Baldwin×Huxley

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: James Baldwin and Aldous Huxley, on On what they envied about the other one across the table.
2. 00:09
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I want to begin by saying I don't think I've ever admitted this to anyone. Not in print, anyway. But there was something about the way you moved through the world, Mr. Huxley, that I found... enviable. The ease of it.
3. 00:21
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Ease? Good God, Baldwin, I spent half my life nearly blind, squinting at manuscripts with a magnifying glass. If that's ease, I'd hate to see difficulty.
4. 00:30
   James Baldwinshare moment

   I don't mean physical ease. I mean the ease of being taken seriously on sight. Of walking into a room and having people assume you belonged to the conversation. That you had something to say worth hearing.
5. 00:43
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Ah. Yes. Well, that's the accident of birth, isn't it? Eton, Oxford, the whole tedious apparatus. Though I confess I never thought of it as ease at the time. More like... a costume one couldn't remove.
6. 00:54
   James Baldwinshare moment

   But you could travel. You could go to India, to California, to Mexico, and people would see you as a serious man pursuing serious questions. When I traveled, I was a Negro writer. The adjective always came first.
7. 01:08
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   The adjective did real work, though, didn't it? I mean, your authority came from having lived through something I could only observe from a great and rather comfortable distance. I envied that. The authenticity.
8. 01:18
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Authenticity. That's a word white people use when they mean they're glad it's not happening to them.
9. 01:23
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Touché. But I'm serious. You wrote from the center of the American catastrophe. I wrote from the British Museum reading room, essentially. From books about books. Do you know how much of Brave New World came from simply reading too much Wells and too much Ford?
10. 01:39
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And yet you saw it coming. You saw what was going to happen to all of us, the machinery of it, the reduction of people to functions. I was still trying to convince people that Negroes were human.
11. 01:50
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Different urgencies, perhaps. But yours was the more essential task, surely. Mine was intellectual parlor games compared to that.
12. 01:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. No, you're being modest and I won't let you. You understood something about the future that I was too angry to see clearly. You understood that the problem wasn't just race, it was the whole structure. The way power had learned to make itself invisible.
13. 02:13
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Well, invisible to some. Rather glaringly visible to others, I'd imagine.
14. 02:18
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Yes. But you had the luxury of thinking about systems. I had to think about survival. And I envied that. The ability to zoom out. To consider humanity in the abstract.
15. 02:28
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Humanity in the abstract is rather easier to love than humanity in particular, I found. You never had that escape route available. You had to deal with actual Americans, actual violence, actual consequences.
16. 02:40
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I also had to deal with editors who wanted me to be angrier, or less angry, or more hopeful, or more despairing, depending on what white readers needed to feel that week. You got to be cerebral. You got to be detached.
17. 02:53
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Detached. Yes. That's the generous word for it. The less generous word is irrelevant. Do you know how it felt to publish After Many a Summer and have people call it clever? Clever! When I was trying to warn them about fascism, about the corruption of life itself into spectacle.
18. 03:09
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But they listened to you. Even when they called it clever, they listened. They taught your books in universities. They made Brave New World required reading.
19. 03:18
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    They made it required reading and learned absolutely nothing from it. That's rather worse than not being read at all, don't you think?
20. 03:25
    James Baldwinshare moment

