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THE PITCH OF PASSION  
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Colm Tóibín
August 2, 2024
New York Review
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_ James Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring
phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a
sentence. _

James Baldwin, Paris, 1975, Sophie Bassouls/Corbis/Sygma/Getty Images


 

I read James Baldwin’s _Go Tell It on the Mountain_ just after my
eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic
upbringing would soon mean little to me. During my first year at
university, which I had just completed, I told no one that I had come
close to joining a seminary. Some of my memories of almost having a
vocation for the priesthood were embarrassing. I wished they belonged
to someone else. But now my religious feelings had not merely ended; I
hoped they had been effectively erased. Such feelings, I noticed, were
mostly absent from the books I was reading, the films I was watching,
the plays I was seeing, the conversations I was having.

Even the religion in James Joyce’s _A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man_ seemed remote. Joyce himself—and Stephen Dedalus in the
novel—had attended the same university where I was now studying, but
the campus had moved to the Dublin suburbs; the new buildings were
glass and steel, worlds away from the intimacy of Newman House in the
center of Dublin where Joyce (and Stephen) had studied. And while I
had attended school retreats as Stephen did, with long sermons, we did
not hear about hell as much as he did. Hell, it appeared, had died out
somewhat.

I did not know much about James Baldwin. I could not have named any of
his other books. I was interested in the civil rights movement in
America; that might have been one reason why I had bought a copy
of _Go Tell It on the Mountain_. And since the university term was
over, I had all summer to read books that were not on the curriculum.

I have no memory of being impressed or even detained much by the
opening paragraph of _Go Tell It on the Mountain_. I just read it. I
wonder if it was designed for that purpose: to be read without
noticing the style. The sixty-one words in this opening paragraph
include forty-two words with only one syllable:

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew
up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without
ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the
morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about
it, and by then it was already too late.

In many passages of _Go Tell It on the Mountain_, I saw when I began
to study it, words are repeated. In the first page, for example, I
registered not only the clarity of the diction, but the deliberate
repetition of words, simple words like “said,” “memories,”
“day,” “hospital,” “stranger.” Most novels avoid the
repetition of single words in a paragraph or a page. If a story is to
be told in chronological time—as though what comes next is not known
and is now being revealed—then each sentence has to seem to follow
from the one before. One sentence does not openly repeat the rhythm of
the previous sentence or reflect it; it survives as though moving
inexorably toward the future. In _Go Tell It on the Mountain_,
however, Baldwin writes as if the story is already known—
“Everyone had always said”—and is now being told again, as a
folk tale might be recounted. Words are repeated as a way of making a
statement appear natural, almost casual, but also as they might appear
in a psalm or a prayer.

Baldwin writes, for example, about John, his young protagonist, in a
church in Harlem: “He did not feel it himself, the joy they felt,
yet he could not doubt that it was, for them, the very bread of
life—could not doubt it, that is, until it was too late to doubt.”
This moment has nothing of the untidy, spontaneous tone of ordinary,
secular speech. Its source is rather religious intonation, words
circling one another with an understated formality.

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In an essay published two years after _Go Tell It on the Mountain_,
Baldwin wrote about the sources of his prose style: “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’s love for bravura.” Baldwin’s style could be high and
grave and reflect his glittering mind; his thought was embodied in his
style. His thought was subtle, ironic, but also engaged and
passionate. When he needed to, he could write a plain, sharp sentence,
or he could produce a high-toned effect, or he could end a long
sentence with a ringing sound. “I don’t mean to compare myself to
a couple of artists I unreservedly admire,” he wrote in _The_ _New
York Times_ in 1962,

Miles Davis and Ray Charles—but I would like to think that some of
the people who liked my book responded to it in a way similar to the
way they respond when Miles and Ray are blowing. These artists, in
their very different ways, sing a kind of universal blues…they are
telling us something about what it is like to be alive…. I think I
really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the
way they sound…. I am aiming at what Henry James called
“perception at the pitch of passion.”

