Truth and self-deception are topics that are never far from literature’s pages. The omission in speech of the facts of the heart, or else the failure to acknowledge them even within one’s own soul, is often the chute down which tragedy falls our lives. Yet in a way, I find books about authenticity harder and harder to believe the closer their settings get to our own time. In life, by which I mean within that vague lumpy western collective population I have to refer to here, it has become boringly easy to tell the truth. Marriages, that great source of anguished self-deception, are no longer arranged, nor are the consequences of divorce as total and obliterating as they were in the days of Anna Karenina or Effi Briest. At an art book fair in Düsseldorf at the weekend, I was surrounded by people who seemed to be being their authentic selves – making bizarre but personal images, wearing silly clothes, having the kind of hairstyles my girlfriend considers hot and my mother considers ghastly.
I wondered, perhaps, whether many of us really now really know inauthenticity well enough to articulate it. If I were to speak of my own case, born into reasonably great financial and social privilege but failing either to commit to being a writer to the full extent of my powers and energies or to commit to making a lot of money and influence as a lawyer or what-have-you by instead choosing a muddly middle ground in a relaxing, reasonably well paying corporate career where I have an excellent work-life balance and time each day to write a few pages – if I talked about this, about being dishonest to both my calling and my familial obligations, well then I would rightly make myself the subject of ridicule and only with great luck would I make a half-decent novel.
The overwhelming advantage and interest to me of writers whose identity conflicted with the society of their time is that they felt questions of authenticity with the full force they ought perhaps to have for us all. There’s Walt Whitman, at times my favourite poet – this man of joy thinly papering over his despair at having to transfer much of his love for men into love for man; then there is E.M. Forster, that supreme writer of the “muddle” of our hearts; and to that list I today add James Baldwin, long ago recommended to me, a gay Black American writer who spoke forcefully for rights and acceptance for himself and for others. I have begun my acquaintance with him through Giovanni’s Room, a novel of self-deception and tragedy in a Paris of the 1950s that is free enough for its main character to find love, but not free enough for him to be willing to admit it.
We start at the end, with the American David standing alone in the house in southern France that he and his girlfriend (fiancée) had rented together. He tells us that she is already on a ship back to the United States. As for Giovanni, this other person with a claim upon David’s heart, this is his last morning alive. The guillotine awaits him. While Giovanni’s Room holds some information back, such as the nature of Giovanni’s crime, the broad contours of its plot – that a man loves a man and yet cannot commit to him, destroying their relationship – are no mystery, even to a reader that has ducked past the book’s back cover. Such an approach, and the way that the narrative is told by David as he looks back upon the wreck of his life, lends the text a fatalistic, determined atmosphere.
This is assuredly deliberate. Looking at Giovanni’s Room as a whole, a certain link becomes apparent between its images and ideas – or rather, a particular opposition. One of movement versus standing still. I have to avoid the temptation to write “stasis”, because Baldwin’s lack of movement is more nuanced than that word would imply. The same thing keeps me from writing “flight”, though this is how David – an American who has left his homeland – describes his own life. Instead, using this simple binary, Baldwin’s other images and ideas, whether the sea, or acting, or time itself, are reflected and refracted, over and over.
But first I should mention the plot. How Hella, David’s girlfriend, had gone away to Spain to think about whether to marry him, while he stayed on in Paris. How Jacques, a wealthy businessman, and David had gone drinking to a bar owned by the Frenchman Guillaume, and how there the bartender was a handsome Italian, Giovanni. How with the same inevitability of the text, Giovanni and David begin a passionate affair that cannot last. (They acknowledge this inevitability too, in word if not in fact). How in the end, Hella returns, and sees Giovanni, and eventually discovers the nature of his relationship with David.
Within this cast we already have one of the markers of a lack of movement – reflections. At several points in the story David is confronted with his reflection as he cleans the house in preparation for his departure in the morning, and from that reflection he quite literally flees. Movement makes the water ripple, the image unrecognisable. Guillaume and Jacques, older gay men, are a kind of grotesque mirror of Giovanni and David. They chase after young men, but their lives are empty of love. Guillaume, the last member of an ancient family, has through his failure to sire an heir become a kind of image of David’s own anxieties over his need to create a family. Jacques can hardly admit his sexuality, even as he tries to flirt with David. The comparison between these young and older men becomes starker once David has broken off with Giovanni, for the latter ends up falling in with Jacques, and thereby begins to adopt “a fairy’s mannerisms”, the same as him. Still another reflection is between Hella and Giovanni – both offering certain images of the future. One respectable, the other true. David sees himself, and the reader sees other reflections, but what we notice each time is his refusal to face those reflections. Self-deception only works if you don’t stand still long enough for the self to notice.
