Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (June 2024)

[Jan C]

I may have read Another Country and Go Tell It on the Mountain when I was too young. I was in high school at the time. But the '60s here were a riotous time.

[G]

I just finished yesterday. Baldwin is such an uncompromising writer that I am always rather daunted whenever I pick him up. Often I've wound up putting him back down after a few pages, because I find the reading of him to be quite a lot of work. I simply do not always have the ability to give it the attention it demands, and I've found that the writing shuts me out if I don't give it what it demands (and deserves).

This was the first of Baldwin's fiction I can recall reading. That's not quite true; I am pretty sure we read some short story, or an extract of a novel, in junior high English, but I cannot remember what it was. Fifty years on, I just recall the sensation: it was like having too quickly downed a very tart and extremely cold drink on a brutally hot day: I’ve forgotten the details of the story but I still experience hints of the pucker in the mouth, the way the eyes are shocked wide-open, and that icy ache in the top of the head.

I think it is the combination of Baldwin’s unrelenting, intelligent honesty and the way he wields the spare elegance of his prose as a flensing knife that both excites and challenges me as a reader. No work of his that I have ever opened was something I could sit down and read quickly or comfortably, and Giovanni's Room was no exception.

I appreciate all the insights from earlier comments in the thread. Two things particularly stood out to me that I did not see in the earlier discussion. I’m used to seeing Paris portrayed (at least by Americans) as a place of light, beauty, liberty, culture. But here it is a city of dinginess, drunkenness, and depravity, but it is also the city that David “loved so much.”

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what we learn of Giovanni’s background. He portrays himself as having led a “normal” heterosexual life right up until the stillbirth of his child. The moment when he literally spat on God and fled set him on a course of steady decline: by the time David meets him he is living in squalor in an upper storey maid’s room. The room is filled with dirty laundry, the walls have been taken apart, the wallpaper has been partly pulled down and left to collect dust in strips on the floor. David arrests the slide for while, but cannot completely reverse it. I find it particularly interesting that as he cleans up Giovanni’s room describes himself with what came across to me as increasing intensity as “dirty”. After the break up, of course, Giovanni’s slide accelerates, and David describes him as taking on more and more stereotyped gay mannerisms, which seems to accelerate his own despair. It struck me how much doubling and reverse imaging there is through all this. And of course David’s self-loathing and his hatred for Giovanni are reverse images of each other.

The thing I find interesting about Giovanni’s trajectory is the way it lines up with the theological assumptions of the kind of church background that Baldwin grew up in: spitting on God leads to moral decline, depravity, death (and of course the belief that homosexuality was one of the worst kinds of depravity was pretty widely held at the time the novel was written). The trajectory is too obvious and neat for me to think Baldwin wants us to take it at face value but I am not at all confident that I’ve figured out quite what he is doing with it.

[Roman Clodia]

Wonderful post, G, and I particularly enjoyed your elucidation of the religious valences here, something which I'm not sensitive to or knowledgeable about.

I agree about the complicated set of mirrorings throughout, culminating in that scene at the end where David is looking at himself in the literal mirror as the execution is taking place.

The representation of 'Giovanni's Room' is complicated: as you say, David describes it as squalid - but it's also the site of great love and happiness which, part of the tragedy of the book, is also the source of so much of David's internalised homophobia and self-loathing.

[Blaine]

Echoing RC's comment on your post, G. One of the things I admired about the novel was that with the exception of the American expat stereotypes it resisted the easy characterisations involving sex, race and Paris.

Although it seems very current to me, I do wonder how our 2020 perceptions make our reading of this novel very different from Baldwin's mindset at the time it was written.

