Speaking of his novels and short stories, Colm Tóibín says of James Baldwin’s prose style that, ‘I have no memory of being impressed or even detained much … . I just read it. I wonder if it was designed for that purpose: to be read without noticing the style’. This is a blog on style that uses dramatic tension and ordinariness simultaneously, and, what readers ‘notice’ in their reading and what they don’t notice as discussed in noticeable and hard-to-notice ways in Colm Tóibín (2024) On James Baldwin Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis University Press.
Author & Front cover of the book.
Speaking personally, I think I was fortunate (or perhaps unfortunate) in being trained in two disciplines (reading literary language and psycho-socially-informed social work) where noticing was akin to reading underneath the surfaces of things. That was the case in social work whether those things were spoken or written words, or events one observed including conversations or other exchanges (even silent ones) between. Hence I do not know whether I was, as Colm Tóibín names John Grimes, a character in Baldwin’s first (and semi-autobiographical) novel Go Tell It On The Mountain, a ‘born noticer’ or not.
Being a ‘noticer’ is not necessarily a good thing, for the person so ‘gifted’, for Tóibín says John ‘carries the weight of being a born noticer’, and this means that he is always alert not only to what is said but what is not, for he becomes ‘an interpreter of silence as much as speech’, forever reading what others would not think to read in an event, in words in faces and bodies manifesting subtle changes. And such a person notices the passage of events differently to other people: such that they are always on the cusp of becoming imminently and painfully aware of ‘having to live in history and inhabit a world that undergoes change’. It is not always change that is for them advantageous or even usable in their own interests.[2] And, as Tóibín makes clear, in the practice of his writing, good readings of literary text, especially about the shifting consciousness of events in a novel (the thing best done by Henry James but adopted as a means of exploring their own worlds by ‘noticers’ like Baldwin and Tóibín, both as ‘readers’ and writers).
Glowing examples of how we ‘notice’ things unnoticed by others, even the ‘born noticer’ themselves at points in their history, emerge through these transcribed lectures, such that it must have been like being in the presence of a magician causing the previously unseen and unheard to emerge from what seemed like flat unresponsive surfaces hiding nothing at all that needs to be noticed. As a kind of flat and unresponsive surface is how, after all, Tóibín, says he, at first, read Baldwin (and how I once read Baldwin) so that only later was it clear that one might have been wrong about a text: ‘I have no memory of being impressed or even detained much … . I just read it. I wonder if it was designed for that purpose: to be read without noticing the style’.[3]
Moreover, this is not just about ‘style’, for style is often the mask and /or the representation of extensions of a text or its context into adjacent domains: of knowing the history, current structurations, psychology and social psychology repressed beneath the surface of a personal, social or cultural account of what we think we see or read. Take the reading Tóibín gives of John Grimes’ encounter with the repressed histories of the South of the USA, to which he ‘returns’ (having never been there personally before) to confront histories of both his family and community from a distant past. John ‘had read about the things white people did to coloured people’ but only the ‘haunted’ and ‘haunting’ apprehension of this as a present fear will show him that history continues ‘in real time’ and that ‘”the night that pressed outside” is not a metaphor’[4]. We, as readers, only learn to read this by accounting for the otherwise unnoticed in Baldwin’s style that he, perhaps, intended ‘to be read without noticing the style’. If this is so, the writer is constantly trying to jog the reader awake to notice more as their awareness grows.
That is how we apprehend ‘history’ after all, Tóibín insists, in novels that carefully occult the history of what has happened and is still, in undercurrent, happening, but not wishing to be noticed. It is the dramatic tension underlying ordinariness. You do not have to think long to be aware that this is how Tóibín’s own novels work, as I have tried to show in various ones of them; take, for instance, the novel, Long Island, a novel whose best offerings to alert reading are barely noticed by reviewers. See my blog on it here. But this is how he reads visual art too, as I hope I showed in my blog on his writing, to give one example, on Frank Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads, as recently exhibited – see this link for my blog on that.
