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Note: In discussing this story, it has sometimes been unavoidable that crucial elements of the plot have been given away. Readers encountering this story for the rst time, therefore, might prefer to read this Introduction afterwards.
In the autumn of 1956, when the novel Giovanni’s Room was published, James Baldwin was a 32-year-old black American writer living in Paris. He had spent much of the previous eight years in Europe, principally in Paris, escaping what he perceived to be the restricted opportunities that his homeland o ered to him. He was, in one sense, just another in a well-established tradition of twentieth-century African–American artists who had chosen to leave the United States for what they hoped would be the less racially-oppressive air of Europe. Sidney Bechet, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker and Richard Wright, were among those who had preceded him, and in 1948 the 24-year-old James Baldwin simply packed his bags and followed in their wake.
Baldwin arrived in Paris with forty dollars to his name. He was the author of numerous reviews and essays, principally for The New Leader, Commentary and the Partisan Review, but he had no book to his name. Predictably, he was soon plunged into the type of unromantic poverty that can quickly overtake the life of an innocent abroad. Baldwin was a gregarious and charismatic young man, and although times were tough (so much so that at one point he was imprisoned), he managed to beg and borrow from friends and eventually complete a rst novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. The novel was published in May 1953 by Alfred A. Knopf, one of America’s most established publishing houses, and it attracted generally favourable reviews. The New York Herald Tribune described it as a work of ‘insight and authoritative realism’, although the New York Times found that its religious themes rendered it ‘almost as remote as a historical novel about the Hebrew
patriarchs and prophets’, However, although Baldwin’s career appeared to be successfully launched, he now faced the problem of what to do about a second novel.
James Baldwin was born on 2 August 1924 in Harlem, New York.
He was the eldest of six children, although the man that the children called ‘Father’ was not actually Baldwin’s father. His mother had given birth to her rst child by a man who had soon disappeared from both of their lives. The man that Baldwin knew as ‘Father’ was a erce, Bible-thumping, disciplinarian who appeared to have little time for his wife’s eldest child. The poverty that bedevilled their family life only served to increase Baldwin’s father’s antipathy toward the world. He was particularly harsh toward the increasingly intelligent and precocious child whose presence he grew to resent.
Young James sought refuge in reading, and in visits to the cinema.
Soon he was writing, and he quickly gained a schoolboy reputation as a ‘man of letters’.
In the summer of 1941, Baldwin left school and began a series of menial jobs. He had harboured a hope that he might go on to college, but his grades were not particularly good, and the family needed him as a breadwinner. However, at this point, the largest trauma in his life was his decision to break with the church. The travails of his upbringing in Harlem, his coming of age in the church, and his subsequent abandoning of the pulpit, are recorded and depicted in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Having left the church the young Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he supported himself in a variety of jobs including railroad hand, dishwasher, waiter and elevator boy. He became part of a more eclectic and artistic community, and during these years he befriended the painter, Beauford Delaney, and the author, Richard Wright, who would soon leave for Paris. Wright recognized that the strangely intense young man had talent and, before leaving for Paris, he helped to secure a fellowship for the cash-strapped edgling. Later, when Baldwin rst arrived in Paris in 1948, Wright extended the hand of welcome, but the friendship between them never fully recovered after Baldwin’s publication, in 1949, of an
essay entitled ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’. The essay was highly critical of Wright’s famous novel, Native Son, and to Wright’s mind, the master had been betrayed by the pupil.
By 1953 James Baldwin had a fast-developing literary reputation, and editors were aware of the young Negro author. However, the label ‘Negro author’ was one which Baldwin never warmed to. He had no desire to be thought of as just another Negro limited to writing only on ‘Negro’ topics. He saw his talent as universal, and he was determined that he should be free to write about anything or anybody he pleased. As he contemplated a new novel, he naturally looked to the world in which he had been living for the past few years: Paris. One of the de ning characteristics of Go Tell It on the Mountain is that it is a novel that essentially contains no white characters, aside from a man who the young hero accidentally bumps into in Central Park. In this sense it was a ‘safe’ novel for a Negro author to write. James Baldwin would not be playing it ‘safe’
again.
