Thoughts on Books

This is a series of essays about books.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin was published in 1956.

Giovanni’s Room is arguably a study of human passion, but the words ‘humane’ and ‘compassion’ more readily spring to mind when thinking about it. It is suffused with a tenderness which makes it profoundly moving, and which is why, in my view, the suffering of the narrator, David, has such an effect upon the reader.

In this novel, much of which takes place in France, more than half the time the protagonists are not speaking their own language, or they are speaking to someone in English for whom English is not their mother tongue. In this essay, I wish to focus rather narrowly on David’s way of speaking, which actually allows us to access the novel’s wide breadth of emotion. The particularities of his speech are identified in his first meeting with Giovanni. We have the following exchange:

“‘You people dumped all this merde on us,’ I said, sullenly, ‘and now you say we’re barbaric because we stink.’ My sullenness delighted him. ‘You’re charming,’ he said, ‘do you always speak like this?’ ‘No,’ I said, and looked down, ‘almost never.’”

Indeed: David never speaks like that. His looking down is the gesture of shame (the emotional keynote of the novel) required for what he would consider to be an uncharacteristic outburst. Even here, when David swears he does it, tellingly, in French, allowing a language not his own to his do his dirty work for him. (Side note: the novel never uses the word gay or homosexual in English – but it does use the French word tapette – this is as close as we get to naming it).

David is never coarse, or vulgar; nor, even when he describes things plainly, could he be described as plain speaking. Rather his use of language is old fashioned and delicate. Certain identifiable mannerisms in his diction create this effect. Firstly, word choice: he often uses the somewhat archaic “for” as “because” (“for I do not like to be laughed at,” “for he was so exactly…”). He also uses “rather” instead of “quite” (it’s a “rather nice restaurant”) and employs the aristocratic “terribly” over “very” or “really” (“I was terribly aware”). Then there is the avoidance of contractions. He uses them in speech but in narration he often weighs out every syllable (“I could not be certain”, “I do not like to be laughed at”). The effect is quaint, rarefied – the idiom of someone much older – and we feel a world-weary nobility in it, a delicacy which makes the reader feel protective of him. It reflects a sensitivity towards his surroundings which distinguishes him in a world of hard-minded, fast-talking people. The specificities of his diction intersect with the novel’s examination of time, or rather history, because this is what characterises the divide between Europe, to which David has escaped, and America, where he was born. It is not merely a geographical distinction but a temporal one. When David and Giovanni first meet, the former notes that

 “You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by,” whereas New York is “very high and new and electric […] It’s very – twentieth century […] Everything is in such movement.” When they toast, Giovanni says “Vive l’amérique”; David responds “Vive le vieux continent”. David’s uncontracted clauses seem to signal that he has opted out of the fast pace associated with New York, and settled himself in the old world, where you have time for every syllable to announce itself.

The tics of David’s speech also tell us something much more profound about his character, about the dimensions of his suffering. His idiom conveys a struggle to accept himself which inhabits his verbs, his doings, his actions. Every “cannot”, every “do not” seems to remove him from the informal register in which people are at ease, where they are relaxed, and has him exist within another register, detached from reality. However, when David is speaking to a fellow American, be it Sue, Hella, or when writing to his father, when he employs levity and adopts a more playful tone, he appears to be his least truthful, the least himself. The letter to his father is particularly egregious, with its uncharacteristic, jocular imperatives. When he speaks to Sue he is unusually forward, blasé, snappy: “don’t you think discoveries are fun?” The novel has a tremendous amount of interiority; most exchanges in dialogue are bookended by David’s thoughts. Yet his interior style is this old-fashioned, faltering one, the one he uses he speaks to Giovanni. If it is put on for foreigners (sometimes we speak more slowly or use clearer words with people who may not understand us) then he treats the reader like a foreigner. Or (more likely) he has internalised so deeply his own estrangement, his own foreignness, that it inhabits his inner thoughts. His register, the register of the old world, to which he does not technically belong, is the one he has made his very own. The result is that we feel his desire to evade, and his shame, in every phrase. That his whole existence is mediated through dislocation, delicacy and euphemism is the summation of his condition. He is permanently attempting to hide what he and society considers to be monstrous sinfulness. His thoughts about his sexuality are coded with the infernal and the morbid. Describing his first sexual experience with a man, Joey’s body is “the black opening a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came”, and the memory of it “a decomposing corpse”. This horror is spatially figured in the prison of Giovanni’s room itself, which he eventually describes in conversation with Giovanni as “hideous”, an atypically blunt insult. Yet a refusal to speak crudely, to seek dignity in the veil of language, although arguably a denial, is also what invests the novel with its beauty and David with his compassion. He will not apply a crude lens, nor a contracted, peremptory register to someone who shares his condition, not least the person he loves: Giovanni. It suppresses him, but we can assume that in this logic it protects others against the squalor he associates with this condition, the “five dirty minutes in the dark” which seem to him, tragically, the only available option for same-sex love. This is his act of kindness – there in every word.