Leo Proudhammer
The narrator. A Black actor at the top of his profession, flat on his back after a heart attack on stage, reviewing how he got there.
To work, and for the work to be worth something to the people watching. Alone on an empty summer-theatre stage in his twenties he decides what he wants is to stand in front of an audience and fill the room with their lives; on the opening night that makes him, he tells himself that as long as he keeps faith with that he will never be useless.
The book
At a glance
- The narrator; a stage actor, telling it from a hospital bed
- Thirty-nine
- New York, and raised in an East Harlem tenement
- A Barbados man, once a follower of Marcus Garvey; a factory hand, later a porter in the garment district
- From New Orleans; a seamstress. Five children born, two lived
- Caleb, seven years older
- By his own account brief and wiry, and not good-looking
- The Actors' Means Workshop, run by Saul and Lola San-Marquand
- Artists' model, waiter, cook, singer, lawn-mower
- Morgan Evans in The Corn Is Green
- He talked his way out of the draft at the Harlem board rather than fight for a country that had interned the Japanese
- San Francisco, after going back on after the second act and collapsing
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLeo Proudhammer is the invented narrator of James Baldwin's fourth novel. He is thirty-nine, a Black American stage actor at the top of his profession, and he tells the whole book from a hospital bed in San Francisco after collapsing during a performance. Everything the reader learns about the other people in the novel comes through his memory of them.
He was born in New York and grew up in an East Harlem tenement. His father came from Barbados, had followed Marcus Garvey and been disappointed by him, and held a factory job and later a porter's job in the garment district, drinking rum on the weekends. His mother came from New Orleans and sewed in the same neighbourhood. Five children were born to them and two lived: Caleb, seven years older, and Leo.
The theatre took twenty years to pay him anything. He lived in a collapsing Village building the tenants called Paradise Alley, posed as an artists' model at the Art Students League, waited tables, hustled, and collected grocery deliveries off the pavement at dawn with his friends. He and Barbara King talked their way into the Actors' Means Workshop, run by Saul and Lola San-Marquand, and were told after their first scene that his equipment for the theatre was extremely meagre. He was twenty-six and cooking in a Harlem barbecue joint when his mother died. His break came shortly after, when a director called Konstantine Rafaeleto cast him as Morgan Evans in The Corn Is Green at a tiny theatre.
By the time of the heart attack he is famous enough that his name draws a crowd, and he is exact about what the position costs. He sits on rally platforms beside other public figures who disapprove of him, and he knows it. In the streets he has heard himself called a hero, a whore and an Uncle Tom. He is at ease about who he sleeps with and much less at ease about what he owes anyone: Barbara for twenty years, a woman named Sally for two, a man named Steve, and Christopher Hall, who is nearly twenty years younger.
The book is his account and it does not pretend otherwise. He tells the reader when he cannot remember something, when his memory of an event is vague, and when he is guessing at what another person felt.
How the book draws them
- Thirty-nine, and smallThe doctor gives him the number in the hospital: thirty-nine, and no longer a boy. He describes himself as brief and wiry and says flatly that he is not good-looking. Jerry teases him that little men always like big women. Lola San-Marquand, sizing him up as a teenager, tells him he is not handsome and not really even good-looking, but that he is haunting.
- The night it happensHe comes offstage at the end of the second act hot and short of breath, has a drink in his dressing room, feels sick, and goes to stand in the wings rather than sit down. He is sweating and freezing at once. Onstage he cannot find his positions or hear the lines, and drags his own up from memory. Barbara whispers, asking whether they should ring the curtain down, and he says no.
- What the doctor tells himA fairly serious heart attack brought on by nervous exhaustion and overwork, with nothing yet wrong with the heart itself or the liver. Drink less, smoke much less, build real rest into the schedule. Otherwise there will be another attack, and another, and one of them will finish him.
- The building on the hillAfter Caleb was taken away, Leo sat on the fire escape of the tenement and watched a large vine-covered building far off on a hill, certain his brother was inside it and signalling to him when the sun caught the windows. He waved back. He kept the vigil for years and told no one. The building was City College. Caleb was on a prison farm in the Deep South.
- The years before the workParadise Alley in the Village, where nothing locked and nothing belonged to anybody. Modelling at the Art Students League, waiting tables, hustling, mowing lawns, and shopping at dawn off the crates left outside the A&P and the Bleecker Street shops. Later a Village restaurant where he was the only waiter, and a Harlem barbecue joint where he cooked until dawn after rehearsing from ten in the morning to ten at night.
- Told he had nothingSaul San-Marquand delivers the workshop's verdict on his audition scene: his equipment for the theatre is extremely meagre, there is nothing to indicate any striking theatrical ability, and the one good moment was a short dance at the end where he looked free and boyish.
- The Corn Is GreenHis break. He sang before the curtain went up, played Morgan Evans, and knew from his first line that he would be all right. He got a telegram the next morning: his mother had had a stroke while dressing to come to the opening, and she died two days later without regaining consciousness. Caleb spoke at the funeral.
- What the fame is likeA nurse who is thrilled to be nursing him. A magazine planning the life and loves of Leo Proudhammer in six instalments. Lunches at the Plaza, dinners at Sardi's, a mink coat beside him and a limousine at the kerb while a reporter who plainly hates him keeps his face straight for the cameras.
- Taken to the precinctThe police remove him from his own lodgings during the workshop summer and hold him with no charge. Lola San-Marquand walks into the station, tells the officer she can break him with a telephone call, informs him he has already exposed himself to a suit for false arrest, and leaves with Leo.
- Who he sleeps withMen and women, and he sets it down without apology or explanation. Barbara, over twenty years. Sally, a student at NYU he lived with for nearly two years and parted from at the point where they would ordinarily have married, because he had decided he could not marry. Steve, a general's son from Pennsylvania who fell in love with him. Christopher.
- The fear of stoppingTold to convalesce in a borrowed villa in the south of France, he is frightened rather than relieved. It will be the first time in more than twenty years that he has not been working, and he asks himself what a worker does when he is not working, and who he will turn out to be with the schedule and the obligations taken away.
He recovers.
The argument the novel does not settle is the one Christopher forces on the way back.