WHEN James Baldwin presented a manuscript of Giovanni’s Room to his agent, Helen Strauss, she told him to burn it. It was his second novel. His first, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was a success with readers and critics. His editor at Knopf was eager for a 
second success by the young and talented “Negro writer.” But a novel set in Paris about the white American David who falls in love with an Italian named Giovanni was not the book they were expecting—or prepared to publish. Eventually, Dial Press published the book, and the critics praised it for its prose and its honesty. “Even as one is dismayed by Mr. Baldwin’s materials,” wrote New York Times critic Granville Hicks, “one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them.”
The plot is a simple one. David, living in the south of France, recounts his last year in Paris after his girlfriend Hella has left for several weeks in Spain. David meets Giovanni in the café life of the Left Bank, and the two fall in love, spending days and nights in Giovanni’s one-room basement apartment. This room, with its paradoxical meanings of protective isolation and prison, haunts the novel’s ending. When Hella returns to Paris, David resolves to build a life with her and leaves Giovanni, escaping without a word. David struggles with his decision, and eventually Hella learns the truth about his relationship with Giovanni. The novel ends with Hella leaving David to return to America, Giovanni executed for the murder of a wealthy gay man, and David alone in the South of France.
Perhaps calling Giovanni’s Room a gay novel is a misnomer. “It’s difficult to say when its love story became a gay love story,” wrote Christopher Bram in Eminent Outlaws. In many ways the novel elides its labels. Both David and Giovanni had sexual and emotional relationships with women and men. You could say the tragedy of the story fits with the plotlines of gay characters in much of mid-20th-century American fiction. But Giovanni’s Room has endured, I suspect, not because of how it fits into the era, but how it resisted such plots and definitions of gay love.
In an essay Baldwin wrote in 1949 for Zero magazine titled “Preservation of Innocence,” he boldly criticized portrayals of homosexuals in contemporary American fiction, most acutely in hard-boiled detective novels: “These novels are not concerned with homosexuality but with the ever present danger of sexual activity between men.” For Baldwin, a novel was meant to witness experiences beyond our definition and understanding of human behavior. Baldwin would harness these ideas in Giovanni’s Room. The novel becomes a kind of anti-narrative of homosexuality by making the complex struggle of homosexual desire the extended, self-conscious heart of the story. There is no happy ending. There is no transcendent heterosexual coupling in the aftermath of a homosexual threat that so often concluded such stories. Instead, Baldwin gives us the turmoil of a man longing to escape the definitions of sexual desires forbidden to him—and failing miserably. The novel’s poignancy lies in how it makes us witness this longing and struggle for ourselves.
The following essay was first published in the January-February 2010 issue. — JP
IN THE FALL OF 1951, the 27-year-old James Baldwin, seeking a quiet place to finish what would become his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, found himself in the Swiss village of Loèche-les Bains. Baldwin had been living in Paris since 1948, beginning an expatriate life that would continue for the next forty years. There in that mountain village, he was the only black man, and he realized quickly that he was in a place that had never actually seen a black man before. The spectacle of Baldwin’s presence, his experiences of being touched and insulted with familiar racist words tinged with French accents, formed the subject of his essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953). But the essay, in both its eloquence and anger, makes a much larger argument beyond the villagers’ actions. Baldwin uses his encounters as an occasion to ponder the whole history of Western white supremacy, arguing that “the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” It was precisely such dislocations from the Manhattan geographies that mapped the terrain of Baldwin’s literary imagination, where he often came to his profound insights about racism—and homophobia—in the U.S.
Baldwin’s fiction and nonfiction almost always focused on the U.S., but they were largely written outside of its borders. Giovanni’s Room, his second novel, is an exception. Set in 1950s Paris, the novel tells the story of the homosexual awakening of David, a young American separated from his girlfriend, who begins a relationship with an Italian, Giovanni. When his girlfriend returns to Paris, the affair with Giovanni ends as David sinks into a heterosexual performance while struggling with his desires for Giovanni. The novel has become a classic in the annals of gay and lesbian literature, even as it complicates the very definition of a stable sexual identity. Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, is set in Manhattan and explores interracial and bisexual relationships among a group of writers and musicians, most of whom come from outside the geographic, sexual, and racial boundaries of 1950s America. Begun in the late 1940s, it took Baldwin over ten years to finish the novel, bringing it to completion on the shores of the Bosporus in a small apartment in Istanbul. “Once you find yourself in another civilization,” he once said, “you are forced to examine your own.”
