Another Country is the book where Baldwin’s quixotic temperament meets his fierce intelligence. It is also the book where his two most notable selves meet each other. There seem to be light years between the world of Go Tell It on the Mountain, which is, on the surface, settled and conservative and religious, and the world of Giovanni’s Room, which is Bohemian and wandering and venal. Just as there seemed to be light years between Baldwin’s Harlem childhood and Baldwin’s life in Paris. But his first two novels share a concern with the flesh, with moral questions and dramatic possibilities around carnality and sensuality. In his third novel, he introduces the two worlds to each other, brings Rufus and Ida down from Harlem to a world of Bohemians and writers; he mixes and matches the two worlds he himself lived in and understood. All of his characters suffer from a longing for a purer love, or even the beginning of one, all of them too are desperately weak and capable of destruction.
Baldwin in all these three novels lets two very powerful ideas play against each other. One can be traced in his essays: it suggests that America is seriously deformed as a society because it cannot accept a large minority of its population and therefore cannot accept itself. By its treatment of the black population, it has managed to disable itself. Thus any group of people in any American novel must reflect this. Baldwin’s other idea redeems him from being merely a critic of America in his novels: it suggests that life itself is dark, that relationships are fraught and broken and personalities are destructive because of the way we are made. Thus Baldwin’s novels combine a criticism of life that is essentially political with one that is philosophical. And because he is interested in his characters trapped in the life, rather than the life itself as an abstract or a mere idea, the novels take on a dark, dramatic and engrossing power.
None of this explains the structure of Another Country. Rufus is Baldwin’s Hamlet, and the novel allows Rufus to disappear after less than eighty pages. He is replaced by Ida, his sister. ‘The principle action in the book, for me,’ Baldwin told the Paris Review,
is the journey of Ida and Vivaldo toward some kind of coherence… You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brother’s death — the key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself.
The scene where Ida first appears in the novel, filtered through Cass’s inquiring and sympathetic eye, is Baldwin at his most Jamesian, every moment offering a new angle and a new clue to nuance of character. Baldwin can also replace Rufus with another version of himself, his Laertes back from abroad, in the guise of Eric. And he can dramatize moments from his own life with the Swiss Lucien Happersberger, whom he had met in Paris and who later came to New York, as well as describe the lives of writers and would-be writers in Greenwich Village.
Baldwin’s work, however, always moved beyond the merely autobiographical, or the portrait of a certain time and place. He became, not only through his education and his reading and his experience, but also through his eloquence, the uneasy and melancholy moral conscience of his race. His years in Paris taught him that he was an American before he was anything. And because of the colour of his skin and his own homosexuality, he grew fascinated not only by the drama of black versus white in his country, but also by the drama of masculinity. Thus while the first part of Another Country deals with the erotics of race and its discontents, the novel after the death of Rufus allows Baldwin to deal with the dark confines and conflicts of gender by which all his characters are so disturbed.
In 1985, two years before his death, Baldwin published an essay in Playboy called ‘Freaks and the American Idea of Manhood’ in which he wrote:
The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This appeal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden — as an unpatriotic act — that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
Twenty-five years earlier, he had alluded to the ‘body of sexual myths… around the figure of the American Negro’ who ‘is penalized for the guilty imagination of the white people who invest him with their hates and longings, and is the principal target of their sexual paranoia’. In his story ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon’, published in 1960 and written during the time when he was working on Another Country, he wrote: ‘They want you to feel that you’re not a man, maybe that’s the only way they can feel like men.’
Baldwin’s version of the American dream hangs just as darkly over his other characters as over Rufus and Leona. Masculinity is a nightmare from which his characters cannot awake. The city is a prison-house of desires which cannot be fulfilled. The description of Benno’s Bar in Another Country is Baldwin at his most eloquent:
The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet fingers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in corners, watching the drifting women. The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other. Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women — who wandered incessantly from the juke-box to the bar — and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here — closer together now than they would be later, when they got home. These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers. Only the juke-box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated, synthetic laments for love.
‘Richard and Cass,’ Baldwin told the Paris Review, ‘were part of the décor. From my point of view there was nothing in the least idealistic about Richard. He was modelled on several liberal American careerists from then and now.’ Vivaldo, more than any of the other characters, is locked in the world of Benno’s, pitched between longing and contempt, locked inside an icy masculinity. The second part of the novel dramatizes his efforts of escape from this. The key moment in his slow and uneasy redemption occurs in the scene where he has been watching a blonde woman at the bar ‘And something in him was breaking: he was briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of colour nor of male or female. There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender.’ A similar scene occurs in Baldwin’s story ‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon’ where our hero is married to a Swedish woman.