From Ralph Dumain’s notes on James Baldwin’s Another Country

25 April 2022:

While in the laundromat a short while ago I finished reading chapter 3 of book 2 of James Baldwin’s Another Country. The recent revival of interest in Baldwin seems to be focused on his nonfiction, especially because of the Black Lives Matter movement.

. . . . . . . . . .

But reading Baldwin’s fiction, especially in the interracial environment he depicts in Another Country, adds a whole other dimension to what people are likely to perceive in his nonfiction. I always admired Baldwin’s subtlety and exactitude in the depiction of human emotions and psychology, but I am re-reading this from a different perspective from the one I had when I was just a baby 50 years ago. I was not scandalized by what I read back then, though I was too naive to absorb it all. But the novel itself was published a decade before I read it, and the events recounted probably transpire in the late 1950s. Well, a whole lot changed between then and the early 1970s, and a whole lot changed in the subsequent half-century, so one would have to write a different novel now. But imagine what a shock it must have been to Baldwin’s readership in 1962! The novel is so unbelievably subversive in its portrayal of interpersonal relationships, class differences, racial differences, male-female differences, homosexuality, and the psychological costs of people not being able to fully develop themselves because of the constraints their society presses upon them. That’s what’s blowing my mind now, not the content itself, but the fact that Baldwin put all this out there in 1962.

Not surprisingly, the relationship that has the greatest impact on me is the love affair between the white Vivaldo (well, Italian, so more off-white) and the Black Ida. Ida of course is my favorite character. I don’t identify with Vivaldo in many respects, because his history with women and his specific doubts are not mine, but the portrayal of his questioning of everything and the change that his relationship with Ida induces in him is incredible.  Who cared about Black women in 1962? The thing that killed me was the way he falls in love with Ida at the end of Book 1, is overwhelmed by her beauty and worships her and wants so desperately for her to love him back. (This is the one aspect of this character I could completely relate to.) And despite her suspicions and reservations, Ida finally crosses that threshold, and all this is happening while they are having sex at the end of Book 1. In Book 2 a whole lot of tension surfaces, mostly Vivaldo’s self-doubt and Ida’s impatience at white stupidity, but Book 1 ends on a bang. Baldwin’s understanding of his characters’ psychology is amazing. But also, how subversive is it in 1962 when nobody gives a shit or can even imagine a serious relationship between a white man and a Black woman and that is the most intense and awesome description of a connection between two people up to that point, and it is all written by a gay Black man?

28 April 2022:

I’ve got to make a few more notes to make on Baldwin’s Another Country. I’m 346 pages in. This is probably the best novel Baldwin wrote, perhaps dated in the sense that the 21^st century is not the 1950s, but psychologically acute far beyond where America was at in 1962. I am most invested in the love affair between Vivaldo and Ida, my favorite character, a Black woman who is more realistic than her white boyfriend and everybody else can handle, more confident than all the rest but struggling against the pressure of white society’s judgment of her . . . much more severe than what is happening today, which is also not a picnic.

28 April 2022:

Now I’m starting to watch a live discussion on philosophy and literature on Facebook, while being just one chapter—a few pages—shy of finishing Baldwin’s Another Country. I must have been strongly affected 50 years ago, when I didn’t know anything but was very impressionable.

Now I feel a pain in my heart, not because this reflects my experience, but because of my emotional investment in the love affair between white Vivaldo and Black Ida—a difficult relationship which might have been a realistic scenario 60+ years ago (Baldwin finished writing this at the end of 1961)—which seems to me the most intense and important one in the novel, but that could just be me talking. My relationship with Black women from 1972-2022 was nothing like this, except in one respect—the experience of being in love—which these two characters are, despite being so deeply damaged. It amazes me that Baldwin could have put so much into this. The scenario would not be convincing now, I don’t think. This is not the society of 1962, when the book was published.

I have been involved with Black women who came from the bottom of society with traumatic childhoods but who overcame tremendous obstacles to become successful, without degrading themselves in the process, and without the level of resentment and self-incrimination that Ida displays. I must be so deeply affected because these two really love one another, he much more desperately than she until the end, and ready to forgive everything. This chapter’s ending wiped me out. I feel like my heart has been torn to pieces. Why? Can anyone do justice to love? It seems we have failed.

