This play is a great example of how important self-interest is in human affairs and the primacy of realpolitik. Bullingbrooke is upset about being disinherited while he is in exile but comes back to disinherit Richard of his crown. All the play’s characters talk about the importance of honour (e.g. ‘mine honor is my life, both grow in one, / take honour from me, and my life is done,” Mowbray, I.i.183-4) but are very quick to change sides depending which way the wind is blowing. They also seem to spend a lot of time plotting behind each other’s backs in spite of their professed love of truth! To me, this perfectly illustrates how ordinarily people do what’s in their best interest and then justify their actions with high sounding principles after the fact. No more so than during a time of uncertainty and insurrection.
York is entrusted the kingdom when Richard goes to Ireland but yields to Bullingbrooke without a fight. In practical terms, it seems he has no choice as everyone is on Bullingbrooke’s side by then anyway, he is old and infirm and King Richard is presumed dead in Ireland. As York summarises pragmatically, ‘things past redress are now with me past care’ (II.iii.171). It is odd, however, when he finds his son the Duke of Aumerle plotting to overthrow Henry IV (formerly Bullingbrooke) he condemns him to the king and pushes for his execution (V.iii). This could be interpreted as yet more pragmatism, cementing his position with the new king by proving he’s willing to sacrifice his own son to demonstrate his loyalty. On the other hand, I also wondered if the self-interested solution for most fathers in his situation would have been to save their sons? I found it confusing to see York so relaxed about Bullingbrooke’s insurrection while being so officious about the one his own son is involved in. He even goes as far as say, “Mine honour lives when his dishonour dies, / Or my sham’d life in his dishonour lies: / Thou kill’st me in his life; giving him breath, / The traitor lives, the true man’s put to death.” (V.iii.70-73). This seems almost recklessly hypocritical given he has just betrayed King Richard! It also shows how quickly circumstances could change and how rapidly the concept of ‘honour’ could be reinterpreted. Gaunt may be seen as an exception to this general rule of realpolitik and also an example of the dangers of acting counter to it. He criticises the king on his deathbed and when he dies the King summarily seizes all his assets.
Richard is by far the most vividly depicted character psychologically with numerous speeches and soliloquies on his internal state. His mood is wildly volatile depending on the circumstances and these change rapidly during this period of civil unrest, insurrection and a foreign war in Ireland. He is depicted as a bad king. He is a vain and capricious ruler, subject to flattery, taxes his people excessively, pronounces arbitrary judgement upon them and generally manages the country irresponsibly and selfishy. Gaunt’s deathbed speech (II.i) and the conversation between the gardners (III.iv) give ample evidence of this. In this sense, Richard’s rule can be seen as an example of realpolitik too; his fate can be seen as the fruits of bad and arbitrary government.
There is an echo of this theme of consequences for unjust acts and an ominous prediction about the new Henry IV’s rule in the speech of the Bishop of Carlisle:
I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks,
Stirr’d up by God, thus boldly for his king.
My Lord Herford here, whom you call king,
Is a foul traitor to proud Herford’s king,
And if you crown him, let me prophesy,
The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future ages groan for this foul act.
Peace shall go to sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.
Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call’d
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you “woe!”
(IV.i.132-148)
The fact that he is arrested immediately after this speech for capital treason also reinforces the point about realpolitik made by Gaunt’s criticism of the king: telling the truth will be unpleasant and costly if it goes against authority.
Besides plainly being a poor king, Richard is also extremely eloquent and some of the plays' most beautiful lines and striking speeches are found on his lips. When in good spirits, he can be a gloriously proud personification of the divine right of kings. For example, proclaiming “not all the water in the rough, rude sea / can wash the balm off from an anointed king” (III.ii.54-55). On the other hand, he is given to bouts of depression of the opposite extremity. For instance, in the same scene, he capitulates and says, “for God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / and tell sad stories of the death of kings” (III.ii.155-156). Later in the same speech he movingly disavows his divine status and stresses his humanity, “For you have mistook me all this while. / I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?” (III.ii.174-177). These wild swings give support to the idea that he is a mercurial leader but also show how tumultuous the country is during the insurrection. In the end, having had a dim view of Richard’s character and reign, he becomes a sympathetic character not least because of the poetry and lyricism of his words. He yields to Bullingbrooke almost as if it is a relief to him too, “Discharge my followers, let them hence away, / From Richard’s night to Bullingbrooke’s fair day.” (III.ii.217-218), and from then on reflects on himself with both insight and poetry. For example, the simile about a well and two buckets he uses to describe his situation relative to his cousin Bullingbrooke:
Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, on that side thine,
Now is this golden crown like deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water:
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high
(IV.i.182-189)
And even more poetically:
Yours cares set up do not pluck my cares
down:
My loss is loss of care, by old care done,
Your care is gain of care, by new care won;
The cares I give I have, though given away,
They tend the crown, yet still with me they stay
(IV.i.194-199)
While on the throne, Richard seems an arrogant and ineffective ruler but once he is deposed his sensitive and articulate poetry turn him into a markedly different proposition for the reader. His final soliloquy in prison recognises his folly and contains my favourite line of the play:
Ha, ha, keep time! How sour sweet music is
When time is broke, and no proportion kept!
So it is in the music of men’s lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now time doth waste me;
(V.v.43-49)
I love the way his deposition and incarceration seem to clear his mind and give him lucidity. He sees the problems that plagued his rule anew, recognises his faults and admits his inability to do so before. His fall and subsequent confession of his crimes in jail seem to totally transform him as a person. He’s no longer indecisive and his psychology no longer swings so wildly between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. This metamorphosis culminates in his fight against the men who come to kill him. Reinvigorated but unarmed, he kills two of them and even impresses his murderer by the valor of his royal blood.
I really enjoyed reading this play and the rhythm of the narrative. The focus on self-interest rings true to me. The transformation of Richard’s character once he has recognised his folly when he was king is a great metamorphosis. He is an extremely varied character, speaks with great poetry and is ultimately highly sympathetic by the end.
Wednesday 29 April 2020
Friday 17 April 2020
Ibram X. Kendi - How To Be An Antiracist
I bought this book after watching the author speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2019. He was clear, calm and concise. I was thrilled to hear someone talk about racism the way he did. I wanted to ask questions and stay behind to get my book signed. Sadly, my raised hand wasn’t chosen and I had another event immediately after. In the end, it didn’t matter because I got the book and it answers a lot of questions I had!
