11 Feb 54 Canyons

Dear Sam :

Hope, first of all, that you have not lost interest
in Letter For My Younger Brother, since I'm going ahead with
it anyway. I begin to think now, though, that I'll have to
wait until I come home to give it its finishing touches - in
a way, to check up on the validity of my own picture, since
the ocean is, after all, so goddamn wide. I wrote to Knopf
at the same time I wrote to you; have had no answer; which
brings to my mind the possibility that Knopf is mad at World,
World is mad at Knopf, and both are mad at me. Please say
it isn't so.

Actually, I suppose Knopf is interested in the second
novel, on which, at long last, and after a long attack of
second novel jitters, have begun to work. ( Have finished my
play, my agent likes it, that's all I know). God knows how
it will go, it may all evaporate beneath my hands tomorrow - it's
in that awful stage when you feel as though you're running one of
those crazy egg-races - also, the stage when you know that every-
thing you're writing now you're going to end up re-writing after
you reach the end, if you reach the end. And it's complicated,
too, by the fact that I'm almost certainly coming home around
Easter-time - without a Paris hat - and I wanted to have the
damn thing done before then. Won't. Will probably come home
and disappear in the Connecticut woods for the summer. I seem
to spend a great deal of my time disappearing into weird backwaters
in order to write.

Anyway, baby, wish me luck on this venture, I'm going

to need it. This is either going to be a *very* good book or a
*very* bad book, it's as unlike Go Tell It as anything could
possibly be, in the entire woodpile there's not a single nigger.
It's all about Americans, and it's done - I hope it's going to
be done - with wit and malice and perception and cruelty and love:
with love above all. You know, I know a lot about Americans, I've
hated them so hard, and watched them so hard, and loved them so
hard - so this is my attempt to give expression to, and to per-
sonally transcend an awful pain which was once a bottomless
bitterness, which is now no longer either, though the wound
remains.

And I have a lot more to say about it, though I distrust
novelists talking about their works in progress - it betrays a
state of nerves, but, then, you know how prone I am to be in
a state of nerves - we'll let it wait until we can have a dry
martini together, or something. But it *is*, in a way, the
sequel to Go Tell It On The Mountain, it's where John goes
when he leaves his father's house. Steven Marcus, who's very
brilliant, is yet very wrong in his judgment of my book: John's
fate is not calamitous in the sense he takes it to be, it is not
his defeat, it is his first real affirmation. He has not gone
into the grave to stay there - he has gone down - as the song says -
to rise again. Marcus sees John so clearly as a Negro that he
fails to see him as anything else. But it is precisely John's
acceptance of his being a Negro which allows one to hope that he
will never again, in all his life, be *merely* that. People are
never, after all, *merely* their social situation - if they are,
they are simply grotesque. Marcus betrays, by the way, in his
assessment of yours truly, a rather stupendous naivete: where,
exactly, does he find his warrant for the opinion that Negroes

hold the white man's world in such esteem? On the level he speaks of - ' the social, material abundance, etc. - Negroes can only hate, or fear, or despise, or envy white men'. Besides, any Negro who covets these things enough does one of two things: he is either crushed, physically, or otherwise, by his envy; or he makes these things his own by aping white men, which cannot be done without despising white men. This makes material for a really penetrating social comedy, which is not of course, the social comedy Marcus sees. For, though I have known many Negroes who **hated** white men for what they had, I have never in my life met a Negro who **loved** white men for what they had. The real tensions, real horrors, real beauty and passion, and our only grounds for hope are not to be found in these superficials, not, at least, until these superficials are examined by an eye far from superficial. That old American dream keeps cropping up in the most improbable places, and has a distorting effect on the vision. If Negroes had ever taken this dream as seriously as white men took it, we would have had a very different inter-racial history, a history which Negroes, in all probability, would have had no means of surviving - ' by bread alone', indeed!

The Swiss are the only people I know who have managed to do it and they more nearly approach the vegetable than any other people on earth. Even their bread is bright with the blood of other people and people are always throwing themselves off those quaint little Swiss bridges or hacking each other to pieces in those quaint little Swiss chalets. From which I conclude that that hunger which men have is not centred merely in the material and social felicities but goes much further and can carry men much further - and by men I, of course, mean Negroes,

too, among whom there is a widespread feeling, which Marcus seems not to know about, that what white men have was not quite worth what white men did to themselves to get it, and is not now worth what white men do to themselves to keep it. Besides which: I should think that when a whole people have come through what was so largely a history of loss, a lesson, nearly, in the faithlessness of temporal things, and have been forced, for their survival, to rely on such resources as they could find within themselves - there remains, I should think, among such a people a certain perception that sorrow and death are the only things on earth which are really certain. What fortune gives today it can take away tomorrow, whatever goes up comes down. White men and black men come into the world and go out of it by the same door and the door's too narrow to take anything with you, not even the thing, or the person you most loved on earth.

