he felt compelled to go…there was a man in the world who loved him.” Probably the most dramatic episode occurs when the avowedly heterosexual Vivaldo falls into bed with Eric. Caught up in a kind of transfiguring grief, each person in the novel departs, in some way, from the person they’ve always imagined themselves to be. His death reverberates in the lives of his best friend Vivaldo-who is white-and his beautiful and tormented sister, Ida, who fall into and then out of love in the lives of Eric, Rufus’ male lover, who, like Baldwin, fled sexual repression to find love in Paris, and Richard and Cass, a young married couple who befriended Rufus and are undone by his death. It begins with a night-long descent into despair: Rufus, a struggling black musician who has just left a doomed and abusive relationship with a white woman, wanders the streets of New York, and finally jumps off the George Washington Bridge.
And Another Country is, inescapably, a novel about racial and sexual liberation. James Baldwin, as most everyone knows, was a black gay American man. They seem to be wondering, not, “Why Baldwin? Why Another Country?” but “Why you?” Often the person I’m talking to says, “I’ve never read it,” or, occasionally, “You know, I love that book.” But the skepticism is always there, just the same: a kind of wary sideways glance, as if waiting for the punchline. For years now I’ve been telling people that my favorite postwar American novel-the novel that’s had the most influence on my own work-is James Baldwin’s Another Country, originally published in 1962.
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