The boldness of the enterprise still astonishes me.īaldwin has been accused of indulging his homosexuality, then a crime in America though not in France where the book is set. It is as if Baldwin is writing above race and gender in order to draw universal conclusions. Yet Giovanni’s Room contains not a single Black character. He insisted that, because whites could not love themselves, they could not love their Black brothers and sisters, and that they paid for their persecution ‘by the lives they led’. Baldwin outspokenly held white America accountable for the racism poisoning its society. For two days I lived on peaches and pasta and read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.īaldwin’s famous novel was published in 1956 when he was becoming not only America’s foremost Black homosexual writer but also a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement. Then I nipped back to Rome, found a seedy pensione and holed up there until he arrived.
To compensate for this structural flaw, I went to Athens and had the adventure I wanted to have. But it occurred to me that he might be re-entering the novel of my life a couple of chapters too soon. Michael was beautiful, he was sexy and he was good. I was escaping my upbringing (small town Irish-American Catholic), and I considered this mission almost but not quite accomplished. But I had turned 20 that May and was, as we used to say, ‘on the loose’ and wanting to be just that little bit looser if I could get away with it. He had a cheap flight and would meet me in the Piazza Navona on 21 August at 6 p.m. I stood on the pavement outside American Express and read it three times. In August 1963 I was staying in Rome and running out of money. My future was a purposeful haze, and I probably thought that by excluding nothing I could have everything. I’d also fallen in love, in advance, with Greece and was determined to go there. I couldn’t or wouldn’t decide and worried about my scholarship and what my parents would say. He wanted me to leave university for a year and travel with him in Mexico, a country he’d visited and loved.
Michael had just graduated and, that summer, was doing social work among the street gangs of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. After my sophomore year at university, I took the $500 I had saved teaching swimming at the local playground and went to Europe, leaving behind the man I then thought I would marry.
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