Some Thoughts on Greatness
James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Mario Puzo, George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
James Baldwin’s famous takedown of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a classic of American literary criticism, and its power comes from Baldwin’s disappointment being rooted in both emotion and reason. Baldwin resented the fact that the book was seen as a balm for racism, as “everybody’s protest novel,” (which is the title of the essay in question, available in Notes of a Native Son and The Price of the Ticket), when in fact Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel upholds a particularly dated kind of racism, a Victorian racism that privileges royalty and whiteness.
Stowe’s particular failing is in her badly drawn characters, says Baldwin:
“Apart from her lively procession of field hands, house n***ers, Chloe, Topsy, etc – who are the stock, lovable figures presenting no problem – she has only three other Negroes in the book.”
Of those three, Baldwin argues, “two can be dismissed outright” because both of them either deny their own Blackness or have it erased for them through unlikely epiphanies. The first escapes prison by disguising himself as a Spanish man. Baldwin quite rightly took offence to the fact that this character must deny his Blackness in order to gain his freedom. The second is found to have a “connection to French gentility,” and this royal association serves to deny his Blackness, and elevate him in the eyes of the white characters.
That the African American characters in Stowe’s novel can only gain respect and/or freedom by not being or acting African American is a dangerous idea and ultimately harmful, especially to the generations of Black kids who grew up being forced to read the book in school while being told it was a wonderful anti-racist book.
While To Kill A Mockingbird doesn’t rely on Stowe-esque such deus ex machina to resolve or erase its characters’ Blackness, it does investigate racism solely from a white family’s point of view, shamelessly extols the virtues of Atticus, a lawyer idealistic enough to believe his work on a single legal case will help break down the inherent racism of America’s legal system, and ultimately focuses on how anti-black racism affects white people. The problem Baldwin identifies is one that persists today. You can see it in the critical reaction toward Them, a historical series focused on the Great Migration that shows violence against black in such gratuity that critics are asking “who is this show for?”
Writing for Refinery 29, Ineye Komonibo asks: “Can a narrative set on triggering its target audience with racial trauma actually be written with us in mind?”
Narratives that include Black characters while assuming white readership are an American tradition, one that Baldwin fought against his whole career. He proudly uses Black vernacular in his books, particularly in Just Above My Head, one of his later efforts and a novel about grief and loss whose narrator has lost his brother. It’s a compelling, full-length spiritual sequel to Baldwin’s masterpiece “Sonny’s Blues,” which has some of the best writing about music I have ever come across:
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”
Vanishing evocations. His triumph…when he triumphs…is ours.
That’s gorgeous stuff. I know the pronoun makes the writing dated, but I think the idea is wonderful, promoting a democratic idea of music, that once a song is created it belongs to both listener and creator, not one or the other. They are both complicit in the life of music, the writer in its creation, the listener in its proliferation.
Aside from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the other book Baldwin criticizes is Richard Wright’s Native Son. Native Son is a well-written example of social realism, and a seriously powerful page-turner, whose narrative thrust literally propels the reader forward as an entire city hunts down a young Black man named Bigger for a crime he did not mean to commit.
The first sentence of the book gives is the sound of an alarm clock (“Brrrrriiing!”) which immediately establishes a sense of urgency. And the manhunt that makes up the bulk of the story is foreshadowed deftly as Bigger wakes up, and then chases a rodent around his apartment before catching and killing it. Baldwin has no problem with the first 90% of Wright’s book. His main beef with Native Son lay with the “Marxist fantasy” nonsense that fills the book’s final twenty pages.
Bigger’s defence lawyer is a staunch socialist who argues to the jury that the legal system is rotten and beyond saving, and that the system caused Bigger to do what he did (Bigger reacts to severe discomfort being in a white woman’s company and accidentally kills her in much the same manner that Lenny in Of Mice and Men kills Curly’s wife (she has no name in the novel, which is why I can’t call her anything else here…“Lenny’s victim” would be no better and just as dehumanizing).
But the lawyer’s speech in Native Son goes on and on for so long that it sucks the energy right out of the novel; it pours water on its own fire and lessens the impact of his own message to take a sharp detour into Bolshevik rhetoric. Native Son is not a disaster of a novel, Baldwin tells the reader, but a missed opportunity for greatness.
