James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" and the Biblical Myth of David
Author(s): Raymond-Jean Frontain
Source: CEA Critic , WINTER 1995, Vol. 57, No. 2 (WINTER 1995), pp. 41-58
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44378258
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James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room
and the Biblical Myth of David
Raymond-Jean Frontain
IN STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE, D. H. LAWRENCE
praises Walt Whitman's "way to Allness . . . through endless sympathy,
merging." Lawrence notes that in Calamus Whitman "sings of the mystery
of manly love, the love of comrades. Over and over he says the same thing:
the new world will be built on the love of comrades, the new great dynamic
of life will be manly love. Out of this manly love will come the inspiration
for the future." For Lawrence, however, the ultimate act of merging "is on
the brink of death" - specifically, he notes, the death of Jonathan, whose
"manly love" for his "comrade" David and subsequent death in battle are
recounted in the biblical Books of Samuel, along with David's powerful
elegy for his friend:
David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan.
It always slides into death.
The death of comrades.
Merging. (159-60)
For Lawrence, a transcendent "merging" or fully realized "manly love"
could be complete only after the death of one member of the relationship as, for example, Rupert Birkin comes sadly to understand upon the death
of Gerald Crich in Women in Love. Lawrence's reliance on the biblical myth
of David and Jonathan to make this point, however, may illuminate an
essential, but heretofore unnoticed,1 part of the dynamic of James Baldwin's
Giovanni's Room (1956). For, by naming the protagonist of the novel David
and the young lover whose loss he laments Giovanni (which is Italian for
Jonathan), Baldwin signals to the reader his intention to offer in Giovanni's
Room a meditation on the conditions of a modern love "passing the love
of women" (2 Sam. 1.26), as the Bible describes the love of David for
Jonathan. Intrigued by the possibility of a drama of unequal affection
suggested by the Bible's statement that Jonathan loved David "as his own
soul" (1 Sam. 18.1) without any specific mention of David's reciprocating
that love, Baldwin makes Giovanni the more committed and passionate
partner. The effect is to intensify the elegiac character of the relationship:
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Raymond-Jean Frontain
David, resisting the redemptive dynamic of Whitmanesque "manly love"
and consequently unable to "merge" with a living Jonathan-Giovanni,
understands the power of Giovanni's love only after irrevocably losing him.
Indeed, the greatest innovation that Baldwin extrapolates from the biblical
model is to expand biblical David's elegy for Jonathan (2 Sam. I)2 into the
stuff of the entire novel: Giovanni's Room , David's soliloquy on the eve of
Giovanni's execution, is an extended elegy.
As Lawrence's practice might suggest, Baldwin is not alone in using the
biblical David myth as a vehicle for exploring modern homosexual or
homoerotic relations.3 Few writers, however, have used the story as
consistently as Baldwin - references to the love of biblical David and
Jonathan forming a persistent theme in Baldwin's fiction and demonstrating (so consistently that they might almost seem intended to substantiate
Lawrence's insight) that "the merging of man-for-man love [can occur
only] ... on the brink of death." I suspect that this merging in death was
the most appealing aspect of the biblical story for Baldwin who, like
Lawrence, experienced inner conflict about his own homosexual or bi-
sexual tendencies. The myth of David would have offered Baldwin biblical
sanction for the expression of homosexual desire, but by delaying "merging" until "the brink of death" it postponed consummation, as it were, until
sexual guilt could be displaced by a guilt of a very different sort - that over
loss of the beloved. Only when the full reach of Baldwin's biblical analogue
has been mapped will the depth of his meditation on the biblical text
become clear, and the full power of the homosexual "love elegies" embedded in his other novels become apparent.
I. The Inequality of Passion
The narrator of the First Book of Samuel emphasizes the special
relationship between Jonathan - the son of King Saul - and David - the
harp-playing shepherd-turned-soldier and fugitive who is described as
"ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to" (1
Sam. 16.12). "The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David," the
narrator records, "and Jonathan loved him as his own soul" (1 Sam. 18.1).
Later, when Saul's murderous jealousy causes his young rival David to flee
the court, the two friends suffer a poignant parting at which "they kissed
one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded" (1 Sam.
20.41). Jonathan's death alongside his father in battle with the Philistines
occasions from David this powerful lament:
The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high places; how are the
mighty fallen!
