Revisiting James Baldwin's masterpiece, Giovanni's Room

Despite publishing James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, publishing house Alfred A. Knopf rejected his second. Upon receiving the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room in 1955, editor Henry Carlisle pronounced it a failure, telling Baldwin the novel, if published, would damage the author’s reputation.

While Carlisle insisted the rejection had nothing to do with the book’s content, Baldwin was convinced otherwise. Knopf, he thought, did not want a story of homosexual love between a white American expat living in Paris and an Italian bartender being told by a Black man from Harlem.

When Giovanni’s Room was finally published by the Dial Press in 1956, reception was mixed. The novel was critiqued both for its queerness, and for not, as was expected from Baldwin, focusing explicitly on the struggle of Black America. Critic Hilton Als has characterised the insipid response as follows:

The dirt and sex you wrote about in ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ and some of the essays. Can you forgo your imagination and be black for me?

Here, instead, was a story about David, the narrator, who, observing his reflection in a windowpane, tells the reader:

My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

Baldwin, in this novel, is interested in the privilege David’s whiteness brings, and the consequent belief that his own needs and desires naturally supersede the needs and desires of those around him.

The novel is also interested in what it means to be queer when homosexuality is so cruelly punished by society that the punishment becomes internalised, self-inflicted. What does it mean, Baldwin wonders, to be unacceptable to oneself?

Nearly 70 years after its publication, Giovanni’s Room is rightly considered one of the great novels of the 20th century. It is a novel about the ways in which love can be difficult to bear, and properly knowing oneself can be difficult to bear.

It is about the incapacity to confront one’s own desires and the terrible things that fear will make us do if we shrink from ourselves and others in order to escape it.

In the opening pages, we learn David’s fiancé, Hella, is returning to America, the titular Giovanni has been sentenced to death – for what crime we are not told – and is awaiting the guillotine, and that we are meeting David on the worst morning of his life. Much of what follows occurs in flashback, as David attempts to make sense of his relationship with Giovanni, their love and their pain, and where things went wrong.

Colm Tóibín, writing about Giovanni’s Room in The New Yorker, has described Baldwin as “the greatest American prose stylist of his generation”. The novel is indeed an object of astonishing beauty. Baldwin’s prose has the rare quality of feeling spoken onto the page while remaining dazzlingly expressive, a language at once natural and elegant.

In his first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin speculated that his style was generated by a mixture of

the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech – and something of Dickens’ love for bravura wit.

As a teenager, Baldwin, like his father, became a successful preacher. In his magisterial autobiographical essay, “Letter from a Region of my Mind”, Baldwin writes that this newfound vocation, at which he found himself extraordinarily adept,

meant that there were hours and even whole days when I could not be interrupted – not even by my father. I had immobilized him. It took rather more time for me to realize that I had also immobilized myself, and had escaped from nothing whatever.

This capacity with language Baldwin developed in the pulpit – the power to persuade, to enliven, to uplift, to condemn – invests Giovanni’s Room with a resonant metaphysical force, reminding us of the moral and aesthetic splendour that remains available despite our human frailties.

This is entwined with the profound and disabling anxiety accompanying the revelation that you have become exquisitely articulate simply to avoid confronting a difficult truth.

David admits this while reflecting on the story he is about to tell:

I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

David’s narration is an exercise in self-deception as much as self-discovery. He first encounters Giovanni at a gay bar in Paris, and they move quickly from sleeping together to living together in Giovanni’s dilapidated, cramped apartment.

Giovanni is louchely charming, beautiful and, having invited David to drink white wine and eat oysters in the Parisian morning sun, stands in for the wonders of Europe, its allure and strangeness.

He offers David an escape, the potential to be unburdened by the weight of American destiny, but also evokes in him terror, bringing to David’s attention his many irreconcilable contradictions, as an American at once repelled and enthralled by his home country, and as a gay man petrified by his attraction to men.

In this tumultuous attachment, David sees only himself, the magnitude of his own feelings reducing Giovanni to an instrument of pleasure and self-loathing, obscuring his lover’s personhood.

Baldwin, born in Harlem, 100 years ago this month, spent much of his early career in France, moving from New York to Paris in 1948, at only 24.

He did so, in part, to escape the oppressive miasma of American racism, and to give himself the freedom to write. Despite arriving in France with only forty dollars, he found the space and atmosphere he needed to pen the books that launched his reputation – Go Tell it on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son – and much of Giovanni’s Room.

In Giovanni’s Room, the United States figures as an unignorable looming entity, a monster that can be fled but never outrun. As Baldwin wished to get out from under America, David fears returning to America. To survive abroad, David relies on money sent by his father, but the father’s increasingly desperate requests that his son come home make David think “of sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.”

Yet, while carousing with Giovanni, made dizzy by the grandeur of Paris, he is struck by an overwhelming nostalgia and desire to return

home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else.

This simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from America was a tension Baldwin returned to throughout his life, with France playing the role of an alternative that was, inevitably, both wondrous and disappointing.

In an essay on the archetype of the American student in Paris, Baldwin wrote that “from the vantage point of Europe, he discovers his own country”. An American in Paris may have escaped America, but they will not have escaped their Americanness.

In 1957, Baldwin moved back to the US (later dividing his time between France and America). In a 1962 interview, Baldwin said despite the many troubles France was facing, the people possessed “a certain largeness and a certain freedom that is very hard to come by here [in America]”.

Elsewhere, Baldwin remarks that the legend of Paris as a city of romance and freedom “is limited, as legends are limited, by being – literally – unliveable, and by referring to the past”.

This paradox – the Paris of fantasy and the Paris of reality being at once irreconcilable and inextricable – is central to the novel, providing a setting, as it does, for a story of paradoxes.

David is a coward with a magnificent ability to articulate his own cowardice, but an immobilising inability to undo the harm he causes. He recounts the significant suffering he has inflicted, yet is never quite able to escape the notion that this is his tragedy, rather than a tragedy for those that loved him.

It is David’s deferral and indecision, a result of his incapacity to acknowledge the needs of either Hella or Giovanni, that ultimately causes his ruin.

Giovanni’s Room is an intimate novel, both in the depth of feeling it has for its characters, and in its deeply felt knowledge of how so often, when we are called to bear witness to ourselves and to our capacity to hurt those we love, we turn away.

Dr Dan Dixon teaches English and creative writing at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on ethics and the author figure in the essay form. This story was first published in The Conversation. Hero photo: American writer James Baldwin poses in front of his typewriter in his house on March 15, 1983 in Saint Paul de Vence, France. Photo: AP Photo/Photo Pressenia.