Backlisted - Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

Episode Date: May 29, 2017

Novelist Niven Govinden joins John and Andy to discuss James Baldwin's 1968 novel 'Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone'. Also discussed: 'The World My Wilderness' by Rose Macaulay, and 'The Gallows Pole' by Ben Myers. Oh, and Lissa Evans' scene stealing turn in 'The Finest', the film adaptation of her WWII set novel.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)11'01 - Infinite Tuesday: An Autobiographical Riff by Michael Nesmith 12'16 The World my Wilderness by Rose Macauley15'51 - The Gallows Pole - Ben Myers29'10 - Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Amazing. So, John, I went to see at the weekend, I went to see the film Their Finest, which is based on the novel Their Finest Hour and a Half

by our former guest, friend of Batlista. Double guest. Double guest, in fact, Lister Evans. And I just... Have you seen it? No, and I really wanted to, because it's got two of the things I love most in the world in it. Bill Nighy and Gemma Arden. Both shown to great effect in the film.

And also, the clips I saw made it look very good. And it got a bit of a stinking review from Camilla Long, which is always a reason. Which is totally wrong. Camilla Wrong. I mean, Camilla Wrong is awful. It's always a reason to see something. But it's so good.

And one of the reasons it's so good is that it's really faithful to Lyssa's novel. And it was really heartwarming, is the right word, to see a film that is sort of... It's a feminist film about writing and collaboration and creativity and art and what the people who make films get out of it and what the people who watch films get out of it and what the people who watch films get out of it.

Isn't Lyssa in it in a kind of Stanley-stroke, Hitchcock-type of kind of walkthrough? Yes, she is indeed. She looked really convincing as a sort of 40s woman. She's got a fantastic... If she's listening to this, she's got a fantastic reaction shot in particular, which one member of the audience in favisham

laughed out loud at her fine thespian talent does nigh take it at the takeover i mean as he just wants to do well the reason why he's so good and the reason why he's getting such good reviews in the film is actually he's he is he doesn't he doesn't take over he plays down a lot of the time. And another thing that the film does really, really well is allow you to... That character is treated with real respect. He's kind of a fading actor. He's had his best moments. But you are allowed to see that he's simultaneously

both a bit of an idiot and that he's very good at his job. Again, as Lissa does in the book, it's perfectly possible to be a kind person and a bit of an arrogant fool sometimes at the same time. But I did a terrible thing because I didn't get to see it. I quite fancied a film set in that period. So I watched this appalling travesty of a movie called Allied, starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard. And it was utter...

I mean, just... It looked like everybody was... It was written by Stephen Knight, who is the creator of Peaky Blinders. And I'm quite fond of Marion Cotillard. Peaky Blinders? But it was... You have to say it like that. Peaky Blinders. And I'm quite fond of Marianne Cotillard. Peaky Blinders? But it was... Yeah, Peaky Blinders.

You have to say it like that. Peaky Blinders. But it was just garbage. In fact, it was the plot of the... It was exactly the same plot as the first series of Peaky Blinders. So Knight was obviously on time. He was obviously on some kind of deal, you know. But it was...

You know when films... It ought to be good, but totally unconvincing. Also, Brad Pitt. I've never really thought much of as an actor. Not good or bad, I just never really thought much of him as an actor. I remember he was quite good in the Jesse James movie. Yeah.

But not as good as Casey Affleck, who was brilliant. I'll tell you what we've been watching, which, much to our surprise, is A, terrific, and B, completely authentic, as far as we can tell. We've been watching repeats of the 1970s BBC series Secret Army. Oh my god, yeah.

You know what? We went into it thinking, oh, this will be a laugh. Not only is it not a laugh, it's absolutely brilliant. Is that you and Mrs Miller? Yeah. You don't have some terrible film club people. We all get together and watch 1970s television.

Well, on this occasion, no. It'll be, what was the one with the smashing thing of virus? The Survivors. Survivors. That scared me. I love that absolutely love that it was very well it's probably terrible now and you're too are you too young to remember survivors yes you remember the Sweeney yes but you remember the same well sort of but you were back and watch the Sweeney now it's

incredibly slow I remember thinking was that yeah the loudest fastest thing on the television but it's lots of blokes in bad suits having conversations in Watch the Sweeney now. It's incredibly slow. I remember thinking it was the loudest, fastest thing on television. But it's lots of blokes in bad suits having conversations in rooms. Every now and then there's a car chase. And a fight. Yeah. A Secret Army sort of... It's the last hurrah.

Well, it's the thing that Alo Alo was based on, isn't it? Well, outrageously and appallingly and offensively, if only to Secret Army, let alone the actual Second World War. Yes. But it's all shot on VT in, like, Lime Grove or White City or something. It's the last of that sort of 70s... I suppose you think of iClaudius as being the perfect example of this,

of how do you put theatre on TV when you have limited resources and you mostly use studios with some film inserts and so it looks really dated but at the same time it's really full on, there's a fantastic episode where there's an outbreak of bubonic plague

which I would love to tell you is sort of you know, playful it's really horrible it is really, really impressively nasty. Good. So, shall we do the unmentionable? Hello, and welcome to Backlisted,

the podcast which gives new life to old books. My name's John Mitchinson, and I publish books at Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. And I'm Andy Miller. I write books, including the year of reading dangerously and others and um before we go any further i'm just going to say very quickly that if you enjoy listening to my voice from my unlikely body i'm doing a couple of events i'm hosting an event at

stoke newington literary festival on saturday j June 3rd. That's a session of Author Confidential where what I do is I ask several authors to come up and talk about things like their writers' routines, and I ask them to talk about unsuccessful events that they might have done, and I ask them to, if they're brave enough, to read out their favourite bad review, which the novelist David Whitehouse did the last time we did one of these at Stoke Newington. It was absolutely hilarious. Absolutely hilarious and very freeing to anyone who's received one star on Goodreads to share it with other people.

