Pantechnicon; James Baldwin

The music is from the American movies. And later on in tonight's Pantechnicon, we'll be talking about American movies, perhaps a bit differently than you've heard them discussed before, because the guest is James Baldwin. Baldwin, playwright, novelist, well-known educator and author, has written a new book called The Devil Finds Work, which is also representative of the way James Baldwin takes a look at the American films and myth in America. That'll be coming up later on tonight's edition of Pantechnicon. I'm Frank Fitzmaurice, And first off on tonight's program, WGBH Radio's Louie Lyons takes a look at the news in tonight's personal commentary. And now here's Louie. Autumn glistens after rain. This morning sun's brief breakthrough was filtered through the concentric circles of a spider's web outside the window. Its gossamer threads made visible only by the sunlight, as with the chemical reaction on a photographic plate. The fall seems early in the swamp maples, but has hardly yet touched the trees in town. But sumac reddens the country roadsides, the earliest color and most intense.

We owe the maples and the sumac for most of our fall color, and the most spectacular. Foliage and football come together and compete, both exhilarating, but football will last longer. The foliar season is fleeting. It won't wait very long for our appreciation. The next two weekends, maybe three, are all. Like a labor union dealing with the first offer, the black African leaders say Rhodesia's concession is not enough. They want more than Ian Smith offered and want it sooner. They're suspicious of the transitional process Smith proposed, But in Washington and London, their response is seen as the opening of negotiations. The road to a negotiated settlement is now open, Secretary Kissinger says. They have accepted the basic proposal, that is, for a transition of power within two years. Britain's Foreign Secretary Crossland says the black leaders neighboring Rhodesia have not slammed

the door on Smith's proposals. He is flying to Africa to join the planning. In Washington, United States, British, and South African diplomats are about to meet to set up the economic aid that Kissinger promised to ease this momentous change in Rhodesia. What the five leaders of the bordering black governments call unacceptable is the procedure in the Smith Plan, although it has been reported as what Kissinger proposed and after he submitted it to Nairari. But Naireri now says the interim government itself must have an African majority. Smith's offer is a temporary council of state with three white and three black members, but under a white chairman and with a requirement of a two-third vote for any action. During the interim of Constitution remaking, the two vital ministries of defense and justice would continue under their white administration. Herrera says this would leave the whole security apparatus in white hands,

but Smith made his commitment and made it publicly in a national broadcast to effect a transfer of power to the black majority within two years. This was under pressure he could no longer resist, from the United States and Britain and from South Africa, which has provided his economic lifeline through the U.N. sanctions and from the rising black guerrilla movement on his borders. He has found it was later than he thought. The Soviet statement condemning the plan and offering support to the Black Revolt was predictable, but it must be a reminder to Smith of Angola and an incentive to get things moving to a settlement. On the other side, if the leaders of the neighbor governments would welcome Soviet support, as most of them would not, they don't have a situation like Angola's. The Black independence movement in Rhodesia appears undivided, solidly behind their national leader in Como, who returned to Rhodesia as a national hero

and then joined the four heads of the neighbor governments in the conference that produced their response to Smith. There's bound to be much more fencing and bickering, suspicion and denunciation between the two sides, but the negotiation on details will be under the sponsorship of the United States and Britain, whose governments are committed to seeing it through. So it is indeed, as it first appeared last Friday, a major breakthrough in race relations in Africa and a major coup for Henry Kissinger that may well prove the most important of his diplomatic career. At this campaign season, its political effect on the American presidential contest cannot be overlooked. Ironic if Kissinger, the butt of the Republican primary contest, should prove the saving element for the Ford administration, its winning card. His is certainly the only positive action abroad of this administration. The morning papers tell of the danger brewing in Panama

from Ford's fear to complete the canal negotiation until after the election. Jingoism among the Panamanians is rising in response to the Reagan jingoism that infected this administration. The United Nations holding up the vote on admitting Vietnam until after our election carries its implication that Ford's threat of veto is wholly political. The conference on the law of the sea has closed in failure. Kissinger had said he was going to take hold of that personally to prevent a failure, but he stayed out of it when he was unable to get administration backing for a plan to save it. The conflict of United States administrative agencies chiefly defense against state so divided American councils as to cancel our position. Two British and Canadian participants in the conference have published a joint letter to the press holding the United States chiefly responsible for the conference failure to reach any agreement. American interests balked at a plan for international sharing