As a white person, I wanted nothing to do with racism for much of my life. ‘Racism’ was a word I didn’t want to associate with and didn’t really want to discuss. Of course I would never discriminate against anyone based on their race. That went without saying and was something only bad, evil people did. Racism was something I had no personal experience of. I thought, or hoped, had ceased to exist. Simultaneously, I held lots of racist ideas and undoubtedly treated people in racist ways. To me, the world was full of injustices and racism was probably one of them but it was rare, like religious extremism, and disappearing. If someone called me a racist, I would have been very upset and defended myself against the slanderous attack. ‘Racist’ was a scary word for me and more often than not I would simply shut down if someone talked about it. This book helped me to confront some of these contradictions and think about racism in a more structured and less emotional way.
Kendi gets it absolutely bang on when he writes that the word ‘racist’ has lost all meaning. The word has become too emotive and the concept too vilified. Even the most racist people claim they’re not racist. The problem demonstrably exists, but no one is prepared to be called a racist and therefore no one is responsible. In its place he introduces the concept of ‘antiracism,’ defined as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (p13). To me, this transforms the subject in a couple of ways. It takes away some of the stigma and taboo attached to being called a racist. Being racist isn’t a permanent condition, like your blood type; it is something an individual can be or not be, depending on their actions. It makes the word less of a terrifying stamp that will brand you forever and turns it into something that can be recognised without the perpetrator becoming the devil incarnate. To be able to discuss the topic in a slightly more sane manner seems better than the insane situation whereby racism exists but there are no racist people or racist actions.
One powerful perspective I got from the book is this: statistically speaking, huge disparities exist between racial groups in the US and UK. This extends to huge swathes of life and includes almost everything. Including, it appears, being more likely to contract and die from the current covid-19 pandemic. The explanation for this situation can be one of two broad choices according to Kendi. Either, A - people of different races have different experiences of life, on average, because there are fundamental differences between their abilities, or, B - it’s because of racism. As Kendi puts it:
“Either racist policies or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier and more powerful than Black people today.” (p117)
The idea that different races could be fundamentally different is genetically and experientially absurd to me, so I must choose that it is down to racism. But is it all down to racism? For Kendi, the answer is yes. I feel like this explanation is undoubtedly important but could become tricky as a theory when examining other types of inequality. Disparities exist between all sorts of groups of people for all sorts of reasons and, unlike Kendi, I can’t see this as all coming from one source. In a seemingly random world of genetic mutations and natural selection, naked luck plays a large part. To use an example I read in a Coleman Hughes review of the book, what explains the difference between earnings of different nationalities of the same race in America? Whereas it seems Kendi would argue it is racist policy, or in this case discriminatory policies of some kind, I feel it is at least partly cultural and associated with values of the society they’ve emigrated from. That is not to judge one culture as “better” than the other, an idea Kendi identifies as culturally racist and rightly rejects, but to observe that they are different and that some can be more suitable to certain circumstances than others, which is observable statistically.
Against this, immigration policy has clearly racial aspects and America’s role in global history could also explain some of these differences. The topic is a complex one and I’m sure Kendi has thought about it more than me! However, his vision is a radical one and I found it more useful as a tool for thinking about what racism really means than a rigorous, all encompassing philosophical schema. Kendi doesn’t really address this question of difference or inequality without discriminatory policy as a cause. I was left wondering if, in a reductio ad absurdum, an antiracist world was one with absolutely no differences between people and how that could work. The idea of all arbitrary groups having statistically the same opportunities struck me as fair and appealing but I wondered how it would work in practice. If income is an example then how do you determine how much of a given disparity is down to discriminatory policy and how much is down to free choice to earn less than they could if one group’s culture prioritises earning money more than another’s? For example, different nationalities of immigrants to the US. Thinking about disparate cultures and people and their choices through narrow statistical lenses could also prove to be problematic.
It’s fair to critique Kendi’s invention as simplistic but I think it brings more clarity to the subject than simply denying its existence. The book isn’t long on specific proposals either but, as an introduction to the subject, it’s not fair to demand too much of it in this respect. The antiracist formulation is black and white and it seems it would be possible to find actions and policies that could not be conclusively proved to be racist or antiracist. For example, the US grant of $1,200 to all Americans earning under $70k during coronavirus doesn’t seem either to me. Although perhaps that makes it antiracist? Or racist because white people have more money on average? The concept isn’t as straightforward to apply as it is to state. Despite these issues with the antiracist concept, I feel it is a good starting point for talking about the problem and understanding it. Given how racist America is, policymakers should definitely be thinking more about this and Kendi is right about this.
Kendi is also keen to dismantle the race as a meaningful grouping. The idea of race as a social construct is not a new one. However, many people, including myself, continue to use unbelievably broad groups like race, nationality and gender to generalise. I liked the way Kendi wants to individualise behaviour and proposes, “to be antiracist is to deracialize behaviour, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behaviour is something humans do, not races.” (p105)
So given that the concept of race has such poor rational underpinnings, why does the concept surround us everywhere we go and why is society suffused with its assumptions? This is a huge question and Kendi does an admirable job of describing a potted history of colonialism, the slave trade and racial stereotyping that I won’t attempt to precis here. One idea he presents when trying to understand the origins of racism, which of course must be various, is: “racist power produces racist policies out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies” (pp129-130). Like Spinoza, I am convinced that self-interest is the governing force in human behaviour so this theory really struck a chord. It feels intuitively correct but also made me worry that racism is, in some sense, a natural human proclivity. When humans encounter something different or new that looks and behaves differently from them, I feel like the normal reaction is fear, a desire to see oneself as superior and negative discrimination. When you add a eurocentric interpretation of progress to this natural fear of what is unknown or different, I feel like racism is a very easy, convenient and, crucially, self-interested idea to arrive at. Is there any way to stop self-interest? Or to stop it from turning into discrimination? The fact that generalisations about the behaviour of people based on such broad categories is so pervasive makes me nervous.
Kendi is disarmingly honest about his own personal experiences with race and admits to being an assimilationist, racist towards black people and racist towards white people at various stages of his life. His honesty and experiences are crucial to the power of the book and really help a white person like me with no experience of racism. His journey from a disengaged teenager to a leading race scholar is hugely educational because he covers all the mistaken ideas he had to abandon along the way, as opposed to just pretending he knew it all from the outset. The book is at its best explaining the interconnections between race, society and personal experience.
Kendi shares a lot of his personal history in the book and, as I mentioned above, this can be really enlightening. It can also be a bit boring and formulaic. The books chapters discuss race as it intersects with various other areas like biology, ethnicity or culture. By the end of the book, I felt like the structure of each chapter was too formulaic and that Kendi overuses his personal experiences in his writing. Sometimes they’re really illustrative but sometimes they’re too tangential. It also doesn’t help that Kendi is loquacious in his writing style. By the end of the book, it feels like talking to a friend who always has a half hour story full of irrelevant details that he has to tell you to demonstrate a fairly straightforward point. I have a pet theory that Kendi picked this up from his proximity to sermons as a child, being the son of a preacher. Just like a sermon, every chapter starts with an intriguing story from the speaker’s life to get the punters interested before we turn to the serious content of God or, in this case, racism. Sometimes it’s illustrative and other times it’s extraneous and I felt it should have been used more sparingly as a technique. One of the stories about how Kendi showed one his students the folly of his ways is nauseatingly self-congratulatory and trite (pp 64-66).