Self-deception births flight – “by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.” Two images best characterise David’s vision of the alternative, of staying still – a cave and a room. After David’s first sexual experience with a man, he runs from the house in horror: “That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood.” “Seemed” – while this word is necessary for a simile, it also contains uncertainty – David doesn’t know how things will be. In the same way, even “opening” hints at something positive: potentiality rather than any negative. Even leaving aside the “manhood” topic for now, the striking thing about this image is not just its power as an image – because it comes in the text suddenly and bearing horror – but also that this image undermines itself. David does not just tell the readers how he thinks he feels, he also, crucially and accidentally, reveals his doubts about those very feelings.
Then there is the room. Giovanni lives outside of the Paris centre, alone, in a small room. Like the cave, the room’s symbolic meanings are multiple. As the doors close for Giovanni and David’s first night together, it is clearly a place of lust and freedom – its very darkness becomes a source of intimacy and desire. It takes one out of the world, distorting time – David feels the need to remind the reader throughout the story that “I did not really stay there very long”. His text, naturally, tells another tale – Hella, the woman he attempts to persuade himself he loves, is barely on the page until the end. Is time to be measured by the days we are truly alive, or just those where all our organs are functioning? David might think it is the latter, but his narration tells us the former.
When David decides to view the room negatively, it becomes so – dirty, overcrowded with rubbish, with peeling wallpaper, and so on. He tries to make himself view it as a site of constraint, rather than of freedom. Unfortunately for him, Giovanni’s later attempts to renovate the place and make it more homely by adding a bookcase mean that even this critical view fails to convince the reader. David calls it “some weird idea”, but at this point the bookcase becomes a reminder Giovanni’s commitment to the relationship that is contrasted harshly with David’s own lack of investment, his constant backward movement.
Few people, however, come out of Giovanni’s Room well or even looking well. Within its pages, it’s a profoundly pessimistic book. The wreck of David’s life at its end is monumental. What hurts, as a reader, is the extent of his self-knowledge. He knows perfectly well how he deludes himself, but that cannot change the past or offer much hope for the future. The affirmations we get, “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes”, are always tempered by the commitment failures that follow.
David surrenders each time only to retreat later. His assertions of a desire for normality are brilliantly false, paper-thin. “I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed.” Really what David wants is a state of innocence that he knows is impossible – a state of things, rather than the concreteness of the children or wife. “Watching”, “unquestioned” – he wants to be able to view his life without shame. But whoever wanted children or a wife rightly or truly only because of the image they would confer? There is also the implicit egotism of that longing – “my” is repeated three times in a single sentence. (Perhaps this also reflects a fear of Giovanni’s equality to him, a desire for control he cannot have with the man). In short, David’s failure to commit is as painful as Giovanni’s own tragedy. That second man, at least, cannot be faulted for his emotions or his earnestness.
Among the characters it is Hella, David’s fiancée, who has the most interesting trajectory, because it contrasts with all the others so clearly. She ends the novel, we learn at its beginning, on a ship back towards her own country. Like David, like all of the other characters, she is acting throughout, putting on a performance for the people around her. In her case, she has pretended to the bohemianism and libertarianism of Paris. Yet upon returning from Spain, she discovers that in reality “I’m not really the emancipated girl I try to be at all. I guess I just want a man to come home to me every night. I want to be able to sleep with a man without being afraid he’s going to knock me up. Hell, I want to be knocked up.” The characters that Giovanni’s Room destroys – David, Giovanni, Guillaume and Jacques – are all given desires that the world they live in will not tolerate seeing in the open. Only the woman, whose true wish (perhaps) is obliterating conventionality, is given the chance not only to know herself, but to be able to choose that life. None of the others, faced with an oppressive society and personal weakness, get anywhere close to this.
In all this and in the cyclicity of the story – with a narrator looking back upon a failed life and an ending returning us to the winter season that marked its beginning – Giovanni’s Room is profoundly pessimistic in temperament. There is no happy ending, of the sort that (admittedly) hurt Forster’s Maurice in my eyes. Instead, the forces to conform are triumphant. Yet by bringing us to face this desolation, the book instead serves that noble goal – that of illuminating all the more brightly the horror of the inauthentically lived life, and the terrible pressures to conform placed upon anyone whose desires or identity lie beyond the “normal” world. Giovanni’s Room is a wonderfully moral book, a profoundly serious one, and that is quite enough.