Giovanni’s Room opens in the south of France with David, a young white American already in his second year in Paris, casting his mind back over the events of the previous few months. David had arrived in Paris determined to break from the United States and the troubling spectre of his father. He met Hella, a young American woman, and they became engaged. When Hella goes on an extended vacation to Spain, David encounters Giovanni, a proud and handsome Italian waiter, and he falls in love with him. Through late winter, and an entire Spring, they conduct their a air. When, in early summer, Hella returns to Paris, David abandons Giovanni and resumes his life with Hella; this causes Giovanni to su er painful feelings of rejection. Eventually a distraught Giovanni returns to his old job working for Guillaume, a seedy and exploitative man, described in the novel as ‘a disgusting old fairy’. Guillaume constantly taunts a depressed and abandoned Giovanni who eventually ‘snaps’ and, in a t of rage, murders Guillaume. On receiving this news, David, who has by this time removed himself to the south of France, is plunged into despair. Hella eventually
discovers the nature of David’s sexuality and she leaves him. A distressed David is left alone in the south of France contemplating the imminent execution of Giovanni, and musing on the chaos that has ensnared his life.
Giovanni’s Room is, by any standards, an audacious second novel.
A novel by a young black writer containing no black characters, and dealing with the taboo subject of homosexuality. There had been other attempts by black writers to write novels without any black characters, This ‘raceless’ writing had been pioneered by Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar at the turn of the century.
Other work in this tradition includes Ann Petry’s Country Place (1947) and William Gardener Smith’s Anger at Innocence (1950).
There had also been attempts by black novelists to write on homosexuality, including Chester Himes’s Cast the First Stone (1952), a novel which introduces us to a handsome white hero who, while in prison, rst resists then succumbs to a sexual relationship with a younger, darker, man. However, to attempt to put the two together, and write a ‘raceless’ homosexual novel, and to do so at the inception of a promising career, suggests either calculation or an admirable recklessness of spirit, or both. In retrospect, it is clear that James Baldwin knew exactly what he was doing.
Some years later, in a reply to an interviewer’s question, James Baldwin made plain his feelings about the connectivity between race and sexuality: ‘The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.’
In other words, for Baldwin, the journey from Go Tell It on the Mountain to Giovanni’s Room was neither discontinuous nor disruptive. The themes of race and sexuality are uni ed, one feeding the other. Although Giovanni’s Room appeared to some critics to be a professional suicide note, as far as Baldwin was concerned the novel was a logical successor to Go Tell It on the Mountain. The uncloseting of sexual desire was to be as just another step on the path towards the unclose the racially prejudiced mind. Baldwin challenges us
question: ‘How, in fact, can one write about race without writing about sexuality?’
But Giovanni’s Room is also about freedom, the same kind of freedom that Baldwin sought to discover by leaving the United States and relocating in France. Some years later, Baldwin memorably described his ight to Paris as ‘a leap into visibility’.
During the course of Giovanni’s Room, David admits that ‘nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to.’ In Paris, David is free to live the ‘dangerous’ Bohemian life, but he is frightened of life. Hella is also frightened. While she is in Spain considering David’s proposal of marriage, she writes to her ancé: ‘I’m really not the emancipated girl I try to be at all. I guess I just want a man to come home to every night… I want to start having babies. In a way it’s really all I’m good for.’ For Baldwin, the narrow, unexamined life, to which the American couple wish to retreat, is a lamentable existence. Sadly, both David and Hella appear to have accepted the stereotype of the roles assigned to them by American society. David bleats on about his fears of not being a
‘real’ man. He longs to be safe, ‘with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman putting my children to bed’. Meanwhile, Giovanni who has embraced risk, and led a life unchecked by society’s hypocritical ‘rules’, is in despair. When Hella returns, David imagines that he can leave Giovanni and return to the ‘purity’
of his restricted world. This, of course, proves to be impossible.
