That Seraphaim’s intransigence is mad is so clear to everyone that no one listens to him—which increases his madness, of course; only Evangeleh understands, out of his own trouble, that his father is pleading for the chance to live his life again. But Seraphaim would live the same life, only this time more successfully; this time he would not be cheated, this time he would not be ruined. He is completely unable to bear the suspicion that the ruin of his life was caused by factors yet more inexorable than those which brought about the stock market crash. This inability is revealed in the usual way, by the most insanely cruel suspicions of everyone around him, particularly that person he most thoroughly betrayed, his wife. Both Seraphaim and Evangeleh wish to live again: but Eddie-Evangeleh is sickened by the life he has led and has embarked on a semiconscious effort to destroy it, in order to be born again.
The relationship between Seraphaim and Eddie-Evangeleh is amazing in its candor and honesty, and very moving. In an odd, and most un-American, way, it is the source of Evangeleh’s strength. It is not based on anything so thin and cerebral as give-and-take, or mutual understanding—which, in practice, nearly always means mutual indifference; it is remote from tolerance, and all the psychoanalytical categories are completely irrelevant to it. This is bloody, brutal, no-holds-barred, father and son mercilessly slugging it out and inflicting real damage on each other. It is not modern, and it is not enlightened, and it is more than a little terrifying; but it is finally affirmative, because the truth of their love for each other, the depth of their involvement with each other, though loudly, theatrically, and endlessly bewailed, is never for an instant denied. It is a relationship so foreign to American life—we imagine ourselves to have gone far beyond it, whereas in truth we have merely fallen far short of it—that it has become nearly impossible to disentangle it from the insane jargon about sadomasochism and Oedipal complexes and penis envy in which it appears now to be breathing its last; but the father-son relationship is one of the most crucial and dangerous on earth, and to pretend that it can be otherwise really amounts to an exceedingly dangerous heresy. There is a terrible fight between Evangeleh and his father after Evangeleh has kidnapped the old man from the hospital, a fight about the past, about their life with each other, about the way the father betrayed the son, about the way the son betrayed the father. It degenerates into the really shattering pettiness of all such quarrels: “… You get your brains from me!” Seraphaim thunders, and the middle-aged Eddie-Evangeleh, shaking like a boy, insists, like a boy, “I became someone in spite of you—I’m not like you, you corrupt and hateful and vicious …” And afterwards, he says, with wonder and remorse, “I thought I’d got over all that.” It is to be doubted that any of us ever do, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that we have, and substitute the lie of our indifference for the truth of our pain. The truth of our pain is all we have, it is the key to who we are.
But this apprehension is absolutely antithetical to Florence’s sense of reality. (I think it is worth noting that Kazan’s portrait of the wife is really amazing in that it is so free of that hostility which we have come to take for granted whenever an American woman appears in the pages of American fiction.) Florence’s limits are subtle and deadly, but they are the limits of her time and place: her qualities are rare, and her love for her husband is real. She does everything in her power to understand him; she does everything in her power not to parade her suffering, not to whimper, not to cheat, not to lie. Until the very end, she wants Eddie to come back to her, and she never pretends that she wants anything else. She is a really honorable and gallant woman, a lady Henry James’s Isabel Archer would certainly have recognized; indeed, if Isabel were living in America now, she would probably, alas, be very much like Florence. No one can possibly blame Florence for being baffled and terrified by the unreadable series of metamorphoses taking place in her husband, who is the center of her life. On the contrary, she is to be saluted for attempting to confront them at all. No one can blame her for being unable to do what none of us can do: to accept the fact that one’s lover loves another, and that, even though you are lying side by side in bed, he is far away and will never come back. (“Don’t love her,” says Florence. “Love me.”) The nature of Florence’s limits are directly attributable to the culture which produced her: “… As a woman, and your wife, I’m awfully glad you have the job you have at Williams and McElroy, that you’re so good at it we can afford a nice home and the help to keep it up, and that I can buy the best books, and when the Broadway shows come to the Biltmore, sit in the best seats, and that Ellen can go to Radcliffe, and feel free to give consideration to other assets in her husband-to-be than whether or not he has a substantial bank account.” This is a very honest statement, on its face, and her saying it is not meant to reveal her as the all-American, predatory bitch. She is saying it as a wife and mother, and saying no more than what all wives and mothers have said throughout the ages.