So I'm doing that on Saturday, June 3rd at Stoke Newington, Author Confidential. And then I'm in conversation with our former guest, John Grindrod, who has a new book out called Outskirts, which is a book about growing up in the suburbs and about the Green Belt. And I'm doing that at Rough Trade East in London on Monday, June the 12th. And the reason why I mention that is because, you'll see why in a minute, John. Well, you join us, um listeners in an actor's

colony in rural upstate new york where the locals are a bit suspicious and we'll be discussing today tell me how long the train's been gone by james baldwin and with us uh today to talk about this book in particular and baldwin in general is novelist niven govindan niven hello hi uh niven is the author of novels including including, but not limited to, We Are the New Romantics, Graffiti My Soul, Black Bread, White Beer, and All the Days and Nights. And, Niven, I need to congratulate you on two things in relation to those books. First of all, I really love how you derive your titles from a variety of sources.

Because I have spotted here right graffiti my soul is a girl's allowed to yes right i knew that one black bread white beer is an inversion of the scritty plitty album title it is white bread black beer and i cheated and i checked all the days and that is lifted from a william max short story. I was just going to say. It's a nod to William Maxwell. So, first of all, good. In fact, that was what he called his collection of... Yeah.

But I love that you... Well, it's actually lifted from a quote by Frida Kahlo on leaving a painting to someone. So that's where the title came from, but at the same time I liked that it was a deliberate nod to William Maxwell. Great. So, just to clarify, don't just take other writers' titles just because I like them I like that

we're always pleased to see another novel or play that derives its title from Shakespeare, yes granted, but it's very nice to see that you pull titles in from a variety of different sources. High literary, pop culture, whatever. I think that's really admirable.

Titles are always interesting. Rankin used to do Stones records, didn't he? Black and Blue. Yeah. It was kind of in Rankin's... I think he ran out of Stones albums. So did they. In about 1972.

He didn't write Tattoo You, did he? He did. Terrible title for an album. What was that one? That famous crime novel. But also, Niven, the other thing that I wanted to say was, part of the thing with this event I'm doing at Rough Trade with John Grinrod, is he's going to be talking about his book about the suburbs.

I'm going to be talking a bit about the suburbs and I'm going to be talking about representations of the suburbs in film and in books. And I am going to be talking about Graffiti, My Soul. Rightly so. Well, the thing about Graffiti, My Soul is it is actually quite a rare novel in as much as it is set in the suburbs.

And the suburbs are very underrepresented in British literature in particular. The city is represented, the country is well represented, but the place where most... Yeah, but that's 30 years ago. And also, if it's North London, it wasn't really suburbia. Yeah, I think I agree. I so feel that that's true.

So it's like, I'll be talking about Graffiti Mysore, I'll be talking about Red Hill Rococo. I mean, I wrote it consciously as a love letter to the suburbs. Did you? Yeah, see? Very much so. Red Hill Rococo? By Shida Mekhi. Yeah.

But I can count on the fingers of one hand. You know, the books which talk about... Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel is specifically about the suburbs, right? And some of Nicola Barker's novels as well are about different suburban areas in Kent. But then I start thinking well and so anyway Coe, bit of Coe

bit of Coe, bit of Nobbs Yeah you see this is one of the reasons why I really like both Coe and Nobbs because of the sound of the suburbs but they're writing about the world that I grew up in Sound of the suburbs Upstairs in his room. So, Andy,

the question which is on everyone's lips and mine most of all is what have you been reading? I've actually been reading two things in the last week. Don't worry. I'm not going to talk about that one. Andy's got an Andy Bruckner on his desk.

I'm not going to talk about that one. Much to the surprise of everyone around the table. So I've been reading Michael Nesmith's autobiography. Michael Nesmith, who originally started out in the Monkees. You might talk about that another week. I'm going to talk about it another week. But I've also been reading Papa Nez.

I'll bring in Papa Nez's recipe for beer. You two gentlemen can judge it. Is he the one with the hat? He's the one with the bottle hat. He was the one with the hat 50 years ago. Yes. Sorry, Mike, if you're listening. Did he play all that fancy guitar stuff on Valerie?

No, but he mimed it superbly. He did, I was going to say. Wait till we talk about it. I know. I just remember someone saying that's no monkey playing the guitar with some DJ. It's always stuck in the guitar. With some DJ. It's always stuck in my mind.

You know when you hear a song, and you think, oh, that's brilliant. I can't remember that on the TV show. And then it was, yeah, that was Valerie by the Monkees, and that was no monkey playing the guitar. So, anyway. Anyway.

Turns out that's true, but not in the way I thought. Yeah. But I've been reading a novel by Rose McC McCauley called The World My Wilderness and this is a really good example of one of those things where I'm indebted to people I know and people I don't know on Twitter several of whom had said to me have you read anything by Rose McCauley because you don't have to be friends on Twitter do you the World My Wilderness by Rose McCauley. It's a fantastic...

I absolutely love this book. I can't help thinking that we will do a full episode on it because, first of all, I see people talk about it quite a lot and, second of all, it's so good and there's so much to say about it. So I think this one is me... Another Virago classic. Yeah, me giving people an early heads-up. So this is a novel that's set in france and in

london immediately after the second world war and it's about uh a young woman in her late teens called barbara denniston who is whose nickname is barbary for a very good reason and her young step brother who have been allowed to run wild with the Maquis in France towards the end of the occupation and their stepfather has been drowned by the resistance after the war even though the extent to which he collaborated is very unclear and left very vague within the novel. And she and he are moved back to London, post-Blitz London, which is still recovering from bomb damage, the black market, and they are in turn left to run free

as though they were members of the Maquis. And the book is a sort of... It's full of these incredible descriptions of characters' motivations, having been part of the war, even if they weren't part of the war what does peace mean when you have been through an experience which has revealed things about you and everyone you know that you would have preferred not to know and certainly