[G]

Ben wrote: "Although it seems very current to me, I do wonder how our 2020 perceptions make our reading of this novel very different from Baldwin's mindset at the time it was written.
"

I was wondering that also. So much has changed with regard to gender, race, masculinity, sexual orientation. I have the understanding that it took Baldwin a long time to make peace with his own homosexuality. I wonder where he was in that process when he wrote this. I wonder how well this side of him was known when he wrote this. Also, I know his step-father was a Baptist preacher, and if I'm not mistaken Baldwin himself spent time in his teens preparing for a call to ministry--though I may be misremembering. I cannot recall whether it was his idea, or his family's, or the community in which he was growing up. (It isn't that unusual in the Black church here in America for teenaged boys--and probably, now, girls--to be called and ordained into ministry. ) I have read, and been told by a handful of Black friends, that even today Black American culture is not at all accepting of homosexuality. Same sex sexual relations were still subject to criminal penalties in the 50's (and for several decades afterward; I believe a few US states still have these laws on the books, even if they are currently unenforceable). What is now called homophobia (at least in the sense of deep aversion) was pretty universal right through the 70's and into the 80's. There continues to be a strongly held view in many branches of the Christian faith that God has forbidden same sex relationships, but I'd say that in the 50's that was a pretty universal tenet of Christian faith, even as it continues to be in several of the other numerically significant faith traditions in the world. I do think that the vitriol evident today in the speech of many of America's far-right evangelicals (on these and many other topics) is an extreme expression of an attitude that was assumed but not often spoken of openly throughout Baldwin's lifetime. We cannot now fully access what it felt like to grow up in that milieu, coming to know that one's own person not only did not conform to the expectation of what was right and good, but in fact embodied in its very nature (not merely as behaviors that can be abandoned) traits that the community that formed one sees as dirty and depraved. It's no wonder that Baldwin had a very complicated relationship with his childhood faith throughout his life, and with his country: he was at least a triple outcast: he was Black in world that gave full humanity only to whites, he was gay in a world that saw that as the epitome of moral decay, and he talked openly about these and other issues that were deeply disturbing to American society.

I didn't mention earlier the number of Biblical references in David's narration, not just the quotation from I Corinthians 13 at the end, but throughout. I think that at the time of writing, these would have been widely recognized, at least in America, because of the cultural hegemony of Protestantism. I don't know how many readers pick up those allusions today, but hearing them (I did listen to the audiobook) made me even more acutely aware of David's struggle.

[G]

Roman Clodia wrote: "I also noted Fitzgerald moments, G, though not particularly Gatsby. I was thinking of Camus, too: L'Étranger.


Yes, RC, now that I've finished I see the echoes of Camus. I have been thinking that I need to go back and reread L'Étranger; perhaps this means I need to move it up the list. I wish I could read even half as fast as you do!

I was wondering all through the novel about symbolism of the knife hanging over the whole book. I have some rather inchoate thoughts, but they continue to defiantly remain a cloud of unknowing.

[G]

Also, does anyone have any thoughts about Jimmy? He comes across to me as Black, though I cannot recall if the book says so explicitly. Do you suppose Jimmy is a stand in for Baldwin himself? That David was modeled in some way on a person Baldwin had loved (and perhaps been abandoned by) in his teens? I usually try to resist the temptation to ascribe much autobiographical significance to details in a writer's work, but when one names a character after oneself, one does rather invite that.

[Roman Clodia]

G wrote: "I was wondering all through the novel about symbolism of the knife hanging over the whole book."

The Sword of Damocles - like a sense of doom or foreboding hanging over David? Also the shadow of the guillotine that gets mentioned very early.

And, going back to Camus, isn't it the sun glinting off a knife that precipitates Meursault's action against the Arab at the beach? With another drop of the guillotine to follow the end of the book.

I wonder to what extent we might think of David as experiencing and maybe rejecting an existential crisis? He wants to take his meaning of life from established values and narratives: Christianity, heterosexuality, marriage and fatherhood. Meursault, of course, rejects all these pressure points of what is supposed to create meaning.

[Roman Clodia]

G wrote: "We cannot now fully access what it felt like to grow up in that milieu, coming to know that one's own person not only did not conform to the expectation of what was right and good, but in fact embodied in its very nature (not merely as behaviors that can be abandoned) traits that the community that formed one sees as dirty and depraved. It's no wonder that Baldwin had a very complicated relationship with his childhood faith throughout his life, and with his country: he was at least a triple outcast: he was Black in world that gave full humanity only to whites, he was gay in a world that saw that as the epitome of moral decay, and he talked openly about these and other issues that were deeply disturbing to American society.
"

I wonder to what extent he discusses these issues in his essays, talks and non-fiction. A lot seems to be available and I'd love to get to some of it.