Baldwin was suggesting that the rhythms of his own diction took their
bearings from the solitary pain and uncompromising glamour of these
two American musicians. But just in case anyone reading him wanted
thus to think of him as a writer not also steeped in a literary
tradition, he also had to invoke Henry James, the high priest of
American refinement, an author known not for his passion, however
pitched, but for the rigor of his controlling imagination.

In essays and interviews Baldwin needed to unloose himself from easy
categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist to
share James’s interest in consciousness as shifting and unconfined
but also hidden and secretive, and his concern with language as both
pure revelation and mask. Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence
itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and
glorious ring of a sentence, as much as with the plain, declarative
line. He would not settle for a single style. In her book _Who Set
You Flowin’: The African-American Migration Novel_, Farah Jasmine
Griffin compares the shifts in style in _Go Tell It on the
Mountain_ with John’s struggles to make a new life for himself:
“Just as John vacillates between the larger white world of the
stranger and the insular black world of Temple of the Fire Baptized,
so too does the very language in which his story is told vacillate
between that of the Western literary tradition and that of the black
church.”

In 1953, just before _Go Tell It on the Mountain_ was published,
Ralph Ellison, who had received bound galleys from the publisher,
wrote to Richard Wright that Baldwin’s book was “the best work on
Negro religious conversion that I have seen thus far.” He had a
problem, however, with the style; he saw the influence of Henry James.
“I do think,” Ellison wrote, “that Baldwin could have gotten a
bit closer to the material if he could have gotten rid of whatever it
is that makes him feel the necessity of projecting such powerful
material armored in Jamesian prose.”

In a letter three months later to his friend Albert Murray, Ellison
found another way of describing his disapproval of the book: “As for
Baldwin, he doesn’t know the difference between getting religion and
going homo.”

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In _Go Tell It on the Mountain_ Baldwin was indeed concerned with
both “getting religion and going homo.” He was also concerned in a
larger way with conscience, with the life of the spirit rather than
the material life. He did not seek to write a novel in which love
might lead to marriage or in which choice and chance would do battle.
Nor did he seek to dramatize the tragic downfall, at the hands of
prejudice or the police or fate itself, of a brilliant young man from
Harlem. His novel is a portrait of the sinner as a young man; it
dramatizes the inner life of John Grimes. John’s struggle with his
father is a metaphor for other, more unearthly, more essential
struggles, including the struggle to save his own soul.

Baldwin’s novel allowed these concepts—“the inner life” and
“the soul”—to appear as natural in a style that played a light,
ironic tone against a fierce sympathy and seriousness. What fascinated
me when I read the book was how John Grimes is allowed to live in the
novel at a remove from what happens to him. In a style we might call
third-person intimate, Baldwin describes and invokes but does not
often analyze motives or desires. The early pages of the novel, so
soaked in church ritual as spectacle, had elements that were familiar
to me, as well as elements that were strange. Nothing else I had read,
however, had taken experiences and emotions that I recognized and then
utterly transformed them. It may have been that very mixture of styles
that Griffin identified, or the way the heightened emotion around
ritual and religious belief strayed into same-sex desire, rendering
the latter as unfathomable and as sacred as the former, but more
dangerous.

The ability to be moved or even startled by religious ritual sets John
apart from his younger brother, Roy. John is the religious one, whose
destiny will be dictated by the intensity of his faith. Or so it might
seem. But, almost gently, Baldwin infuses John’s faith with a
current of feeling that is both distant and dangerously close. On the
second page John and Roy recall watching a couple have sex, but even
though Roy has watched them many times and “told John he had done it
with some girls down the block,” John “had never watched again; he
had been afraid.” On the next page we are introduced to John’s
Sunday school teacher Elisha, who is seventeen, three years older than
John, and “had but lately arrived from Georgia.”

John stared at Elisha all during the lesson, admiring the timbre of
Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring the
leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness of Elisha in his
Sunday suit, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy.