Baldwin was in many respects the first global American writer. He pulled together the threads of American history from its European traditions and African exploitations, and created stories that were deeply anchored to his own experiences in postwar America. In his self-imposed exile, he was given many labels during his lifetime: Negro, black, gay, queer, radical, pacifist, Northerner, race traitor, expatriate writer. He spent his career embracing the vicissitudes of being both outside and inside the many social identities that were foisted upon him. In the introduction to her fascinating 2009 book, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, Magdalena Zaborowska opened with a striking quote from the writer: “Perhaps only someone who is outside of the States realizes that it’s impossible to get out.” This idea echoes a similar one from “Stranger in the Village”: “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” These layered confinements of geography and history gave shape to Baldwin’s literary and political visions and marked his self-imposed exile as a crucial component of his creative work.
There has been much interest in Baldwin’s life and writings since his death in 1987, but his biographers have scarcely considered the influence of his expatriate life on his work. Herb Boyd’s Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin (2008) places him in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s as it’s played out in the neighborhood of Baldwin’s childhood, but gives little acknowledgment of Baldwin’s homosexuality. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), by the Scottish writer James Campbell, details Baldwin’s life through a reading of his fiction without dwelling on his life abroad. James Baldwin Now (1999), a collection of essays edited by Dwight A. McBride, focuses more on Baldwin’s sexual orientation, with a few essays focused on his transatlantic migrations.
Baldwin’s Turkish Decade situates Baldwin within a complicated constellation of sexual, racial, and national identities, and offers a subtle analysis of Baldwin that moves beyond simple classifications. “This project,” Zaborowska writes, “attempts to bring the conflicting and often contradictory depictions of Baldwin’s person and writings together.” To see Baldwin in Turkey, a country layered with complex histories and divided between Europe and Asia, is, as Zaborowska suggests, to see Baldwin anew.
Like Baldwin himself, this book defies easy classification. Part travel memoir, part literary analysis, part biography, and part social history of Turkey in the 1960s, the book explores the ways in which Baldwin “functioned as a transatlantic black intellectual,” how the city influenced his work, and how he came to affect the cultural and intellectual life of Istanbul. The book is organized around three significant works that Baldwin accomplished during his time in Istanbul: the completion of his novel Another Country, a book which, according to Zaborowska, should be reconsidered as “a record of sorts of Baldwin’s contacts with the new places, peoples, and cultures of Turkey”; his directing and staging of John Herbert’s controversial play Fortune in Men’s Eyes, about homosexuality in prison; and his work on a collection of essays, No Name on the Street, which reflect on the Civil Rights Movement and, according to Zaborowska, offer “a careful analysis of black masculinity in relationship to homophobia on both sides of the color line.” Within each part of the book, she weaves the analysis of Baldwin’s writings in with her interviews of the writers, journalists, artists, diplomats, and family members who populated Baldwin’s life in Turkey.
Baldwin was shaped by the city and its people, to be sure, but they in turn were shaped by his works. For example, when Baldwin took on the project to direct and stage Herbert’s play, which was translated as “Düsenin Dostu” or “Friend of the Fallen,” it was a radical move. “The play was a success because it was a revolutionary play for the Turkish audience … this was the first time that homosexuality was vividly being shown [in the theater],” says one of Zaborowska’s interviewees.
Zaborowska organizes the book around a short film made by Turkish director, photographer, and friend of Baldwin, Sedat Pakay. Entitled “James Baldwin: From Another Place,” the film captures Baldwin’s movements through the city streets and markets over a three-day period in 1970. In one interview, Baldwin says: “Watching people on the streets of Turkey and dealing with some of the people who I know here, one’s aware of the certain kind of uneasiness in them, in relation to the western world, a certain angle (anger?) to their relationship to it. Which echoes something in me … because of our own peculiar relationship to the west.” The film and Baldwin’s words thread throughout the book as a metaphor for a new way of visualizing and understanding his writings. This is particularly true in Zaborowska rereading of Another Country as a novel not only about New York but deeply shaped by a hybrid outlook of “East-West urban imaginary.”
The one problem I have with Zaborowska’s study is her casual use of the terms “gay” and “queer”—terms that hold particular meanings today that they didn’t have in the 1960s. Zaborowska notes that “while Baldwin championed erotic liberation since the 1940s” he “resisted the term ‘gay’” even in the later years of his life. While Zaborowska doesn’t explore this resistance, it raises a vexing conundrum about how to frame Baldwin’s life in a study that so astutely places him as an outsider to the national idioms of race and sexuality. In the end, the book demonstrates that any account of Baldwin’s life and writings is itself constantly “trapped in history,” searching and stumbling for the very terms of sexual identity that Baldwin so often rejected.
Zaborowska’s book will make you want to reread Another Country and his later works with a new context of understanding. The book illuminates, with a scholar’s focus and a writer’s nuance, how Baldwin’s exile in Istanbul was not simply a theme or escape from the racism and homophobia of the U.S., but also a deeply felt condition crucial to his intellectual and creative imagination. Indeed, the book reminds us that some of the most poignant and insightful writings about sexuality and race in the canon of American literature were composed well beyond our shores.
James Polchin teaches writing at New York University and is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