Another criticism I have is the sheer number of times Kendi will repeat the same point. Sometimes a whole paragraph will be filled with multiple examples of the same point when the point is perfectly clear from the first example. Sometimes it might be justified on grounds of clarity but usually it just feels like Kendi has a long-winded style.
More annoyingly, while some concepts are explained half to death, others are tossed in with hardly any justification or explanation whatsoever. For example, while Kendi spends 250 odd pages painstakingly explaining the nuances of racism, he dismisses capitalism in 4 short pages without any of the care and attention to detail he shows in the rest of the book. It’s not so much that I disagree with his conclusion but that I’d like him to explain what he means in more detail. He uses a vague analogy about racism and capitalism being conjoined twins and only really gives the most precursory sketches of a theory itself based on skimming vast swathes of history. For example,
“the conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed still greater empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins - but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the US, the EU, China and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name.” (p157)
It’s impossible to deny that capitalism's history is inextricably intertwined with a lot of injustice and inequality. But there’s no mention of capitalism’s more positive aspects or, crucially, analysis of the relative merits of alternative systems. At its best the book is thorough, methodical and lucid. The quote above gives some flavour of how it is anything but on the subject of capitalism. Ideas are piled willy-nilly on top of each other without any of care or detail I’d come to expect from it. The subject is so vast, I feel it would have been better to leave it out than to try and deal with it in a few hundred one-sided words that make it feel like he is trying to gloss over it. The juxtaposition of carefully argued, over-exemplified points followed by sweeping, unsupported assertion is certainly jarring to read.
This book was a strange mixture. Part of it is intensely personal reflection. Part of it is a textbook or primer on the subject of racism. The latter was, in the main, much better than the former. Kendi has obviously read widely on the subject and the book provides many interesting areas for further reading for a non-specialist like me. It is beautifully footnoted and indexed, which makes it easy for the reader to find out more. In this sense, the book had an academic quality. The inclusion of the more folksy, autobiographical material may be there to help break up the denser sections. I felt it was overused, formulaic and didn’t always bring much to the chapter. For me, Kendi is not an especially talented writer and he writes too much. However, Kendi should definitely be admired for trying to make this book accessible. Some academic literature I have read on inequality is actually incomprensible to the layperson. Equally, I had a lot of admiration for his desire to be an active agent of change and not limit himself to just writing about it. He presents himself as relentlessly self-critical and in search of new ideas and understanding, which is something I have nothing but respect for.
As a white person, I wanted nothing to do with racism for much of my life. ‘Racism’ was a word I didn’t want to associate with and didn’t really want to discuss. Of course I would never discriminate against anyone based on their race. That went without saying and was something only bad, evil people did. Racism was something I had no personal experience of. I thought, or hoped, had ceased to exist. Simultaneously, I held lots of racist ideas and undoubtedly treated people in racist ways. To me, the world was full of injustices and racism was probably one of them but it was rare, like religious extremism, and disappearing. If someone called me a racist, I would have been very upset and defended myself against the slanderous attack. ‘Racist’ was a scary word for me and more often than not I would simply shut down if someone talked about it. This book helped me to confront some of these contradictions and think about racism in a more structured and less emotional way.
Kendi gets it absolutely bang on when he writes that the word ‘racist’ has lost all meaning. The word has become too emotive and the concept too vilified. Even the most racist people claim they’re not racist. The problem demonstrably exists, but no one is prepared to be called a racist and therefore no one is responsible. In its place he introduces the concept of ‘antiracism,’ defined as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (p13). To me, this transforms the subject in a couple of ways. It takes away some of the stigma and taboo attached to being called a racist. Being racist isn’t a permanent condition, like your blood type; it is something an individual can be or not be, depending on their actions. It makes the word less of a terrifying stamp that will brand you forever and turns it into something that can be recognised without the perpetrator becoming the devil incarnate. To be able to discuss the topic in a slightly more sane manner seems better than the insane situation whereby racism exists but there are no racist people or racist actions.
One powerful perspective I got from the book is this: statistically speaking, huge disparities exist between racial groups in the US and UK. This extends to huge swathes of life and includes almost everything. Including, it appears, being more likely to contract and die from the current covid-19 pandemic. The explanation for this situation can be one of two broad choices according to Kendi. Either, A - people of different races have different experiences of life, on average, because there are fundamental differences between their abilities, or, B - it’s because of racism. As Kendi puts it:
“Either racist policies or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier and more powerful than Black people today.” (p117)
The idea that different races could be fundamentally different is genetically and experientially absurd to me, so I must choose that it is down to racism. But is it all down to racism? For Kendi, the answer is yes. I feel like this explanation is undoubtedly important but could become tricky as a theory when examining other types of inequality. Disparities exist between all sorts of groups of people for all sorts of reasons and, unlike Kendi, I can’t see this as all coming from one source. In a seemingly random world of genetic mutations and natural selection, naked luck plays a large part. To use an example I read in a Coleman Hughes review of the book, what explains the difference between earnings of different nationalities of the same race in America? Whereas it seems Kendi would argue it is racist policy, or in this case discriminatory policies of some kind, I feel it is at least partly cultural and associated with values of the society they’ve emigrated from. That is not to judge one culture as “better” than the other, an idea Kendi identifies as culturally racist and rightly rejects, but to observe that they are different and that some can be more suitable to certain circumstances than others, which is observable statistically.
Against this, immigration policy has clearly racial aspects and America’s role in global history could also explain some of these differences. The topic is a complex one and I’m sure Kendi has thought about it more than me! However, his vision is a radical one and I found it more useful as a tool for thinking about what racism really means than a rigorous, all encompassing philosophical schema. Kendi doesn’t really address this question of difference or inequality without discriminatory policy as a cause. I was left wondering if, in a reductio ad absurdum, an antiracist world was one with absolutely no differences between people and how that could work. The idea of all arbitrary groups having statistically the same opportunities struck me as fair and appealing but I wondered how it would work in practice. If income is an example then how do you determine how much of a given disparity is down to discriminatory policy and how much is down to free choice to earn less than they could if one group’s culture prioritises earning money more than another’s? For example, different nationalities of immigrants to the US. Thinking about disparate cultures and people and their choices through narrow statistical lenses could also prove to be problematic.