One of the wonders of these lectures and now book is that Tóibín shows that there are various ways of achieving notice for things, especially those things that fracture our confidence in the solidity and durability of the outside world and our systems of organising it as if it were solid and durable (systems like ideology or authority, for instance). The very purpose of ideology is not to be overly noticed, lest we reject its right to be present when we do notice it.
Tóibín brilliantly analyses, for instance, how the burden of conflict in Black history is sometimes unfelt in Harlem by people in the midst of that conflict but merely accepted. It is so, he says, as well as in the South of America, because of the ‘cover’ of ordinariness over it. To understand this he uses an analogy with a different method of illustrating the phenomenon in fiction where felt history is diffused over a novel’s surface, that in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as Baldwin refuses to write a ‘parable of race relations’ in his novels, so Joyce takes the ‘powder-keg’ in Irish history that was 1914 – 21 when the novel was composed [5] and yet sets his narrative in the quieter Dublin of 1904 in order to achieve some distance from overt conflict. Nevertheless, he occults a knowledge in the story of Irish characters of the oppression thwy experience from Ireland’s British rulers, not now in the plain style that looks ‘ordinary’ but in ‘competing styles, such that ‘a drama in which Irish characters are controlled by hatred and fear’ (of British Rule) is felt in other modes. Hence of his Irish characters, especially the Jewish-Irish Bloom, it can be said that ‘their oppression emerges as linguistic performance and comic interludes’. Colm then invents a sentence no writer could not have wished to invent for themselves: ‘History is the comedy from which his characters are trying to awake’.[6]
This is NOT Baldwin’s method but it involves similar strategies of misrecognitions of intent beneath the surface of both narrative, genre and prose styles, deep harder-to-notice effects. Baldwin’s method is very like Tóibín’s own, as a novelist. Many critics feel the latter’s insistence on small communities where not much happens apparently, is all there is to him – a novel of provincial manners is offered in rather refined style, but ‘style’ for its own sake.
Style is what he learned from Henry James and put to use in The Master, although with less noticeable surface effect than in James. It is the technique he labels in this book, as Baldwin’s, the ‘third-person intimate’ style; it enables characters (and test this on Nora Webster too or any of the Enniscorthy novels) to ‘live in the novel at one remove from what happens to him’.[7] The literary academy could barely countenance such insight, still, at least in its subjugated students, and only Tóibín’s reputation as an international novelist allows him to front at Brandeis in such shameful disregard for what academics still call ‘rigour’, but by which they mean only stating the obviously evidenced truths.
An author who is “gay and from a provincial place”. Author photo available: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Colm-Toibin Provincial town Enniscorthy photo available: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/colm-toibin-loses-the-plot
I think ‘close reading’ is a methodology more often invoked in the humanities, including those on the cusp of science like anthropology, than practiced and still smeared with notions of ‘subjectivism’. Yet in these lectures Tóibín shows how only it, even by inviting his reader to do it over long quoted passages, can access contrasts which evidence the layers of ideological facture that make the difference between the kinds of experience conditioned by structures of feeling.