of the development of undersea minerals. The administration failed to sponsor or accept a solution that was opposed by powerful interests. These items and the death of detente will emerge in the second Ford-Carter debate on foreign policy, the 6th of next month. But perhaps closer to home, and more nearly understandable to the voter, will be the nuclear issue that has suddenly become both a foreign and domestic issue. Sweden's chancellor blames the defeat of his party's long tenure on the opposition to its national plan for development of nuclear power, and the opposition was chiefly by the new young voters. The source of their opposition, the chancellor says, was the United States. He calls it an imported issue, stimulated among Sweden's youth by their response to Ralph Nader. The surprise upset of the Swedish socialistic government after 44 years brought this environmentalist fear of nuclear reactions into international headlines. It bounced back to the United States as a campaign issue.

Jimmy Carter declared yesterday that he would stop sales of nuclear reactors and fuel to any nations that would not accept a ban on their use to develop weapons. He would call on all nations to accept a voluntary moratorium on nuclear development. He charged that President Ford had failed to exert responsible leadership to halt nuclear proliferation. Senator Mondale took up the same issue. Fallout from last week's debate continues to make headlines. Some polls show a narrowing of the gap between Carter and Ford, even show Ford passing Carter in the far west. That was Carter's weakest territory in the primaries, where he failed to win California, Oregon, Idaho, Nebraska, and the mountain states. A possible explanation for the West comes in a census report out today that incomes are rising fastest in the West and South. The increase in incomes of typical families in those regions so large that they all but escape the effect of inflation.

The reduction of purchasing power last year was less than 1 % in the West as against 2.6 % drop nationally. But the more significant fact politically in this census report on income is that last year saw an increase of 2.5 million in people living below the poverty line as the government defines it. This was an increase of 10.7 % in the number of poor to a total of nearly 26 million, or one American in eight. Prolonged unemployment is given as the chief cause. Many more people exhausted their unemployment benefits than the year before that also saw a big increase in the poor. In two of every five families that had fallen below the poverty line during the year, the reason given was either that the head of the household had been unable to find work during the entire year or was unemployed 15 weeks or more. Four and a third million persons exhausted unemployment benefits in 1975.

The number of poor, as the census counts them, is the largest since the census began income reports in 1959. Families with the highest median income last year had both husband and wife on paid jobs, and the median for such was just over $17,000. But only about a third of the wives of the poor had paid work any part of the year. Those of the others who sought work added to the unemployment statistics. The surge of women into the labor force, then, represents mostly those above the poverty line, women working to keep the family income ahead of inflation to pay for children's rising education costs or maintain living standards. More than a million women were added to the labor force the first half of this year, two and eight-tenths million in the last two and a half years. That counts both those who got jobs and those who failed, the latter adding to unemployment figures. Both the women forced to jobs by inflation and those of the poor who failed to find any will be

political statistics in November. A domestic straw in our presidential campaign is today's report that the shape of Senate contests suggests the Democrats will gain two seats. Getting out the votes for them will be expected to add also votes for the Democratic presidential candidate, though it doesn't always work that way. The presidential poll showing Ford gains suggests that Watergate, which swept Democrats into Congress two years ago, is no longer a factor. Corruption of the Grant administration brought a political penalty on his party for only one presidential election. The Harding administration corruption had no follow-up effect. Coolidge had cleaned house in less than two years to the next election. If there's a new element in this campaign, I suggest it's the further extent to which public relations has taken over, programming the candidates, plotting their tactics and strategy in every detail.

The Republicans seem to have attained a more sophisticated grasp on this. They've established a strategy of confident assertion, of an optimism that they must hope will be infectious, and perhaps it is. The president's very presidential posture is a part of this, and his declaration that he won't give up a single state is carrying his campaign this weekend with gusto by a Mississippi riverboat into the Carter stronghold of the South, telling Southern audiences, I want your vote. This mood, real or synthetic, catches the headlines, reaches the television audience. To some, it recalls Senator Akin's statement on Vietnam. Let's say we want to go home. It attempts to capture the national psychology. Something to watch anyway. And his Playboy interview continues to dog Jimmy Carter. James Baldwin is 51 years old. He was born in New York City, the first of nine

