2024-08-16 - Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
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Recently i read Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin, and
wanted to read more of his writing.
More recently i read Giovanni's Room while camping. In my perspective
the book is about self-sabotage all around. Setting aside the
ancestral momentum, the legal and social restrictions, and the
internalized homophobia, it still seemed to me that David, Giovanni,
and Hella were each getting in the way of their own happiness. They
lived in a hell partially of their own creation.
This brings to mind a comment i read about queer characters in old
books. Until recently, queer protagonists were doomed to unhappy
outcomes, even in literature written by queer authors. I sensed this
when I read The Well of Loneliness by Radclyff Hall.
Another thought is that David and Giovanni spent a period living
together sharing very cramped quarters. Not only was it physically
chaotic, it was also psychologically smothering, especially after
Giovanni lost his job and started hanging out with David 24/7. This
meshes with the statistic i've been told that most marriages that
fail, will fail within the first 2 years. It's a major change in
my book to transition from living along to living as a couple.
I enjoyed the depth and warm cynicism in this book. What follows
are interesting quotes.
... nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. ...
people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and
their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life
gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to
say Yes to life.
And yet--when one begins to search for the crucial, the definitive
moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself
pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly
locking doors.
... I am--or I was--one of those people who pride themselves 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 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.
What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I
wearied of the motion, wearied of the joyless seas of alcohol, wearied
of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships,
wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied
of the work which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense.
Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. ... I think
now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find
would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so
much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.
* * *
... though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I
should be so abruptly entangled with a boy; what was strange was that
this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle, occurring
everywhere, without end, forever.
* * *
This was after Giovanni had lost his job and we walked around in the
evenings. Those evenings were bitter. Giovanni knew I was going to
leave him but he did not dare accuse me for fear of being
corroborated. I did not dare tell him. Hella was on her way back
from Spain and my father had agreed to send me money, which I was not
going to use to help Giovanni, who had done so much to help me. I
was going to use it to escape his room.
* * *
Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to
him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back. I did
not, for example, really tell him about Hella until after I had been
living in the room a month. I told him about her then because her
letters had begun to sound as though she would be coming back to
Paris very soon.
* * *
The beast [of homosexuality] which Giovanni had awakened in me would
never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni
anymore. And I would then, like all the others, find myself turning
and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues,
into what dark places?
With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni
which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same
roots.
* * *
But it was not the room's disorder which was frightening; it was the
fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder one
realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For
this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was
a matter of punishment and grief. I do not know how I knew this, but
I knew it at once...
I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his
last retreat. I was to destroy this room and to give Giovanni a new
and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to
transform Giovanni's, must first become a part of Giovanni's room.
In the beginning, because the motives which led me to Giovanni's room
were so mixed; had so little to do with his hopes and desires and
were so deeply a part of my own desperation, I invented in myself a
kind of pleasure in playing the housewife after Giovanni had gone to
work. I threw out the paper, the bottles, the fantastic accumulation
of trash, I examined the contents of the innumerable boxes and
suitcases and disposed of them. But I am not a housewife...
* * *
[Giovanni to David:]
"I do not know what I would do if you left me." For the first time I
felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice--or I put it in there.
"I have been alone so long--I do not think I would be able to live if
I had to be alone again."
* * *
I was the only person on God's cold, green earth who cared about him,
who knew his speech and silence, knew his arms, and did not carry a
knife. The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could
not endure it.
* * *
Such a scandal always threatens, before its reverberations cease, to
rock the very foundations of the state. It is necessary to find an
explanation, a solution, and a victim [scapegoat] with the utmost
speed. Most of the men picked up in connection with this crime were
not picked up on suspicion of murder. [They were picked up o
suspicion of being gay, because the murdered man was gay.]
Until the case was closed they [the men who hired male prostitutes]
could not be certain which way to jump, whether to cry out that they
were martyrs, or remain what, at heart, of course, they were, simple
citizens, bitter against outrage and anxious to see justice done and
the health of the state preserved.
It was fortunate, therefore, that Giovanni was a foreigner. As
though by some magnificently tacit agreement, with every day that he
was at large, the press became more vituperative against him...
author: Baldwin, James, 1924-1987
detail:
LOC: PS3552.A45 G5
tags: book,fiction,queer
book
fiction
queer