Arts
This Year, Jesus Has Two Mommies
Queer Classics
Queer Classics
James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room"
by Ernie McLeod
When James Baldwin (1924-1987) submitted his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, for publication, no one was pleased. His publisher, Knopf, turned the book down; his agent told him to burn the manuscript; everyone said he shouldn’t have written it. This was the mid-50s and Baldwin, born in Harlem and the grandson of a slave, had already established a reputation for himself with prestigiously published essays and an acclaimed semi-autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. These early works branded Baldwin an eloquent chronicler of the black experience, and, logically, it was expected that his next work would also deal with “the Negro problem.” Instead, Giovanni’s Room was set in Paris, featured white characters, and dealt with sexual ambivalence at a time when ambivalence was frowned upon and sexuality was locked tight behind closet doors.
In spite of its shocking theme, the novel did get published, first in London and then in the States by a smaller press than Knopf. The reviews were, at best, mixed. One, while praising Baldwin’s delicacy with such a controversial topic, made sure to also note that much of the novel was “laid in scenes of squalor” and host to a “grotesque and repulsive” background of characters.
Complicated as its reception was, Giovanni’s Room couldn’t have a simpler plot. In the first few pages, David, the story’s narrator, reveals that his fiancée Hella has abandoned him in the south of France to sail back to America and that Giovanni — the man he was “with” when Hella went off to Spain for a while — is headed for the guillotine the next morning. The rest of the novel is basically an extended flashback tracing David’s relationship with Giovanni from its drunkenly romantic Paris inception through its unbearably cruel unwinding as David attempts to forge a more acceptable life with Hella. The novel circles back finally to David standing completely alone on the eve of Giovanni’s execution, imagining for the reader Giovanni’s last hours on earth and the circumstances of his downfall, while contemplating how he might save his own body from the “sentence of death.”
If it sounds like a exceptionally gloomy tale, it is. But Baldwin’s language is often so exquisitely mournful that you’ll want to embrace it even as you angrily reject the narrator’s assertion that two men together cannot have a life. When Baldwin describes a “tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst,” you feel it. He falters only in his rendering of “les folles” — men who call each other “she” and scream “like parrots.” It may be the narrator who confesses that the sight of such men gives him an unease akin to that of “monkeys eating their own excrement,” but it’s hard not to suspect that it’s really the author’s internalized homophobia intruding into the text.
While Baldwin didn’t care for the label “gay” — preferring to be “open to love, no matter what form or gender it might take,” he also didn’t hide his sexuality. His unclosetedness was especially brave given his religious upbringing in the Bronx (where he did some preaching as a teenager) and his passionate involvement in the Civil Rights movement (which was generally hostile towards homosexuals). In fact, black activists such as Eldridge Cleaver were among Baldwin’s harshest critics, calling him a “faggot” in print and claiming that the homo scenes in his novels were somehow evidence of hatred towards blacks. (A black man getting fucked by a white man in the 1961 novel Another Country was the ultimate sin.) Baldwin’s insistence on including multiple sexualities in his fiction was probably what excluded him from speaking at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington.
Most of Baldwin’s adult life was spent in France, where he moved in the late 40s to escape the racial bigotry of the States. He considered himself a “commuter,” though, not an expatriate. In an interview he said, “Only white Americans can consider themselves to be expatriates.” During his early years in Paris, he fell in love with a Swiss man named Lucien; their relationship and the city’s sexual ambiance at the time helped set the tone for Giovanni’s Room. Though Lucien went on to marry, the novel was dedicated to him, and he and Baldwin remained involved in one way or another until Baldwin’s death.
Many critics — particularly straight ones, I’m guessing — consider Baldwin’s essays rather than his novels and plays to be his lasting contribution to literature. The Publishing Triangle, however, ranks Giovanni’s Room second (behind Death in Venice) on their list of the 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels. The first time I read Giovanni’s Room I found the narrator a bit cold and flat, as if the black commuter Baldwin didn’t quite want to get under the expatriate David’s privileged white skin. Baldwin did say he purposefully excluded race from the story because he didn’t think he could “handle both propositions in the same book.”
This time around I appreciated Giovanni’s Room most for its elegantly simple structure, and for the nuanced way Baldwin negotiated “the stink of love,” the “lying little moralities” we invent out of fear. When asked what Giovanni’s Room was about, Baldwin said it wasn’t about homosexual love per se, but about “what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody.” Giovanni is a memorable character because, unlike David, he isn’t afraid to love. He’s the lusted-after provincial straight boy who turns out to be not so straight and much too vulnerable. David may need to flee Giovanni and all his “filthy little room” represents, but the reader who’s a sucker for the tragically romantic will want to linger in the squalor, to slip between the sheets and hold him tight.
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