When Baldwin delivered the manuscript to his publishers, Knopf, they suggested that he change the title of the book, and make it about a woman. Baldwin refused. Having rejected the iron collar of assigned identity in his personal life, Baldwin felt that he had no choice but to do so in his professional life. When the Knopf editorial team continued to urge him to either adapt or abandon the novel, and instead come up with another ‘Negro’ novel, Baldwin chose instead to leave his publisher and move to the smaller, less prestigious, Dial Press. The book would be published just as Baldwin
had written it, and Giovanni’s Room immediately elicited the kind of responses that one might have predicted.
Although white critics praised aspects of the book – its construction, its lyricism, its daring – their response was in the main muted. The New York Times was typical, its reviewer regarding Giovanni’s Room as a novel written with ‘dignity and intensity’. A notable exception was the response of the writer, Nelson Algren, who, in The Nation, went out of his way to welcome Baldwin’s second novel. ‘This novel,’ he insisted, ‘is more than another report on homosexuality. It is a story of a man who could not make up his mind, one who could not say yes to life. It is a glimpse into the special hell of Genet, told with a driving intensity and horror sustained all the way.’
Black critics, on the other hand, both publicly and privately, were dismayed and ba ed. Langston Hughes (with reference to Go Tell It on the Mountain) was already on record as having suggested that Baldwin ‘over-writes and over-poeticizes in images way over the heads of the folks supposedly thinking them’. He described the young writer’s rst novel as ‘a low-down story in a velvet bag – and a Knopf binding’. Even before the appearance of Giovanni’s Room, Hughes had suggested that Baldwin had not only a racial and cultural identity crisis, but a personal identity crisis too. The
‘evidence’ of Giovanni’s Room served only to ‘con rm’ Hughes’s worst suspicions, although on this occasion the ‘dean’ of Negro writers chose to hold his tongue.
Later black critics, notably Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka, did not share Hughes’ reticence. Their hostile responses to Baldwin’s sexual agenda seemed to be fuelled by homophobia and envy. In Cleaver’s essay on Baldwin, ‘Notes on a Native Son’, Cleaver describes homosexuality as a ‘sickness’ on a level with ‘baby-rape’.
In an essay on Baldwin by Baraka, the author suggests that Baldwin is so antiblack that if he were ‘turned white… there would be no more noise from [him]’. Baldwin, however, in his public utterances on identity politics, and the relationship between sexuality and race, refused to grant those such as Clever and Baraka any ground. He
remained stubbornly de ant: ‘People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity… Straight cats invent faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves.’
Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country (1960), built upon the sexual themes of Giovanni’s Room, but it was set in New York City and contained a multiracial cast. In fact, after Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin never again wrote a novel with an exclusively white cast.
His career did, however, continue to resist narrow categorization, and he continued to redraw literary and socio-political boundaries.
Easy connections and casual prejudice were anathema to Baldwin’s moral world, and the remarkable Giovanni’s Room makes an early and unforgettable declaration of the author’s future intentions.
Since its publication the novel has become a foundation text for gay culture, but the appeal of Giovanni’s Room is decidedly broader than this. Baldwin understood this, even as those around him faltered in their support, insisting that publication would wreck his career: ‘They said I was a negro writer and I would reach a very special audience… And I would be dead if I alienated that audience.
That, in e ect, nobody would accept that book coming from me…
My agent told me to burn it.’ Mercifully, the young James Baldwin had already cultivated a necessary stubbornness. He red his agent.
He refused to allow anybody to curtail his freedom, or dictate the terms of his own life, both personally and professionally. Giovanni’s Room is an elegant, and courageous, second novel in a literary career which would soon develop into one of the most remarkable of the second half of the twentieth century.