BOOKS: Giovanni's Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

In a train of thought that started with Zak Ové’s sculpture installation at LACMA, I recently got to thinking about James Baldwin, and how I’d never read him, and I really should. He’d been coming up over the past year, as we visited where he lived in St Paul de Vence, and I later saw the film adapted from his book If Beale Street Could Talk. Like his Civil Rights Era contemporary Bayard Rustin, Baldwin bore two crosses, being black and gay. Being such an outsider can certainly heighten one’s sense of social observation and personal introspection. Matching such a vantage point with his facility with language was bound to result in some great literature, and thus I picked up his novel Giovanni’s Room, arguably 35 years later than I ought to have.

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

Even though the world has changed immensely since Baldwin wrote this in 1956, and even since 1982 when I started coming out, so much in this landmark novel reaches incisively across all those decades. While it is very much embedded in a specific, vividly described time and place – 1950s Paris and its under-the-radar gay scene – its emotional insight still resonates today. The protagonist is an American ex-pat on the verge of being engaged to a woman, when he meets and falls in love with a man, and ultimately has to make a choice with devastating consequences. Yet that synopsis, while accurate, is about as true as saying that Les Misérables is a jail-break story. With Baldwin, that plot is just the frame in which he paints a dead-on psychological portrait of subconsciously intentional self-unawareness and avoidance. He describes with such beautiful language that if you’re the sort to turn down the corner of a page when a passage really grabs you, you’ll have folded more than half the pages by the end. (I’ve pulled out just a couple of my favorite quotes here.) Giovanni, who knows exactly who he is and what he wants, is such a foil for David, even as his older acquaintance Jacques, whom David half-despises, tries to show him his possible future. In the final morning, David is left trying to study his reflection in the window as the daybreak makes his reflection fade, a haunting image that will stay with me a long time.