At my age, I don’t have the time to study all the
great books I cherish. But I may spend more time on Giovanni’s Room. One of only two novels by James Baldwin, it can
break the heart of anyone who cherishes the right of people to live in freedom.
By “freedom,” I don’t believe in freedom from incarceration
or freedom from tyranny, but in the complete freedom to live as one’s
physiological genetics would have them do, as long as that freedom didn’t harm
another.
Of course, people are harmed in Baldwin’s book. The narrator,
David, is a severely damaged man who damages others. He is a gay man in an era
in which the shame heaped upon him and those like him stifled and contorted
every emotional impulse. His tormentors weren’t necessarily open and visible,
like that poor, demented, homophobic county clerk in Kentucky of today’s
headlines. No, at the time covered by the book, prejudice and punishment flowed
over the likes of David as some dense, impenetrable fog, silent, pervasive, and
unyielding. That fog of torment created a self-disgust that caused its victims
even to despise their own fellow wanderers, even their own lovers, even
humanity in essence, and worse, even themselves.
One struggles to imagine what it must be like to have the
world stifle one’s emotional feelings to the point of harm against humanity or
against one’s own person.
Readers have treated the book as a study of shame, and it
is. Moreover, it is a book that rips away scabs and displays the raw damage
done to society by hate and homophobia. The festering sores flow from the
narrator to others, mostly the innocent who, themselves, struggle to find the
freedom to love in a society given to hatred.
Would that it could be required reading.
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| A life burned out too quickly |
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