Unless one supposes that it is somehow wrong for women to consider that the safety and security of the nest are paramount, one cannot even quarrel with her assumptions. It is very hard to blame her for the fact that the life she lives is, in brutal truth, a hopeless series of non sequiturs. She is a modern, emancipated woman, but she is appalled by the fact that Eddie sends their daughter out to buy a diaphragm. She is devoted to civil rights, but exhibits a restrained distress when she learns that their daughter is having an affair with a Negro, and is relieved when the affair ends. (“It turned out that Ralph is not the best balanced person in the world. Well, how could you expect him to be?”) She believes in the life of the mind and the adventure of the spirit, but is wretchedly dependent on her psychiatrist. She is the book’s principal victim, and Kazan never allows us to take any easy attitude toward her. We are confronted with her suffering, in the face of which all judgment is valueless; and, furthermore, she is so placed that, however we judge her, we are, exactly as Eddie is, forced to judge ourselves. She is the book’s principal victim because she is one of the principal victims of the way we live now: what, indeed, given the options chosen by men, are her options? If Eddie, in the autumn of his life, realizes that he has been a whore, and begins to despise the life he’s led and resolves to change it, she is not to be blamed for her panic and pain. He became a whore, she did not make him one, and the life his whoring made for her is the only life she knows. Furthermore, Eddie’s options, in the land of the free, were not so very great, either, as he discovers when he decides, in effect, like Huck Finn, to “light out for the territory.”
As his father lies dying, Eddie-Evangeleh goes to the house where his family had lived for thirty years. In all that great mountain of heirlooms, mementoes of past wealth, photographs of weddings, children, uncles, aunts, cousins, old bills of sale, relics, relics, relics, only one thing seems truly to reflect his father, one thing only, Eddie-Evangeleh concludes, had his father loved: a photograph of the Anatolian mountain in the shadow of which he was born, and to which, now that he is dying, he longs to return. Eddie-Evangeleh thinks:
The mountain represented in that photograph seemed to be demanding some judgment of me, some verdict. What do you think, it seemed to say, what do you really think? And if I had been forced to answer and give a verdict at that moment, I would have had to say that I thought the whole passage of my family to this country had been a failure, not the country’s fault perhaps, but the inevitable result of the time, and the spirit in the air in those days. The symbols of affluence gained had been empty even by the standards of the market place. The money they had acquired wasn’t worth much; they had found that out in 1929. As for the other acquisitions—the homes, the furniture, the cars, the pianos, the decorations, the clothes, the land—they had meant nothing. These men who had cried, America, America! as the century died had come here looking for freedom and the other human things, and all they had found was the freedom to make as much money as possible … They had left that country with its running water, and its orchards of
fruit, and all, all that my grandmother never stopped talking about; they had left that to find a better place to live and all they found was a better place to make money.
This is not the official version of American history, but that it very nearly sums it up can scarcely be doubted by anyone with the courage to look into the faces one encounters all over this land: who listens to the voices, hearing incessantly the buried uneasiness, the bewilderment, the unadmitted despair, hearing the arrogant, jaunty, fathomless, utterly astounding ignorance; a cultivated ignorance of all things public, and a terrified ignorance of all things private; translating itself, visibly, hourly, into a hatred of all that is strange or vivid—and what is vivid is always strange; into a hatred, at last, of life. I don’t like my life. So thinks Eddie-Evangeleh. How have I become what I’ve become?
