James Baldwin is a historian of pain and a tactician of delicacy. Like a blind man’s fingers telling a scar, he reads the history of injury with a touch so gentle, so noble, you can forget it’s agony that he’s tracing out. But when Baldwin whispers, thundering quietly, it is agony, always agony, the frustration and despair of an inner self at complete odds with outer circumstance. A black American from Harlem who was more at home in the cafés of Paris, a gay man who couldn’t make peace with his own desires, Baldwin was forever in conflict, and his novels give character and voice to these turmoils, to the wrenching caused by life moving one way while the spirit moves the other. It’s a cliché to compare an artist to an oyster that generates the pearl because it can’t assimilate the foreign, unwelcome presence of grit within its shell, but James Baldwin truly was such an oyster, forever struggling with impulses he couldn’t escape, but forging them into beauty at the cost of his own contentment.
Of his great novels—Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country—Giovanni’s Room is, to my mind, the most regal and perhaps the most intimate. Taking its epigraph from Whitman—“I am the man. I suffered. I was there.”—it tells of David the narrator’s affair in France with the “insolent and dark and leonine” barman Giovanni. When the novel begins, David is alone drinking in a house in the south of France, his fiancée, Hella, has just left him, and Giovanni is awaiting execution for murder (the reasons for which we won’t learn till later). The events are loosely based on Baldwin’s affair with a young Frenchman, Lucien Happsberger, to whom the book is dedicated, but things don’t turn out exactly as they did in life (see “Quirky Fact”). It’s clear that David loves Giovanni as Baldwin loved Happsberger, but it’s also clear that, even before Giovanni’s imprisonment, these men who thought they had found each other will instead find severance before solace.
Reading Giovanni’s Room this time, the diverse feelings it elicited made me think of that wonder of mélange, the estuary, where an ocean—in this case the still, stately beauty of Baldwin’s narration—is met by a foaming expiring river—the inner anguish and outer tragedy of each of the novel’s characters. Whether pain or beauty predominates, it’s hard to say. Both are so fully present, so intricately enmeshed, one can’t tell whether to take hope in humanity’s ability to feel and express as beautifully as Baldwin does, or to despair that so many lives are careering off the rails. What you eventually remember is the oceanic feeling, with Baldwin’s aesthetic grace like hints of sandalwood in the air, but while reading one feels the blows and fists, the back and forth of engagement and retreat, desire and despondency, where no ecstasy goes untainted by shame.
What makes Giovanni’s Room truly incredible is the main character David’s “discovery,” if you will, of his homosexuality, first in as nuanced, lucid, and tortured a moment of sexual awakening as you will ever read (in the childhood scene with his friend Joey, see “What’s Sexy”) and later in his slow, inexorable but resisting capitulation to Giovanni’s seduction. From there, the novel asks a simply phrased, excruciating-to-answer question: how do you walk away from love? In Baldwin’s answer, we have one of the absolute finest of American novels.
The Buzz: Giovanni’s Room is famous both for being as explicit a gay novel as it was for the time and for Baldwin choosing to have all his characters be white. I agree that it’s pretty shockingly explicit, but not because of the actual physical details (which are graphic—sans the porno prefix), but in the precision of the psychological picture. We enter numerous minds (and bodies) in conflict, and we enter them deeply.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): In addition to its explorations of homosexuality, Giovanni’s Room contains an exceptionally pained and strained both-sides-know-it’s-a-one-night-stand heterosexual encounter. When David, trying desperately to unconvince himself that he’s gay, makes “love” to his friend Sue—egads. As he’s leaving, she says, “Maybe you’ll be lonely again” (wearing a smile the description of which will devastate you). He walks out the door saying only, “Keep a candle in the window.” Ouch.
Best Line: My favorite single line is: “My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already.” For my favorite paragraph, keep reading.
What’s Sexy: Here, as the adolescent David wrestles with his friend Joey, is the decisive moment in his sexual awareness:
When I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened, I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy, we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
But Joey is a boy.
Quirky Fact: Yes, the novel is based on Baldwin’s affair with Lucien Happsberger, but the truth of the matter is that Happsberger wasn’t executed, technically—he simply married a woman! I guess Baldwin didn’t attend the wedding.
What to Skip: Giovanni’s Room is short; it’ll only take you an afternoon to read. And trust me, there’s nothing to skip.