It’s fair to critique Kendi’s invention as simplistic but I think it brings more clarity to the subject than simply denying its existence. The book isn’t long on specific proposals either but, as an introduction to the subject, it’s not fair to demand too much of it in this respect. The antiracist formulation is black and white and it seems it would be possible to find actions and policies that could not be conclusively proved to be racist or antiracist. For example, the US grant of $1,200 to all Americans earning under $70k during coronavirus doesn’t seem either to me. Although perhaps that makes it antiracist? Or racist because white people have more money on average? The concept isn’t as straightforward to apply as it is to state. Despite these issues with the antiracist concept, I feel it is a good starting point for talking about the problem and understanding it. Given how racist America is, policymakers should definitely be thinking more about this and Kendi is right about this.
Kendi is also keen to dismantle the race as a meaningful grouping. The idea of race as a social construct is not a new one. However, many people, including myself, continue to use unbelievably broad groups like race, nationality and gender to generalise. I liked the way Kendi wants to individualise behaviour and proposes, “to be antiracist is to deracialize behaviour, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behaviour is something humans do, not races.” (p105)
So given that the concept of race has such poor rational underpinnings, why does the concept surround us everywhere we go and why is society suffused with its assumptions? This is a huge question and Kendi does an admirable job of describing a potted history of colonialism, the slave trade and racial stereotyping that I won’t attempt to precis here. One idea he presents when trying to understand the origins of racism, which of course must be various, is: “racist power produces racist policies out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies” (pp129-130). Like Spinoza, I am convinced that self-interest is the governing force in human behaviour so this theory really struck a chord. It feels intuitively correct but also made me worry that racism is, in some sense, a natural human proclivity. When humans encounter something different or new that looks and behaves differently from them, I feel like the normal reaction is fear, a desire to see oneself as superior and negative discrimination. When you add a eurocentric interpretation of progress to this natural fear of what is unknown or different, I feel like racism is a very easy, convenient and, crucially, self-interested idea to arrive at. Is there any way to stop self-interest? Or to stop it from turning into discrimination? The fact that generalisations about the behaviour of people based on such broad categories is so pervasive makes me nervous.
Kendi is disarmingly honest about his own personal experiences with race and admits to being an assimilationist, racist towards black people and racist towards white people at various stages of his life. His honesty and experiences are crucial to the power of the book and really help a white person like me with no experience of racism. His journey from a disengaged teenager to a leading race scholar is hugely educational because he covers all the mistaken ideas he had to abandon along the way, as opposed to just pretending he knew it all from the outset. The book is at its best explaining the interconnections between race, society and personal experience.
Kendi shares a lot of his personal history in the book and, as I mentioned above, this can be really enlightening. It can also be a bit boring and formulaic. The books chapters discuss race as it intersects with various other areas like biology, ethnicity or culture. By the end of the book, I felt like the structure of each chapter was too formulaic and that Kendi overuses his personal experiences in his writing. Sometimes they’re really illustrative but sometimes they’re too tangential. It also doesn’t help that Kendi is loquacious in his writing style. By the end of the book, it feels like talking to a friend who always has a half hour story full of irrelevant details that he has to tell you to demonstrate a fairly straightforward point. I have a pet theory that Kendi picked this up from his proximity to sermons as a child, being the son of a preacher. Just like a sermon, every chapter starts with an intriguing story from the speaker’s life to get the punters interested before we turn to the serious content of God or, in this case, racism. Sometimes it’s illustrative and other times it’s extraneous and I felt it should have been used more sparingly as a technique. One of the stories about how Kendi showed one his students the folly of his ways is nauseatingly self-congratulatory and trite (pp 64-66).
Another criticism I have is the sheer number of times Kendi will repeat the same point. Sometimes a whole paragraph will be filled with multiple examples of the same point when the point is perfectly clear from the first example. Sometimes it might be justified on grounds of clarity but usually it just feels like Kendi has a long-winded style.
More annoyingly, while some concepts are explained half to death, others are tossed in with hardly any justification or explanation whatsoever. For example, while Kendi spends 250 odd pages painstakingly explaining the nuances of racism, he dismisses capitalism in 4 short pages without any of the care and attention to detail he shows in the rest of the book. It’s not so much that I disagree with his conclusion but that I’d like him to explain what he means in more detail. He uses a vague analogy about racism and capitalism being conjoined twins and only really gives the most precursory sketches of a theory itself based on skimming vast swathes of history. For example,
“the conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed still greater empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins - but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the US, the EU, China and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name.” (p157)
It’s impossible to deny that capitalism's history is inextricably intertwined with a lot of injustice and inequality. But there’s no mention of capitalism’s more positive aspects or, crucially, analysis of the relative merits of alternative systems. At its best the book is thorough, methodical and lucid. The quote above gives some flavour of how it is anything but on the subject of capitalism. Ideas are piled willy-nilly on top of each other without any of care or detail I’d come to expect from it. The subject is so vast, I feel it would have been better to leave it out than to try and deal with it in a few hundred one-sided words that make it feel like he is trying to gloss over it. The juxtaposition of carefully argued, over-exemplified points followed by sweeping, unsupported assertion is certainly jarring to read.
This book was a strange mixture. Part of it is intensely personal reflection. Part of it is a textbook or primer on the subject of racism. The latter was, in the main, much better than the former. Kendi has obviously read widely on the subject and the book provides many interesting areas for further reading for a non-specialist like me. It is beautifully footnoted and indexed, which makes it easy for the reader to find out more. In this sense, the book had an academic quality. The inclusion of the more folksy, autobiographical material may be there to help break up the denser sections. I felt it was overused, formulaic and didn’t always bring much to the chapter. For me, Kendi is not an especially talented writer and he writes too much. However, Kendi should definitely be admired for trying to make this book accessible. Some academic literature I have read on inequality is actually incomprensible to the layperson. Equally, I had a lot of admiration for his desire to be an active agent of change and not limit himself to just writing about it. He presents himself as relentlessly self-critical and in search of new ideas and understanding, which is something I have nothing but respect for.
Saturday 4 April 2020
James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
This is a gem of a book and I loved almost all of it. It’s well paced and beautifully structured so the reader knows the very end of the story from the outset but retains a sense of suspense and anticipation nonetheless. Baldwin nimbly flits backwards and forwards along the chronology of events but never in a confusing, pretentious or overly complicated way. The characters and scenes seem immediately identifiable and familiar. The prose is mostly excellent, although occasionally the dialogue is over wrought. The book touches on heavy, complicated themes with incredible poignancy and insight. Baldwin achieves all this in scarcely 150 pages with an almost unbelievable ease of style. The writer’s artful hand is hardly glanced by the reader.