for children which is what these are they are um ill-equipped to process what has happened to them so one of the things that this book is about is you gradually get a sense of the things that had happened to barbary during the war you but they're not presented to you as a kind of and here's the psychological reason why she's behaving like this they are only ever alluded to or hinted at what matters is the trauma rather than the cause of the trauma so dealing with the cause of the trauma it's you're left quite clear is impossible all you can deal with is the aftermath how do we deal with the aftermath of a war is really what the book is about and because it's set it's got these incredible descriptions of the french countryside but it's also and the

reason why i think people have really started to talk about this book and find this book, Rose Macaulay, who is famous, of course, for writing The Towers of Trebizond, which is the novel after this one, in the late 50s. But there are these incredible descriptions in this book of the area around St. Paul's Cathedral, which had been substantially bombed in the Blitz, where the children play, where certain black marketeers come and hang out, but where nature is reclaiming the bombed out.

So I'm just going to read this opening. I'd almost like to read the whole chapter because it's only two pages but this is from about halfway through the book and this is this is this will give you some idea of the mixture of modes of character and and prose in the book so this is quite typical chapter 18 the maze of little streets threading through the wilderness the broken walls the great pits with their dense forests of bracken and bramble golden ragwort and coltsfoot fennel and fox club and vetch all the wild rambling shrubs that spring from ruin the vaults and cellars and deep caves the wrecked guild halls that had belonged to saddlers, merchant

tailors, haberdashers, wax chandlers, barbers, brewers, coopers and coachmakers, all the ancient city fraternities, the broken office stairways that spiralled steeply past empty doorways and rubbled closets into the sky, empty shells of churches with their towers still strangely spiring above the wilderness their empty window arches where green boughs pushed in their broken pavement floors St Vedast's, St Alban's, St Anne's and St Agnes, St Giles' Cripplegate its tower high above the rest the ghosts of churches burnt in an earlier fire St Olav's and St John Zachary's, haunting the green-flowered

churchyards that bore their names, the ghosts of taverns where merchants and clerks had drunk, of restaurants where they had eaten. All this scarred and hoarded green and stone and brambled wilderness lying under the august sun, a hum with insects and a stir with secret darting burrowing life received the return traveler into its dwellings with a wrecked indifferent calm here its cliffs and chasms and caves seem to say is your home here you belong you cannot get away you do not wish to get away for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world and here your feet are set here you find the irremediable barbarism that comes up from the depth of the earth and that you have known elsewhere where are the roots that clutch what branches grow out of this stony rubbish son of man you cannot say or guess Wow.

How about that? How about that? I mean, I got goosebumps as i was reading it to you there that is such a wonderful book the world my wilderness by rose mccauley i really hope we come back and do that book on on here because uh brilliant i just like an excuse to read it again such a good book fantastic john what have you been reading i have been reading this week uh novel by ben myers who is a friend a friend of backlisted indeed benjamin myers uh who is the gallows pole ben has as you know has won portico prize for literature he also won pig iron was the winner of the great novel pig iron was the inaugural winner of the Gordon Byrne Prize and this is a historical

novel set in the late 18th century in the Upper Calder Valley which is where Ben himself lives published by the brilliant small publisher Blue Moose who are based in Hebden Bridge and it is a it's based on a true story of King David Hartley and the Crag Vale Coiners. Now, the coining was basically late 18th century. It was, you'd get coins, the coin of the realm, and you'd clip it with shears, and then you'd melt down what you clipped, and you'd make it into new coins. So it was a way of making more money out of money, and massively illegal. And the Crag Vale Coiners were the most brilliantly efficient. coin so it was a way of making more money out of money and massively illegal and the cragvale

coin coiners were the most brilliantly efficient they lived on the high moors and hardly he kind of ran it as a as a kingdom he's known as the king um he's kind of semi-mythical figure but he was a real historical figure and obviously eventually without giving too much away the excisemen tracked them down uh they persuaded one of uh one of the cragwell coins to turn uh evidence and and it's really the descent of it's the capture and then the the the narrative of the book is is the um the eventual arrest and imprisonment, and I think I can tell you without giving too much away, the execution of David Hartley.

But it's also interleaved with his own kind of phonetically harsh, written-out statement. I think it's a brilliant novel. I mean, fans of The Wake, fans of Sarah Perry, it is, as you'd imagine, it's full of millstone grit and bracken and the high moors, and it's full of old pagan English. I mean, the language in the book,

he's obviously researched it to a huge degree, not only the stories and the historical accuracy, but the dialect words. It's so incredibly... There's nothing dry about it. It doesn't smell at all, as they say, of the lamp. He turns it into a fantastically fast-paced thriller, but with this incredible character, Hartley,

who you don't know whether is a monster. And the book is cleverly written so there are times when you know what was this was this a true story about it was it just a story that everybody told about Hartley um but he's a he's a he's a he is a sort of pre-epic strong powerful um I mean it's it's they're strange we'll come on to with Baldwin later you know the kind of the the sort of the of the pagan versus Christian sort of views of the universe. And I'm not going to read much. There's just one tiny little bit, which is from one of the monologues, which are David Hartley's own autobiography.

With this stump of lead and what paper it is I have wangled from the turnkey. He's writing this when he's in jail. I have writ a poem that I call the song of the Cragvale Coiners and it goes like this. It goes hot Yorkshire blood and tough Yorkshire bones, stiff Yorkshire prick and stout Yorkshire stones

there's no man can map where it is a fearsome Cragvale clipper goes and that's real man's poetry, is that. That makes it sound more... I think it's a really, really interesting, powerful, original historical novel. And I think it's getting a bit of traction

and it deserves to get a hold on. You know, if you like... I mean, it's just great. That sort of Ted Hughes vein, one of the problems I have with it is its utter lack of humour. But there's masses... What I love about Ben's writing is it's just great. That sort of Ted Hughes vein, one of the problems I have with it is its utter lack of humour. But there's masses... What I love about Ben's writing is it's...