These structures include retrospective and anticipatory feelings that are of the otherwise UNNOTICED ‘feel’ of a life, that can seem at one time to be both full and yet very empty. Tóibín expresses this, for instance, in comparing invited close readings of two passages in order to show how feelings of being ‘at home’ and redeemed (a ‘sanctuary in which there is mystery and passion’) is compared to ones of a life of ‘death and destruction’ (‘garish and sad, utterly lonely’).[8]
For Tóibín, these are the most pertinent modern themes that contain almost trivial instances of a larger history of ‘Great Migration’ (of once enslaved Black people to the North, of the Irish to the United Kingdom and its once-colonies (especially the USA) and of ‘displacement’).[9] These are the themes of his novels, even the ones about great literary masters like James and Mann. When Tóibín says here of Go Tell It On The Mountain, that ‘what happened a generation earlier doesn’t merely foreshadow events in time present, but it infuses and animates them’, he is describing the means by which dramatic tension and ordinariness play against each other in his novels in sometimes occulted ways.[10]
Tóibín also gets pressure, I think, and whenever I have seen him at public events I have tried to apply it too, to write the great Irish queer novel that is in them (not that many of his novels and stories aren’t already on the way there). I wrote in an earlier blog that:
… the idea of a queer novel was implicit in his early historical book on queer writers Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar of 2001. It is explored as an idea brilliantly a story in that wondrous collection of short stories The Empty Family, called ‘The Street’ (in the dark context of wider human survival in illegal immigration and asylum). His major attempt at a more recognisable, in the Violet Quill mode (see my blog from this link), queer novel was House of Names, but its setting in an anachronistic mix of Mycenaean Greek and Irish mythological material meant it appealed to fewer people than it should. The Magician takes a step further than The Master (focused on episodes from the life of Henry James) by the study of different responses to living a life in which queer survival operates in stealth – emerging more often in writing, and sometimes only in issues of ‘style’ – in writers from a darker past. In Thomas Mann’s case that darkness was truly profound and included the threat of the Queer Holocaust in Nazi Germany.[11]
Typically, Tóibín does not help get us nearer to the way in which queer life is there to be noticed – but you do do so if you are a ‘noticer’ – in his novels, but I think this is always implicit in his method, especially as it becomes more refined. But something in On James Baldwin made me think that Tóibín may yet break through with a novel that stands out as the queer classic of our century. In this book, he does so by comparing features of his own life as a writer exiled by, in particular, the oppression of queer people with Baldwin’s. As the latter had to take to Paris and then set his only openly queer novel in the containment of one Parisian ‘room’, so Tóibín insists was the function of his sojourn in Barcelona in 1975, where he could write about a ‘gay life in cities that was both deeply secretive and oddly on display’.
These passages contain writing of a high order that not only uncover queer life but show how it was contaminated by oppression and something of the existentially lonely, incapable of redemption and cut off from the need and desire to love the other rather than just ‘be eager to’ (in a formal phrase used by a pick-up he thought might mature into a lover, but for these stylistic give-aways) experience acts like that of ‘penetrar el recto’. These were problems though of a life lived according to ideologically imposed ‘necessities’ in queer lives: of ‘the silence, the invisibility, the strangeness’.[12]
Clearly the displacements that required Baldwin to set his queer novel in a foreign city but also in only one room of that city, so that city seems a matter of imagined invention also apply to The South (a very displaced novel where a passionate woman is what Tóibín calls in this book a ‘double, someone who shadows the writer’: ‘an emerging self that lives within the self, passing for real, passing for fictional, wavering and hovering in the dream-space between the two’. Tóibín toys with his own past, making it part of the generality of what writers do were it not that these writers played games of ‘concealment and disclosure’ with their own autobiography over matters where openness is feared as having unwanted consequences. Look at the games in this, especially the hiding of himself (as he wrote The Magician) in a sub-phrase, just as others are hidden there or inverted. Baldwin instancing the circumstance of Giovanni’s Room is implicit the last phrase:
A novelist can create a self-portrait; a woman novelist can make a man; a contemporary novelist can make a figure from the past; an Irish novelist can make a German, a straight novelist can make a homosexual; an African American novelist can make a White American. [13]
The secret of the new queer novel is something I think Giovanni’s Room, despite its over-enclosed setting may have been looking for and for which Tóibín is still seeking the key and that is the search for ‘the home of his sexuality, which is both hidden and apparent’, but which is not always as comfortable as ideologies from all directions pretend it is. In the end it is all implicated in notions of ‘passing’ as what one is not, which is the human condition, for we are never one thing all the time without some imposture. There is a fine expression of this which I will not even quote, but it too is on page 91. It needs understanding to see the brilliance of the comparison between Giovanni’s Room and Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, a comparison I would never otherwise have been capable of contemplating.
