Review: Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baldwin’s story of his own coming of age at first blush resembles Mary Olivier: A Life. Both feature young people who are smart, literate, critically-minded children of conservative Christian parents, conflicts with whom prove the crucial factors determining their values to come. Mary learns to live with her mother, but young James in Go Tell It on the Mountain says he loves to hate his father, who indeed is a perfect human portrait of evil, a tortured and torturing soul, so consumed by interior conflict that he morphs, in positively Greek fashion, into the monster of so many lives, James being merely one.

Where May Sinclair’s experimental self-references expand the views of the fragmented self, Baldwin instead dives deep into the lives of his step-father and mother. Elizabeth could have doubled for ill-fated Roberta in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, her first lover in every way reminiscent of Clyde Griffiths, slim, handsome, an uncreative elevator boy in New York in the 1920s, except Richard is black, so instead of a leg up from a rich uncle, as Clyde got, Richard faces police brutality and quickly succumbs to depression and suicide.

The social realism of Baldwin’s style dissolves, in its final climax, into a heady, Romantic soup of gothic verse:

Then there began to flood John’s soul the waters of despair. Love is as strong as death, as deep as the grave. But love, which had, perhaps, like a benevolent monarch, swelled the population of his neighbouring kingdom, Death, had not himself descended: they owed him no allegiance here. Here there was no speech or language, and there was no love; no one to say: You are beautiful, John; no one to forgive him, no matter what his sin; no one to heal him, and lift him up. No one: father and mother looked backward, Roy was bloody, Elisha was not here.

Then the darkness began to murmur—a terrible sound—and John’s ears trembled. In this murmur that filled the grave, like a thousand wings beating on the air, he recognized a sound that he had always heard. He began, for terror, to weep and moan—and this sound was swallowed up, and yet was magnified by the echoes that filled the darkness.

This sound had filled John’s life, so it now seemed, from the moment he had first drawn breath. He had heard it everywhere, in prayer and in daily speech, and wherever the saints were gathered, and in the unbelieving streets. It was in his father’s anger, and in his mother’s calm insistence, and in the vehement mockery of his aunt; it had rung, so oddly, in Roy’s voice this afternoon, and when Elisha played the piano it was there; it was in the beat and jangle of Sister McCandless’s tambourine, it was in the very cadence of her testimony, and invested that testimony with a matchless, unimpeachable authority. Yes, he had heard it all his life, but it was only now that his ears were opened to this sound that came from darkness, that could only come from darkness, that yet bore such sure witness to the glory of the light. And now in his moaning, and so far from any help, he heard it in himself—it rose from his bleeding, his cracked-open heart.

Wow. Too much of this sort of thing can be maudlin, tedious. Still, one is struck by the memory of similar passages in Richard Wright’s Native Son, as Bigger awaits execution, or indeed back in An American Tragedy when Clyde awaits his own. It strikes me that the source for such strongly-flavored language must be the gothic doom of late Victorian poetry, like James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night:

For me this infinite Past is blank and dumb:
This chance recurreth never, nevermore;
Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come. 30

And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
A mockery, a delusion; and my breath
Of noble human life upon this earth
So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.

My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, 35
My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
I worse than lose the years which are my all:
What can console me for the loss supreme?

Speak not of comfort where no comfort is,
Speak not at all: can words make foul things fair? 40
Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss:
Hush and be mute envisaging despair.—

Did James Baldwin read such work? Likely, since his famed mentor Countee Cullen certainly did. But it’s also possible that Baldwin, imbued with the Bible and the the stiff structures of his father’s law, somehow reproduced the structure of feeling the gothic and decadent poets felt for the laws of their fathers, making Baldwin an African-American decadent, at least in his early years. I think he’d like that characterization.

View all my reviews