20.4
PARTISAN REVIEW
friendless, and always the smallest boy in each class. When he en–
counters
Of Human Bondage
he identifies (almost inconceivably)
with Mildred. In Baldwin's "Autobiographical Notes" in
Notes of a
Native Son,
the author identifies himself with Caliban, and says to
white Prospero, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is I
know how to curse." In
Giovanni's Room
the book's most contemp–
tible-pathetic character, Jacques, retires "into that strong self-pity
which was, perhaps, the only thing he had which really belonged to
h· "
un.
Accompanying the self-pity is a compensatory grandiose fantasy.
In the blues, Bessie Smith sings:
Say, I wisht I had
me
a heaven of my own,
Say,
I wisht I had me a heaven of my own;
I'd
give all the poor girls a long lost happy home.
In Negro writing, the grandiose fantasy is often upward, but rarely
so otherworldly as a private heaven. The nameless Negro protagonist
of "The Man Who Lived Underground," after a casual and pointless
robbery, papers the walls of his sewer cavern with hundred-dollar
bills, hangs gold watches and rings from nails all around him, and
makes the dirt floor a mosaic of diamonds. The narrator of
Invisible
Man
wires
his
hole in the ground with 1,369 light bulbs covering
every inch of the ceiling, and plans on five phonographs simultan–
eously playing Louis Armstrong's record of "Black and Blue" while
he eats pink and white, vanilla ice cream covered with sloe
gin.
In
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
John lives in a fantasy world where he
is "beautiful, tall, and popular." In his daydreams he feels "like a
giant who might crumble this city with his anger; he felt like a
tyrant who might crush this city beneath his heel; he felt like a long–
awaited conqueror at whose feet flowers would be strewn and before
whom multitudes cried, Hosanna!" Sometimes John fancies, in the
direct imagery of the blues, that he has "a closet full of whisky and
wine," at other times, in his family's imagery, that he is the John of
Revelation, or St. Paul. His identification with Maugham's Mildred
is not only self-pity but power fantasy. Baldwin writes: "He wanted
to be like her, only more powerful, more thorough, and more cruel;
to make those around him, all who hurt him, suffer as she made the
student suffer, and laugh in their faces when they asked pity for their
pain."