Yes, it is an alternative history of the North. It's a history of oppression. You know, the Cragvale Coiners are... Like the Levellers or the Chartists, what they were trying to do was to give a big fat finger to the oppressive, increasingly imperial British state by running their own country. But he manages to do that with a

massive amount of humour and quite a bit of you know, this is not a book that is that anyone you know, you don't have to be interested in the north of England to pick it up. It's just a really good story. No special pleasing. Well, I know of England to pick it up. It's just a really good story. No special reason.

Well, I know. Because I know. I'm selling it hard to hear. You don't have to come from Hepton's store to enjoy it. But it helps. Before we get into the main business of the show, as if we haven't delayed this long enough, as you know, we're doing each week now

an advert for an Unbound book. Unbound, our sponsors. Thank you, Unbound. And this week it is the chilling, I think brilliant debut by a thriller writer who will be writing many more thrillers, Carenza Jennings and Seas of Snow. My name is Carenza Jennings. I'm the author of a psychological thriller called Seas of Snow, which is a story which explores at the heart of it whether evil is born or made. It's about a

life lifted and liberated by poetry, but it's a very, very bleak, dark story. It's also about a life haunted in fear. It's the story of a little girl called Gracie Scott who lives in North East Tyneside. It's around the time of the Second World War in the early 50s. And when her Uncle Joe comes into her life, her life changes forever. Uncle Joe turns out to be a psychopath. And what I was trying to do in Seas of Snow is explore the mind and motives of a psychopath. In my life, I always find that literature, and poetry in particular, is the greatest solace.

It's almost like the best self-help on the planet when you can dive into books and worlds of your imagination and particularly poetry because it takes so much thought you can sort of unpick the words and you hear how they sound and you read them out loud and they come together in this incredible beauty and they whisk you away and I find I lose myself when I read poetry and I lose myself when I read books. So when I was trying to think about how could a little girl who's subjected to such awful torments and abuses try to cope with it, it was all about escaping into her imagination. So partly she does that with playtime with her

best friend Billy, who lives up the road in her little street, and partly it's diving into literature and she discovers the beauty of poetry And she discovers it through school, through a school teacher, a very kindly English teacher helps her get to grips with it. And what I partly wanted to do with that as well is help people see how incredibly wonderful poetry can be. It's not scary and intimidating. A lot of people think poetry is either boring or just a little bit difficult to get. And I wanted to sort of show it through a little girl's eyes. So she's only sort of five or six when we first meet her in the book but she begins to fall in love with sounds and words and it takes her away and it lifts her and it liberates her. Chapter one, Claws. She could still feel the lingering stench of his presence. Soap suds were melting away around

her softly. The cold water shivered into her. His darkness had breathed into the room and the ash bit of foulness of him enveloped her small white form. He had reached down and seared her skin with his touch. She looked down and tucked her chin onto her knees. Of course the picture she presented to the world was a mask. What choice did she have? The rain trickled into dropleted patterns down the glass, rivulets darting about, fat luscious large ones and tiny sparkly little ones, almost swimming. A kind of kinetic energy which belied the mistiness of the rainfall. Outside, the view is hazy through the spray. Splashes of green and grey, the odd moment of purple or yellow. Spring then.

Her heart was beginning to beat with that familiar anxiety. Inside, she knew she just had to get through it again. Deep breaths. There was a straggly set of daffodils squatting in a white china vase downstairs. The formica gleamed, a scent of polish lingering in the air, Harpic and Jay's fluid, bitter piercing. It was a house that looked like one of those dream homes you saw in pictures. But this wasn't a place anyone could call a home. It wasn't home meant to mean something warm and inviting, safe and cosy, hearth and heart, home, sweet home. This house was a dream that never was.

A game of make-believe, of nightmares. When I was writing Seas of Snow, I was thinking very much about a female audience and I was thinking about mums and all the people that have children in their lives. And I was particularly thinking I wanted to write something where when you read it, you'd want to hug every child in your life that bit tighter before they went to bed at night. What I've discovered having now written it and having lots of different people read it is just as many men are loving it as women and I'm really really pleased about that. It sort of shows a sweet sort of humanity I think in all the various readers that I have come across and I've been reading the reviews on Amazon which are amazing

I looked this morning there were 88 reviews on Amazon of which 85 are five star you know a lot of them are completely anonymous but some are men some are women and it's just touched me profoundly that just as many men as women seem to be enjoying it in fact there's one in particular one chap whose other favourite book is The Wasp Factory

so I was rather pleased about that. Seas of Snow by Carenza Jennings is out now, published by Unbound, and available from all good bookshops or direct from the Unbound website, www.unbound.com. We've talked about books enough. Now for some capitalism. So, after that message from our sponsors, let's get to the meat of the podcast, which is... Yes, because, in fact, we didn't just ask Niven in to sit and listen to us. Entertaining as it is. So, we are here to talk about Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin.

I had read two books by James Baldwin before I read this, Niven, and so I sort of slightly foolishly thought I knew what I was going to get and it's not what I got at all. Before I ask you about the book, should we just say what the book is about? We can probably do it in a line. It's the story of an actor who has a heart attack on stage. At the top of his game. And looks back over his life to see

how he got there. The great name of Leo Proudhammer and it's essentially the kind of in and out of consciousness of the heart attack enables him to look back over his life and in a way the forging

of the personality who has had the heart attack. So I think he's 39 when he has the heart attack. Yeah. And it's interesting because it was written in 68, it makes it sound like 39 is... He's literally on the point of death even before the heart attack. It's kind of nuts.

That's really true. There's several points where... They're like, you're an old man, he's 39. Yeah, yeah's 39. What does Christopher call him? Old Daddy? So, Niven, I want to break the first question that I normally ask into two separate bits, and we'll see why in a moment. So when did you first read James Baldwin? Well, I've got a very specific answer, and this is sort of another high culture, pop culture reference.