In short, ‘Giovanni’s Room’ is about David, an American man in his late twenties, living in Paris during the 1950s. He is somewhat lost in life and has been living in Paris with his American girlfriend, Hella, without a job. He proposes to Hella, who says she wants to travel to Spain alone to think about it for a few weeks. During this time, David runs out of money and is about to be kicked out of his hotel, so he calls up his friend Jacques. Jacques is an aging ‘fairy’ who covets a sexual relationship with David and lends him money. A flashback reveals that David had a homosexual experience as an adolescent but that he was so terrified of its consequences he stopped being friends with the other boy, Joey, and subsequently bullied him. It’s established that David has strong homosexual urges but is afraid of their consequences and has repressed them. Jacques and David go to a bar owned by Jacques' friend, Guillaume, also an aging fairy. It turns out the bar has a new Italian barman, Giovanni, who is very attractive. Jacques tells David he wants to try to seduce him. Instead, David ends up flirting with Giovanni while Guillaume talks to Jacques. The quartet continue drinking all night and David goes home with Giovanni. David then falls inexorably in love with Giovanni and the two spend all their time together in Giovanni’s tiny maid’s room in suburban Paris for a few weeks.
During this cohabitation, Giovanni gets sacked from the bar for refusing Guillaume’s sexual advances. To make matters worse, Guillaume humiliates Giovanni in front of all the customers by falsely accusing him of stealing and making a show of his dismissal. Giovanni is distraught and David comforts him but without his income, the pair now have money problems. David has some money back home in New York and he tells Giovanni he is going to get his father to send it. However, when he goes to the American embassy to collect his mail he discovers his Dad refuses to send it until he tells him what he’s up to and when he is going to come home. He also receives a letter from Hella saying that she will marry him and is coming back to Paris soon. David finds himself in turmoil but doesn’t mention her return to Giovanni. Although Giovanni is aware of her existence he doesn’t see her as a threat and thinks David will stay in Paris and continue to have a relationship with him. David struggles with his love for Giovanni and tries to master his urge to be with him. He sleeps with a woman he faintly knows as part of his effort to convince himself he is straight before Hella arrives back.
When Hella arrives back, David simply leaves Giovanni without saying a word or moving any of his things from his room. This is repulsively cowardly. He then lives with Hella in her hotel and they begin to make plans for married life. He writes to his father to tell him he is getting married and to send him money, now sure that he will do so because he is announcing a straight marriage to an American woman rather than a gay one with an Italian. Hella and David bump into Jacques and Giovanni who are apparently some kind of couple now. Jacques tells David out of Hella’s hearing that Giovanni had called him after David had abandoned him alone and penniless and terrified that David was dead. Jacques insists they all go for a drink, but Hella dislikes Jacques' mannerisms and says she is tired and needs to sleep after her journey. David walks her back to her hotel and passes off Giovanni's upset looks as those of a dramatic former roommate, rather than a jilted lover. He then goes to Giovanni’s room to talk to him. Giovanni is deeply upset and asks David why he has treated him so badly and no longer wants to have a relationship with him. David says he must be with a woman if he wants to be a man and that things can never work between them. Over the next few weeks, he sees Giovanni around and thinks he is adopting ‘fairy’ mannerisms. He also learns from a mutual acquaintance that he is no longer with Jacques and may have got his old job back at Guillaume’s bar. The next thing David learns about Giovanni is that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. David imagines that Giovanni went back to Guillaume in desperation, in spite of his earlier humiliation, and even agreed to sleep with him to get his job back. But then Guillaume had refused to give it to him, insulted him and Giovanni had flown into a rage and killed him. A manhunt for Giovanni ensues and he is eventually found and sentenced to death. David tells Hella he wants to leave Paris immediately and to move to the south of France and get married and take their honeymoon there. While Giovanni awaits the guillotine, David and Hella discuss gender roles and Hella expresses the opinion that a woman can only be a woman once she is with a man. Haunted by his memories and wracked with guilt, David runs away from Hella and goes to Nice for a few days, which he spends fucking a male sailor on leave. But Hella follows him and discovers his bisexuality. She is upset with David, refuses to marry him and returns to America. The book ends with David imagining the scenes of Giovanni’s final minutes and his execution by guillotine, while leaving the rented house in the south of France.
The prose was beautiful and unobtrusive while at the same time being aphoristic and poetic. For example, at the book’s very beginning, a drunk David reflects:
“But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” p4-5
This is an interesting idea to think about even as it is presented with little or no context. The tone is wise and experienced but I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘is that true? Don’t we have slightly more agency over those relationships than our parental ones?’ As the story progresses it takes on darker significance. David leaves Giovanni in a brutal manner, which he knows upset him and made him want to die, and then Giovanni murders someone and is executed for it. This determinist philosophy could be seen to suit him very nicely, as it exculpates him from his gruesome parting with Giovanni. But who could begrudge David these paltry efforts at philosophy when he’s carrying such a burden of guilt about it? By the end of the book, we understand that David is talking about himself when he speaks about the difficulty saying Yes to life. His life lies in a precarious state as he leaves the house in the south of France alone. Giovanni’s death serves as a grim prediction. Is David too selfish a character, too well practiced in repressing his emotions to end up dead like Giovanni? Or is the loss of his relationship with Giovanni, and then Giovanni himself, dragging him towards death? Baldwin writes his character as a selfish one and one accustomed to repressing his feelings. He also writes him as someone who was deeply in love with Giovanni but was trying to deny it, which only makes his current circumstances worse. The story ends at a moment that continues that finely balanced ambiguity and it left me wondering and wanting to know more.
Given the bare facts of the story it seems hard to believe that the reader might have sympathy for David’s character. Prima facie, David is a selfish arsehole. He treats Giovanni like shit because he is afraid of his feelings for him, spurns love because he is a coward, tries to marry someone he doesn’t love before running off to cheat on her with a sailor in Nice. However, David is an eloquent, contemplative and intelligent narrator who exposes the mechanics and confusion of his tumultuous emotions. He’s willing to recognise mistakes he’s made and this helps to soften his character and make him more likeable. Baldwin gives David considerable complexity as a character and the story is narrated in a way that meant I found him likeable and relatable.
