Blackballs
CLEMENT FREUD
Within a short generation the long arm of our permissive society has reached out and embraced the publishing trade. Books bound in plain brown paper, containing brave words like damn and bum are now being serialised on Children's Hour. I bought mine surrepti- tiously at left-bank bookshops.
Four-letter words are taken, rightly, in the spirit in which they are uttered and only reviewers are urged not to use them—unless of course it is a straight quote. Here is a straight quote:
'The morning of the day which will end in the opening night is a very strange moment. One wakes in a tremendous silence, the judgment morning silence . . . One lies in bed very straight and still and listens and listens with great attention to the morning . . . and I had a terrible melancholy hard on and I wanted to pee or jerk myself off but didn't have the energy for either. It was in this bed that I had slept with Sally and then with Steve. And this room had witnessed both departures.'
James Baldwin. His book Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone could be a dramatised civil rights pamphlet. It is also a novel of great quality because Baldwin is a writer of immense ability.
Leo Proudhammer, his hero, moves jerkily from cuddly eleven year old, who shares a bed with his mysterious brother Caleb, through puberty, bumming, pimping, whoring, waiting, cooking . . . to become the greatest negro actor of the age. His story is written in that old familiar flashback technique, starting with a heart attack on stage. While Leo is cosseted back to health by his faithful white southern belle (before he is taken off to the south of France by his unfaithful black beau) he has managed to think back through 400 pages of his life.
Take his brother's arrest and assault by the police who pick him up in a brothel on a trumped-up charge: "We're taking you to the station."
"What for?"
"You're a very inquisitive bunch of niggers. Here's what for"—and he suddenly grabbed Caleb and smashed the pistol butt against the side of his head. The blood ran down, my brother's blood. I jumped up howling from the sofa trying to get to Caleb but they knocked me back. . .
The trouble about flashback technique is that you never stop at a point in time—and the author's stop is invariably not the one about which you want to hear. So you have to read about Barbara's boring parents when you really desire to know more about Caleb in whom the elements of love and hate are so beau- tifully blended that it is with real regret that you find him becoming a preacher; he deserved better.
Lying in his hospital bed, Leo conjures up his bisexual past: the heterosexual occa- sions are described with clinical, biological detail. The loving of men on the other hand is shrouded in an aura of mystery of the 'we lay down in each other's arms and went to sleep' type. But the book is fascinating and beautifully written; his description of his first starring part on the stage has one putting down the book to applaud with the audience and if his characters tend to start their sentence with : `shit baby, let's get the fuck out of here' this is entirely in the mood of the moment. It lends a certain urgency to the action and as Baldwin has the good taste to use no word worse than 'balls' until page 80, when it hits you you are already with him waiting for it.
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