For Paris is, according to its legend,” James Baldwin wrote in his essay “A Question of Identity” in 1954, “the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans—the city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom.”
Exploring and deconstructing this legend worked wonders for a number of American novelists in the 20th century, including indeed Baldwin himself. In his novel Giovanni’s Room, republished this month 60 years after it first appeared, he sought to dramatise the idea of love and loyalty, commitment and truth. Using Paris as the backdrop offered his book not only a glamour and an intensity, but also allowed it to become part of a tradition of American novels set outside America.
Baldwin said Giovanni's Room was about “what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody”
© ROSEMAY DAHAN
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April 2016
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