Novel sounds

James Baldwin's Just Above My Head

When James Baldwin, the writer, was a young man searching for signs of himself in Greenwich Village in the late '30s, he was taken in by Beauford Delaney, the painter. Delaney was black and gay, and he introduced the former child preacher -- who was also black and as time would reveal also gay -- to the world of black secular music, playing Baldwin the Bessie Smith and Fats Waller records Baldwin's stepfather wouldn't let him listen to at home.

Delaney died in 1979, just when Baldwin was in the middle of writing Just Above My Head, a novel that begins with a death -- of a black gay gospel singer on the floor of a London pub -- and spends the next 500 pages mourning the loss of his song and finding meaning in the echo of its refrain. Just Above My Head was Baldwin's final novel. It was his riskiest (his only novel where black men have sex with black men), his most cumbersome, his most overwhelming -- both his greatest literary achievement and his most indulgent blunder. And it is the one novel most critics and Baldwin fans never mention. Now it has just been published in a new Delta edition (part of a slow-churning Baldwin renaissance that includes the Library of America's indispensable 1998 collection of his nonfiction, last year's James Baldwin Now essay tribute, and rumors of an HBO bio-pic) available for a new generation of readers to appreciate for what it was: Baldwin's own great song, the piece of music that he had always wanted to write ever since he realized that his goal as a writer was to be a blues singer. As he often said, he wanted to write the way Ray Charles sang and Miles Davis played.

Every line of Just Above My Head is saturated with the sounds of black music -- from spirituals and sorrow songs to blues and jazz -- and solos off a single repeated drumbeat, the old gospel lyric, "I've got to live the life I sing about in song." The characters in the novel -- Arthur the gospel singer, his brother/manager Hall, Arthur's lover Jimmy, Jimmy's preacher sister Julia -- grapple with what it really means to sing a song when the song is not just any song but your song, the song that sings you. For Baldwin, this involved a tremendous danger, because singing the song we are meant to sing involves coming to terms with a truth that we may not be able to bear.

"When you sing," Arthur tells Hall, "you can't sing outside the song. You've got to be the song you sing. You've got to make a confession." Arthur's confession is that he's gay (his death is the price he pays for confessing), and throughout the novel, his singing of his song is always coupled with detailed memories of sexual encounter -- being threateningly seduced as a child by an older man, having hot oral sex with a member of his gospel quartet. Hall's challenge is to listen to what Arthur is singing, to hear his confession and learn to live with it out of love.

Which makes Just Above My Head about what all of Baldwin's writing was always about: the painful and terrifying quest for connection between human beings who have been denied life by the categories they've been told to live within -- the problem of how to hook up and hear each other within the dissonance of the prisons (and there are so many) that keep us locked up. "I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro," Baldwin wrote back in 1961, and the characters in Just Above My Head struggle not too be merely anything -- black, white, gay, men, women, Americans -- but truly everything, bearing witness to one another while bearing witness to themselves. Baldwin has Hall bring it back to music: "We are all limited, and, mostly misshapen instruments, and yet, if we can, simultaneously, confront and surrender, extraordinary fingers can string from us the response to our humanity."

This was the grand project -- or better, the profound dare -- of Baldwin's own life, which seven years before his death from cancer as an ex-pat in St. Paul de Vence makes its way without much masking into nearly every turn of Just Above My Head. Like Baldwin, Arthur leaves America for Paris to find relief from "the Negro problem" and the impossibility of being gay and black in a country that refused to tolerate either. Arthur and Hall share the bond that Baldwin shared with his own brother David. Baldwin gives his middle name to Arthur, his own name to Arthur's lover, and his sister's name to Hall's wife, Ruth.

It is a deep, awful burden for a novel to bear -- to make universal music out of one's own life -- and Baldwin inevitably saw it as a failure. "I wanted it to be a great song," he told David after he finished. "Instead it's just a lyric." More than two decades later, that lyric sounds more like an entire record, and its revolutions make for a magnificent listen.

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