But enough - I shall say all this more clearly on another day, in some other fashion - this was meant to be a note. You see the wretched pretexts a novelist uncertain about his new novel will descend to in order to delay the moment when he must go to work. But now I must go to work; and, besides, this epistle had a far more mundane motive, a motive which can only be described as materialistic. In brief, I want you, as quickly as you can, if this means I owe you thirty, you can, to loan me twenty dollars. / This request for many reasons, largely among them, Christmas. But also for the following reasons: I am at the moment in a wierd backwater called Grasse, which is near Cannes, alone in a house too big and too expensive. I'm fittery about getting through the rest of the month because my coal bill has been so fantastic, and, having paid it, and paid my rent - well, you get the picture I'm sure. I could wirte my

agent, who has my money but she's not supposed to send me any money until the beginning of March. Not only am I frightened of a lecture about my extravagances, but, having already begun negotiations with a bank to get my money out of her hands, I have a feeling that asking her for money now would hopelessly snarl up the financial machinery, which, as I have bitter reasons for believing, is very easily snarled. I'm asking you because you're the only person I know in NY who subscribes to two conditions, (a) you won't lecture me, and (b) you have a job. Have just liquidated all but one of my Paris debts and wish to keep the tremendous aura of respectability and solidity which this gives one, at least in the eyes of other people.

On the other hand, baby, please don't strain yourself because I can actually get through the month down here on credit - it's only that that always makes me panicky. And if you send it I will send it back to you as soon as I get my financial affairs straightened, which certainly cannot be later than the first week in March.

I shall leave you now, and go to work. As it seems now, I'll see you soon.

Love,

James Baldwin,
American Express,
Cannes

["On an Author", "William Cole", "James Baldwin", "IN SWITZERLAND now is James Baldwin, author of \"Go Tell It on the Mountain,\" the recently published and much-praised first novel of three generations of an American Negro family against a Deep South-Harlem background. And here, in excerpts from letters from Mr. Baldwin, is something about himself:", "\"I was born in Harlem twenty-eight years ago and cut my teeth, apparently, on a rusty fountain pen; I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. I'm the oldest of nine children (five sisters, three brothers) and, to my amazement (for we fought a lot when growing up), we get on very well today.", "\"When I was fourteen I became a preacher [Mr. Baldwin's father was a Harlem clergyman], and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly there-", "after I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and industry—I guess they would say they struggled with me. From 1945 (when I got the Saxton Fellowship from Harpers for a much different version of 'Go Tell It on the Mountain') onwards I turned my attention more and more to writing—that is to say, I wrote more and more and ate less and less.", "\"When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own. I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech— and something of Dickens' love for bravura—have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. . . . I suppose the most difficult (and rewarding) thing in my life is the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.", "\"One of the difficulties about being a", "Negro writer (and this is not special pleading, since I don't mean to suggest that he has it worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information, and every one, therefore, considers himself informed. . . . Negro—and American life, therefore—is much richer and more complex, much harder and much more beautiful than most of our fiction would lead us to suspect. I have always wondered why there has never, or almost never, appeared in fiction any of the joy of Louis Armstrong or the really bottomless, ironic and mocking sadness of Billie Holliday.", "\"We seem to feel, at bottom, that the truth about white and black men in America is so terrible that it cannot really be told. But the truth about the past is really all we have to guide us in the present. One's only got to look back to see that, though we certainly have cause for shame, we have, equally, cause for pride.\"", "Book Review", "Edited by", "IRITA VAN DOREN", "NORTH FROM MALAYA, by William O. Douglas. Reviewed by James A. Michener. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kingsley Martin memoir show, he possessed an ardently generous spirit.

The return to England and the assumption of the post in the London School of Economics which he held until his death, found him precipitated into the center of British intellectual life. He "wrigled in everywhere," as Holmes wrote to him, half admirably and half warningly. Presently he was nmanifesting that desire to rule from behind the scenes (he had deliberately rejected political office) which was to lead him into so many controversies and exhaust even his immense store of energy. The constitutional crisis of 1931, when Prime Minister MacDonald formed a National government, convinced Laski that Labor would find its reforms thwarted unless it was prepared to take extreme measures; and from that time his Marxism became increasingly strident and doctrinaire. Even during wartime he argued incisantly for radical social innovation—for "a revolution by consent" to be introduced in the midst of the overwhelming national effort. The postwar years found him dangerously committed as an apologist for Russia. He died prematurely, feeling (as he wrote) that he was "already a ghost in a play that is over."