I basically discovered Baldwin reading an interview with Madonna in Vanity Fair in 1991, when it was just before In Bed With Madonna came out and she was literally living in Hollywood and she'd stopped making records and all she was doing was making films. And she'd bought the rights to Giovanni's Room and she was talking about how she'd always been obsessed with James Baldwin as a young person reading

and she really wanted to make it into a film. And I read that and I said, you know, James Baldwin, who was an incendiary black American writer in the 60s, and it was a completely taboo subject of two gay men when it was published in the 50s and it was out of print and she wanted to put it out. And I read that and thought, I want to read that book. And that's basically kind of how I discovered him.

But I couldn't find Giovanni's Room. The first book I read, I think, was Another Country and Go Tell It on a Mountain, then Giovanni's Room. And then probably in the space of about two years, I was just hoovering up whichever books I could find. So he's probably a cornerstone for me from a really young age. And also we should say that although a lot of books by, a lot of James Baldwin's work is in print in the UK

and all of it is in print in the States, as far as I can tell. Tell me how long the train's been gone. Although it has been in print in this country, Penguin had it in 20th century classics. It's not available at the moment. Not that i could you have to get you have to import the american vintage yeah that's what i had to do yeah yeah

and so okay so that's changed so how old so how old were you roughly 19 yeah that's a good age to be finding this isn't it i think finding ball yeah 18 19 so yeah from age about 18 to 21 i kind of read everything so tell me how long the train's been gone is published in 1968 yes basically this is the first novel he wrote after another country so that was like he had a big hit novel maybe like four or five years ago yeah in between he was writing essays and he wrote plays yeah but then this was the first big novel so there was a lot of expectation and we should also make the point and this and I'm sure we'll come back to this, that those five or six years that separate the publication of another country

and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone weren't any old five or six years. They were 1962 to 1968 in America. Very tumultuous time for Baldwin personally and for society in general. So let's talk about this book, Nivin. When you read it, what did you think of it? Can you remember? I think what I really remember, what struck me the most was that it felt like it was a composite of a lot of things that had come before. It's the first, I think, more so than the other novels. It's very much a product of someone who has been writing a lot of essays as well as a lot of fiction. And it's treating the novel in a completely different way.

The first novel was about a stepson's relationship with his preached father. Another country was about Bohemian community in New York and jazz. And this is about acting. I mean, acting, I suppose it's those two things Another Country was about Bohemian community in New York and jazz. And this is about acting. I mean, acting, I suppose it's those two things that are the strands in what else he does with his work. And when you read the later novels, nothing is as distilled as this book.

It's quite unruly in a way. Oh, very much. There's a lot more finesse in the others. And obviously this didn't strike me at the time, but it strikes me now. Probably out of all the books, I think it's definitely the angriest novel. There's all sorts of reasons why that might be. Which we'll come on to.

I want to say this up front, that I found this quite challenging to read, and yet if I opened it now at any page, I guarantee you I could find something sensational to read out. As a novel, I think it kind at any page, I guarantee you I could find something sensational to read out. As a novel, I think it kind of stumbles along. And it's very wordy, more than the others.

And I think the other thing as well, which probably makes it a harder read than any of the other books, is because it's about actors, it's really theatrical and it's really, really lovely. And they probably speak way more than you would see in any of his other books. There's an ease of speaking I think in the other books.

I mean, you feel that. I know he was famously somebody who did a lot of drafts. This feels like a novel that probably could have done with... Ah, there's a story that goes with this which is actually incredibly interesting. And it kind of ends in a slightly kind of... I was wondering how he was going to end it.

So he handed the manuscript in. I don't know if you know this story or not. He handed the manuscript in. And shortly afterwards, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Ah, right. And they came back to him and said, here are the proofs. And he said, I can't do this. Do what you want.

Yeah, I can't do it. So there's a slight feeling that i mean i feel it reads slightly like somebody who is trying to find their way to the next thing they want to write about even within the novel i've got not to say that isn't full of magnificent stuff i think when you break it down there's just so much that jumps but this is why i really love this book because it's just such a forgotten book yeah in a lot of ways this comes right in the middle of his career but it's really pivotal to everything that came before and everything that came afterwards i just want to i really love it i just wanted to read this quote out this is a quote from conversation an interview that hilton alice gave you know the new yorker theater critic who just won the pulitzer prize

talking about baldwin and he coined this phrase. There's a magnificent article, which I commend to everyone listening to this, a very long article which is online in two parts that ran in both the LRB and The Guardian, written by Comte Toy Bean in 2001 about Baldwin. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Utterly brilliant bit of critical writing.

And he quotes Hilton House then. And Hilton House, who is himself a black, gay writer, describes Baldwin's style, his high faggot style. And this is what he says about him. And his influence on House's work.

He says, what you learned then as a gay person was how to survive in gay bars, so the language had to be very precise, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. The thing that was systematic about the writing was the emotion throughout. That didn't necessarily mean the idea was going to be consistent. Baldwin wrote, In arias of feeling and thought,

and when he'd get bored with one idea, he'd go on to another. So true. This took me years of reading to understand. I was so taken by his certainty of feeling. It was the thing that really made me see that it was possible to live a life that had value in literature and one thing I learned fromwin as a writer was to use singing the sound of singing as prose to make prose sound like an aria to bring a chorus in to take actual lyrics and expand on them and i i i when i read that um i only read that yesterday i thought i sort of heaved a sigh of relief because i kind of okay, OK, that, you know, one doesn't need permission for one's opinions. But I kind of thought, OK,

this really makes me understand a lot more about where Baldwin's coming from. So that even as he's writing, he can kind of slightly lose interest in what he's writing about, but then find something else to really take off with. Because this is not the most tightly plotted book at all. It's a very kind of expansive, lumbering...