This is the question, beating, like a muffled drum, through all the American streets, which has become, in this most sinister and preposterous of Edens, of all questions the most forbidden, the most intolerable. Fire and flood! thinks Eddie-Evangeleh, while struggling with this question, and he burns down the unloved, loveless, uninhabitable house.
(1967)
A Man’s Life: An Autobiography by Roger Wilkins
I NEVER BELIEVED IT—the American Dream—or so I say now. That I didn’t believe it, if I didn’t, wasn’t due to my extraordinary powers of perception. It does not demand perception to realize that you are poor: nor do you need to be gifted in order to realize that you are despised. (But it helps.)
So: the people who hurt me most at the beginning of what we must now, somewhat helplessly, call my professional life—my late teens, when I was aspiring to become a journalist—were not white. They were black. They laughed at me. I stank of the ghetto, this pop-eyed little black boy, who had barely managed high school, could certainly never go further, and was an (undeserved) handicap to the Race.
I put it this way because I hate to put it this way. I’m telling you like it is because that’s the way it was; but it is very important to let you know that I can now begin to allow myself to remember that dreadful, distant pain because Roger Wilkins has written A Man’s Life. Or, in other words: it may still be as it was, but angels have been troubling the waters and Roger Wilkins, praise the Lord, has now accepted that he was born into that same disreputable category.
And, in a way, if life were different, I’d sign off here, and urge you to drop whatever you are doing right now and loot the nearest bookstore.
Life, however, being what it is, and A Man’s Life being so unprecedented a performance, I am obliged to suggest to you some of the reasons that I consider it to be indispensable reading.
Wilkins has written a most beautiful book, has delivered an impeccable testimony out of that implacable private place where a man either lives or dies.
It says a great deal about this country that, black like each other, legally at least, Roger Wilkins, living on the Hill, and I, born in the Hollow, should have had to undergo so many forms of death in order to realize that our life was the anonymity dictated by the Republic, an institution which could always find a way to use us, though it has yet to find a way to respect us.
What is implicit in this confession—no, this is testimony, far more noble than a mere confession: Mr. Wilkins is not a whining boy—is the extent to which black Americans have been, perhaps still are, the accomplices to our captivity. We both tried to be white: he on the Hill, myself in the Hollow. We both tried not to stink. This is because we recognized that the gleaming Republic associated our color and our odor with the color and the odor of shit. We were treated like shit. And we were determined to overcome. Or, in other words, to prove to a people who had to believe, and who, indeed, proclaimed us less than cattle, that we had a title to the tree of life.
And let the record show, we went the route—were much nicer, for example, when the chips were down, to Bobby Kennedy than Bobby Kennedy ever was, or could have dreamed of being, to us. Let us scuttle the Camelot legend. I am weary of Lincoln Memorials, of the American piety, which is nothing less than a Sunday-school apology for genocide.
I have earned the right, from the moment of my own stupendous performance on the auction block, to tell you that this Republic is a total liar and has never contained the remotest possibility, let alone desire, to let my people go. (I know that that offends grammar, but it be’s that way sometimes.) The Lincoln Memorial is a pious fraud. Lincoln freed those slaves not because he had the remotest interest in human liberty, still less in the freedom of the slave (a freedom which no one dared, or dares, imagine), but because—to paraphrase him—he was determined to preserve the Union. Which, indeed, for what it’s worth, he did.
Blacks have never had a President, in these yet to be United States, who cared whether they lived or died. (Roosevelt didn’t dare pass an antilynch bill, as he explained to Walter White of the NAACP, because the Congress would have prevented him from doing “great things” for America and, said the most “liberal” President in American history, “I just can’t take that chance.”)
And as for Bobby and his brother JFK, they were millionaire sons of a Boston-Irish adventurer, who made his money through one of the American Puritanical convulsions, Prohibition. Well, when Bobby K. decided to channel the black discontent into voter registration, he was doing exactly what Lincoln had done, a century before: he was immobilizing, with the promise of freedom, those slaves he could not buy.
