The New Calvinism
Giovanni’s Room
By James Baldwin
dial Press. 248 pp. $3.00.
Baptized in the fierce fires of evangelism, scourged by race hate, redeemed by the blessings of partisans and reviewers, James Baldwin has emerged as one of the most promising of the younger American writers. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room, is a further attempt to wrestle with some of the issues so strikingly dramatized in Go Tell It on the Mountain.1 Though Baldwin has abandoned the primitive Calvinism on which he was reared, its dogma stall has him in thrall. Everything he has written is filled with a sense of human depravity, a deterministic view of the universe, a hopeless search for salvation, and a conviction that unregenerate, alienated modern man is doomed. “The human heart is deceitful and above all things desperately wicked.” “There is no health in us,” and our damnation is sure. In Baldwin’s theology, however, there is no Messiah. The “Power” is an illusion, and the “Glory” has departed. Jehovah the Avenger will smite, for our offense is rank. Fear, loneliness, desperation, the sense of sin stalk all Baldwin’s characters; all life culminates for them in a single, terrible moment, as the past is said to flash before the eyes of drowning men.
Go Tell It on the Mountain, in which the hero, John, is “saved” by the love of an older boy, ends on the hope that salvation may lie in human love; Giovanni’s Room portrays the inevitable collapse of that hope. David, the narrator of the new novel, is an American living in Paris, another young man with an Oedipus problem, restless, seeking some harbor from the emotional storms within. His search for salvation, like John’s, is essentially the quest for an identity, an image of himself which will give him not only “sexual authority,” but meaningful place in the world. He is a lost man. His difficulties are aggravated, of course, by the fact that those whom he would love are also lost. Hella, his fiancée, is a curiously brittle and unsympathetic girl who goes off on a jaunt to Spain to decide whether to marry him. While she is gone David gets involved with as grotesque a group of homosexuals as any in contemporary literature and finally falls in love with Giovanni, a handsome and sensible Italian bartender, whom he then leaves for Hella on her return to Paris. The abandoned Giovanni, without money and in distress, murders the corrupt Guillaume—for which he is about to be guillotined. Love for Giovanni combines with a sense of guilt to destroy David’s relation with Hella as, driven by his old lusts, he picks up a sailor.
But David’s homosexuality is seen as an attempt to adopt another man’s identity. This idea Baldwin dramatizes vividly by having David tell the whole story on the night before Giovanni’s execution when it seems as if the knife were about to fall on David’s neck as well. “Giovanni’s room,” then, is a double entendre: Giovanni has left an enormous void in hi-friend, and whatever identity David might have had is buried with the Italian. “The journey to the grave is already begun.”
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Baldwin’s style is, perhaps, his greatest strength; he is never obvious, banal, or trite. And the determinism and outraged horror with which he views life crop up in a hundred images and ironies: “We dawdled as doomed mountain climbers may be said to dawdle above the chasm, held only by a snapping rope.” Or: “I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on die metal. Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.”
Yet it must be pointed out that these bold, flashing phrases often bring Baldwin close to melodrama and sensationalism. His favorite word is “doom.” There are too many “sheer, sheer drops.” A fear lies “like a decomposed corpse” in a man’s mind, others are “like monkeys eating their own excrement.” Though the reader is swept along by the intense emotional quality with which Baldwin invests everything he creates, the total impression is somewhat too taut, feverish, and contrived.
The book does represent two new departures in Baldwin’s work, however: its locale is France, and there are no Negroes in it. While I am not urging Baldwin to flee Paris for Harlem, and I certainly do not mean to imply that he Should write only about Negroes, it is my feeling that Go Tell It on the Mountain has a substantiality and conviction lacking in Giovanni’s Room. The latter’s characters are on the periphery of the society in which they live, and though Baldwin attempts to make them symbolic of a universal malaise, they are like roots out of a dry ground. It is difficult to take them very seriously. No character here has an inner and outer world as fully realized as Gabriel’s in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
One is tempted to compare Baldwin with Hawthorne, except that Hawthorne had a healthiness of mind and spirit and a disinterestedness as an artist which Baldwin altogether lacks. In Baldwin the culminating effect is one of damnation; wretched man is dragged before the bar and condemned to endless fires of guilt and fear. It is the New Calvinism dramatized. In the end, Baldwin’s books are strangely out of date; they are written as if Locke and the Enlightenment had not happened. Their determinism, doom, and feeling of depravity are unrelieved not only by the sense of human possibility, but even by the hope of spiritual salvation.
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In Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays published over a year ago,2 the anachronism of James Baldwin became explicit. There he was the man who, tormented by self-hate, assumed the inferiority of the Negro: “Black is the color of damnation,” and “we cannot escape our origins,” whereas “white men are the creators of civilization.” The clear implication is that “civilization” is transmitted in the genes.
It is a dismal fact, of course, that Calvinism appealed to the oppressed Negro slave—it was the only view provided by his master, and it seemed, indeed, to explain his condition in the world. Similarly, Baldwin’s devastating experiences of race hate are at the bottom of his whole view of life. He writes in Notes of a Native Son:
It is of quite considerable significance that black men remain, in the imagination, in overwhelming numbers in fact, beyond the disciplines of salvation; and this despite the fact that the West has been ‘buying’ African natives for centuries. There is . . . an instantaneous necessity to be divorced from this so visibly unsaved stranger, in whose heart, moreover, one cannot guess what dreams of vengeance are being nourished.
It is not only that whites believe this, however, Baldwin does too. His acceptance of the damnation of the black man finds a quick response in white readers, and one might venture to say that his rapid rise as a writer owes something to this. Moreover, his complicity in this anachronistic attitude toward race is like the inversion of his characters, who, in their sickness, hope for any acceptance, however dishonorable. The position is not different from that of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom—who, since he is black, can only survive by “the incessant mortification of the flesh.” Baldwin’s attitude is superior only in its rhetoric.
Baldwin and Harriet Beecher Stowe are, in fact, spiritual cousins. The ghost of Calvin dogs them both, but it is Baldwin who “accepts a theology that denies him life.” Mrs. Stowe’s Calvinism was somewhat diluted by the social gospel; Baldwin’s is fierce and harsh, for “God and the devil can never be divorced.” Mrs. Stowe believed in the message of redemption of the New Testament; Baldwin, the apostate, does not. “To flee or not, to move or not, it is all the same; his doom is written on his forehead, it is carried in his heart.” This is Baldwin’s last word about man. It is difficult to see in his writings the fulfillment of his exhortations to Richard Wright and Mrs. Stowe: “Our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.” To this we say, Amen. “Go and do thou likewise.”
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1 Reviewed by Steven Marcus in the November 1953 COMMENTARY.—ED.
2 Reviewed by R. W. Flint in the May 1956 COMMENTARY.—ED.
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