children. He grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister, and for a brief time in his own teens, James Baldwin, like his father, became a preacher. But now in 1976, James Baldwin has established himself as a playwright, a novelist, and now a critic of the social scene. He's just written a new book about the American movie called The Devil Finds Work, published by the Dial Press. As a playwright, he's written such Broadway productions as The Blues for Mr. Charlie, The Amen Corner, Giovanni's Room, a whole group of novels, including Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Well, James Baldwin has warmed up his prose again for The Devil Finds Work, an open broadside attack on what the American film has done to the mind of the American people. James Baldwin. The book is not as much about movies as it is about American myth. You see that sort

of frame of light and it's moving all the time. And if you throw yourself back, which is almost impossible to do, but to the extent that you can, there was a moment when you saw it for the first time, and it was kind of miraculous, you know. And something very comforting about it, though it's very difficult to explain why, but it didn't challenge you. It somehow comforted you. You know, all the things you saw in the movies were something you wanted to be or to do, let's say, it was dreams come true, kind of, you know. It indicated that you could be like that too. But were they the right dreams, I guess is the question. Well, no, a dream is a dream, and a dream has got to awaken. What the book is about is what happens if you really believe that image

that is thrown back at you of yourself. There's 11 of which you can say that no one in the entire history of the world has ever really looked like Joan Crawford, I'm just using her now as an image, including Joan Crawford, you know. And there's a level on which then, you know, it's no longer, you know, there's no word quite for, let's say, you know, I go to Hollywood tomorrow and, you know, and people do something with my hair, you know, something with my chin, you know, lights and shadows and shit, you know. And they photograph it, and then I see it. Now, I don't look like that, really. But, you know, now I do. Now I do because it's what I see. And I don't see myself, therefore, you know, when I'm picking my, you know, cutting my nails, or when I'm shaving, or when I'm angry, or when the camera and the lights are not there, you know,

or as time passes, you know, one begins to be trapped in, one's frozen. Well, you're a novelist. A novelist does the same thing, don't you? No, a novelist doesn't do the same thing at all. A novelist is another problem, altogether another problem. The problem of a novelist, to be very arbitrary about it, because I think you talk about these things, you know, that way, but the problem of a novelist is to make the reader imagine the person. You know, as a novelist, I learned, as a novelist, I remember, you know, years and years and years ago, reading a letter that Chekhov wrote to Gorky. And Chekhov said to Gorky, in effect, having read something that Gorky had just written, your colonel, I think it was a colonel, but anyway, your military figure in this story is so covered with helmets and plumes and sabers. medals and braid, that I don't see him, which I concluded later on in my life, that you

don't describe the character. You give the reader just enough indication to let the reader's imagination create the character for himself, which is why people, when they go to see a film made out of a novel what they liked, are always disappointed because they have already seen Raskolnikov or Sidney Carton and nobody who can do it on the screen can possibly match what their imagination made of it, which is a very different thing. On screen, everything is supplied. I'm talking about the film's certain category of American film. Everything is supplied. There's nothing left for the imagination to do. including earthquakes, shocks, fires, tidal waves, King Kong. The imagination cannot possibly match that.

You're talking about a very curious, it must be historical, and very successful endeavor to make real what you think you believe, and you've got to make it real that way because you don't really believe it. Because something in the human being knows better. It has to be the middle to not believe, after all, although on another level he must have, you know, in all those enormous fantasies he created. But he created a whole generation out of them, which he must have had to pay very dearly. He is paying very dearly indeed. You know, for having believed what they wanted to believe, Knowing, after all, that it wasn't really true. Well, what's the price that we had to pay for DeMille's fantasies? I used DeMille arbitrarily. Well, the Hollywood fantasies. That is, well, one of the prices you pay is that on a very subtle level, everyone in this country still believes that you can marry the boss's daughter.

Clark Gable, Clark Colbert. every man can be free Shane you know love conquers all Mildred Pierce we can be happy Doris Day it begins to be sinister because the people who fill the cinemas have to go home well is that a limitation of the medium as you suggested when you were talking about novelists, or is it a limitation of the people putting the fantasies... It's not a limitation of the medium at all, because the medium is not arbitrarily made for that. It's a limitation of the... In the severe context in which you're speaking, it's a limitation of the dreams of this country. It's a limitation of the sense of reality of this country. The dreams of a homeless people, in fact, is what it comes to.

Whenever people are discussing American movies of the 30s and the MGM studios and all the Busby Berkeley dance marathons they cranked out, the usual excuse for all of it is that, well, everything in real life, quotes, was so depressing and depressed during the 30s that people needed this kind of fantasy escape, and that's the purpose that the movie said. However, they missed the point. You know, with all of the money spent on the Busby Berkeley musicals, one could have fed a few more people. Now, I do know that man cannot live by bread alone, you know. But bread can also be poisoned, you know. I'm not accusing anybody of anything now either. I simply observe that the legend of the last of the Mohicans is vivid until today. People still believe it. I'm talking about the film, not necessarily the novel.

