Customer Reviews

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

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Does it sound trite in cold print to say that a book changed your life? In college in the 1970s, a friend suggested this novel to me, and it was my first exposure to James Baldwin. For the first time in my life, I felt I was reading about *me*. Baldwin's gift in writing about how people try to find dignity and self-worth in a world not of their own choosing is breathtaking and heartfelt. Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider will feel great empathy with Baldwin's work. In Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, Baldwin focuses on the shifting relationships between a small group of people trying to work out who they are and how they can be true to themselves in an environment that's often uncaring. Over and over I was struck by the amount of raw experience Baldwin poured onto each page, and the amount of pain that must have been behind each sentence. As the years have gone by, I've also found that you can reread Baldwin at different stages of your life and see something different each time.

Baldwin may be better known for his essays than his fiction, but I've always found his fiction more powerful. This novel, and Just Above My Head, are two of the most beautiful works I've ever read.

If Giovanni's Room is an unresolved love story between two men, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone puts its protagonist in the center of social spotlight where ideals of ethnics, politics, and sex force him to put on a mask. Leo Proudhammer, a 39-years-old black man, suffers from a heart attack at the height of his theatrical career, forcing him to abort all ongoing performance and rehearsal. As he hovers between life and death, James Baldwin delineates a tapestry of human life that is terrifyingly vulnerable - through the meticulous choices that have rendered him enviously famous in theater, through the racial and gay covering that have split him into multiple identities.

There exists something edgy and cruel about a childhood riddled with braving the Harlem streets. Proudhammer often found him in the spotlight of eyes: eyes of children who outjocked him, eyes of the white cops toward whom he felt a rush of murderous hatred, and the tell-tale eyes of the older folks who suspected of his sexuality. The prose sustains a tincture of anguish, a tinge of paranoid, of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of unstoppable racial war owing the ludicrous demands to cover stereotype associated with both race and sexuality.

The theatrical industry which Proudhammer desires throws him further in disguises. Ironically it is through the many disguises he wears that he comes to term with his means. Instead of fleeing from the truth, he is approaching the reality. Disguises in a sense help make the truth a quantity with which he can live. In the juggling selves, Proudhammer retains loyalty to a white woman and a young black man. At first he might be most intimidated by his color for he does not appear to know that he is colored. He is met with people's baleful exasperation as if he is possessed by some evil spirit. Then he begins to be intimidated (and confronted), far more grievously, by the fact of his sexuality. He is gripped with the realization that he has never, in the sexual context, arrived at an understanding of being bisexual or gay.

Written during a time in which racism and assimilation to white norms are horrifyingly rife, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone brings to vivid view a man struggling to become himself through identities of a black man, a bisexual man, and an artist. Various occasions demand him to cover one of more of these identities in order to fit in. The novel pieces together moments of a man's life that teach one the price of human connection. Trapped in the wrong time, at the wrong place, and with the wrong ambitions trapped in the wrong skin, Proudhammer's perseverance earns him a reward that redeems and justifies all that pain, stigma, and bewilderment he once experienced.

This is another of James Baldwin's literary triumphs. Here he weaves the deepest hopes, sorrows, fears and desires of the human condition into an unforgettable tapestry. The story centers around an actor named Leo Proudhammer and the choices he made in his life, the results that followed and the people he shared his life with. Here we read about Leo as a youngster growing up in Harlem, his struggles as a young man trying to break into showbiz amidst a multitude of obstacles and his successful rise to stardom. This is a very poignant and tender but, powerful and gripping story that will hold your attention. Also recommended: "Giovanni's Room", "Another Country" and "Going to Meet the Man".

I bought Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone still swooning over Baldwin's Another Country. To my disappointment, this book did not have the same complexity, depth, nor energy that Another Country had. I found myself sticking to the book in some hopes that I would reach the same feeling of satisfaction and rapture that I found with Another Country, or Giovanni's Room. Not a complete waste of time, but not Baldwin's best.

Recently I started a review of a film documentary, "Lenny Bruce: Without Tears", using the following lines that I found appropriate to use to set the same kind of tone in reviewing James Baldwin's his 1974 novel, "If Beale Street Could Talk". I also find it useful to do so here as well in reviewing "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone":

"Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block today knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against him. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the "justice" system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city block pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches."

And that sums up the message behind almost all of Baldwin's' best work, at least the message that will last and that should be etched in the memory of every fighter for social justice.

Now I have been, as is my wont when I get "hooked" on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at "Go Tell It On The Mountain", the play "Blues For Mr. Charlie", and "If Beale Street Could Talk. Frankly, those works, caught my attention more so that this work of "black uplift". Although it is well-written and powerful in spots it did not remind me why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid.

Why? Well, while I could definitely relate to the main character, Leo's, struggle to make a career for himself in the very white theater of his day and I could also sympathize with his struggle against the ingrained racism that he faced in daily life, even when he was successful, there was just a little too much self-satisfaction to move me into his direction. I will say that Baldwin's use, as on previous occasions, of the two-tier past and present interspersed literary format to tell Leo's early story (and his brother Caleb's and his white paramour Barbara's as well) and his current ill-health induced dilemma makes the novel move better than expected when I started reading the book.