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Critic 57.2
I am very distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very
pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love was wonderful,
passing the love of women. (2 Sam. 1.19-26)
Baldwin found in the David story - unparalleled in the Bible for its
depiction of male love so lavish that it becomes "excessive" (to adapt the
telling word employed by the King James translator) - the invitation to
explore complex emotional and psychological relationships that the Samuel
redactor so suggestively, but only inconclusively, develops. Baldwin waits
until the end of his novel, however, to reveal the reason Giovanni should
love David "as his own soul." Giovanni suffered a spiritual crisis when,
enraged that his young wife was delivered of a stillborn infant, he cursed
the God who would permit such a blasphemy against the sacrament of life
to occur and took down from the wall the crucifix containing the image of
God's own "stillborn" son, spat on it, and threw it to the floor. Within the
Henry Jamesian scheme of values that Horace Porter has shown operates
within the novel, Giovanni had thus already suffered a "loss of innocence"
when he left his small Italian village the next day, which he remembers as
"the day of my death" (204-5). 4
Consequently, when Giovanni meets David in Paris shortly thereafter,
he is still consumed by grief and feels his life is accursed. Only hours after
meeting the handsome American, however, Giovanni flirtatiously admits
to David that "I have . . .just found out that I want to live" (72). Giovanni's
delight in David is immediate. When introducing David to the members of
his former set early that first morning, "something is burning in his eyes
and it lights up all his face" (77). "It is joy and pride," the narrator
observes - presumably joy and pride in his new friend David. Even David
cannot help but notice Giovanni's new-found animation: "You look like a
kid about five years old waking up on Christmas morning," he comments
(86). Because of David, Giovanni experiences an awakening from the
somnambulistic state to which his grief and apostasy had reduced him.
Unfortunately, however, David does not understand until later the significance of Giovanni's investing in him the possibility of escaping from the
accursed life symbolized by Giovanni's prisonlike room with its naked light
bulb dangling from the ceiling:
Under this blunted arrow, this smashed flower of lightf,] lay the
terrors which encompassed Giovanni's soul. I understood why
Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat.
I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better
life. (127)
David and his love are the only things that stand "between [Giovanni] . . .
and the dark" of his grief and despair (128). Small wonder that, in the
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Raymond- Jean Frontain
words of Baldwin's biblical model, Giovanni should love David "as his own
soul." His faith destroyed by the death of his child, Giovanni comes to
depend on David as his reason to live almost immediately upon meeting
him.
II. Passing the Love of Women
Curiously, Baldwin offers no explanation as to why Giovanni's wife
whom he claims to have loved very much - should not have proved mor
of a comfort to him. Giovanni's despair of a righteous and loving God,
however, is figured both by his leaving the innocent Eden of sunny, joy
filled Italy for colder and more dour Paris and by his renouncing - for th
foreseeable future, at least - the love of women. "'I don't seem to be very
interested in women right now,"' he tells David with a shrug. "'I don't kno
why. I used to be. Perhaps I will be again'" (115).
When he meets Giovanni in Paris, David likewise has had little reason
to trust in heterosexual relations. The women of David's earliest memories
are threatening, not affectionate, presences. His mother, who died when
David was just a child, became a nightmarish figure for him (15); her
photograph enshrined in the family's living room betrays "a strength as
various as it was unyielding and . . . dangerous because it was so entirely
unexpected" (18). The aunt who moved in to care for David and his father
is remembered as being brittle and shrill; it seemed to young David "that
she was always carrying a great bag full of dangerous looking knitting
needles" ( 1 7). At parties, with her mouth painted "redder than any blood"
and her voice "going on and on like a razor blade on glass," she stood
grasping her cocktail glass so tightly that it "threatened,] ... at any instant,
to be reduced to splinters" (18). Nowhere else does Baldwin present a
woman as the Freudian vagina dentata - the seductive figure who eventually drains the male of happiness and betrays him into sterility; indeed, as
Trudier Harris has shown, Baldwin generally creates powerful, nurturing
women. Yet it appears in keeping with the novel's early images that
Giovanni later swears off women completely, condemning them for what
seems an abstract or purely theoretical treacherousness (115-16).
In attempting to create a modern love "passing the love of women,"
Baldwin seems to be protesting the particularly escapist quality of postwar
American heterosexual relations popularized by the media.5 The stereotype that neither David nor Giovanni can find satisfying is figured by the
paper that Giovanni strips from the wall of his room, with its mocking
pattern of "a lady in a hoop skirt and a man in knee breeches perpetually
walkfing] together, hemmed in by roses" (124) - that is, a relationship of
protracted innocence, unreal in its archaic gentility, its asexuality, and its
obliviousness to pain. And this, despite the evidence of their own painful
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Critic 57.2
experience, is the "ideal" of marriage that too many heterosexual couples
in the novel self-deludingly adhere to. David's father, for example, writes
in a cheery tone of male bluster to encourage David to return home, marry,
and settle down (131-33). He is blind to the impression made on his young
son by the tragic nature of his own first marriage and the period of drunken
womanizing that preceded his remarriage to a woman who remains
nameless and faceless in the novel. Likewise, ignoring the loss of two sons
in the war and the rareness of her surviving son's visits, David's landlady
in the south of France advises him to "go and find yourself another woman,
a good woman, and get married, and have babies" (100) as the cure for his
depression after Hella has left him. And the landlady is not alone in her
inability to recognize the contradiction implicit in her personal circumstances. All of the women in the village seem "to have gone into mourning
directly [after] the last child moved out of childhood," and the men seem
more like sons than husbands; after the war they had "come home ... to
rest and be scolded and wait for death, home to those breasts, now dry,
which had nourished them in their beginnings" (96-97). Emotionally
stunted, their lives curiously static, the married couples in the novel mouth
platitudes that betray the very sadness of their condition.