In my last blog at this link (on I Am Not Your Negro which work gets quoted in this book too), I puzzled over a moment of the writing of the relationship between Baldwin and Malcolm X. Here is the gist of that puzzling, that uses a passage in On James Baldwin which reads thus:
… the heightened emotion around ritual and religious belief strayed into same-sex desire, rendering the latter as unfathomable and as beguiling as the former, but more dangerous’.[14]
I try to use this passage to read a piece about a formal encounter at a lecture between these men:
It is not an interaction that is in any way queer in embodied practice, and would not anyway, by all accounts have been amenable to Malcolm X in this form, but in Baldwin’s words there is much there to my reading of it that can be nothing other than ‘heightened emotion around ritual and religious belief’ that has ‘strayed into’ one-sided same-sex desire, rendering the latter as unfathomable and as beguiling as the former, but more dangerous’:
I first met Malcolm X.
I saw Malcolm before I met him.
I was giving a lecture somewhere in New York.
Malcolm was sitting in the first row of the hall,
bending forward at such an angle
that his long arms nearly caressed the ankles
of his long legs, staring up at me.
I go on to argue that there is something ‘in the “caressing” of the self’ by Malcolm that is made to pass as auto-erotic. This need not indicate, I say, the sexual or auto-erotic but it borrows the energies of both in order to bond these men in the consciousness of one of them. I have continued to think about this and thin that what it shows is that writing always invents some ‘other’ from elements that may only exist in ways identifiable as such within the writer. But a writer MUST write them if they are not to otherwise make them appear unthinkable and inhuman rather than a version of the human that forever changes in the relationships between people. It fits exactly with the sensibility that Tóibín detects in Baldwin and for which he finds a satisfying quoted statement:
He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way few of his White novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”[15]
We do not like seeing our ‘confessions’ as ‘excremental’ but, of course, they are – things that have we have noticed, ingested, processed but which are now wasted on us and must be guiltily returned to the outside world, where, strangely enough, they may not be disgusting, but potential truths unnoticed by others, anguished because other people fail to validate them by noticing them too. Of course some of the vomited is just waste and excrement and no more, but some is not. It is merely highly over-processed product of reflective digestion that still has a use, like the ambergris of the sperm whale.
Colm Tóibín, in this book, suggests, even in a poem he writes in the final lecture or chapter about the battle between contradictory flows in the tidal River Hudson in New York that finding a ‘home’ for oneself, across the intersections of the ways class, race and sexuality as you perceive them and as others do, both determine and free you is a matter of struggle that requires a rich awareness of how the inner and outer lives of which all people bear many come together in expressive art. It means that any light we have is ‘cut into pieces’ and constantly surviving because it is drowning too.[16] If that is so, it is a tragic view of life and I suppose one I think Tóibín may share with Baldwin, and both with Ingmar Bergman, mentioned at the end of the book. But of that, I am far than certain.
But this is a beautiful book to read.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxx
[1] Colm Tóibín(2021:2) On James Baldwin Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis University Press.
[2] Ibid: 13
[3] ibid:2
[4] Ibid: 32
[5] Ibid: 22f.
[6] Ibid: 18
[7] Ibid: 9
[8] Ibid: 134f. (see passages 133f.)
[9] Ibid: 29f.
[10] Ibid: 14
[11] See my blog at: https://livesteven.com/2021/10/16/the-teeming-commercial-life-of-the-street-had-its-own-sensuality-most-people-in-these-streets-were-men-he-was-like-a-child-surrounded-by-things-he-dearly-wanted-an-almost-un/
[12] Ibid: 83f.
[13] Ibid: 91
[14] Ibid: 10
[15] Ibid: 96f.
[16] Ibid: 120
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