During my twenties and early thirties, I read James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country several times. For some reason I kept going back and back to it, though it made me uncomfortable in ways that paralleled my discomfort/attraction to Malcolm X's Autobiography and the novels of Philip Roth. Like them, it seemed to affirm that young, well-educated, well-meaning, Protestant white women such as myself just had to take whatever these oppressed, angry men cared to dish out to us. That's a very limited reading of what's going on in the work of these authors, but it was also a lesson that I found myself needing to absorb, though I was also mystified and distressed by the way in which a literary generation was typecasting my kind as a way to reach its own necessary ends.

Coming back to Another Country now, in my mid-forties, as not only an older woman but a more experienced writer, I find myself absorbed by a very different concern. In many ways, the book's portrayals of gender, class, race, and sexual anxiety seem to cohere into an umbrella anxiety: how does one create the art that one needs to--that one ought to--that one must--create? Thus far, the two arts in question are jazz and the novel; and if you're interested in examples, you can read yesterday's post as well as this one, from earlier in the summer. When I was younger, I must have skimmed over those passages, perhaps chalking them up as generic "writing a book about writing" talk. But now they seem intensely important to me; they seem to reinforce my sense that we have no right to make art that isn't the art we ought to make. Yet they also insist that it is impossible to transmit the "dark, strange, dangerous, difficult" secrets of our inarticulate selves without putting those selves into mortal peril. To a forty-seven-year-old vaguely Protestant heterosexual white woman who lives in the ugly countryside where she writes and writes and writes, these assertions of a thirty-eight-year-old ex-Pentecostal homosexual black man living in Paris where he wrote and wrote and wrote feel deeply, excruciatingly, accurate.