Austen×Baldwin

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Radio Ether. Up next on TITANS: Jane Austen and James Baldwin, on On the work they left undone, and who they trusted to finish it.
2. 00:09
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I died at forty-one, Mr. Baldwin. Persuasion had been published only months before, and there were, as always, other projects, other thoughts. One does not plan to leave work undone. One simply runs out of mornings.
3. 00:24
   James Baldwinshare moment

   No. You don't plan it. But I think—I think some part of you knows. Near the end I was working on a book about America that I couldn't finish, about the men I'd loved and what we'd all survived or hadn't. There's a point where you realize the thing you're writing is larger than the time you've got left.
4. 00:42
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Sanditon. I had begun it, you know. Twelve chapters, I believe. A seaside town, a speculation in every sense. And then I could not hold the pen.
5. 00:54
   James Baldwinshare moment

   What was it about?
6. 00:56
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Greed, optimism, the sort of people who arrive at a place and announce they shall improve it. Mr. Parker was convinced his village could be fashioned into a resort by sheer force of advertisement. I was, I think, more skeptical than he.
7. 01:10
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Gentrification.
8. 01:11
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I beg your pardon?
9. 01:12
   James Baldwinshare moment

   That's what we'd call it now. People showing up, saying this place could be something if only it were less itself. I lived through that in the Village, in Harlem, in the South of France even. It's an old story. You were writing it in 1817.
10. 01:26
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How gratifying to learn that my concerns remain fashionable. Though I confess I did not finish the thought. Miss Heywood was barely acquainted with the Parker family. The hypochondriacs had scarcely begun complaining. It was all promise, no conclusion.
11. 01:42
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But you knew where it was going.
12. 01:44
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I had my suspicions. One always does. But suspecting and completing are not the same operation, and I am not certain it matters. The novel exists as twelve chapters, and perhaps that is what it was meant to be.
13. 01:57
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You don't believe that.
14. 01:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I believe I did not finish it, which is a fact, and that wishing otherwise is a waste of what little dignity one retains after death. You said you left a book undone. Did you wish to finish it?
15. 02:09
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Every day. Every single day. It was going to be called Remember This House. About Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King—three men murdered while I was still alive to write about them. I owed them the truth of what happened, the whole architecture of why those murders were inevitable in this country.
16. 02:27
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is a rather heavier burden than a comic novel about seaside lodgings.
17. 02:32
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe. Or maybe you were doing the same thing in a different key. Showing people how they lie to themselves, how they build worlds on sand and call it progress. I think the work we didn't finish might be the most honest thing about us—it shows what we thought was still worth saying when we ran out of time.
18. 02:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You give incompletion a rather noble character. I am not convinced. When my nephew published Sanditon after my death, he did so with a preface explaining my illness, my decline. The fragment became evidence of my suffering. I would have preferred to be remembered for what I completed.
19. 03:09
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But that's not how it works, is it? People finish our work for us. They write sequels to your novels, they turn my thirty pages into a documentary film. They take what we left and make it say things we never said.
20. 03:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am aware. There are rather more Darcy novels than I intended. One was sufficient.
21. 03:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    See, that's what I mean. You gave people something they couldn't let go of, something incomplete in them that your work touched. So they keep writing it. They keep arguing with you, which means you're still in the room.
22. 03:40
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am not certain I wish to be in so many rooms at once. And I do not think they are arguing with me, Mr. Baldwin. They are arguing with a version of me that never existed—a woman who believed in fairy-tale romance, in tidy endings. I was far more interested in money.
23. 03:56
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And I get turned into a saint. The prophet of civil rights, the man who loved everybody. I didn't love everybody. I was furious most of the time. But that's harder to sell, so they sand it down.
24. 04:08
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then we are both inconvenient to our inheritors.
25. 04:11
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. Which brings me back to the question—who did you trust? When you knew you weren't going to finish Sanditon, was there someone you thought, they'll understand what I was doing, they'll carry it forward?
26. 04:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    My sister Cassandra, perhaps. Though I am not sure I thought in those terms. I was very ill, Mr. Baldwin. One's concerns become quite immediate. But Cassandra knew my mind. She burned a great many of my letters, you know.
27. 04:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    She burned them?
28. 04:37
    Jane Austenshare moment