That said, Baldwin is at his best when he creates situations where his characters have to confront the hard, hard reality of up-front racism in American. Little scenes like "being black" while in small town New Jersey, being black while in big time Broadway, and being black while dealing with a white (female) lover bring home the point nicely. And of those racial nodal points the strongest is when Baldwin has the bi-sexual Leo's male paramour, Black Christopher, who represents the "new" post- civil rights movement young black draws just the right historical parallel to the Jewish experience in World War II when he states, in effect- we will not go sheepishly into the concentration camps that the whites have ready for us when things get too hot. Powerful stuff. To bad it got buried in a story line that in the end has Leo traipsing off to Europe and not worthy of such insights.

... could ever have confounded happiness with this rage. Yet, the scene we entered had been tirelessly reproduced, in stale and meticulous, absolutely libelous detail, in countless musical comedies and innumerable pork-chop-in-the-sky films: the nigger, moving in uncanny time to the music, hips, hands, and feet working, all flashing teeth and eyes, without a care in the world."

Yes, the rage is still there, captured so authentically by Baldwin, the spokesman for those marginalized by the larger white, heterosexual society. The stereotype that was promoted, as indicated in the above paragraph, for so many years, of the "happy darkie," has disappeared from mainstream American society, in the course of some 50 years. I first read Baldwin over 40 years ago, starting with "Another Country," then going on to "Go Tell It on The Mountain" and "The Fire Next Time." Some of the other reviewers did not believe this book was of the same caliber as the others. I demur. The anger and anguish of the dispossessed leaps out, as in the other novels, but with each there are different facets, which make Baldwin so much more than a "one novel" author.

The book starts with the heart attack of a (very!) youthful and successful black American actor, Leo Proudhammer, at the age of 39. In short order, it is apparent that his lover is a white woman, Barbara, in an age when this was still somewhat "edgy." Through flashbacks Baldwin describes an upbringing in Harlem, with the poverty, and the "emasculation" of a father who cannot provide for his family, and the loss of his older brother Caleb to jail as he associated with "the wrong crowd." The white police make more than just a cameo appearance, always a looming and threatening presence. And there is the detailing of another "edgy" crowd, the theater people, where "mixed" liaisons are largely acceptable, even the homosexual ones with "Black Christopher."

Baldwin also transcends the issues related to "America's dilemma," to use Gunner Myrdal's phrase, and addresses those of the human condition. Consider insights into the medical profession with: "Hi, there, sleepy-head!" she cried cheerfully--with that really unnerving cheerfulness of nurses; one dare not speculate on what awful knowledge the cheerfulness hides-- (p66) or of fame: "People who achieve any eminence whatever are driven to do so; and there is always something terribly vulnerable about such people. They very soon discover that their eminence makes of them an incitement and a target--it does not cause them to be loved. They are trapped on their hill. They cannot come down." (p 444) And then there is the possibly extremely prophetic: "We were the only colored people there. I had worked in the kitchen, not a hundred years ago; outside were the millions of starving--Chinese"....." This groaning board was a heavy weight on the backs of many millions, whose groaning was not heard. Beneath this table, deep in the bowels of the earth, as far away as China... an energy moved and gathered and it would , one day, overturn this table..." (p 477). And stop buying our T-bills, for example?

Baldwin eventually gave up on America, and sought solace in France. His final resting place is high on the hills overlooking the Mediterranean, in St. Paul de Vence. He did not live long enough to hear the new President of the United States speak in his inaugural address of one who might have been refused a seat at a lunch counter now taking the oath of office for the highest position in the land. For those who did not live through the period of these 50 years, and for those who did, Baldwin remains as vital a read as ever. And although the stereotypes about Blacks have largely disappeared from polite discourse, they certainly have been replaced by those concerning Muslims, much to the same end, of distancing "us" from "them." I suspect Baldwin would have been equally appalled at this transformation.

I am a firm believer that any writer worthy of the ink expended in the pursuit of his creative genius should be able to hook a reader into his story within the first one hundred pages of the novel. I'm disappointed to say that this novel by Baldwin falls far short of my expectations of good writing and specifically my expectations of him. In most novels, the author uses the story as a means to make a point. Throughout the first hundred pages of this novel I couldn't help but feel that Baldwin was writing, instead, to prove a point. This would be understandable had the novel been written during the early years of Baldwin's career. During that period publishers showed little interest in the talents of Black writers. Relegating their work as inferior in comparison to that of white authors. However, this novel was published well into Baldwin's career, yet it appears to me that Baldwin is writing more so to prove his ability to write, than to tell a compelling story. The novel's pace is labored with the use of excessive language, creating complex sentence structures that distract from the rhythm of the story. The characters (at least those introduced in the first hundred pages of the book) are lifeless, uninteresting. If a writer can not establish a relationship with the reader through his characters within the first hundred pages why should the reader invest any more of his time?

My experience with some of Baldwin's previous works, specifically, Giovanni's Room and The Fire Next Time, was phenomenal. Although Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone falls short of my expectations, my overall experience of Baldwin's work thus far leaves no doubt that in my mind that he was an exceptional writer, worthy of all the acclaim bestowed him. For this reason, I'll continue to read his work, fiction and non-fiction, knowing that with all his greatness, he too like the rest of us, experienced times when he was not at his best.