Giovanni’s Room
I picked up Giovanni’s Room because I was minded to read some Baldwin whose name was the kind I’d often dishonestly cited in civil conversation – this is quite derivative of Baldwin, don’t you think? – oh yes, he’s my favourite French author – he’s American – what (and so and so). I was also feeling nostalgic for Paris.
I’d read the first page on a train some months ago between Amsterdam and Berlin and was struck immediately by his prose:
“I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same … At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her … It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.”
It helped that I only had to look up and down to see the scene play out on page and on stage. But, no less, it was obvious even from that initial paragraph that he had a talent for writing SOCIETY with all the letters spaced out, so you could look at each one naked, weird, and up-close. S O C I E T Y. It looks different with all those gaps, less powerful and more human-like, don’t you think? Baldwin lavishes in language but lacerates all pretence – especially his own. I added him immediately to my rolodex of talented writers.
But then a kind of laziness came upon me, intimidated by the intellectual stamina needed for reading a good book, especially one I worried would be wholly possessed of some man’s ruminations looking out the window of a tiny French apartment (I hadn’t made it past the opening page). I was not prepared to indulge such fiction – at least not while on holiday. I put it down.
Recently, however, I’ve developed a taste for reading in the park at lunch. I don’t sit on the grass, the lawn is chronically damp, and on a rare day when I find a park bench, the warm sun makes me dreamy and unfocused. The solution I’ve discovered is walking laps around the Hyde Park fountain while reading. The weirdness and highly observable nature of the act forces me to block everything out and focus on my reading. I read Proust’s The Fall in this manner and only tripped twice.
So, there I was, the unchallenging promise of a small book in hand (you have to emphasise how unchallenging something is to overcome your fear of it), and I was ready to pass the threshold of page 1. I began to turn about the fountain.
You should know, at this time I’d been seeing a boy and I was having the kinds of reactions you shouldn’t have after a week of knowing a boy, but the kinds you only get from a week of knowing a boy. It was creating in me a concern that I was skating down some large hill, and as freeing and exciting as it was (the closest feeling to flying many say), I had an impending anxiety that I was going to smash into a wall or maybe some invisible tree branch that would knock me winded and concussed to the ground. Every day he didn’t message me the street closed in further and my skate act became that more perilous. His monosyllabic texts added gravel to the path and occasionally sent me rolling bloody a metre or two down the hill, until I got back on my wheels, knees skinless, and kept skating. I couldn’t stop myself, I was losing control, even when the blood got in-between the wheels and made them extremely slick and quick, I wouldn’t give in. What if I could fly? I needed a hand to yank me – not to a stop, that seemed impossible – but just up and off this hill.
It was in this condition that I entered Giovanni’s Room.
Baldwin tells a love story, not exactly the kind I was experiencing, but certainly a bloody one. He writes with none of the safety or certainty common to the genre, but with every ounce of life-altering passion. He’s been on the hill. I do not wish to comment on the plot, characters, social commentary, the sophisticated treatment of desire, sexuality, shame etc etc, such things are for PHD students and high school classes, I only want to reflect on how it felt to sit in that world. Being in a Balwin novel is like sitting in an orchestra pit of thoughts, so creative, original and symphonic.
He described one French scene that I do not believe could be sketched in more realistic detail without including any detail of reality in it:
“Behind the counter sat one of those inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outraged and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountain-top. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash-register as though it were an egg … Though some are white-haired and some not, some fat, some thin, some grandmothers and some but lately virgins, they all have exactly the same shrewd, vacant, all-registering eye; it is difficult to believe that they ever cried for milk, or looked at the sun; it seems they must have come into the world hungry for banknotes, and squinting helplessly, unable to focus their eyes until they came to rest on a cash register.”
A mermaid on a mountain-top. Pencil, I need a pencil. I need to trace those words and keep them in my pocket. How glorious an image, so fitting and delightful. We know nothing of this woman in any police-sketch sense of the word – where did she fall on the fat, thin, old, virgin spectrum. But we know her in a truer sense.
His imagery only intensifies in its casual self-aware poetry, with scenes of love, sex and repression rendered with every pock mark, sweaty armpit, ugly thought and pathetically relatable need to touch someone and be touched. It was deeply unsettling how easily he could read people, and especially himself. How many of us can stare at our naked bodies in a mirror and write about what we thought we thought when we saw it?
He has something beyond a mind’s eye. It seems he does not soak up life, but lets it roll off his trenchcoat and gather into a puddle in his hand, a face reflecting back, until he drops it again and keeps walking. You can enter a Paris bar, and it has that manufactured art that could be captured pale and dull on camera, but in Baldwin’s hands is a shelter for his characters, hazy and textured with woven literal and figurative meaning. His work has a kind of fifth dimension quality, as sophisticated as it is difficult to achieve.
His book was a shelter for me, I was given space to sit in the room of his imagination and think about my own damning relationship with desire and love. It’s reassuring to know how little control any of us have over ourselves, and indeed this was why Baldwin wrote. In his words, “you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
I put my head up, I’d made at least nine different rotations of the fountain, moving through tour groups, wedding photos, children who slap the water, parents who fish out their little wet hands, teenagers in over-sized blazers, barristers in over-priced blazers, paralegals eating last-nights food in melted tupperware, and one man with 7/11 cup full of 50 cent coins. It might as well have been a heavy black curtain as I walked round.
I was pulled aside when I returned to my desk.
“What were you reading?” asked an associate. I laughed in shock that anyone might have observed what would have been considered in the early 20th century sanatorium-worthy.
“Oh just some Baldwin,” and I savoured that honest opportunity to invoke a great writer, “did you see me?’ How embarrassing.” You have to say such things, so you don’t seem insane.
“Yes, but it just made me curious about what you were reading.”
“Page 2 of Giovanni’s Room.”