This is careful writing. The gaze is direct and sexual until “in his
Sunday suit,” which reduces the intensity and makes it seem more
ordinary. The “wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was
holy” can be taken at face value, but it can also be read as a way
of avoiding what John is really wondering. And just as John’s stare
is not conscious, just as John is not self-aware, a reader like me in
1973 in Ireland could read this as a plain, straightforward account of
how John is. He is different. He looks up to Elisha because Elisha is
older, because he is holy, but also because of some other appeal, a
masculine appeal, with the words there to prove it—“deeper and
manlier,” “leanness, and grace, and strength.”

Elsewhere, John’s desires are almost spelled out. Clearly he
masturbates, but the word is too clinical. Instead, “he had sinned
with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive.” It happens when he
is “in the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older,
bigger, braver…” A scene when Elisha dances is filled with imagery
that is almost garishly sexual; it describes a body on display using
terms that move far beyond the religious even while invoking the name
of Jesus. “And then, like a great black cat in trouble in the
jungle, he stiffened and trembled, and cried out. _Jesus, Jesus, oh
Lord Jesus!_”

There is no single word to describe how John feels, or who John is. He
is religious, that much is certain. But what else is he? The novel
says that he was a “funny” child, not because of a hinted-at
sexuality but because he appeared both distant and unusually alert.
Early in the book, in an unsettling moment, John becomes aware “that
his mother was not saying everything she meant.” At another point he
sees her face changing to the face “he gave her in his dreams.”
But no image is simple. “Between the two faces there stretched a
darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him
to hate her.” This is a fleeting thought; it does not define John.
It merely shows his mind darting and shifting. He is becoming an
interpreter of silence as much as speech. John is most alive when he
is most alone. His stray or deliberately unspoken thoughts create an
energy at the very center of the novel.

John is thoughtful, watchful, haunted by some things, afraid of
others. He is also proud, but maybe that is an aspect of his fear.
Sometimes his response is simple yet he is too interesting to be
settled. Even when he decides early in the book that he would have a
life different from that of his father “or his father’s
fathers,” it is not clear if this is fantasy or youthful ambition or
a passing thought or a mixture of all these things.

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While the power of prayer is apparent in Baldwin’s language, it does
not save his characters from having to live in history and inhabit a
world that undergoes change rather than redemption. John carries the
weight of being a born noticer and the weight of having been a
fourteen-year-old who can undergo a religious conversion. But he also
carries another weight, which gives the book its structure. He carries
the weight of what his parents went through.

In his book about Catholic novelists, _Maria Cross_, published in
1952, the Irish critic Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote about how those of
us who come from “small and vocal communities” deal with a time
and a generation that have passed:

There is for all of us a twilit zone of time, stretching back for a
generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to
the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our
memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding
and traversing our own individual being…. Children of small and
vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if
they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own
lives a significant span of time before their individual births.

In _Go Tell It on the Mountain_, it is as if John contains all that
has been experienced by the previous generation, who had come to
Harlem from the South. He has thus been singled out in his own world
not merely because of his intelligence, or because of his sexuality,
or because of his eloquence or his susceptibility to religious
feeling, but also because he comes haunted by what happened to his
family before he was born. Roy is not haunted in this way.

The middle sections of the novel narrate the stories of the lives of
the generation before John—the two sons who were born out of
wedlock, the bad marriages, the religious fervor matched by hypocrisy.
Baldwin’s shifting point of view gives us an intimate sense of
John’s mother, Elizabeth; father, Richard; stepfather, Gabriel; and
aunt, Florence. What happened a generation earlier doesn’t merely
foreshadow events in time present, but infuses them, lives within
them.

For Baldwin, the past was bound up with place, and since his sense of
place was bound up with displacement, the past did not come simply.
What is strange is how stories from the past represent the very center
of _Go Tell It on the Mountain_, enough to make it a novel about how
the displacement caused by the Great Migration entered into the spirit
of these characters and their relationships. The novel has a shadow
world where the past happened, where the earlier generation came from,
and where much that was unresolved had been left behind.

That lost place is the American South. “A black boy born in New
York’s Harlem in 1924,” Baldwin wrote in _Esquire_ in 1980,
“was born of southerners who had but lately been driven from land,
and therefore was born into a southern community.” Two years after
the novel appeared, Baldwin published an account of how his father,
who died on July 29, 1943, came to resemble the figure of Gabriel:

No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly how old he
was…. He was of the first generation of free men. He, along with
thousands of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of
that generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes
sometimes call the Old Country.