But perhaps the most telling indictment of what Baldwin sees modern
"love of women" to be is the scene that David witnesses at a crucial moment
in his relationship with Hella. David studies the tourist couples that
surround him at the American Express office in Paris as he waits in line for
his mail. Like their rural French counterparts, David's compatriots appear
to him to have been frozen in an unseemly innocence:
[T]he men . . . seemed incapable of age; they smelled of soap,
which seemed indeed to be their preservative against the
dangers and exigencies of any more intimate odor; the boy he
had been shone, somehow, unsoiled, untouched, unchanged,
through the eyes of the man of sixty, booking passage, with his
smiling wife, to Rome. His wife might have been his mother,
forcing more oatmeal down his throat, and Rome might have
been the movie she had promised to allow him to see. Yet I also
suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and
perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces,
these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both
unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of
the disconnected. (130)
Like the figures in the pattern of Giovanni's wallpaper, these couples
attempt to walk in an eternal rose garden and remain oblivious to what
Giovanni calls "the stink of love" (207) - that is, the imperfect but perfectly
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human aspects of any interpersonal relationship. Such couples may preserve their innocence by refusing to acknowledge the sorrow at the heart
of all human relationships, but they do so at the expense of their relations
as men and women, as husbands and wives, and, most especially, as lovers.
"Disconnected," they are reduced to living out that most innocent and
asexual of relations - the one that exists between a mother and her child.
Yet, curiously, they are unable to recognize their unhappiness: Given the
chance, the couples at the American Express office would probably goodnaturedly encourage David to marry and have children, much as his father
and landlady do, blind to the ridiculousness of the examples that they
themselves offer.
Can there be any hope, then, for David and Hella's relationship when
each is cognizant enough to resent being betrayed by the sexual role that
he or she feels forced to play? Resenting the social reality that as a female
she is allowed no identity outside marriage, Hella initially resists Davidi
proposal. "'It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross,
unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself,'" she explains with
reluctance when pressed. She is very shrewd in analyzing the condition of
all the long-married couples that appear in the novel:
"For a woman ... I think a man is always a stranger. And there's
something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger. . . .
[M]en may be at the mercy of women - I think men like that
idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular man is
ever at the mercy of a particular woman - why, he's somehow
stopped being a man. And the lady, then, is more neatly trapped
than ever." (183-84)
For their relationship to succeed, David and Hella would have to balance
very carefully the joy of connection (to reverse the phrase that David uses
in describing the couples at the American Express office) and their mutual
fear of being "trapped" - something that they prove equally unable to do,
and for much the same reason.
For, despite her reservations, the isolation that comes with maintaining
her independence proves too much for Hella. Socially, she is unable to feel
she's a woman unless her femininity is validated by a relationship with a
man. Returning from her solitary travel through Spain, she carefully
broaches the topic with David:
"You know, 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
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Critic 57.2
knock me up. Hell, I want to be knocked up. I want to start
having babies. In a way, it's really all I'm good for." (180)
It is finally easier to submit to an unshaven stranger and play the socially
well-defined role of "the little woman" (181) than it is to struggle to
maintain her own identity in a world that is cold and dark and that offers
little comfort. Hella's claim that having babies is "really all I'm good for"
is a frightening admission of self-defeat - a denial of the bright, spirited,
independent person she could be, which not only leads to her great
personal unhappiness but also precipitates, in part, the larger tragedy that
follows.
David, likewise, is betrayed by his attempt to don the mask of conventional heterosexuality. Initially relieved to find in Hella "the possibility of
licit surrender" (175), David shortly begins to fear being trapped in the
relationship, confessing that during their lovemaking "when I entered her
I began to feel that I would never get out alive" (232). Here, Baldwin's
perhaps overly obvious psychologizing figures as castration anxiety; David's
loss of identity when "surrendering" to the demands of the "licit" while
playing the socially acceptable part. Later, haunted by the knowledge that
his abandonment of Giovanni has driven his ex-lover to kill Guillaume,
David suddenly disappears for several days. Eventually discovering him in
a gay bar in Nice, Hella bitterly accepts part of the blame for the break-up
of their own relationship, even while accusing David of not abiding by the
socially inculcated rules of gender behavior:
"I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time
you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only
you had told me the truth then. Don't you see how unjust it was
to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me ? I had
the ńght to expect to hear from you - women are always waiting
for the man to speak. Or hadn't you heard?" (241)
Playing socially prescribed roles has undone their relationship when,
ironically, they undertook to play those roles only because each was
frightened of the sorrow they would have to confront daily if they lived
alone. What they don't understand is that the same social conventions that
make heterosexual surrender "licit" are the ones that risk destroying
individuality. The dissolution of David's relationship with Hella is anticipated by his afternoon contretemps with Sue, an American student whom
he propositions in the street one day when he is feeling claustrophobic
about his life with Giovanni. David and Sue engage in this mistrustful and
entirely mechanical coupling because he wishes to assert his masculinity,
and initially she feels more feminine even though it's only a token
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Raymond-Jean Frontain
expression of male interest in her. Consequently, their mechanical roleplaying makes the encounter a guilt-ridden rather than a joyous act.