It almost feels, in the three, there are three sections to it, sort of like a symphonic kind of... Yes. The mood music of the three different sections are quite different. What I love about him is that he you're right about the sort of slightly losing interest but when he needs to nail a scene

Oh yeah. Amazing scene with Caleb's his brother's the main character. I think he really sings in those. Yeah. I love that. I think the brother being arrested think that the brother being arrested and then the brother coming back amazing scene where he and his brother sort of comfort one

another that's a lovely thing that idea of feeling that his certainty of feeling i don't know i know not your favorite but there are times in it when he reminded me of that in lawrence dh lawrence where you feel you know you may be going on a crazy rollercoaster ride, but the ability to nail the psychological, emotional intensity. Lawrence, I can see that, but it really reminded me of Hubert Selby. Not just some of the low-life stuff. Just the visceral... Yeah, but the musicality of it.

It's the kind of rhythmical... Aria is such a brilliant way of describing those little chains of words that he puts together. But also what I find interesting about him in terms of what he wants to write about in fiction is he's really... He has a really strong interest in performers and people who express that side of themselves in a way he can't as a writer.

So, you know, the first novel is very heavily influenced by jazz and jazz musicians. This is about, you know, acting. One of the later novels, Just About My Head, is about a gospel singer. He's really interested in those mechanics and those people. Like, he's in sort of wonderment about how do they do that? Jacqueline Goldsby, who is the person who was in conversation

with Hilton House in the little thing I just read, she says something very similar to that. She says, Baldwin, too, thought very hard about the necessities of private experience, private life, of the internal. I actually find the formlessness of the novels after Another Country to be part of the point. He's trying to figure out how to push the novel form

into new relations with other forms, whether it's song or theatre or photography or cinema. And Hilton House says, I hadn't thought of it that way but you're right that's amazing, he was bringing in his various frustrations with other mediums to the form and frustration, you know frustration

is a big thing in this book. He'd written two plays by this point and you really feel his frustration with the slow pace of the American theatre and trying to get his preoccupation, they don't match what you know, what he wanted to do. So when they're in summer stock, they're doing these plays that really mean nothing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you want to read to us a little bit from... Yeah. Tell me how long the train's been gone so we can hear it at Baldwin at work. So this is quite late in the book when he's still training to be an actor and he's a waiter in a village,

in a restaurant in the village in New York. You get a sense of the time, it's probably like late 50s, so it's kind of quite sort of beat-esque. And it's just a really great description of the customers in the village and just, you know, it's just really... Anyway. Here they come. The nice blonde girl from Minneapolis

who lived in the village with her black musician husband. Eventually, he went mad and she turned into a lush. I don't know what happened to their little boy. Here they come, Rhoda and Sam, the happiest young couple in the village. She committed suicide and he vanished into Spain. Here they come, two girls who worked in advertising and who lived together in fear and trembling, who told me all about their lives one drunken night. One of them found a psychiatrist,

married a very fat boy in advertising and moved to California, and they are now very successful on vocal fascists. I don't know what happened to the other girl. Here they come, the black man from Kentucky, who called himself an African prince and had some ridiculous name like Omar and his trembling Bryn Mawr girlfriend, whose virginity he wore like a flag. Her family eventually had him arrested and the girl married somebody else from Yale.

Here they came, the brilliant, ageing Negro lawyer who lived on whiskey and Benzedrine and fat white women. Here they came, the bright-eyed boy from the South who was going to be a writer and who turned into a wino. Here they came, the boy who had just fled from his rich family in Florida and who was going to live a different life to theirs and who turned into a junkie. Here they came, the faggot painter and his lesbian wife

who had an understanding with each other which made them brutally cruel to all their playmates and which welded them hatefully to each other it's really good really good i'm just going to read the blurb on the back of this copy i've got a dell copy from an american copy from 1968 right and uh with a somewhat lurid cover and the reason i want to read this out is well we normally read the blurb out but also it's important i think to put it in the context as i say of america in the late 60s and what happened to baldwin up to that point tell me how long the train's been gone is the story of leo proudhammer

who rose from the bitter streets of harlem to become america's greatest black actor a powerful magnetic figure whose one-way path to success suddenly became an agonising crossroads. Here is a novel that tells it like it is, about sex, race and morality today. That's it. That's pretty good. And also the two main characters, you know, Barbara, his sort of on-off love interest,

it's very sort of Richard Burton, Liz Taylor. It is. Yeah. It is. Yeah. It is. And I mean, he's so, I love, he's such a good psychologist as well. And you know, there are so many of the, as well as the kind of the stuff, brilliant descriptive writing. You know, the two main things that kind of the book seems to be about,

the difficulty of identity. How do you become a person? And also that it is a book about love, but it's a book about how difficult love is. And this is from really early on in the book, where he says, Everyone desires love, but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it. However great the private disasters to which love may lead,

love itself is strikingly and mysteriously impersonal. It is a reality which is not altered by anything one does. Therefore, one does many things, turns the key in the lock over and over again, hoping to be locked out. Once locked out, one will never again be forced to encounter in the eyes of a stranger who loves him the impenetrable truth concerning the stranger, oneself, who is who is loved and yet one would prefer after all not to be locked out one would prefer merely that the key unlocked a less stunningly unusual door yeah and like you say there's there's there's so much of that in the book you know often

just dropped in in the middle of kind of the narrative the narrative because it's a sort of philosophical treatise as much as it is a novel There's a film that came out was shortlisted in the Oscar documentary category last year just made it to Britain this year called I Am Not Your Negro and we have a

and it's about James Baldwin in the 60s and there is a sense, we'll come on to this in a minute, that Baldwin flew too close to the civil rights flame in the 1960s for his own good as an artist. That is one narrative about Baldwin's career. I'm not saying that I agree with that, but that is one narrative about Baldwin's career.