28 April 2022:

. . . . after lunch I resumed reading Baldwin’s Another Country . . . . I’ve been carrying the novel around with me. I resumed reading when I got home. I read over 100 pages and finished it tonight at 10:40 pm. But I paused after finishing the penultimate chapter—which blew me away—with just the final chapter consisting of only a few pages to go. Then I took time out to watch a live discussion on Facebook on literature and philosophy that bored the crap out of me, and then I read the final chapter.

I must have been strongly affected by the novel 50 years ago, when I didn’t know anything but was very impressionable. Probably back then I was strongly affected by the relationship between white Vivaldo and Black Ida, in the same time frame as when I fell in love with a Black woman for the first time, but without the pathological aspects of their relationship. Marianne liked men, period, and she did not discriminate, so she had no reservations about white men.  The drawback was that she was looking for a husband, which would not be me. But I don’t remember how I processed the novel; in any case what did I know at the age of 19?

25 March 2026:

The above notes and the quoted passage below were compiled from emails to two close African-American female friends. The penultimate chapter of Another Country contains the final confrontation and reconciliation of Vivaldo and Ida. To me this troubled love affair between a white man and a Black woman is the crux of the novel.

The prior intimate relationships of both were unsatisfactory or downright toxic. This was the first real love both experienced. But at the same time, there was a barrier between them, for general and specific reasons. Specifically, Ida proved to be guilty of cheating on Vivaldo in the most opportunistic way, while Vivaldo, despite his close friendship with Ida’s ultimately suicidal brother Rufus and his love for Ida, does not completely grasp Ida’s inner world as a reflection of her place in society, her trauma, and her own compromises. So here comes the final confrontation, where Ida reveals why she kept Vivaldo at an emotional distance despite her love for him, partly to protect his innocence of some unpleasant truths, and partly due to her own clandestine behavior. But despite the shock, and despite her expectation of the worst, ultimately what takes precedence is his love for her. He loves her! And then what Baldwin writes as this chapter concludes just knocked me flat. This is what Baldwin believed in the 1960s prior to King’s assassination. After everything, love. Nobody can write like Baldwin! I think I should record this. If you want to read some real writing, this is some motherfucking writing. Here it is:

“Vivaldo,” she said, wearily, “just one thing. I don’t want you to be understanding. I don’t want you to be kind, okay?” She looked directly at him, and an unnameable heat and tension flashed violently alive between them, as close to hatred as it was to love. She softened and reached out, and touched his hand. “Promise me that.”

“I promise you that,” he said. And then, furiously, “You seem to forget that I love you.”

They stared at each other. Suddenly, he reached out and pulled her to him, trembling, with tears starting up behind his eyes, burning and blinding, and covered her face with kisses, which seemed to freeze as they fell. She clung to him; with a sigh she buried her face in his chest. There was nothing erotic in it; they were like two weary children. And it was she who was comforting him. Her long fingers stroked his back, and he began, slowly, with a horrible, strangling sound, to weep, for she was stroking his innocence out of him.

By and by, he was still. He rose, and went to the bathroom and washed his face, and then sat down at his work table. She put on a record by Mahalia Jackson, In the Upper Room, and sat at the window, her hands in her lap, looking out over the sparkling streets. Much, much later, while he was still working and she slept, she turned in her sleep, and she called his name. He paused, waiting, staring at her, but she did not move again, or speak again. He rose, and walked to the window. The rain had ceased, in the black-blue sky a few stars were scattered, and the wind roughly jostled the clouds along.

Ralph Dumain’s notes on James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

James Baldwin Revisited (2): Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin Revisited (1): Prolegomena

James Baldwin as an American Intellectual:
Talking at the Gates Reviewed by R. Dumain

Ishmael Reed: Literary Ambulance Chaser?
by Ralph Dumain

Individual Identity, Historical Meaning, and the Unknown Autodidact
by Ralph Dumain

Black Studies, Music, America vs Europe Study Guide

Atheism / Freethought / Humanism / Rationalism / Skepticism / Unbelief /
Secularism / Church-State Separation Web Links

Offsite:

James Baldwin @ Reason & Society
(Dumain blog)

Uploaded 16 April 2026

©2026 Ralph Dumain