Similarly, David and Hella become exactly what they have feared most.
After tracking him down, Hella looks at David's unkempt reflection in the
bar mirror and sees the unshaven stranger at whose mercy she had hoped
never to be placed; and David, who has used Hella to assert the manhood
he feared he'd lost in his realtionship with Giovanni, is forced to accept how
powerful his homosexual feelings are. Hella angrily returns to America and
the bourgeois existence she had tried to escape by coming to Europe,
leaving David to stare drunkenly at his reflection in the darkened window
pane, waiting for morning to release him from his solitude. Both are alone.
III. David's Lament
Heterosexual relations seem socially fated to fail in Giovanni's Roo
Whatever circumstances in Baldwin's private life during the mid-195
prevented him from imagining the success of heterosexual love (a poin
which I return later), he is very close to his biblical model in this regard, f
the narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel fails to suggest that biblical David is at
time happy in his "love of women." His marriage to Jonathan's si
Michal (preceded by the procurement of the Philistine foreskins her fa
had asked for as dowry) is later abrogated by King Saul, who then gives
to another man; Michal is later rendered barren by the Lord after moc
David for his exuberance in dancing naked before the Ark. Abiga
marriage to David follows her husband Nabal's fatal stroke, suffered a
he learns of her extraordinary generosity toward the handsome outl
She is, in my opinion, the most interesting of David's wives, but she fa
into narrative darkness after this brief moment in the spotlight. Da
adulterous and murderous relationship with Bathsheba is punished
plicitly by the death of their first child and implicitly by the rape, homic
revenge, and political rebellion that his other children wreak on him a
on each other. It is only in his relationship with Jonathan, the biblic
narrative suggests, that David knows sustained happiness in love.
Thus, if Baldwin succeeds in demonstrating why Jonathan-Giovan
should be the more committed of the two lovers, his re-creation of bib
David's character and circumstances proves even more astute. Bibl
David lapses into a curious emotional void after becoming king upon
deaths of Saul and Jonathan. He acts aggressively to satisfy his lust f
Bathsheba and to disguise her inconvenient pregnancy but stands
helplessly as his children rape and murder each other - vicious testam
to their inheritance of David's own worst qualities. The reader's final im
of King David, in the opening chapters of 1 Kings, is that of an impot
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Critic 57.2
old man suffering from old age, kept warm by the virgin Abishag, and
traduced by Nathan and Bathsheba's plot to ensure that the crown passes
to her son, Solomon. Thus, after ascending the throne, biblical David
gradually loses the very energy and vibrancy that made him a hero in 1
Samuel. He becomes the increasingly passive victim of his own pathetic
appetites, as well as of the machinations of others. Baldwin provocatively
suggests that biblical David's failure to return Jonathan's love is the reason
for this emotional and spiritual decline.
From the start of their relationship, Giovanni holds out to David love's
promise of revitalization. "'In Italy we are friendly, we dance and sing and
make love,"' Giovanni tells David during their initial encounter in
Guillaume's bar (53). And it is the friendly, generous, uninhibited (indeed,
to recall that telling biblical description, excessive) joy in love that David
experiences, for the first time in his life, with Giovanni. Giovanni quickly
sees past the heterosexual swagger that David affects when asserting his
sexual normalcy. Embarrassed by his financial dependence on Jacques,
David tries to shrug off the implications of that relationship. Giovanni's
response launches their own incipient relationship onto a new plane:
"Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life
had ever looked at me directly before" (54). David not only is known
directly and honestly for the first time in his adult life but also is accepted
for even those weaknesses he cannot accept in himself. The only word that
David can use to describe the effect of Giovanni's love on him is "awaken-
ing" (63) - the awakening of his long-suppressed, true self. Reluctant to
describe too explicitly David and Giovanni's celebration of love's rites,
Baldwin parallels the awakening of their love with the physical pleasure of
Paris in budding spring (1 10-12).
However, in translating to modern times the biblical love "passing the
love of women," Baldwin must accommodate the homosexual self-doubt
that David Bergman calls "internalized homophobia" (166). Baldwin's
Giovanni is not killed on the battlefield, as biblical Jonathan was; it is
David's inability to accept Giovanni's love that precipitates Giovanni's
tragic death. Just as David's afternoon sport with Sue anticipates the
breakdown of his relationship with Hella, David's abandonment of Giovanni
is prefigured by his childhood relationship with a boy named Joey, whom
David cruelly abandons after one night of loving bliss because he is afraid
of "the power and the promise and the mystery" of the other boy's body
(12). Middle-aged Jacques passionately entreats David not to dismiss
Giovanni similarly:
"Love him," said Jacques, with vehemence, "love him and let
him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really
matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both
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men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure
you, only five minutes, and most of that, helasi in the dark. And
if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty - they will
be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising
your flesh and his. But you can make your time together
anything but dirty, you can give each other something which
will make both of you better - forever - if you will not be
ashamed, if you will only not play it safe." (206)6
David, however, is unable to tolerate what Giovanni calls the "stink" of love:
"You do not," cried Giovanni . . . , "love anyone! You never have
loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity,
you love your mirror - you are just like a little virgin, you walk
around with your hands in front of you as though you had some
precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there
between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will
never let anybody touch it - man or woman. You want to be clean .