And we just have a clip here, which they use in the film which is Baldwin on the Dick Cavett show and you what you can hear Baldwin doing here I think is what you can read him doing in print that he is working on an almost musical level of rhetoric here I don't know what most white people in this country feel but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it,

that the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means that I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter, but I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobby is anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto.

I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I know the textbooks I give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children, on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.

Thank you. It's a magnificent film, largely because Baldwin is, as you say, the power of the rhetoric. It's also a slightly depressing film because you feel the way that so much of the Black Lives Matter footage is cut into it with Baldwin's words being brilliantly performed kind of in a measured, angry way.

I think I sort of felt sad for him by the end, though, because you got from the film that he was sidelined from a lot of the mainstream civil rights stuff because they didn't always want to share a platform with him. the end though because you felt you you you got from the film that he was he was sidelined from a lot of the mainstream civil rights stuff because they didn't always want to share a platform with him yeah and you get a lot of that frustration really comes out in this book yes particularly towards the end doesn't it where christopher who is his younger lover basically says you know you're you're kind of you know you are the man now you've become the man. You've got as much to lose as a white face. And there's some great passages where he's describing

where Christopher's protecting him as he's going up to speak at these rallies and stuff. And there's a certain wistfulness there, especially after you watch the film and you think, actually, you say that he did a lot, but I don't think he did half as much as he would have liked. Yeah, yeah. And that's's sort of sad

In the early 1960s Baldwin went to live in France for a while because he couldn't stand it in the States and indeed Those three early novels are all written abroad he basically says that he couldn't write the idea of becoming a black novelist in America, I mean he goes and turns up on Richard Wright's doorstep

and just says hey I love your work and And he also has a relationship with Ralph Ellison. But he then goes, he basically can't imagine himself becoming a writer in America. And he goes penniless. He doesn't speak any French. He's got no money. But going to Paris enables him to

write. Well, I just want to read this little bit, if I may, from the book. I mean, this is supposedly Leo Proudhammer speaking, but it's hard not to hear Baldwin directly here by the way I don't think Baldwin's one of those writers who ever gets you know some writers get very annoyed if you if you say your works are autobiographical because he said there's the only thing you could write about is his experience he's talking about the states here right I was too tired to argue I didn't want to leave this fire or this room, but I wanted to get out of the country.

I had had it among all these deadly and dangerous people who made their own lives and all the lives they touched so flat and stale and joyless. Once I thought a day would come when I would be able to get along with them. And indeed, the day had come. I got along with them by keeping them far from me. the day had come I got along with them by keeping them far from me I didn't have anything against them particularly or I had so much against them that the bill could now never be tallied and so had become irrelevant my countrymen impressed me simply as being on the whole the emptiest and most unattractive people in the world it seemed a great waste of one's only lifetime to be condemned to their chattering vicious vicious, pathetic, hysterically dishonest company. There were other things to do, other people to see. There was

another way to live. I had seen it after all, and I knew, but I also knew that what I had seen, I had seen from a distance, a distance determined by my history. I was part of these people, no matter how bitterly I judged them. I would never be able to leave this country. I could only leave it briefly, like a drowning man coming up for air. I had the choice of perishing with these doomed people or of fleeing them, denying them, and in that effort, perishing. It was a very cunning trap and a very bitter joke. Yes. You know, it's really, again, that thing we were just talking about. The anger that you're saying about the... There are bits in this book that are so...

That thing about learning to hate, particularly after he gets Caleb, his brother, to explain what's happened. Caleb is arrested and imprisoned and has a nightmarish experience in a southern jail. I mean, they're very, very powerful and affecting those scenes. Yeah, very much so. And he really changes from that point.

Yeah, it's phenomenal. Let's go back to this thing about the effects of being so heavily involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. I mean, I thought the film was brilliant. But in attempting to focus and present you with Baldwin as a civil rights champion, he's actually very difficult to pin down, I think. Tremendously articulate.

But then that's why he wrote those notes which became what that film was. He didn't want to write his history of the civil rights um era he wanted to write about lewis varrican yeah yeah luther king etc yeah so he you know even by doing that he was always he puts himself in a side figure role yeah yeah well we were talking earlier about the um because in a lot of ways, I think you watch that film, I don't feel like I really learn that much about him. No. It's about the era and the time

and about his thoughts on those people who shaped the movement and it reflects his contribution to the movement, but he doesn't own it. I guess the thing... Maybe rightly so. I think you're right. I think what it was was a sort of brilliantly polemical film and what I came away from was that strong sense of him.

And you get it from this book as well, that this is not my problem. It's white people's problems. And I thought he communicated that with an articulacy and a clarity, which is kind of rare. And it's interesting that we're talking about this book now. It's interesting that that movie's come out this year, because Baldwin could easily be one of those writers who sort of sunk. You know, he's never going to sell in the kind of John Updike level.

He says once that he had no particular use for John Updike because he didn't really recognize Updike's universe. But he really understood the Cheever universe, which is interesting to me. understood the chiva universe which is interesting to me some of the bits of this book that i loved were he captures that despair that sense of your life being out of control and there was the moments where where leo goes and just sits in the park and drifts or there's an amazing scene where he gets lost on the subway yeah the old man picks him up and takes him home yeah and also he's really great on couples like, you know, Lola and Saul, the people who run that sort of dodgy sort of actor's studio. I mean, in a lot of ways, which we haven't talked about,

this is a book about the theatre. And, you know, if you loved All About Eve, this is the sort of novel that you would read and would resonate really heavily. You know, Somerset, the actor's studio, the agony of what acting means, the ridiculousness of it, I mean, the pantomime of it.

All about Eve, that's a brilliant point of comparison. I saw Baldwin described somewhere as he would speak with his Betty Davis cigarette. You know, because there's that sense of... And he was from that era. Yeah, yeah. This is his world. He loved the movies as well.

