A Homosexual Dilemma

...But Hella sees only part way...

...The feeling is the feeling of Baldwin's book, but the words are those of a character in a novel published in 1887 and called The Yoke of the Thorah...

...so that one begins to suspect at last that there must really be Negroes present, censored, camouflaged or encoded...

...For space reasons, F. W. Dupee's review-essay on D. H. Lawrence, promised for this Christmas Book Number, could not appear...

...I must believe...

...but I believe he believes in it and feel the consequences of such a belief as he renders them in this book...

...author, "An End to Innocence'' For what seems a long time but surely can be no more than a few years...

...It will be published in a forthcoming issue...

...It is all very moral and melodramatic, almost a little morality play in modern dress, in which the characters tend to become allegorical and life is portrayed as exacting consequences more bloody and final than its usual fumblings attain...

...it is a basic American plot—a staple of popular fiction wherever it dares approach the problematical...

...All my vivid realization of how utterly base I myself had been, and of your unspeakable agony, caused by me, your despair, your humiliation, all my remorse...

...is with David, who has betrayed everything, in his appeal to the "heavy grace of God...

...But what he wants he does not know, and it requires his confidence in his own maleness to define her...

...It means they never can be happy again...

...David, who has never faced up to anything in himself, is driven to make a choice between marriage to Hella and a life with Giovanni in the miserable room on the outskirts of Paris that serves as a symbol of the shoddiness, the isolation, the appallingly naked intimacy of such an affair...

...In the mature novel toward which Baldwin is progressing, surely Negro characters will be present, at the periphery or in the center, as the exigencies and probabilities of the story demand—a full world fully rendered...

...Giovanni's Room does not create such a full world in any sense...

...Our very concern with Negro-white relations has tended to make a cliche of every aspect of them, and the writer who accepts them as the subject lays up for himself a life of exasperation and frustration...

...It's all I want...

...Once more, Hella is his mouthpiece: "Americans should never come to Europe...

...It is a little like the feeling of Trilling's Middle of the Journey, in which no Jew is permitted to enter a world of intellectual Communists and fellow-travelers...

...if beyond happiness there is despair, beyond morality bewilderment, past despair and bewilderment there is God...

...I do not finally believe in Baldwin's sense of "the lack of sexual authority" in our world...

...But if David is our latest Last Puritan, he is by that very token the most uncertain of them all...

...But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then...

...Beneath the melodramatic statement, he is attempting a tragic theme: the loss of the last American innocence, the last moral certainty—that the mirror does not lie, that little boys are boys, little girls girls...

...It is David, the American, who feels driven to ask not "Can I love Giovanni...

...Happiness was all we had...

...and in his cry to his deepest self...

...And what of Hella, what of women in a world where men are as lost as David...

...But he must, I am convinced, break through, find ways of registering his identity and outsidedness through other symbols than the accidental, autobiographical one of skin color...

...The earlier protagonist, a Jew, has reached his final pitch of despair by refusing to marry the Gentile girl with whom he was truly in love, by failing to cast off the "yoke of the Torah...

...There is something quite old-fashioned about the basic fable...

...But I have only been talking about who I want...

...What's the good of an American who isn't happy...

...It is a tightly focused book, a novella rather than a novel—dense at its best moments, thin at its worst, but always spare...

...I must believe...

...Baldwin is finally a religious writer, though his religion is desperate and tentative in the expected modern manner...

...I have had the sense that here for once was a young Negro writer, capable of outgrowing at the same moment both qualifications and becoming simply a writer...

...Indeed, there is a clue here...

...In terms of Baldwin's novel, this conflict between the "what" and "who" approach to love comes to stand for a deep conflict of the American and European conscience...

...and he is left to a life of degradation and self-reproach, punctuated by furtive affairs with sailors...

...Not even choosing in full awareness, but drifting and fleeing, he abandons Giovanni, who in his desolation and poverty is led to commit a murder and is finally guillotined...

...but this is not what troubles me finally...

...indeed, David's despair after his unalterable rejection of Giovanni recalls phrases from books long confined to the ten-cent tables of secondhand book stores...

...I do not mean to imply that the writer who is also a Negro can afford to ignore the deepest passions and conditions of his growing up, and Baldwin has, indeed, treated those passions and conditions in his earlier novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain...

...my sense of what I had wantonly flung away, and lost beyond all recovery in a word, all my love—love that had lain as I supposed dead, now suddenly had come to, never to let me rest any more...

...But David cannot, in the end, marry Hella at all, her very touch having become repulsive to him...

...but "Can I love a man...

...But it is the gimmick of Baldwin's, book to have made the poor but worthy girl a poor but worthy fairy, and thus to have dissolved the sentimental assurance of the older versions into a quite contemporary sort of ambiguity...

...There is not only no Negro problem in Baldwin's new book...

...The moral concern remains, but where is the assured moral answer ? "You are the one who keeps talking about what I want," Giovanni insists at one point to David...

...We are back now to The Ambassadors, to Henry James and the clash between the recent American notion that experience is itself a good and love the great experience, and the more ancient American conviction that there are clean and unclean loves and that only what is clean is good...

...but no more can he return to the well-washed Hella, to a clean America...

...It is rather the fact that he encounters no black faces in his movements through Paris and the south of France, that not even the supernumeraries are colored...

...There are only three characters who count: David himself, the American girl Hella, and the Italian homosexual Giovanni...

...I have been watching James Baldwin's work—not merely reading it, but watching it, warily, hopefully —a little incredulously...

...But he might well have been (and was in the novel of a few decades later) a white boy giving up his Negro mistress, a social climber rejecting the poor (and pregnant) girl for an heiress...

...David," she cries, "please, let me be a woman...

...His protagonist, David, is a shade too pale-face, almost ladies-magazine-Saxon, gleaming blond and "rather like an arrow...

...there are not even any Negroes—and this, I must confess, makes me a little uneasy...

...Giovanni's Room, whatever its limitations, is a step in this direction—that is to say, a step beyond the Negro writer's usual obsession with his situation as a Negro in a white culture, an obsession which keeps him forever writing a first book...

...He knows he cannot endure the stench of Giovanni's room, of Europe...

...It is the most amusing of Baldwin's wry ironies to portray the last stand of Puritanism as a defense of heterosexuality...

...The last word, after all...

...A writer need be only a little enlightened to recommend (heartily or tearfully) breaking through economic or religious or social conventions to marry the girl one loves...

...But what if the girl is a boy...

...It is not easy to make poetry of sociological banalities, especially if one approaches them already committed to righteousness and self-pity...

...just as his ancestors, of whom, despite his expatriation, he is so proud ("My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains "), might have asked: Can I love a Jew, a Negro, a dissolute woman, one older than myself...