Over the past couple of years, I’ve started making my way through the works of James Baldwin, the African-American writer and activist whose essays and writing grappled with race relations, sexuality and masculinity (Baldwin was himself gay, eventually openly so), and so much more. But as much as I love his essays – and I think he may be one of the great essayists of the 20th century (his essay “Notes of a Native Son” may be one of the finest essays ever written, full stop) – his fiction is no less remarkable for the ways it both explores the very themes that Baldwin so often explored elsewhere, but also for the emotional complexity and richness that Baldwin brings to bear in them. That was no surprise in Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was based very much on his own life, but the same holds true for Giovanni’s Room, a 1956 tale of a narrator confused and threatened by his own sexuality and his love for another man.
The plot of Giovanni’s Room is deceptively slim – it’s the story of David, an American ex-pat living in Paris; by the time our story begins, his fiancee is already on her way back to America, and his lover Giovanni is awaiting execution. And really, in the end, that tells you everything you need to know, in a horrible way – how David’s separation from his girlfriend finds him meeting Giovanni, how he comes to terms with his own desires and love, and how his own desire to repress that part of himself ultimately leads to the destruction of his relationships. There’s an inevitability to it all that feels heartbreaking – and, no doubt, appropriately so given the mores and beliefs of the 1950s (to say nothing of a lot of gay literature of the time, which so often was permitted as long as it ended with a tragic tone representing a return to the status quo).
And yet, to focus solely on the tragedy of it all is to miss the beauty and richness with which Baldwin explores David and his entire world. From the war of desires to the ease of self-delusion, from the freedom of being in a country where no one knows him to the sense of being judged for a culture that produced him, there’s a complexity and depth to Giovanni’s Room that’s hardly surprising from a writer like Baldwin – nor, of course, is it any shock to find how well-written and well-crafted the book is, as I (per usual, with Baldwin) found myself stopping again and again to mark sentences and passages:
“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.“
“Somebody,” said Jacques, “your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour – and in the oddest places! – for the lack of it.”
“I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, 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. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.“
“Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.”
So, yes, the English teacher in me delighted in the language. And that’s to say nothing of that all-too-common weakness of English teachers, seeing the life and beliefs and world of the author reflected through the novel: the way that David drifts isolated from the world around him (something that Baldwin, in his double intersection of minority status, always felt acutely), or how his relationship with his father lingers over the book (see “Notes of a Native Son”), or the sense of alienation and sadness as someone who’s left his own country (much as Baldwin had, not long before writing Giovanni’s Room).
All of which is to say that as a piece of writing, Giovanni’s Room is beautiful – immaculately crafted and constructed, richly drawn, devastating in its impact, and far richer than its brevity might lead you to think. It is further testament to Baldwin’s genius, but more than that, his essential humanity – for to read Baldwin is to see someone utterly human and utterly humane, depicting the world with compassion and honesty and beauty and pain – in short, the whole spectrum of the human experience. It’s a reminder that there may be no better machine designed for empathy and understanding than a novel – and Giovanni’s Room is a well-functioning machine indeed.
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