People still believe it, partly because they had to, and the vehicle for the continuation of that belief, which spreads disaster until this hour, has been the American film. People still think, you know, when they see an Indian, what they learned in the last of the Mohicans, you know, And all the more or less nonsensical films designed to prove that niggers are just like everybody else prove exactly the opposite, because the assumptions on which they're based are exactly the same assumptions the country's base. What are some examples of that? Well, there's so many. In the book I talk about, I guess, it's coming to dinner. and talk about, and luckily you can't avoid talking about American film and black people in it, talking about my friend Sidney. Sidney Baudet, but I'm not talking about him as him. I'm talking about some of the vehicles in which he's appeared. And everyone, in any case, is in the same trap.

But if you examine the assumptions of the defiant ones, you discover it's really very sentimental and absolutely false. The character played by Tony Curtis is simply, if one wants to be brutal about it, and, in fact, in American life, one has to be brutal about it. In life, he is simply an incipient fascist, really. You know, he's a little white boy, he didn't make it. That's all, you know. And that is, and to be sentimental about that figure, it's a lie about American history and therefore, fatally, the lie about black history in this country. You see what I'm trying to say? Yeah, yeah. Where did the problem start? The problem started with people who found themselves displaced, more or less violently. Even if the Mayflower was a boat that people took voluntarily, it could not have been a very peaceful one. In any case, everybody else came in steerage. No one, you know, Europe had had several debacles, too many, and America was here,

and the Statue of Liberty said, give me your poor, give us your poor. And everybody believed they could make a new life here, but the condition of making a new life here, the price of the ticket, was to become white. That is to say, you come, let's say, from Poland, or you come from Ireland, or you come from Greece, or you come from Turkey, or you come from France, or you come from Italy, you come from anywhere in Europe, and there you are, a Pole, or a Greek, or a Turk, or an Italian, or whatever you are. but the price of the ticket was to become white that's why it's called melting pot now the only way for you to be white is for me to be black that's what is happening in Boston now those kids who speared the soldier the boys who speared the black man with the American flag were proving that they were white that is American history

that is what is in the American films that is the American crime on the other side do you think there's anybody telling the truth in American film no one I can easily name you know and there you put me there's some things in American films which interest me but it must be said even for the most part I'm being general for the most part let's say Coolhead Luke it's fairly safe which is more or less a chain gang story Well, it's not a bad film, but baby, I know much more about chain gangs than that. Much more.

I'm talking about the level of experience which Americans lie about, deny, pretend does not exist, because they think they're white. What do you mean by that? They think they're white. They think that they believe for racial alger, strive and succeed. they don't understand how they got their politicians. The only level of success in this country really on it is the level of wealth, which CF Watergate means one's ability to steal. After all, the land was stolen. It was not bought. I was kidnapped. I was not invited. and the roles that we play in relation to each other arbitrarily, you can begin to see how powerful the motive is or was, is. The moment you, for example, as a legally speaking white man,

try to step out of it, or I as a legally speaking black man try to step out of it, and this is the country which belongs to us both, in which everything should belong to both of us. The country's on the edge of civil war because it's never accepted that proposition. It seems you're talking about a lot more than just film. Why did you target out the film for this book? That was really a kind of accident because Esquire magazine asked me to do a thing about black films and I started it and then I discovered what is in the book. So the book is not really about films either. The book is about using films as a vehicle for my own discovery in a way of something which in a sense I may always have known.

The truth is that when I began to examine these films I began to realize that I too had been formed by them. Then I began to examine, try to examine that, and that's how the book came about. What part of you do you feel was formed by them? Well, at one point in my life, I was a child. I went to the movies like everybody else, you know, and believed it like everybody else. And it had some effect. It had to have some, you know, obviously a real effect on my mind. And the proof of that, in a sense, is the trauma you go through when you begin to divorce yourself from the assumptions that you've been given, as exemplified above all in the cinema, which is where you, to what you're exposed all of the years you're growing up. Novelist, playwright, essayist, James Baldwin, whose new book is called The Devil Finds Work and is published by the Dial Press of New York. that's it for Pantechnicon tonight thanks for being with us I'm Frank Fitzmaurice

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