Milk Run

TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE by James Baldwin. 484 pages. Dial. $5.95.

There are two James Baldwins, equally passionate, at times equally gifted. One is the racial rhetorician, the polished pamphleteer, the literate prophet who warned about The Fire Next Time long before the words, "Burn, baby, burn" raged in the land. His preachments remain intensely articulate, painfully--and plainly--relevant.

The other James Baldwin is the questing novelist, the private man loaded down with personal problems that he must defeat--or be defeated by. This is the Baldwin who with his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, marvelously evoked a Harlem boyhood nurtured in a storefront church. It is the Baldwin who, with post-Gide candor, courageously rendered the homosexual experience in his second novel, Giovanni's Room. But this is also the writer who six years ago turned out the deeply disappointing novel, Another Country, a lengthy excursion into the world of bisexuality.

White Sister, Black Cat. This new book is further evidence that as a fictioneer Baldwin is in great danger of becoming drearily irrelevant. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone rambles like a milk train over the same run that Baldwin covered in Another Country, creaks over the same hard ground, sounds the same blast about the Negro's condition, rattles the same rationale for homosexuality: "My terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face in any human breast, to tell it all, to let it out, to be brought into the world, and, out of human affection, to be born again."

As in Another Country, the hero is a black artist, this time a handsome, slightly built 39-year-old actor, Leo Proudhammer. The dramatic high point occurs on the very first page, when Leo suffers a heart attack onstage. From then on, the reader must bear with him through a convalescence plagued by interminable flashbacks. There is a Harlem boyhood that includes an incestuous homosexual interlude with his older brother. This is followed by a pre-hippie East Village adolescence during which Leo begins to forge a lasting black-brother, white-sister relationship with Barbara King, a Kentucky-born actress. And finally comes the highly satisfactory love affair with Christopher, a natty young militant black cat. The most important thematic progression to be noted in this work is that for the first time in a Baldwin novel, black man gets black boy.

Out of Step, Out of Date. Baldwin manages his set pieces well: a Harlem church service, the white world's Hollywood movies as seen through black eyes, a ghetto tenement flat on Saturday night. But the heterosexual love scenes are dry, joyless and dread-inducing, while some of the writing plays with trite truisms ("If you are depending on a guy for your life, you don't really much care what color he is"). The penultimate scene, in which the Negro star plays host to Barbara's white old-Kentucky-home family, seems to have been lifted out of an old Lillian Hellman play; and the final speeches have a tacked-on and tatty Odets-like quality.

Indeed, '30s protest realism seems to be Baldwin's out-of-step, out-of-date fictional method. But the highly specialized theme of a contemporary black bisexual requires far more savage honesty and a far more ruthless sense of the absurd if it is to achieve any literary validity. When he was 14, Baldwin was a boy preacher, a black Cotton Mather, raging against sin, obsessed with guilt. He still is. But whereas in his essays and speeches the public Baldwin eloquently indicted white America for its sins, the private Baldwin has not yet been able to find the right fictional way to bear his own personal sense of guilt.

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