Such is the outline of Mr. Kingsley Martin's story. It leaves out the rich detail which makes the biography evoke the tantalizing and fascinating figure which

FOUR

## Illustrations by James Reynolds from "Fabulous Spain"

### FABULOUS SPAIN.

By James Reynolds. 319 pp. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $7.50.

Reviewed by
GEOFFREY PARSONS

IT MAY seem a long jump from "Ghosts in Irish Houses" to the fables of Spain. But Mr. Reynolds has no difficulty whatever in making the flight credible. In one of his best chapters, that which includes Salamanca, he draws from his fund of Celtic tradition to describe the close bonds that have existed between the two regions, especially those centering in this most beautiful of all Spanish cities—perhaps, of all Europe. "The Irish Nobles College is a splendid gesture of high Renaissance where the roster of students has, since its inception in the sixteenth century, been predominantly Irish." Its museum records the close association between the Irish and Iberians since the tenth century. Four Spanish horses with a coach of olive wood upholstered in tooled Cordoban leather were part of the dowry of a daughter of the Costello family when she journeyed to Donegal, Linen, tweed and woolens accompanied the Irish students and occasionally a violet-eyed daughter, fresh and healthy from the peaty bogs, went along to carry her smiles and wit into

the austerity of some Spanish family." Passion and daring of the South mated well with the wilderness and poetic sense of the North.

This whole section of the Reynolds wanderings is especially rich in color and anecdote. It starts from Valladolid in the north, runs west to the enchanted town of Zamora and thence south to a clibax at Salamanca. The luck of the map has cut off this particular region from most travelers. Yet it is only a matter of a hundred odd miles northwest of Madrid—and only about fifty miles beyond Avila, which has become a "must" for motorists. Of the tower-capped dome of the cathedral at Zamora, Mr. Reynolds writes with all his imaginative power:

> I had kept watch of the changing sunlight and drifting cloud patterns on the dome of the cathedral from two or three kilometers away. In all Europe there is no more remarkable conceit in masonry. It appears to be an airy silken tent pavilion, perhaps for Tamerlane or Suleiman the Magnificent, floating in some cloudland battlefield. Grouped in a circle around the central dome are a collection of round towers, the top of each one delicately pierced by a columned colonnade capped by a dome in form like a Saracen warrior helmet;

enlisted men. He arrogated to himself the rank of commodore while still a lieutenant—which infuriated the Navy—he was usually in hot water for disobeying or exceeding orders, he made enemies by the dozen, yet he got things done. What he did and how is the subject of Daniel Henderson's admirable biography of a man who was often maligned and who was equally often respected—though with reservations.

Remembered today mainly because of his seizure of the Confederate Commissioners, Mason and Slidell, from the Trent, a seizure which threatened to involve the United States in a war with England at a time when a civil war was being fought at home, his earlier exploits have been largely forgotten, yet it was on those deeds that his true fame rests. For Admiral Wilkes was

Much of Mr. Henderson's book is devoted to the search for Antarctica and the resulting squabbles with Great Britain and France, a squabble which is, even today, not entirely ended. Who first discovered Antarctica as a continent? D'Urville, of France, claimed the honor; Ross, of the British Navy, disputed it, and all three had their defenders. The author has carefully and skillfully sifted all the facts, arriving at the, to us, agreeable conclusion that Wilkes was right and deserves full credit for a momentous event.

Returning home after four years in the Antarctic, Pacific islands, the Northwest and much of the Orient, exploring, discovering and charting hitherto unknown lands and seas, Admiral Wilkes was rewarded, not with honors, but with a court martial of interminable length which finally convicted him of over-lashing his seamen and acquitted him of some thirty-five pages of other charges. Then came the Trent affair, which aroused the British people and eventually led to Wilkes' retirement from the Navy. In this instance, his high-handed methods, insubordination and his reputation as a stormy petrel, all combined to end a tempestuous career.

Mr. Henderson has written a full dress biography of an able officer who defeated himself by ambition and arrogance.

Capt. P. J. Searles is an engineer, U. S. N., retired.

HERALD TRIBUNE BOOK REVIEW—MAY 31, 1953