Ironically, Baldwin himself would see a cool critical reception to his novels, despite his essays always being received well. There has, however, been a long overdue critical reappraisal of Baldwin’s fiction these last ten or fifteen years, particularly his second novel Giovanni’s Room, which depicts a doomed gay couple in Paris in the 1950s. The book was not released in the United States under the advice of Baldwin’s agent, who argued that Baldwin was already dealing with severe discrimination for being a Black man, and that to openly declare himself gay would bring so much heat and abuse it could overwhelm the man.
The agent was probably right, though Baldwin never cared for deception, neither explicit nor by omission, and he left America to move to France, where he was received with welcoming arms by the literati. He still experienced racism there, but of a lesser virulence than the kind he saw Stateside. Indeed, Baldwin’s reputation was such in the United States that many white Supremacist groups had him on a kill list, up there with Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. He lived in France for the rest of his life, dying of lung cancer in rural Saint-Paul-De-Vence in 1987.
His other novels sold well but were generally poorly received. Mario Puzo, of The Godfather fame, wrote a dismissive review of Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone. Although the novel is admittedly one of Baldwin’s weaker efforts, and the name of the book’s protagonist could have used a second draft (Leo Proudhammer? So he’s proud and he hits hard?) it wasn’t as bad as Puzo let on. He chides Baldwin in his review by giving him what is tantamount to a public writing lesson:
"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is written in the first-person singular, the "I" person, perhaps the most misused, most misunderstood technique today, from its irrelevance in Mailer's The Deer Park to its crippling effect on Styron's thought and style in The Confessions of Nat Turner. It doesn't do Baldwin any good here because the "I" person should never be used in a novel of social protest, which this is. Why? Because it doesn't work. To be specific, the "I" person should be used in either of two ways (geniuses are excused): either to narrow the focus, to let the main character telling the story filter everything through his own aricular vision of the world and of himself; and to get away with it he has to be someone with a special version--nutty or eccentric, not balanced, (Donleavy's The Ginger Man is a good example.) or the "I" person should be a minor character telling us about a main character who is basically unexplainable and perhaps would be unbelievable if presented in the third person (The Great Gatsby).
Mario Puzo was a fine writer in his own right (his first novel The Fortunate Pilgrim is an incredible fictional account of the Italian-American experience in New York in the 1920s leading up to the 1960s. Much better than The Godfather books). Despite Puzo’s bonafides, it is straight up rude and condescending to try and give another author, especially an author as accomplished and erudite as Baldwin was, writing advice in the pages of The New York Times. Puzo would have known that his “lesson” would humiliate Baldwin, or at least anger him, but he wrote it anyway. That’s a dick move. Anyway, the review isn’t very credible. In it Puzo finds the time to dismiss Steinbeck’s classic social realist novel The Grapes of Wrath as a “propaganda novel.”
Baldwin’s criticism of Native Son shocked its author Richard Wright and the fallout all but ended the two men’s friendship. Baldwin would be subsequently criticized for publically critiquing the man who mentored him in his early years, but these critiques, Baldwin argued, were themselves rooted in racism.
“I thought you guys stuck together?” said one white literary critic to Baldwin, implying that Black authors all hung out together and supported each other, a fanciful notion that is racist in its presumption that Black authors couldn’t possibly disagree with each other or take exception to each other’s work. “I wasn’t trying to attack [Wright],” Balwin would explain later. “I was just trying to clarify something for myself.”
Baldwin is a little disingenuous here. If he only wanted to clarify something for himself, why publish the essay? But writers write, and great writers publish, so I can’t blame him for wanting to see “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in ink.
I have a beef of my own, and it’s with Game of Thrones.
A lot of people turned on the TV show when the last season came out. There was the revelation that a scene was released with a Starbucks cup sitting in frame, a problem for a show that exists on a different planet and in a Medieval era. Then there was Daenerys’ ostensible turnaround. People were so angry that she became tyrannical at the end and claimed it was “out of character.” What show have they been watching? Dany burned a woman alive in Season One (Mirri Maz Duur ). She burns Randall and Dickon Tarly. She burns the Khals. So none of this surprised her fans, but they were surprised when she burned King’s Landing? Gimme a fuckin’ break.