    After my death. She kept some, destroyed others. I believe she was protecting me, or protecting the family, or protecting some idea of propriety. I cannot ask her now. But yes, she decided what survived. Do you find that shocking?
29. 04:52
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I find it terrifying. My sister burned things too, after I died. Papers she thought were too private, too raw. And I understand it—I do—but it also means the person who knew you best decided the world couldn't handle all of you.
30. 05:09
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Perhaps the world could not. I wrote a great deal about very little, Mr. Baldwin. Three or four families in a country village, as I once said. My canvas was small by design. What was burned may have been no loss at all.
31. 05:21
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You don't believe that either.
32. 05:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I believe it was Cassandra's decision to make. I was dead. The work belonged to those who remained.
33. 05:29
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But that's the problem, isn't it? The work doesn't belong to us anymore, but it doesn't really belong to them either. It's suspended between what we meant and what they need us to have meant. And the unfinished work—that's the most dangerous, because they can pour anything into that silence.
34. 05:44
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Sanditon has been completed by others, you know. Several times. Different endings, different morals. I have not read them, being dead, but I am told they exist.
35. 05:55
    James Baldwinshare moment

    How do you feel about that?
36. 05:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How does one feel about anything after death? I think they are welcome to their efforts. I do not flatter myself that my twelve chapters constitute holy writ. If someone wishes to marry off Miss Heywood and resolve Mr. Parker's delusions, they may do so. It will not be my novel, but I am no longer writing novels.
37. 06:17
    James Baldwinshare moment

    See, I can't be that calm about it. When I think about Remember This House, about those thirty pages I left—Raoul Peck made a film from them, from my notes and letters. I Am Not Your Negro. And it's good, it's powerful, but it's also not the book I would have written. He had to imagine what I meant, fill in what I didn't say.
38. 06:39
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And did he imagine well?
39. 06:40
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Better than I could have hoped, honestly. But it's still his imagination, not mine. The book I was writing would have taken another five years, maybe ten. I would have gotten it wrong and started over. I would have cut it to pieces and rebuilt it. That's the process. He didn't have that time. He had what I left him.
40. 06:59
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then perhaps he was faithful to your method, if not your manuscript. You said you would have started over. He started. That is not nothing.
41. 07:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. No, it's not nothing. But it makes me wonder—when you think about Sanditon now, do you think about what you wrote or what you didn't write?
42. 07:18
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think about being forty-one and knowing I would not see forty-two. I think about my sister reading those pages after I was gone and weeping, or not weeping, I do not know. I think the unfinished work is a letter to no one, Mr. Baldwin. It says: I was here, I was thinking, and then I stopped.
43. 07:37
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It says more than that. It says: I trusted you to know what mattered. I trusted you to see past the surface. Every book I published, I was trying to tell the truth about what it cost to be alive, to be Black, to be queer, to be human in a country built on lies. The unfinished one—that was going to be the clearest truth I'd ever told. And I had to trust that the thirty pages I left would be enough for someone to understand what I was reaching for.
44. 08:06
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And was it enough?
45. 08:08
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I don't know. I hope so. I hope someone reads it and understands that those three men, those murders, they weren't accidents. They were the system working exactly as designed. And I hope they understand that I loved those men, that their deaths weren't abstractions to me. They were my friends. That's what I wanted the book to say.
46. 08:26
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then it has said it, in your saying so now. The work may be unfinished, but the intention survives. Perhaps that is all we can leave—not conclusions, but directions. Here is where I was going. You may follow or diverge as you see fit.
47. 08:43
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You make it sound almost peaceful.
48. 08:45
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I assure you it was not peaceful. Dying rarely is. But I have had two centuries to consider the matter, and I have concluded that completion is overrated. My finished novels are studied, analyzed, adapted into film and television. My unfinished novel is read by scholars and the curious. Both have their place. I wrote until I could not, and that is sufficient.
49. 09:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I'm not there yet. I'm still angry that I ran out of time. There was so much left to say.
50. 09:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    There is always more to say, Mr. Baldwin. That is the nature of living. You wrote a great deal in sixty-three years. Perhaps the unfinished work is not a failure but an invitation—to those who come after, to continue the conversation.
51. 09:31
    James Baldwinshare moment

    An invitation they may not accept. Or worse, they'll accept it and get it wrong.
52. 09:36
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then they will get it wrong. People have been getting my work wrong for two hundred years. They persist in believing I wrote romances. I wrote about economic survival in a limited marriage market, but this is apparently less appealing. One adjusts one's expectations.
53. 09:53
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You're saying I should let it go.
54. 09:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am saying you have no choice, which is different. You are dead, as am I. The work continues without us. The only question is whether we resent that fact or accept it.
55. 10:06
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And which do you do?
56. 10:07
    Jane Austenshare moment

    On Tuesdays, I resent it. On Thursdays, I accept it. Today is Wednesday. I have not yet decided.
57. 10:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That might be the most honest thing either of us has said.
58. 10:17
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have always found honesty efficient, Mr. Baldwin. It saves a great deal of time. And time, as we have both discovered, is the one thing we cannot retrieve once it is spent.