You think you came here [to Giovanni's room] covered with
soap and you think you will go out covered with soap- and you
do not want to stink, not even for five minutes in the meantime."
(206-7)
David proves unable to break with the expectation that love should be the
pleasant, sweet-smelling rose garden promised by Giovanni's wallpaper.
Although David asks the troubled question, "What kind of life can two men
have together, anyway?" (208), Baldwin insisted in later life that the novel
is finally not about homosexuality at all; "it's about what happens to you
when you're afraid to love anybody" (qtd. in Troupe 176). The problem
with this late authorial disclaimer is that the novel makes clear that David
has a real chance of happiness with Giovanni, something that he never has
with Helia. Love passing the love of women could work if David were not
so frightened of falling "out of the web of safety" (152).
In finally refusing to love Giovanni and to stand between him and the
darkness that threatens to engulf him, David paradoxically casts himself
into that same troubled and defenseless state. As I noted earlier, the novel
is David's soliloquy on the eve of Giovanni's execution; the night's darkness
presses against the plate-glass window in which David watches himself as
he reviews the events that make up the novel. In fleeing Giovanni, David
does not escape him but paradoxically confirms the other man's power
over him (212). Even as he turns to leave Giovanni's room after insisting
on separating from him, David is painfully conscious that "[o]ne day I'll
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Critic 57.2
weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry" (212-13). And, like his
biblical prototype, David can only lament:
Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to
rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face
will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact
timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my
ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in
the days which are coming - God grant me the grace to live
them: in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids
raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep,
facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the
smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night [when they
first met], so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy
tunnel trapped around his head. (63)
The entire novel, then, is an elegy - David's recollections as he stands
at the window during the night that, he says, "is leading me to the most
terrible morning of my life" (3). Morning, of course, homonymically
suggests "mourning"; the novel is one sustained cry of grief at the
happiness he has lost in withholding his love from the one person so
completely deserving of it. David understands that, like his biblical
prototype's, his remaining life will prove empty and meaningless. His is a
modern grief worthy of being published from the ancient mountains of
Gilboa: "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. ... I am
distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been
unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" (2 Sam.
1.19, 26).
IV. Conclusion: Baldwin's Homosexual Elegies
In the brief autobiographical essay prefacing the published vers
The Amen Corner (1968), Baldwin speaks of a lesson that in early adu
he "most bitterly needed to know - i.e., that love and compassion,
always arrive in such unexpected packages, have nothing to do wit
color of anybody's skin" (xii). Nor, as he demonstrates in Giovanni's
do they have anything to do with the gender of the beloved. David'
of the kind of life that two men could have together is answered in the
by Jacques: Loving Giovanni is finally all that matters. David learn
hard way how sound Jacques's advice is.
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Raymond-Jean Frontain
But David must learn something else as well. As Pastor Margaret comes
to realize in The Amen Corner , "It's an awful thing to think about, the way
love never dies!" (81). This, I suspect, is the truth that David is left to
confront after the death of Giovanni - and what Baldwin means to suggest
by David's anticipation of a miserably bleak future. In David's case,
however, such knowledge is worse than even Pastor Margaret imagines, for
David is left to think about the death of a beloved caused by his own fear of
loving and being loved.
The grief one man feels at the loss of another man, a man he has
imperfectly loved or was acutely afraid to love, forms the nexus of several
of Baldwin's most moving fictions. A great deal of the power of these works
derives, as in the case of Giovanni's Room , from their elegiac character.
And, as with Giovanni's Room , the basis of these similar relationships is, I
believe, the biblical narrative of David's loss of Jonathan.
Consider, first, the short story "The Outing" (1965), in which young
Johnnie and David go on a picnic with other members of their church.
During the picnic, Johnnie "discovers" not Jesus, as members of the church
had been praying he might, but David (5 1 ). Similar to the biblical Jonathan,
the oldest son of King Saul, Johnnie is the son of a church deacon, and he
suffers from constantly being reminded of his position in the community.
Like Saul, Johnnie's father is frustrated to find that the spirit has passed
from him: He is not called upon to preach at the picnic service. The story
poignantly parallels the sexual self-discovery that Johnnie is on the verge of
making with the spiritual self-discovery that the church "saints" seek to
encourage in the younger members of the congregation during this outing.
The final image in the story is that of the two boys sitting together on the
deck of the boat bringing the congregation back to the city that night:
After a moment Johnnie moved and put his head on David's
shoulder. David put his arms around him. But now where there
had been peace there was only panic and where there had been
safety, danger, like a flower, opened. (57)
The story only intimates that the panic and danger that have suddenly
emerged in their relationship are sexual in nature; the reader can only
wonder if this David, like the David who abandoned Joey in Giovanni's
Room , will abandon the trusting younger boy who is last seen, quite literally,
"depending" on him.
