James Baldwin’s mid-century masterpiece, Giovanni’s Room
- Written by Dan Dixon, Adjunct Lecturer, University of Sydney
Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books.
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.
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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]”.
James Baldwin addresses the crowd from the speaker’s platform after participating in the march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights in Alabama in 1965.
Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke, Getty Images
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.
Authors: Dan Dixon, Adjunct Lecturer, University of Sydney
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