James Baldwin

1956

I went through a weird phase for a few months where I couldn't read anything. I had started reading this book but could not gather the attention span to actually dive into it. Flashforward to now, I finished it in two days because of how captivating it is. It's also a fairly short read, 169 pages, could even be finished in a day.

Placed in 1950s Paris, we follow a small portion of an American man's life, his name is David. The first chapter begins with David sitting alone in an apartment that he and his ex fiance, Hella, had gotten together in the South of France. He seems to be stuck in a whirlwind of memories remembering past lovers. The first lover that we learn about is called Joey, David recalls him from when he was young and expresses how meeting him had awoken something in him, something that he seemed to be afraid of and led him to act as if Joey was nothing special. He doesn't talk with regret but he speaks of him and their memories in a very melancholic way. We then learn of Giovanni. And to know Giovanni you know Hella.

Hella had travelled to Paris to pursue studying painting but eventually gave up. She ended up going to Spain when David proposed to her so she could get a clear evaluation of their relationship without the influence of a man. While she was away, David was trying to find a way to sustain his life since he no longer had any money to his name. He reaches out to a businessman and acquaintance, Jacques. Jacques was an older, gay man who offered to take David out to dinner where he gave him 10,000 francs, which was about 28 dollars in the 1950s. After dinner they went to Guillaume’s, a local gay bar. This is when a newly hired, Italian gentleman walks in, named Giovanni. Jacques had taken an interest in him and wanted David to invite him for a drink but this lit a spark between the American and the Italian, one that is undeniable but also unattainable. 

The reason I felt so captivated by this book is because of David. David is someone who considers himself to be heterosexual but contemplates loving the same sex, he finds love to be different with a man but he quickly diminishes that after he realizes he's taken part in an act that's not necessarily socially acceptable. You see examples of this all throughout the book but there's two quotes when he talks about Joey that I find to be perfectly written because this is what begins his life long secret temptation. The first is when he and Joey have their first physical encounter, “Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find” (pg.8). The following page he talks about how “Joey is a boy” (pg. 9), he soon expresses “I could have cried, cried for shame and terror, cried for not understanding how this could have happened to me, how this could have happened in me” (pg. 9). It seemed to be a love that was possibly too great that he had to destroy every element of it. Nevertheless, that hunger still lived in him. And he experiences a greater feeling with Giovanni that he pushes down until he learns of Giovanni's execution. During this time Hella has returned from Spain and they have left for the South of France, where his narration begins. As they both learn of the news, David becomes enraged with how the papers had made Giovanni out to look but his rage I don’t think is towards the papers but rather towards their last encounter. He had left Giovanni in a fragile state, broke and alone in the maids room that they once shared. He loved Giovanni more than he did Hella and even she knew that something was different but only David could not face the truth. The last line of the book shows us that no matter David tried to run from this part of himself, it was always there and it will always come back. He receives a letter informing him of Giovanni's execution date but rips up the paper in an attempt to move on. “Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me” (pg. 169). Everything about his book just captured the confused heart so well, I can only hope that one day David was able to see that the love he wanted and experienced was not wrong, it was him in the most vulnerable way.