Johnnie of "The Outing" repeats protagonist John Grimes's presumably unrequited attraction to the handsome, athletic Elisha, a young
deacon, in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) - the first of Baldwin's many
novel-length developments of this paradigm relationship. In the novels
following Giovanni's Room , emphasis shifts to the male lover's sense of loss
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Critic 57.2
after the failure of the relationship as one male figure is left to lament the
death - whether literal or symbolic - of a brother figure whom he regrets
not having loved more fully and completely. Leo Proudhammer is grateful
to have been of sexual comfort to his older brother, Caleb, in Tell Me How
Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) but as an adult must live alienated from
him after Caleb - sexually and racially humiliated while in prison - turns
militantly religious. Hall Montana, on the other hand, ponders the circumstances of his homosexual brother Arthur's death in Just above My Head
(1979), a novel whose form repeats the elegiac soliloquization of Giovanni's
Room ? And, like David in Giovanni's Room , Arthur resists giving himself to
his younger male lover, dying suggestively of a heart attack; he too fears the
"contamination" of love. In Another Country (1962), however, Vivaldo is
given, with Eric, a second chance to experience male love, even though he
is certain that his refusal to love Rufus led, in part, to the musician's suicide.
But if the pattern of loss and regret is clear, it is much more difficult to
establish the reason Baldwin returned to this elegiac mode so frequently.
Bergman has written eloquently on the particular "agony" of mid-century
American black gay writers. Drawing on the work of sociologist Max C.
Smith, Bergman concludes that it is difficult enough to sustain a healthy
sense of self in a society in which one is regularly addressed as "boy," and
it is well nigh impossible to face being called "faggot" as well. This seems
supported by the fact that records of Baldwin's sexual life are blank strangely so for a writer of his extraordinary visibility, and for one who
wrote so eloquently about his personal experience in many other areas and
who spoke freely and regularly about himself in public forums. With the
exception of a single, casual photograph of Baldwin and Lucien
Happersberger that appears in James Campbell's biography, neither W.J.
Weatherby nor Campbell, for example, documents any of Baldwin's love
relationships, although Weatherby alludes to Baldwin's seemingly innumerable male sexual partners (293-94). 8 Even Baldwin's relationship with
Happersberger - the friend who rescued him in Paris when his spirits were
at their lowest and brought him to the Swiss village where Baldwin
completed Go Tell It on the Mountain', who remained Baldwin's lifelong
confidant and business advisor and served as one of the executors of
Baldwin's will; and the man to whom Giovanni's Room is dedicated - is
maddeningly imprecise. (I suspect, for example, that Happersberger is th
original of Guy Lazar, the Frenchman in Just above My Head who introduces
Arthur Montana to adult sexual pleasure.) It is almost as though eve
reference to Baldwin's romantic or sexual life has been erased.
Thus, there is no definitive biographical explanation of why, during the
period in which he wrote Giovanni's Room, Baldwin polarized heterosexual
and homosexual relations so dramatically, presenting the former as socially licit but suffocating in their mediocrity, and the latter as enlivening
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Raymond-Jean Frontain
and redemptive but socially suffocating. The reader can only accept this as
part of the novel's worldview. And I suspect that in addition to its
neglecting the racial themes that his readers had come to expect - and to
the homosexual content that many mainstream American readers in the
1990s still find as difficult to accept as did Baldwin's original readers in
1956 (see Emmanuel S. Nelson) - one of the reasons Giovanni's Room
remains possibly the least discussed of Baldwin's novels is its inability to
imagine a successful love relationship of any kind. Baldwin is one of the
great modern poets of human redemption, but Giovanni's Room is the
record of love's inability to redeem.
If the novel fails - and to a certain extent I believe it does - it is because
Baldwin presents David and Giovanni's relationship as a diptych (before
and after) rather than as a more psychologically persuasive triptych
(before, during , and after). The reader sees very little of the two men in love;
David has only moved in with Giovanni when the novel anticipates how he
will leave (112). In his next novel, Another Country, Baldwin astutely
parallels Vivaldo - who, like David, is indirectly responsible for the death
of a man whom he could not bring himself freely to love - with Eric, whose
joy-filled reunion with Yves creates that novel's final triumphant image.
Significantly, it is only in his final novel, Just above My Head, that Baldwin
dares explicitly describe a male sex scene of mutual enjoyment: Arthur's
discovery of the joys of oral sex in his boarding house room with fellow
musician Crunch (203-9). This is one of the most powerful scenes in a
highly uneven novel, one that momentarily rises to the level of poetry that
readers came to expect early on from Baldwin's prose. It is as though
Baldwin could make explicit, public acknowledgement of the possibility of
one man's sexual happiness with another man only shortly before his own
death.9
Speculation on a writer's inner life, even in as general a fashion as this -
and especially on that of an individual as complex and conflicted as
Baldwin - inevitably fails. I cannot refrain from wondering, however,
whether Baldwin, who clearly identified personally with biblical David,10
did not prove by his own life, as well as in his fiction, the truth of Lawrence's
insight into the biblical story: Merging between men comes, finally, only in
death - the biblical story of David and Jonathan proving to be the great
tragic archetype for love between males.