    At least you got to be disappointed by how people misread you. I had to fight to be read in the first place. Giovanni's Room—they wanted to know why I wasn't writing about race. As if I was only authorized to have one subject.
21. 03:38
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Whereas I was authorized to have any subject I liked, so long as I stayed comfortably removed from anything that might make me inconvenient at dinner parties. The minute I started talking about mescaline and mystical experience, I became a curiosity. The blind man who took drugs and saw God.
22. 03:55
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But you did see something, didn't you? You saw a way out of the trap. That's what I envied most, I think. You believed there was a door.
23. 04:02
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I believed there might be a door. Through chemistry, through contemplation, through some fundamental rewiring of consciousness. But I was never sure it wasn't just another form of escape.
24. 04:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You were allowed to look for escape. I had to stay and fight. Every single day, I had to stay and fight, because if I didn't, who would? You could go to California and experiment with perception. I had to keep explaining why my nephew's life mattered.
25. 04:28
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And you did it with a prose style I would have killed for, incidentally. That control. That heat underneath the control. I was all arabesques and qualifications. You were direct.
26. 04:38
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I was direct because I didn't have time not to be. You had time. You had centuries of English prose style behind you, holding you up. I had to invent the language as I went.
27. 04:49
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes, but that's precisely it. You got to invent. I was always decorating someone else's architecture. Even my heresies were well-bred heresies. Yours were actual heresies.
28. 04:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    My heresies got me exiled. Yours got you invited to lecture.
29. 05:03
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Your exile made you essential. My lectures made me forgettable. There's a reason people still need to read The Fire Next Time. Nobody needs to read my essays on overpopulation, even though I was right about that too.
30. 05:14
    James Baldwinshare moment

    People read The Fire Next Time because the fire is still coming. It never stopped coming. But they read Brave New World because you showed them the shape of their cage before they were locked inside it.
31. 05:25
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And yet they walked into the cage anyway, smiling. At least you told them the truth about what it cost to be free. I just told them clever stories about how unfree they were becoming.
32. 05:35
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe that's what I envied most. The belief that cleverness mattered. That if you just explained it well enough, showed them the mechanism clearly enough, they might stop. I never believed that.
33. 05:46
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You believed something harder. You believed they might change. Not because you explained it, but because you loved them enough to keep telling them the truth. That's not something I ever managed.
34. 05:56
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I didn't love them. I was stuck with them. With all of us. With this country. You could leave.
35. 06:02
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I left England and discovered I'd brought England with me. You left America and discovered America had come along in your bloodstream. Perhaps neither of us could really leave.
36. 06:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    But you could pretend to. You could sit in the California sun and think about the perennial philosophy. I sat in exile and thought about my brother's son.
37. 06:21
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And wrote a sentence I've never forgotten: 'I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.' I couldn't have written that. I didn't love England that way.
38. 06:33
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Maybe you loved ideas more than countries. Maybe that's the real difference. You got to love ideas.
39. 06:39
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Ideas don't break your heart. People do. You knew that from the beginning. I had to take mescaline to figure it out.
40. 06:45
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You figured it out, though. That's the thing. You got there. And you wrote it down in language that people could hear. Even if they didn't listen.
41. 06:54
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    They listened to you. Even when they didn't want to. Even when it cost them something to hear it. That's a different kind of power than I ever had.
42. 07:01
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's not power. It's just necessity speaking. You had the power to be heard without the necessity behind it. That's what I envied. The freedom to be wrong without it killing anyone.
43. 07:12
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And you had the authority of being right when being right was dangerous. When it cost something. I envied that. The weight of it. The mattering.
44. 07:20
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We're talking in circles now.
45. 07:22
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes. Rather like two men admitting they wanted each other's burden. Which is absurd when you say it out loud.
46. 07:28
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It's not absurd. It's just true. You wanted to matter in the way I mattered. I wanted to breathe in the way you breathed.
47. 07:36
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And neither of us got what we wanted.
48. 07:37
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. But we got the work done anyway. That's something.
49. 07:40
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes. I suppose it is. Though I still think you got the better deal. Your work is alive. Mine feels like a museum exhibit.
50. 07:47
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Your work is a map. Mine is a wound. I would have preferred to make maps.
51. 07:51
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And I would have preferred to have something worth wounding people about. Shall we agree to disagree on who envied whom more?
52. 07:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    We can agree on that. Though I think we both know the answer.
53. 08:01
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Do we?
54. 08:02
    James Baldwinshare moment

    You wanted what I had to pay for. I wanted what you got for free. That's not the same thing at all.