To be a black American is much worse than being in love with, tied to, inexorably, mysteriously, responsible for, someone whom you don’t like, don’t respect, and don’t dare trust.
Read Roger Wilkins’s record of how it is. Few documents will, in your lifetime, equal it. Do not read it as a missionary. Do not imagine that anyone is asking you to do anything at all. You have done quite enough already.
Read it, if you have the courage to love your children. This book is an act of love, written by a lover and a father and one of the only friends your children have.
(1982)
FICTION
The Death of a Prophet
“The Death of a Prophet,” a story about a young man’s reckoning with his father’s death, first appeared in Commentary in 1950, even as Baldwin continued to work on his first novel, variously titled In My Father’s House and Crying Holy, before its publication as Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1953. Some critics imagine the story as anticipating “Notes of a Native Son.”
• • •
ON THIS SAME AVENUE down which he hurried now, he had once walked with his father on bright Sunday mornings and vibrant Sunday nights. Churchgoers and heretics passed them, dressed in their brightest clothes. On Sunday the sun never failed to shine; on Sunday nights the stars were brighter and the sky was a deeper blue. When they turned the corner that led to the church, they saw the lighted windows and heard, with a fierce excitement, the sound of tambourines and singing and the clapping of hands. Then they hurried to reach the house of God. So had his father lived in the Southern cotton fields; so had his mother lived before him; who, born a slave, and with no knowledge—“as men call knowledge”—yet turned, sobbing, on her final pillow, “A mighty fortress is our God.” When Johnnie was very young, though he feared his father and was frightened and troubled at church, he did not doubt that the gospel his father preached, to which the church bore witness, was the truth; that under the shadow of His everlasting wings was all love and all power and the assured redemption of his soul. One wintertime, while his mother was again pregnant and his father had no job, and they lived, his mother and his father and his two brothers and himself, in two cold rooms at the top of a tenement where rats whispered behind the plaster and harlots made love behind the stairs, Johnnie had cursed God. But to curse God is not to doubt Him. His father stripped him naked and beat him until he lay on the splintery floor, in feverish sobbing and in terror of death.
In a hospital in Long Island his father now lay dying. He had been ill a long while, but Johnnie, who no longer
lived in Harlem, had never been to see him. And he hurried unwillingly now, only because his mother was ill and had called him at his downtown rooming house to beg him, for her sake, not to let his father die with only strangers at his bedside. By strangers she meant white strangers; she surely knew that Johnnie was a stranger in his father’s eyes.
According to the vision of their church, in which, at length, he became a burdened hope, the son of a prophet, all that was in the world was sin. He was not allowed to go to movies or to plays; smoking and drinking were forbidden. It was not thought wise to read more at school than was absolutely necessary, for schools also, it had been revealed, might function as the anteroom to hell. One read the newspapers only to remark how exactly, how relentlessly, the Word of God approached fulfillment. From his pulpit his father warned them of the wrath to come. “Behold, in the last days there shall be wars and rumours of wars; nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.” Many an ancient throne shall topple and many a king, like Nebuchadnezzar, crawl raving in the dust. But all these things (and Amen! cried the church and once his own heart had cried, Amen!) should bring rejoicing to the hearts of the redeemed. For it meant that their trials on earth were nearly done, their salvation was at hand: in the twinkling of an eye that same power which raised Jesus from the dead would lift them from the guilty earth and, for their reward, they would triumph over death and hell and reign forever with the Father and the Son. But by this time Johnnie was a child no longer, but an eighteen-year-old about to leave high school, where he had read too much. What he had read undermined his faith and, equally, what his faith had been distorted all that he had read. His faith was nothing but panic and his thoughts were all confusion. Then he hated his father. He fought to be free of his father and his father’s God, now so crushingly shapeless and omnipotent, Who had come out of Eden and Jerusalem and Africa to sweeten the cotton field and make endurable the lash, and Who now hovered, like the promise of mercy, above the brutal Northern streets.