Norman, oh Norman..

Mailer was right to insist in his essay that the hipster took his
key, his beat, from the Negro, and that the two shared a place
on the margin of a society which, though free, constantly
threatened them. He omitted to stress a crucial distinction,
however: the hipster refused to accept conventional society;
the Negro was refused by it. Mailer’s essay is bursting with
insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He did
not pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all
this white Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris,
Baldwin, whomhe began to see regularly back in New York,
was about to inform him. '
Baldwin, though he had friends who considered themselves
beatniks or hipsters (Mailer’s distinction was that hipster was
a beatnik who reads), was inclined to be contemptuous of their
‘we-gotta-go’ ways of conceiving freedom. To him, being free
could never be a matter of dropping out of school, or giving up
your job, and hitching a lift to Denver. The people Baldwin
had grown up with in Harlem had little chance of getting in to
school. And he could hardly ever find a proper job. At the end
of the 1940s, Baldwin had had difficulty getting a place to rent
in Greenwich Village (supposedly the most liberal section of
New York), and not because of a shortage of rooms.
And now the bars and streets were overrun with white kids
saying ‘man’ and ‘cool’ and digging chicks and smoking
reefers and blowing horns and looking for kicks and bringing
down squares as a drag — as if these things had just been dis-
covered. Chester Himes may not have been able to give a
baroque definition of ‘cool’, but he knew what it meant. He
had learned it ‘in the body’. Compare what Mailer wrote
about the white hipster’sreaction to ‘ever-threatening danger’
with how Himes responded to the danger he felt surrounded
him, even in the free atmosphere of Paris:
I remained the same, a thinking animal, filled with regrets, experi-
encing hunger, stirred by anger along with the acceptance of the
necessity to live. . . . I had become very violent, dangerous, with a
wild skyrocketing temper. Sex and violence held me in a vice.
In ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, a personal essay
about Mailer written in 1960, Baldwin looked back on their
Paris nights fondly, but he could not help a little weariness
creeping in when forced to consider his friend’s intellectual
romance with the outlaw. Baldwin administered a gentle but
effective put-down, which was, however, intended to make a
serious point about Hip and the different perspectives of black
and white. I
‘I could not, with the best will in the world,’ Baldwin wrote,
‘make any sense out of “The White Negro”.’ In searching for the
likely spark of Mailer’s essay, he recalled their nights in Paris:
" the Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found our-
selves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider
him as being even remotely ‘hip’ and Norman did not know this
and I could not tell him. He never broke through to them . . . and
they were far too ‘hip’, if that is the word I want, even to consid-
er breaking through to him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay
cat, but a little frantic.
Baldwin is having fun, but it s hardly surprising that he
should have taken up an attitude before ‘The White Negro’.
What makes hip language a special language, Mailer wrote, ‘is
that it cannot really be taught’. Which is just what Baldwin
was trying to tell him.