The American writer James Baldwin was born 100 years ago today. He was by any stretch of the imagination one of the most radical and important voices of the 20th century. His 1956 novel Giovanni's Room was a remarkable achievement.
It was the first mainstream novel written by a black man to include queer themes. Made even more remarkable by the fact that it would be another seven years before segregation was ended in America, and decades before the birth of gay rights in the country. He was the outspoken grandson of a slave who Bore witness to the consequences of American racial strife.
He was an opinionated, critical, blunt, and provocative man at a time when THAT was considered dangerous . But it was as an author that he took the greatest risks that no other commercial writer at the time was taking, that could so easily have destroyed his career. His first novel, The semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in America in 1952, and it was an immediate critical and Commercial Success.
His follow-up novel would come four years later when his American publisher Alfred Knopf received the manuscript for Giovanni's Room. He told Baldwin that he should burn it. Convinced that it would alienate the newly won audience acquired by his previous bestseller.
Undeterred, Baldwin decided to ignore his publisher's advice and approach a British publisher instead. Within a decade he would become America's most famous writer. James Arthur Jones was born on the 2nd of August 1924, on the island of Manhattan, in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of creativity in the Arts associated with The Great Migration.
The largest internal migration in history. Between 1910 and 1970, millions of black Americans fled the Southern United States for the northern and western cities. Emma Burdis Jones, Baldwin's mother, a young Maryland crab picker and oyster shucker, moved to Harlem at the age of 19.
Her first son James was born out of wedlock, and Emma raised him as a single mother. Little is known about Baldwin's biological father, but when he was 3 years old, Emma married David Baldwin, a great migrant, charismatic preacher. The preacher, who despised his adopted son, would be the basis of the austere preacher in Go Tell it on the mountain.
Growing up in poverty and violence, the eldest of nine children, the young James found refuge in reading books at the public library. And he began writing poems short stories and plays at a very young age. Baldwin himself became a charismatic preacher at the age of 14 and his brief experience in the church would have an important impact on his rhetorical style, and on the themes, symbols, and biblical Illusions in his writing Biblical analogies abound in his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, and at the beginning of Giovanni's Room, a character turns to the main protagonist David and comments that: To which David replies prophetically The Old Testament tale of David and Jonathan is often considered an early biblical example of same-sex love, and Baldwin a voracious reader and lapsed Christian knew the passage well Baldwin was referencing the biblical coupling in Giovanni's Room.
The two main characters in the novel are David and Giovani, the Italian form of John. Baldwin used the name David often. It was the name of his stepfather, his brother, his character from his short story The outing, The Preacher's Son in his play Amen corner, and of course the main protagonist in Giovanni's Room.
Post World War II, riots erupted in two dozen cities, and racist violence killed or injured hundreds of people. Baldwin, tired of the violence, the death of his friends, and the everyday racism he faced, began making plans to leave the US. Paris in 1948 meant freedom for many American expats like Baldwin, who abandoned the United States that year for the French Capital.
He became part of the fabled African-American ex-Patriots who came to Paris to pursue a Freer life, away from the repressive Jim Crow laws. People like Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, Beauford Delaney and Langston Hughes. Baldwin later said that he could not have finished his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in America, and he almost certainly could not have written his second novel there.
He needed to move away. At a safe distance from the country of his birth he (like others) felt better disposed to write about it. Baldwin arrived in France on the 11th of November 1948 with $40 in his pocket.
He would stay in Paris for the next eight years and he would spend most of his adult life in France as an exile. On arrival he was taken to Le Deux Magots, a cafe and popular artist's hub in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where on any given day Simone de Beauvoir, Truman Capote, or Jean Paul Sartre might be sat at a busy table. The city was already familiar to him because he had studied Honore de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert.
He had already absorbed Paris from the pages of books, and now he was here, and he decided that a novel set in the City of Lights was his Destiny. It was a stark contrast from America. In Paris, there were no signs outside hotels saying "NO coloreds" and Baldwin could rent a cheap room wherever he wanted.
Nobody cared if a black man took a white woman back to a hotel room, or even if two men were known to be sleeping together there. In Paris, Baldwin was free. He could live openly as a gay black man, at a time when in the US, there was such deep social hatred of those who shared either Baldwin's race or sexual identity, let alone both.
Paris gave Baldwin the opportunity not afforded elsewhere. To openly explore both his literary craft and his sexuality. Giovanni's Room tells the story of an American expat who has a contentious love affair with a bartender he meets at a Parisian bar.