Baldwin seems to suggest the real culprit is 1950s American society and its attitudes to homosexuality, which was then still illegal. It’s David’s belief that he can’t have a life with Giovanni, or any man, back at home. Even in the relatively liberal Paris, David seems to find the lives of older homosexuals unappealing. Before he met Giovanni, he was planning on returning and settling down with Hella to have a family. So his feelings for Giovanni come as an inconvenient and, in some sense, unwanted surprise. Of course, with hindsight it is easy to say that David should have left Hella to be with Giovanni, because Hella subsequently leaves him anyway. Arguably, this might not have happened if Giovanni had stayed alive. There are too many alternatives to ponder meaningfully. But no reader could fail to sympathise with David as he struggles with the intensity of his newfound homosexual relationship and the limitations it would place on his life. Staying with Giovanni was a choice that meant staying in France, probably without money and continuing to be estranged from his family until he came out, which could result in him being disowned by his jock, womanising father. Most would struggle to take a gamble like that. Given David seems to be bisexual, who can blame him for trying to choose a heterosexual relationship when it would make his life so much easier? As he justifies himself to Giovanni, ‘“I can have a life with her” (p126). Even though he is also devastatingly indifferent towards her, as an example, I need only cite the wonderfully self-defeating, “I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.” (p106)
The tragedy of the book is that the love affair with Giovanni is portrayed as so blissful and David’s parting is so agonising that it seems like he should have tried to stay with him, however difficult it would have been. When Giovanni dies, it changes everything. Their relationship is finished ultimately and finally and they’ll never know if it might have worked. David can never reverse his decision and also feels deeply responsible for his death. They had a perfect love affair that David ruined by breaking it off cruelly and now it will always be preserved in perfection in David’s memory. Forever coupled with Giovanni’s tragic death.
I’m not convinced that David would have managed to live a happy life with Hella if Giovanni had remained alive and otherwise unknown to David. David’s sexual awakening at high school suggests something fundamental or, at least, longstanding. There is also the intensity of his affair with Giovanni to consider. When it becomes clear to David that the two are going to have to stop living together when Hella comes back to Paris, he experiences near total turmoil. A charitable interpretation would blame this for his heartless abandonment of Giovanni. Overwhelmed, he simply walks away from a problem too difficult to contemplate. Even though it’s Giovanni that ends up dead, it felt very much like David kills a part of himself when he leaves Giovanni. In the same way David goes on to bully Joey during his repression of his first homosexual encounter, he destroys the relationship he has built with Giovanni via an act of violence. Just like bullying Joey, it’s also an act of violence towards himself and a denial of himself. But while his relationship with Joey amounts to little more than pubescent fumbling, his relationship with Giovanni is adult, mature and meaningful. The violence and destruction required by its repression are always going to be far more painful, even before Giovanni’s death makes it almost unbearable.
There is also David’s situation and context to consider. Baldwin captures the feeling of being in a foreign country excellently. There’s an atmosphere of freedom, full of possible adventure away from the rigid stays of home life. But with this freedom there’s also necessarily loneliness, vulnerability, and an unsupported, somewhat disoriented feeling, like your position is almost precarious. Having run out of money, David seems torn between his enjoyment of this freedom in France and the suspicion that it’s impossible to sustain and can only ever be a dalliance before he returns to home, family life and conformity.
Baldwin paints very vividly the oppressive nature of being gay in 1950s America and the social isolation it entailed. He might have experienced this type of bigoted discrimination himself as an African American. This helps the reader to understand the claustrophobia and costs that went along with being in a gay relationship at that time. David’s fears seem more reasonable in this light and Baldwin does a great job of putting them in context and expressing them through David’s words and feelings. David feels a homosexual relationship denies him the safe, steady normality of marriage and children. “A life,” as he so memorably calls it in his final parting with Giovanni. Guillaume and Jacques are portrayed as terrifyingly lonely, lifeless figures and David thinks them sad and despicable. This is in Paris too, not America. They’re a personification of everything David thinks unsustainable about his homosexuality and he’s afraid they’re what he’ll end up like if he pursues his love with Giovanni. He wants to live the life of normality he grew up aspiring to, but knows that this is impossible with Giovanni. These are fears that David ultimately feels more strongly than his love for Giovanni, at least thinks he does in that moment. There’s an excellent juxtaposition throughout the book between the warmth and love between David and Giovanni and the terror and turmoil David feels about the relationship internally. Doubtless some of this is because of the danger and impracticality of being in a homsexual relationship during the 50s, especially in America. But David’s fear seems more multifaceted than that. He seems distrustful of his emotions towards Giovanni, afraid of the messy consequences pursuing a relationship with him would mean, and scared of sacrificing his own masculinity, identity and possibly family for a fling his head tells him can never work. In this sense, the book is a parable about the dangers of trying to rule your heart with your head. It is not a simple counsel to let your heart rule your head either - there’s far too much nuance, subtlety and contradiction for such a simple reading.
The violence of their separation is rammed home with memorable intensity in the final scene of reckoning between David and Giovanni. David must face up to his cowardly and cruel treatment of Giovanni and finally deny that he loves him even though everything in the book speaks to the contrary. Giovanni grabs David and screams:
“You want to leave GIovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you - you are IMMORAL. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, LOOK what you’ve done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is THIS what you should do to love?”(p125)
David tries to deny he feels anything and to persuade Giovanni that nothing can ever happen between them but Giovanni, rightly, accuses David of breaking up with him precisely because he knows something can happen and, with terrible foresight, tells him one day he will regret it (p127). David leaves as quickly as possible and tries to distract himself with the fantasy of his marriage with Hella. The way David thinks getting out of Paris will save him from himself is well drawn and as recognisable as it is futile. As the truth of his situation begins to dawn on David he expresses his fear eloquently:
“I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a very high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall.” (p140)
I had wanted to take issue with the book for having overblown, unlikely dialogue in places. I think it’s a supportable criticism. For example, when Giovanni and David first meet in the bar and again during parts of their final bust up. The more I wrote about the book and considered it the less I felt justified in complaining about it. It now seems a bit like complaining that characters at the theatre don’t um and er like normal people do when they speak. If the play’s content reveals new perspectives to you and makes you think new things then surely it’s a bit churlish to complain. There is a poetic character to Baldwin’s prose that doesn’t necessarily translate that well into dialogue. This book might occasionally be a bit too mannered to be believable, but it had so many other good aspects it seems wrong to dwell on this minor flaw.
Ultimately, the final outcome of David’s relationship with Giovanni makes us pity him more than any other single factor. Any reasonable, and reasonably mature, person will admit to making mistakes and acting in a cowardly or selfish way, especially when it comes to relationships. The fact that David is forced to live with his mistakes in such a brutal way struck me as unfair and desperately sad. Even if you felt like David should be punished for his treatment of Giovanni, surely the sentence he receives is too harsh. Baldwin recognises a fundamental truth in the character of David, that there is a full spectrum of good and bad in all of us and that we must puzzle our way through our moral lives constantly making mistakes. This tragic story shows that the messy, painful face of love can be as beautiful as the happy, smiling one - perhaps even more so. The book is a love story but it is also a poignant comment on so many things - gender, trust, honesty, identity, what it means to conform, to be a foreigner, to be an outsider and to try to be yourself. There are no heroes and villains in this subtle and sad story, which was moving, thought provoking and said so much in such a short space. An amazing read!