Notes
'Curiously, although Baldwin criticism accepts as a given the biblical ethos inherent in
the language and narrative circumstances of Baldwin's work, it has almost entirely ignored
the operations of the David-Jonathan analogue that controls Giovanni's Room. The exceptions are Claude Summers (192) and David Bergman (171), each of whom cites the name
parallels but in the context of an argument that does not permit consideration of their
larger significance. Georges-Michel Sarotte (54-60) skirts but does not pursue the identifi-
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Critic 57.2
cation when he parallels the relationship of David and Giovanni with that of David and
Johnnie in "The Outing."
2David's lament for Jonathan is, historically, one of the most influential lyric models for
the expression of grief at the death of a male beloved: Neither Herakles at the death of Hylas
nor Akhilleus at the loss of Patroklos issues so eloquent or loving a poetic lament. On the
influence of the elegy, see Raymond-Jean Frontain, "Bible."
'Lawrence's own "alternative search for satisfying relationships between men," observes biographer Jeffrey Meyers, is "modeled on the biblical friendship of David and
Jonathan" (207); the covenant established by the two biblical characters came to represent
for Lawrence a bond that infuses physical relations with mystical meaning (207-10).
References to the biblical story abound in his fiction, from the echo of biblical David's lament
for Jonathan in The White Peacock, Lawrence's first novel, to the ideal of intimate comrade-
ship that informs Kangaroo, one of his last. Curiously, Meyers slights the most obvious of
Lawrence's works in this regard, his David: A Play.
Similarly, Herman Melville suggests the homoerotic component of the shipboard
drama in Billy Budd by comparing Claggart's persecution of handsome Billy with Saul's
pursuit of comely David across the plains of ancient Israel. And William Faulkner found that
he could convey through the David and Jonathan relationship the ambivalence he wanted
to suggest in Charles Bon's friendship with Henry Sutpen. The biblical David story, one
might argue, is one of the most important vehicles - if not the central religiously ordained
myth - of homosexual love in the West. See Anne Lapidus Lerner for a homoerotic reading
of the biblical narrative and the uses made of it by one modern writer, André Gide; and for
the earlier development of part of this tradition, see Frontain, "Ruddy."
4Porter's analysis of Baldwin's indebtedness to Henry James (123-53) focuses more on
David's transition, in the manner of Christopher Newman, from innocence to experience
as an American in Europe - and on the suggestive parallels between Giovanni and Richard
Wright's Bigger Thomas - than on the significance of Giovanni's leaving sunny and
seemingly innocent Italy for the cold and damp world of experience in Paris. Porter's
chapter on Giovanni's Room nonetheless remains the most perceptive exploration of the
novel's Edenlike tragedy of innocence, experience, and consciousness. See also Lyall
Powers's comments on Baldwin and James (qtd. in Weatherby 97-98).
'Summers analyzes Giovanni's Room as
a critique of American attitudes and of the American inability to face facts and
to express emotion honestly. The novel dramatizes some of the social
observations that Baldwin repeats in his essays, including his analysis of the
American longing for the recovery of innocence and the function of conformity as a means of avoiding self-questioning. (173)
Among the 1950s' media images that Baldwin might have been objecting to are the innocent
flirtations in Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies; television's insistence that married
couples slept in twin beds; and matronly Mamie Eisenhower's absurdly girlish bangs.
'Jacques's speech echoes Lambert Strether's advice to "little Bilham" in bk. 5, chap. 2
of Henry James's The Ambassadors ("Live all you can; it's a mistake not to"). This is another
indication of Baldwin's indebtedness to the Jamesian narrative of American innocence and
experience in Europe. Baldwin's David is the homo Americanos thatSarotte (27-28) describes
as virile but unable to act on his homoerotic desires because of his inbred Puritanism. On
Baldwin's fondness for the Strether quotation, see Weatherby 2. See also Charlotte
Alexander's analysis of the failure of love relationships in Baldwin.
7Harris concludes that "the essential truth of the novel" is that "Hall Montana has been
hopelessly, sexually in love with his brother Arthur" (199; but be careful to see 199-203 for
her larger argument of this point). This conclusion seems to me reductive of the complex
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Raymond-Jean Frontain
drama that Baldwin creates in the novel, Harris's conclusion ultimately erroneous because
it is rendered so bluntly. However, I find valuable her implicit recognition of how the
relationship between Hall and Arthur parallels that of David and Giovanni and other loving
"brothers" of Baldwin's fiction.
