Free The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin Page B

herself and commenting, with extreme distaste, on whatever she is doing. It is on this affliction that her precarious dignity depends. The first hint I caught of this was when Gerry, preparing, rather wearily, to listen to her beach-boy lover’s * discourse, sits down at her wardrobe trunk, picks up her mirror, looks into it, and puts it down again. It was electrifying. It was terribly funny. It was terribly sad. And I also remember her achievement of that moment when the boy finishes his monologue and turns to her, saying, “Princess, will you help me?” And she holds out her arms, incurably predatory even as she is incurably lonely, but, also, at that moment, very beautiful and moving, because for that moment, if only in her own mind, she is both wife and mother and has again a human value for someone in the world.
    Acting is (for me, anyway) one of the most mysterious of all the arts—mysterious because the instrument, the actor himself, without changing at all, undergoes such inexplicable transformations before one’s eyes. I think that this sustained and steady tension between the real and the make-believe is healthy for the soul: it forces one to examine reality again. Seeing Gerry around the studio, or on television, had never caused me, really, to look at her, to wonder about her—and by “wonder” I don’t mean the currently prevalent zoological sniffing which lacks even the primary virtue of curiosity—or, for that matter, to listen to her. I saw a girl who was enormously
sympathique
, not strikingly pretty, with a rather light, agreeable voice. That’s all I saw. How in the world, then, did this girl manage to turn herself into a ruined and desperate harridan, with a voice that made one jump and with a face into which had somehow been burned the defeats, indignities, and agonies of a long and intolerable lifetime? I know that, technically and theatrically speaking, there are a great many answers to this question, although I also know that no one has ever really answered it. And when the same question confronts us, in life, in time, the answers are even more desperately makeshift. My point, anyway, is that all I saw ofGerry is all that most of us, wandering in our grisly isolation through this world, ever see of any other person. Whoever forces this terrible truth once more on our attention has also helped us to bear it and to that extent, at least, has lessened it. It is a small light brought into a vast darkness—but a small light, considering, especially, what everyone is searching for, may be quite enough. As for the light which Gerry holds, may it burn long.
    (1962)
    * The role of her lover was played by Paul Newman.

From
What’s the Reason Why?: A Symposium by Best-Selling Authors:
James Baldwin on
Another Country
    In the December 2, 1962, issue of
The New York Times
, the editors of the
Book Review
asked the year’s best-selling authors, “what they believe there is about their book or the climate of the times that has made [it] so popular.”
Another Country
had been on the best-seller list since June.
    ·      ·     ·
    P EOPLE BOUGHT
Another Country
in considerably larger numbers than I imagined they would. I suppose this must have something to do with the fact that many more people than are willing to admit it lead lives not at all unlike the lives of the people in my book. I don’t mean to compare myself to a couple of artists I unreservedly admire—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 kindof universal blues, they speak of something far beyond their charts, graphs, statistics, they are telling us something about what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity which one hears in them, but compassion. And perhaps this is the place for me to say that I really do not, at the very