In short, ‘Giovanni’s Room’ is about David, an American man in his late twenties, living in Paris during the 1950s. He is somewhat lost in life and has been living in Paris with his American girlfriend, Hella, without a job. He proposes to Hella, who says she wants to travel to Spain alone to think about it for a few weeks. During this time, David runs out of money and is about to be kicked out of his hotel, so he calls up his friend Jacques. Jacques is an aging ‘fairy’ who covets a sexual relationship with David and lends him money. A flashback reveals that David had a homosexual experience as an adolescent but that he was so terrified of its consequences he stopped being friends with the other boy, Joey, and subsequently bullied him. It’s established that David has strong homosexual urges but is afraid of their consequences and has repressed them. Jacques and David go to a bar owned by Jacques' friend, Guillaume, also an aging fairy. It turns out the bar has a new Italian barman, Giovanni, who is very attractive. Jacques tells David he wants to try to seduce him. Instead, David ends up flirting with Giovanni while Guillaume talks to Jacques. The quartet continue drinking all night and David goes home with Giovanni. David then falls inexorably in love with Giovanni and the two spend all their time together in Giovanni’s tiny maid’s room in suburban Paris for a few weeks.
During this cohabitation, Giovanni gets sacked from the bar for refusing Guillaume’s sexual advances. To make matters worse, Guillaume humiliates Giovanni in front of all the customers by falsely accusing him of stealing and making a show of his dismissal. Giovanni is distraught and David comforts him but without his income, the pair now have money problems. David has some money back home in New York and he tells Giovanni he is going to get his father to send it. However, when he goes to the American embassy to collect his mail he discovers his Dad refuses to send it until he tells him what he’s up to and when he is going to come home. He also receives a letter from Hella saying that she will marry him and is coming back to Paris soon. David finds himself in turmoil but doesn’t mention her return to Giovanni. Although Giovanni is aware of her existence he doesn’t see her as a threat and thinks David will stay in Paris and continue to have a relationship with him. David struggles with his love for Giovanni and tries to master his urge to be with him. He sleeps with a woman he faintly knows as part of his effort to convince himself he is straight before Hella arrives back.
When Hella arrives back, David simply leaves Giovanni without saying a word or moving any of his things from his room. This is repulsively cowardly. He then lives with Hella in her hotel and they begin to make plans for married life. He writes to his father to tell him he is getting married and to send him money, now sure that he will do so because he is announcing a straight marriage to an American woman rather than a gay one with an Italian. Hella and David bump into Jacques and Giovanni who are apparently some kind of couple now. Jacques tells David out of Hella’s hearing that Giovanni had called him after David had abandoned him alone and penniless and terrified that David was dead. Jacques insists they all go for a drink, but Hella dislikes Jacques' mannerisms and says she is tired and needs to sleep after her journey. David walks her back to her hotel and passes off Giovanni's upset looks as those of a dramatic former roommate, rather than a jilted lover. He then goes to Giovanni’s room to talk to him. Giovanni is deeply upset and asks David why he has treated him so badly and no longer wants to have a relationship with him. David says he must be with a woman if he wants to be a man and that things can never work between them. Over the next few weeks, he sees Giovanni around and thinks he is adopting ‘fairy’ mannerisms. He also learns from a mutual acquaintance that he is no longer with Jacques and may have got his old job back at Guillaume’s bar. The next thing David learns about Giovanni is that Guillaume has been murdered and that Giovanni is the prime suspect. David imagines that Giovanni went back to Guillaume in desperation, in spite of his earlier humiliation, and even agreed to sleep with him to get his job back. But then Guillaume had refused to give it to him, insulted him and Giovanni had flown into a rage and killed him. A manhunt for Giovanni ensues and he is eventually found and sentenced to death. David tells Hella he wants to leave Paris immediately and to move to the south of France and get married and take their honeymoon there. While Giovanni awaits the guillotine, David and Hella discuss gender roles and Hella expresses the opinion that a woman can only be a woman once she is with a man. Haunted by his memories and wracked with guilt, David runs away from Hella and goes to Nice for a few days, which he spends fucking a male sailor on leave. But Hella follows him and discovers his bisexuality. She is upset with David, refuses to marry him and returns to America. The book ends with David imagining the scenes of Giovanni’s final minutes and his execution by guillotine, while leaving the rented house in the south of France.
The prose was beautiful and unobtrusive while at the same time being aphoristic and poetic. For example, at the book’s very beginning, a drunk David reflects:
“But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” p4-5
This is an interesting idea to think about even as it is presented with little or no context. The tone is wise and experienced but I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘is that true? Don’t we have slightly more agency over those relationships than our parental ones?’ As the story progresses it takes on darker significance. David leaves Giovanni in a brutal manner, which he knows upset him and made him want to die, and then Giovanni murders someone and is executed for it. This determinist philosophy could be seen to suit him very nicely, as it exculpates him from his gruesome parting with Giovanni. But who could begrudge David these paltry efforts at philosophy when he’s carrying such a burden of guilt about it? By the end of the book, we understand that David is talking about himself when he speaks about the difficulty saying Yes to life. His life lies in a precarious state as he leaves the house in the south of France alone. Giovanni’s death serves as a grim prediction. Is David too selfish a character, too well practiced in repressing his emotions to end up dead like Giovanni? Or is the loss of his relationship with Giovanni, and then Giovanni himself, dragging him towards death? Baldwin writes his character as a selfish one and one accustomed to repressing his feelings. He also writes him as someone who was deeply in love with Giovanni but was trying to deny it, which only makes his current circumstances worse. The story ends at a moment that continues that finely balanced ambiguity and it left me wondering and wanting to know more.
Given the bare facts of the story it seems hard to believe that the reader might have sympathy for David’s character. Prima facie, David is a selfish arsehole. He treats Giovanni like shit because he is afraid of his feelings for him, spurns love because he is a coward, tries to marry someone he doesn’t love before running off to cheat on her with a sailor in Nice. However, David is an eloquent, contemplative and intelligent narrator who exposes the mechanics and confusion of his tumultuous emotions. He’s willing to recognise mistakes he’s made and this helps to soften his character and make him more likeable. Baldwin gives David considerable complexity as a character and the story is narrated in a way that meant I found him likeable and relatable.