You know, you get that from the movie, the movie, I'm Not Your Negro. But in this book, young Leo, you can sort of feel he's trying on hats yes he goes he goes to the movies and he oh i like that you know likes this actress like it's a book about finding a personality yeah and finding a personality through acting which is all about being somebody else yeah kind of i want to just mention i want to say thank you to alistair zaldua on twitter who when he saw that we were talking about this book he gave us a quote something that baldwin had said baldwin had been asked what is your favorite book and baldwin says

there are two answers to that question a the next one and b the book that got the worst treatment bad publicity unfair reviews general ignorance of all my books. That was Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. What a quote. Yeah. And one of the main planks of that reception was the review in the New York Times by Mario Puzo, who went on to write the book. It was presumably writing that had written The Godfather, 1968.

And this relates to what we were talking about a few minutes ago. It starts, tragedy calls out for a great artist, revolution for a true prophet. Six years ago, James Baldwin predicted the black revolution that's now changing our society. His new novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, is his attempt to recreate, as an artist this time, the tragic condition of the Negro in America. He has not been successful. This is a simple-minded one-dimensional novel with mostly cardboard characters a polemical rather than narrative

tone weak invention and poor selection of incident individual scenes have people talking too much for what the author has to say and crucial events are told by one character to another rather than created the construction the novel is theatrical, tidily nailed into a predictable form. Blah, blah, blah. Novelists are born sinners, and their salvation does not come so easily. And certainly the last role the artist should play is that of the prosecutor, the creator of a propaganda novel.

A propaganda novel may be socially valuable, grapes of wrath, a gentleman's agreement, but it is not art what a damning review but also what a brilliant example of a review that written in the moment i can see must have yeah seemed truthful he just wasn't ready he wasn't ready for that book precisely that's so what i thought when iibin, when I read the review. I thought, you don't yet have the vocabulary or the thought processes to get your... I'm not saying this is the most successful novel in the world.

It isn't. No, absolutely. But what it chooses to focus on, this is what's so important about it, how it chooses to focus on those things is, in its own slightly despairing way, revolutionary. I can't think of another book I've read like this. It's a really unusual book. Yeah, and especially because, you know, it was published at the time it came out, you know, 68, for sure. I think it's such a strong contribution. I couldn't agree more. And I think the point about anybody who's wanting to reach for a Baldwin

after watching I'm Not Your Negro, this is a brilliant book to get because it has, I think, a lot of the emotional backstory that he was both proud and frustrated by his involvement in civil rights. His intelligence is too fine-grained to cope with the rhetoric and yet what you get out of the film is that sense of utter loss, of losing the three, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. The sense of that is here in the book as well, and the kind of deep anger that wells up from time to time in it.

It seemed to me that one of the fascinating things about Baldwin is even as he was being accepted as a fellow traveller by certain key figures in the civil rights movement he was being rejected by those same people because of his sexuality yeah it was a massive issue there are numerous instances of people not sharing a platform with him

because he had written about homosexuality in a truthful and open way and we have a clip here from just a couple of months before the end of his life in 1987. Baldwin in London being interviewed by Mavis Nicholson about sexuality and love. Doesn't get better than that. Amazing.

There's a prejudice that at one time was against homosexuals. At one time? Yeah, hold on. When it was a criminal offense, even. Then that got removed. The law. And people started to appear to accept. Back, it comes again now because of AIDS. It never went anywhere. It never went anywhere. It was attitude zone change because the law changes. I know that. And the homosexual question is like,

it's like what we call the racial question. Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. And you don't know where it will carry you. And it is a terrifying thing, love. It is the only human possibility, but it's terrifying. And a man can fall in love with a man,

a woman can fall in love with a woman. There's nothing anybody can do about it. It's not in the province of the law. It's something you do with the church. And if you lie about that, if you lie about that, you lie about everything. And no one has a right to try to tell another human being whom he or she can or should love.

What a privilege to be able to share that with people, don't you think? I find it incredibly stirring. Well, I think it's very much in the spirit in which this book is written, but one of the things I like about the book is I don't think it's a resolved book. It's not emotion recollected in tranquility it's sort of written at the at the kind of the height I think in some ways at the height of his his powers as a kind of creative but he you know the anger and the confusion and the that wanting to be loved and then not wanting to be loved and there's a bit towards the end where he says that one could

not cling to happiness happiness simply submitted to no clinging and it's criminal to use the unspoken unrealized needs of another as a means of escorting him elaborately into the prison of those needs and sealing him there but on the other hand the stone i hope to offer was nevertheless a stone its edges drew blood and its weight was tremendous it was he's saying that freedom not happiness was the precious stone and i think he i guess that in the end that's the the path of the artist which is definitely the path he was about he had to tell the truth even though that came at the price of his own happiness. Well, listen, thank you, Niven. When one says, after doing one of these,

it's been educational, it sounds like a sort of damning it with faint praise, but I mean that in the best possible way. I feel totally... Again, one of the things about doing this is being given an excuse to really learn something about a writer about whom you thought you knew stuff, but it turns out you didn't know stuff. know who i'd love to read more of i'm going to read one last one last

tiny little bit about his mother the mother of leo in the book which said she was watching our father praying that the daylight would come before his spirit should be forever broken she was watching caleb praying that the daylight would come before his hope, which was his youth, should be forever destroyed. And she was watching me, wondering what I was learning and what I would be like when the daylight came. The daylight may always come, but it does not come for everybody and it does not come on time. It's just a book full of, I think, a book full of, and it may not be perfect, but I think it's just remarkable. Sorry, I think it's just really good.

OK, that's probably a good moment on which to end. Thanks to our guests, Niven Govenden and our producer, Matt Hall. Our extensive archive of old shows is available on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com forward slash backlistedpod and we're available and active on Twitter and Facebook so come and join the conversation if you've enjoyed the show it would be great if you could

leave us a review on iTunes as that really helps boost our profile thank you for listening see you in a fortnight, goodbye thanks everyone Fort Wright. Goodbye. Thanks everyone. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com

forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.