And it was in Paris that Baldwin encountered the characters, situations, and settings, that would inhabit Giovanni's Room. In his book every small town, every seedy bar, taxi drive, and Paris Street, all ring with biting authenticity Like Balzac, Baldwin found in Paris not only a place to work, but also a literary subject. Balzac's "The Human Comedy", is a vast series of novels and stories, where he tirelessly observed and detailed the lives and social mores of the Bourgeoisie and the working classes of France.
Lives that had been ignored in literature, because they were ugly or vulgar, Balzac's influence is apparent in the intense realism of Baldwin's book, the style, and the radical subject matter. It is even possible that Balzac was in the back of Baldwin's mind when he described where Giovanni lived: Baldwin was also influenced by Henry James, another American writer who lived a self-imposed Exile, and came to Europe to find out what it means to be an American. Through all his years in Paris, Baldwin would hang a signed picture of Henry James over his writing desk, and like David in Giovanni's Room, which has been called Baldwin's most "Jamesian" novel, the protagonist in james' novel The ambassadors, Lewis Lambert Strether is an American expatriate, who came to Paris to try to find out what he wants to do with his life.
As the academic Lyle H Powers wrote: Giovanni's Room, is set in the Contemporary Paris of American expatriates, and a rented house in the south of France, where a young white American man David, the blond handsome narrator of the book heads to Paris to sort himself out prior to his marriage to his fiancé, Hella, and finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. The book is told in flashbacks, and darts between David's realtime angst, and his recent past. In David's present, he is in in the middle of a severe alcoholic episode.
The house he is readying to leave is in a small village where the locals notice everything. During the flashback a relationship develops between David and Giovanni, an Italian barman, in the Grim and seedy gay Dives of nocturnal Paris that he frequents with Jaques, a friend he does not really like, but who is supporting him financially. This is not David's first same-sex encounter, as early on we learn of his relationship with his best friend Joey, an encounter that made him doubt his masculinity and filled him with anxiety and shame.
Later, in the Army, he has another sexual encounter with a fellow Soldier, and once again struggles with his sexuality. It is David's fear of deviating from society's Norms that hangs over and ultimately drives the characters in the book. The Bar Giovani Works in is owned by Guillaume, an older gay man from a well-respected French family whose Grizzly fate at Giovanni's hands, will make him a key player in the tragic spirit in which the book commences and concludes.
Dingy bars like Guillaume's, are inhabited by customers that disgust David and act as a mirror for his own self loathing. His description of a drag queen is particularly venomous: Despite how David feels about himself and the places he gets drunk in Paris, he allows Giovani to fall for him, and the two men begin an affair that mostly takes place in the titular room, a squalled h that Giovanni rents. Hella, David's fiance, is away traveling when he and Giovani meet for the first time, and the relationship between the two men develops during her absence, and concludes unceremoniously upon her return.
When David decides to marry her, and conform to society's norms and expectations, Giovanni is cruelly denied any explanation for being unceremoniously dumped. Leading to an awkward chance encounter between David, Hella and Giovanni. David had told his fiance that Giovanni was just his "roommate", and she cannot figure out why Giovanni is so angry when they meet.
She and David decide to go to the south of France, but once again he is unable to suppress his same-sex desire, and once again heads out to a gay bar, where he meets a sailor. While at the bar with the man, David is surprised to find a heartbroken Hella, standing behind him. An episode that reveals the depth of Cruelty that an inability to love oneself can lead to.
As she packs her bags to head home, alone to America, Hella turns to David and says: the publisher who suggested the manuscript of Giovanni's Room should be burnt, because of the overtly homosexual content, offended Baldwin deeply - AND missed the point. As far as Baldwin was concerned, the sexuality of the subjects was incidental to the broader themes. This was not an all-white homosexual novel, but an essay on the human consequences of the problematic "American condition", disguised as fiction.
With this book, Baldwin wanted to prove that he was not merely a "Negro" writer, and he would not let his talent be defined solely by racial subjects. Giovanni's Room is a novel that refuses to accept the usual boundaries of nationality, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. A novel, that shows no matter who we are, if we embrace fear, shame, and Prejudice, we fail.
And no place: America France or anywhere else will be our refuge. Baldwin's leading concern throughout his writing career was the effect that the "American experiment" has on its people. He believed that the United States was a: for Baldwin, the character of David in Giovanni's room, was one of those "homeless Europeans".