Baldwin seems to suggest the real culprit is 1950s American society and its attitudes to homosexuality, which was then still illegal. It’s David’s belief that he can’t have a life with Giovanni, or any man, back at home. Even in the relatively liberal Paris, David seems to find the lives of older homosexuals unappealing. Before he met Giovanni, he was planning on returning and settling down with Hella to have a family. So his feelings for Giovanni come as an inconvenient and, in some sense, unwanted surprise. Of course, with hindsight it is easy to say that David should have left Hella to be with Giovanni, because Hella subsequently leaves him anyway. Arguably, this might not have happened if Giovanni had stayed alive. There are too many alternatives to ponder meaningfully. But no reader could fail to sympathise with David as he struggles with the intensity of his newfound homosexual relationship and the limitations it would place on his life. Staying with Giovanni was a choice that meant staying in France, probably without money and continuing to be estranged from his family until he came out, which could result in him being disowned by his jock, womanising father. Most would struggle to take a gamble like that. Given David seems to be bisexual, who can blame him for trying to choose a heterosexual relationship when it would make his life so much easier? As he justifies himself to Giovanni, ‘“I can have a life with her” (p126). Even though he is also devastatingly indifferent towards her, as an example, I need only cite the wonderfully self-defeating, “I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.” (p106)
The tragedy of the book is that the love affair with Giovanni is portrayed as so blissful and David’s parting is so agonising that it seems like he should have tried to stay with him, however difficult it would have been. When Giovanni dies, it changes everything. Their relationship is finished ultimately and finally and they’ll never know if it might have worked. David can never reverse his decision and also feels deeply responsible for his death. They had a perfect love affair that David ruined by breaking it off cruelly and now it will always be preserved in perfection in David’s memory. Forever coupled with Giovanni’s tragic death.
I’m not convinced that David would have managed to live a happy life with Hella if Giovanni had remained alive and otherwise unknown to David. David’s sexual awakening at high school suggests something fundamental or, at least, longstanding. There is also the intensity of his affair with Giovanni to consider. When it becomes clear to David that the two are going to have to stop living together when Hella comes back to Paris, he experiences near total turmoil. A charitable interpretation would blame this for his heartless abandonment of Giovanni. Overwhelmed, he simply walks away from a problem too difficult to contemplate. Even though it’s Giovanni that ends up dead, it felt very much like David kills a part of himself when he leaves Giovanni. In the same way David goes on to bully Joey during his repression of his first homosexual encounter, he destroys the relationship he has built with Giovanni via an act of violence. Just like bullying Joey, it’s also an act of violence towards himself and a denial of himself. But while his relationship with Joey amounts to little more than pubescent fumbling, his relationship with Giovanni is adult, mature and meaningful. The violence and destruction required by its repression are always going to be far more painful, even before Giovanni’s death makes it almost unbearable.
There is also David’s situation and context to consider. Baldwin captures the feeling of being in a foreign country excellently. There’s an atmosphere of freedom, full of possible adventure away from the rigid stays of home life. But with this freedom there’s also necessarily loneliness, vulnerability, and an unsupported, somewhat disoriented feeling, like your position is almost precarious. Having run out of money, David seems torn between his enjoyment of this freedom in France and the suspicion that it’s impossible to sustain and can only ever be a dalliance before he returns to home, family life and conformity.
Baldwin paints very vividly the oppressive nature of being gay in 1950s America and the social isolation it entailed. He might have experienced this type of bigoted discrimination himself as an African American. This helps the reader to understand the claustrophobia and costs that went along with being in a gay relationship at that time. David’s fears seem more reasonable in this light and Baldwin does a great job of putting them in context and expressing them through David’s words and feelings. David feels a homosexual relationship denies him the safe, steady normality of marriage and children. “A life,” as he so memorably calls it in his final parting with Giovanni. Guillaume and Jacques are portrayed as terrifyingly lonely, lifeless figures and David thinks them sad and despicable. This is in Paris too, not America. They’re a personification of everything David thinks unsustainable about his homosexuality and he’s afraid they’re what he’ll end up like if he pursues his love with Giovanni. He wants to live the life of normality he grew up aspiring to, but knows that this is impossible with Giovanni. These are fears that David ultimately feels more strongly than his love for Giovanni, at least thinks he does in that moment. There’s an excellent juxtaposition throughout the book between the warmth and love between David and Giovanni and the terror and turmoil David feels about the relationship internally. Doubtless some of this is because of the danger and impracticality of being in a homsexual relationship during the 50s, especially in America. But David’s fear seems more multifaceted than that. He seems distrustful of his emotions towards Giovanni, afraid of the messy consequences pursuing a relationship with him would mean, and scared of sacrificing his own masculinity, identity and possibly family for a fling his head tells him can never work. In this sense, the book is a parable about the dangers of trying to rule your heart with your head. It is not a simple counsel to let your heart rule your head either - there’s far too much nuance, subtlety and contradiction for such a simple reading.
The violence of their separation is rammed home with memorable intensity in the final scene of reckoning between David and Giovanni. David must face up to his cowardly and cruel treatment of Giovanni and finally deny that he loves him even though everything in the book speaks to the contrary. Giovanni grabs David and screams:
“You want to leave GIovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you - you are IMMORAL. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, LOOK what you’ve done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is THIS what you should do to love?”(p125)
David tries to deny he feels anything and to persuade Giovanni that nothing can ever happen between them but Giovanni, rightly, accuses David of breaking up with him precisely because he knows something can happen and, with terrible foresight, tells him one day he will regret it (p127). David leaves as quickly as possible and tries to distract himself with the fantasy of his marriage with Hella. The way David thinks getting out of Paris will save him from himself is well drawn and as recognisable as it is futile. As the truth of his situation begins to dawn on David he expresses his fear eloquently:
“I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a very high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall.” (p140)
I had wanted to take issue with the book for having overblown, unlikely dialogue in places. I think it’s a supportable criticism. For example, when Giovanni and David first meet in the bar and again during parts of their final bust up. The more I wrote about the book and considered it the less I felt justified in complaining about it. It now seems a bit like complaining that characters at the theatre don’t um and er like normal people do when they speak. If the play’s content reveals new perspectives to you and makes you think new things then surely it’s a bit churlish to complain. There is a poetic character to Baldwin’s prose that doesn’t necessarily translate that well into dialogue. This book might occasionally be a bit too mannered to be believable, but it had so many other good aspects it seems wrong to dwell on this minor flaw.
Ultimately, the final outcome of David’s relationship with Giovanni makes us pity him more than any other single factor. Any reasonable, and reasonably mature, person will admit to making mistakes and acting in a cowardly or selfish way, especially when it comes to relationships. The fact that David is forced to live with his mistakes in such a brutal way struck me as unfair and desperately sad. Even if you felt like David should be punished for his treatment of Giovanni, surely the sentence he receives is too harsh. Baldwin recognises a fundamental truth in the character of David, that there is a full spectrum of good and bad in all of us and that we must puzzle our way through our moral lives constantly making mistakes. This tragic story shows that the messy, painful face of love can be as beautiful as the happy, smiling one - perhaps even more so. The book is a love story but it is also a poignant comment on so many things - gender, trust, honesty, identity, what it means to conform, to be a foreigner, to be an outsider and to try to be yourself. There are no heroes and villains in this subtle and sad story, which was moving, thought provoking and said so much in such a short space. An amazing read!
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