8Although Randall Kenan has uncovered no new biographical information, he does
bring into much sharper focus the implications of material already cited by Weatherby and
Campbell (see, for example, 48 and 52-53). I particularly value his speculation that
Baldwin's trauma over the 1946 suicide of his friend Eugene Worth "owed as much to
[Baldwin's] own confusion about his sexual identity" (53) as it did to his despair at the
consequences of white hatred on black lives. As Kenan points out,
the first two novels that Baldwin finished after Worth's suicide and the
completion of his already-begun work-in-progress are both concerned with a
death that results, at least in part, from a failure or inability to acknowledge
the possibility of sexual love between men - a failure or inability that Baldwin
was to acknowledge, though for reasons much different than those motivating
his fictional characters, was a part of his relationship with Worth. (56)
9I am uncomfortable speculating on how the intensely elegiac character of male love in
Baldwin's imagination might have found its impulse in Baldwin's life. Weatherby reports,
however, that as a child Baldwin was taunted with the nickname "Froggy" because of his
markedly protruding eyeballs and was repeatedly told by his stepfather that he was ugly
(15). It is not clear that Baldwin was ever finally able to accept himself as lovable (see
Weatherby 178, 385). Weatherby also reports that Baldwin was forced by his publisher to
suppress the more explicit description of John Grimes's feelings for Elisha when preparing
Go Tell It on the Mountain for publication, and the difficulty that Baldwin had in getting
Giovanni's Room published at all (133-37). Public reception of the latter (see Nelson) might
additionally have forced Baldwin to question the value of addressing the topic of homosexual love so openly.
Finally, Eldrige Cleaver's famous attack on Baldwin (see Weatherby 33 1-34) - coupled
with references to him as "Martin Luther Queen" by black leaders close to Dr. King who
worried that Baldwin's homosexuality would damage the image of the civil rights movement - may have suggested to Baldwin the need to carefully separate what had become his
two major themes, or the two sides of his one thematic coin; his commitment to the civil
rights movement demanded it. Actually, I find it less surprising that Baldwin was unable
to imagine male love except "on the verge of death" than that he was able to write as
forcefully and as emphatically as he did. I wonder whether in Giovanni's Room Baldwin is
not both the exotic outsider who is emotionally needful (Giovanni) and the conflicted
American who fears "contamination" in love (David).
In claiming that the boarding house scene in Just above My Head is Baldwin's first frank
treatment of mutual enjoyment in male sexual intercourse, I am not overlooking the scene
between Eric and Vivaldo in Another Country (383-87). Baldwin's writing is more allusive
here than in Just above My Head , and Vivaldo's uncertainty makes the affection expressed
by the act less fully mutually requited than that between Arthur and Crunch.
Significantly, the only autobiographical essay in which Baldwin alludes directly to his
homosexuality is "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," which appeared in the
January 1 985 issue of Playboy. Retitled "Here Be Dragons" in Price of the Ticket , it is the next-
to-last essay that Baldwin published before his death in December 1987.
10Baldwin's initial attraction to the biblical David character may have been for family
reasons: Both his stepfather, whom Baldwin initially despised but later realized he had
misunderstood, and a much beloved younger stepbrother were named David. (Weatherby
notes that "friends of the two brothers . . . sometimes compared them to David and Jonathan
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Critic 57.2
in the Bible" [111].) The general power that biblical David had for Baldwin, however, is
suggested by the numerous allusions that he makes to the biblical narrative within his
canon. The Psalms of David are quoted in both Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (299)
and Just above My Head (69); Gabriel preaches on David's grief at the loss of his first child
in Go Tell It on the Mountain (133-34, 157; see also 154); and Julia preaches a sermon on
David in Just above My Head (71-73). References to David's dancing naked before the Ark
help to characterize John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain (209-10, 238), and Pastor
Margaret Alexander tells her son David that he has "a natural gift for music . . . - the Lord
gave it to you, you didn't learn it in no school" ( Amen Corner 19), a trait that associates him
with David as author of the Psalms and as the musician whose playing soothed Saul in his
fits of madness.
Works Cited
Alexander, Charlotte. "The 'Stink' of Reality: Mothers and Whores in James Baldwin's
Fiction." Rpt. in James Baldwin : A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Kenneth Kinnamon.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1974. 77-95.
Baldwin, James. The Amen Corner: A Play. New York: Dial P, 1968.
York: St. Martin's, 1985. 677-90.
Bergman, David. "The Agony of Gay Black Literature."
Representation in American Literature. Madison: U of W
Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Ba
Frontain, Raymond-Jean. "Bible." Gay and Lesbian Literary
New York: Holt, 1995. 30-39.
Renaissance Hom[m]osexuality." Cahiers Elisabethains O
Harris, Trudier. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldw
1985.
Holy Bible: Authorized (King James) Version. Nashville: Gideons, 1975.
Kenan, Randall. James Baldwin. Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians Series. New York:
Chelsea House, 1994.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Heinemann, 1964.
Lerner, Anne Lapidus. Passing the Love of Women: A Study of Gide's "Saul". Lanham, MD: UP
of America, 1980.
Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1990.
Nelson, Emmanuel S. Critical Deviance: Homophobia and the Reception ol James
Baldwin's Fiction." Journal of American Culture 14 (Fall 1991): 91-96.
Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan UP, 1989.
Sarotte, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover : Male Homosexuality in the American Novel
and Theatre from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Trans. Richard Miller. Garden City,
NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1978.
Summers, Claude J. "'Looking at the Naked Sun': James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room." Gay
Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York:
Continuum, 1990. 172-94.
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Troupe, Quincy, ed .Jamts Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon, 1989.
Weatherby, W. J . Jamts Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989.
University of Central Arkansas
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