David Leeming, in his biography of Baldwin, writes: “During the
summer of 1957 Baldwin talked incessantly about the South, his fear of
it and his sense of his own vulnerability in relation to it.” He was
about to make his first visit there. In the essay “Nobody Knows My
Name: A Letter from the South,” Baldwin notes that, as he was
preparing to set out, he was cautioned by a friend to “remember that
Southern Negroes had endured things I could not imagine.” Leeming
writes that he was warned of “the tension that might exist between
blacks of the South and the black reporter from the North.” He is
told “that it might be a good idea to arrive in Charlotte, North
Carolina, the first stop on the itinerary, during the day rather than
at night.”

Among the photographs in John’s family’s possession is one of his
aunt, Florence, “when she had just come North” and another of his
father as a young preacher who was married to a woman called Deborah,
who had died in the South. “If she had lived, John thought, then he
would never have been born; his father would never have come North and
met his mother.” He doesn’t yet know that Gabriel is his
stepfather, not his biological father.

That first wife of Gabriel’s, “this shadowy woman, dead so many
years, whose name he knew had been Deborah, held in the fastness of
her tomb, it seemed to John, the key to all those mysteries he so
longed to unlock. It was she who had known his father in a life where
John was not, and in a country John had never seen.” But it was a
country he knows about: “John had read about the things white people
did to colored people; how, in the South, where his parents came from,
white people cheated them of their wages, and burned them, and shot
them—and did worse things, said his father, which the tongue could
not endure to utter.”

Gradually, events that took place in the South come to haunt the book,
as they haunt John’s imagination, and offer a more fervid tone to
the narrative. When Deborah was taken into the fields and raped by
many White men, Deborah’s father threatened that he would kill these
men, and he was left for dead by them. Then everyone, including
Gabriel’s mother and his sister, “had shut their doors, praying
and waiting, for it was said that the white folks would come tonight
and set fire to all the houses, as they had done before.”

Baldwin has a special tone to describe the Southern night. A special
eloquence, a way of balancing his sentences, using elaborate
description and then a plain statement—moving from human feelings to
ones that embrace the Almighty, creating an atmosphere that is
unearthly and ominous: “In the night that pressed outside they heard
only the horse’s hoofs, which did not stop; there was not the
laughter they would have heard had there been many coming on this
road, and no calling out of curses, and no one crying for mercy to
white men, or to God.”

The South is not merely a place of fear but a place where slavery
exists in living memory. John’s father’s mother had grown up as a
slave, as “one of the field-workers, for she was very tall and
strong; and by and by she had married and raised children, all of whom
had been taken from her, one by sickness and two by auction; and one,
whom she had not been allowed to call her own, had been raised in the
master’s house.” From this place people would disappear, would be
gone by morning on their journey North. Florence’s father, whom she
scarcely remembered, had departed that way one morning not many months
after the birth of her brother Gabriel. “And not only her father;
every day she heard that another man or woman had said farewell to
this iron earth and sky, and started on the journey North.”

It is as if the language of the book had itself known an earlier time,
as if it took its bearing from a rhetoric that had been heard in a
more dangerous place than Harlem, a place from which people sought to
escape, as though escape were kind of deliverance. When Florence
appears in the church at the very end of section one of the novel,
Baldwin writes: “John knew that it was the hand of the Lord that had
led her to this place, and his heart grew cold. The Lord was riding on
the wind tonight. What might that wind have spoken before the morning
came?”

THIS ESSAY IS ADAPTED FROM _ON JAMES BALDWIN_, PUBLISHED TODAY
BY BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
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_COLM TÓIBÍN is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the
Humanities at Columbia. His eleventh novel, Long Island, was
published in May. (July 2024)_

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English
language.” The New York Review began during the New York
publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind
of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of
our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as
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* literature
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* James Baldwin
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* Book Review
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* African American history
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* the Great Migration
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* slavery
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