Dany’s transformation has been anything but brief. And her frequent “he better bend the knee!” speeches when talking about Tyrion, or Jamie, or Jon Snow, were already tiresome in the penultimate season. By the time the last season rolled around those same speeches were putting me in a coma, so tired were they.
But these aren’t my beefs with GoT. My beef is the show’s not-so-secret obsession with lineage and “good genes.” Think about it. SPOILER ALERT. The narrative of the show is set up in a way that we root for a “bastard,” that is…a brother of the Night’s Watch who grew up an outsider because his parents were not married. We root for Jon because he is a nobody from nowhere, rising the ranks and trying to live right. He protects Sam. He cares about doing the right thing. He’s a good person.
^ Jon with his beloved Ghost, a runt he found after discovering what he thought was a litter of five…a dog for each Stark. Then a sixth dog, Ghost bounds into his arms!
Theon Greyjoy: The runt of the litter? That one’s yours Snow.
The viewer: Fuck off Theon.
Ramsay Snow, soon to be Bolton: Just wait til I get my hands on you, you little…
That’s a different storyline though. Here’s Jon finding his beloved dog. A runt for the runt! Except no. Jon is not a runt. And you, the viewer, have been had.
So how disappointed I was to learn that., wait…actually Jon is of noble blood! He’s a Targaryan! Instead of the show offering a Horatio Alger “you can do anything if you just work hard enough,” it instead advances a “it’s who you are that matters, not what you do.” For GoT to embrace the outmoded Great Man view of History after doing such a fine job of showing how war affects everyday people, and that wars are won by the multitudes, not the shitty tyrants (Ahem…Ramsay Bolton, who is killed by the very dogs he starved for a week, or Robert Baratheon…who is killed when hog hunting…like an idiot) is more than a little disappointing. It’s a betrayal of ideals the show itself advanced.
And yes, I know in the real world it matters who you are, because your network gets you the job that will make you rich, while the poor, who are just as capable and intelligent, stay poor because they can’t afford a six-month unpaid internship at Nike, or The New York Times, or CNN, or whatever startup is hot right now. But even if that’s how the real world works, all the more reason for our entertainment to tell different stories. I don’t need nihilism when what I want is escapism. Show me dragons flying and bastards succeeding. Don’t freeze my dragon or tell me the nobody I rooted for all along is actually a royal personage. Don’t fuckin’ do that. Anything but that.
My disappointment in the Jon Snow revelation was a lot like James Baldwin’s disappointment that one of the characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is actually a noble. Like…why do these people have to be noble to be thought of as legitimate? Shouldn’t their actions define them?
Apparently not.
George R. R. Martin grew up in the projects of Manhattan and every day he walked by a large house and a large warehouse on the docks, both buildings that his family owned before the Depression came and they lost everything. From the author’s Wikipedia:
“His mother's family used to be wealthy, owning a successful construction business, but lost it all in the Great Depression, something Martin was reminded about every day when he passed what used to be his family's dock and house. It made him feel that even if they were poor, they came from greatness that had been taken away from them.”
Even if they were poor, they were once great? I do not like that past tense shit where class is concerned Mr. Martin. Poor people are great people. They withstand more suffering than any other human beings, save for the poor and chronically ill. While my heart goes out to affluent people who are sick, it is far better to have money and be sick, than have no money and be sick. It is undoubtedly better to be poor and healthy, however. One cannot put a price on health.
I was disappointed to read those words, as they show a worldview that has been fatally poisoned by the concrete tenets of capitalism. I read that GRRM recently signed an 8-figure deal with HBO to develop over five (!) future projects, all related to the GoT universe. Boring.
At least he got his greatness back.
Or did he?
Would it be better if the final season of GoT were received as enthusiastically as the first seven and GRRM didn’t have these five offers?
I say yes. Reputation is priceless. And money has no owners anyway. Just spenders.
^ George dreams of dollar bills flying through the air like ravens. “Money…in a voice that rustled.”
George, to quote Dean Stockwell in Married to the Mob: you disappointed the shit outta me.