(by James Baldwin)
In his introduction to this edition, Kevin Young writes about buying a copy of this book “knowing only it was a book of Paris and exile.” That was more or less my starting point, too – knowing this book was a classic of queer lit, set in Paris, with an American expat as one of the main characters. I remembered from The Fire Next Time how much I like Baldwin’s writing, and on a sentence level, this book does not disappoint. I mean, look at this, from when our narrator is talking about summer in New York and the first guy he ever hooked up with: “I remember walking down the dark, tropical Brooklyn streets with heat coming up from the pavements and banging from the walls of houses with enough force to kill a man, with all the world’s grownups, it seemed, sitting shrill and dishevelled on the stoops and all the world’s children on the sidewalks or in the gutters or hanging from fire escapes, with my arm around Joey’s shoulder.”
But this isn’t a New York story, it’s a Paris story – though by the time the book opens our narrator, David, is in the south of France, “remembering the City of Light while having a dark night of the soul,” to quote Kevin Young’s intro again. The scenery is very Parisian – late-night bars with oysters and wine and cognac, the Seine, descriptions like this: “At the end of the long, curving street which faced us were the trees of the boulevard and straw chairs piled high before cafes and the great stone spire of Saint-Germain-des-Prés” – but also descriptions like this: “It seemed to turn cold overnight. The tourists in their thousands disappeared, conjured away by timetables. When one walked through the gardens, leaves fell about one’s head and sighed and crashed beneath one’s feet. The stone of the city, which had been luminous and changing, faded slowly, but with no hesitation, into simple grey stone again.”
This book is about having love and joy and light but only for the briefest of moments, and about losing it, and about losing it because you run away from it. The book was written in (and set in) the 1950s; at one point David says to Giovanni, “What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?” We see everything from David’s perspective – his shame and internalized homophobia, his guilt, his uncertainty and fear – and sometimes he sees himself clearly but more often he doesn’t at all, he can’t or won’t. Near the of the book he looks at himself in the mirror and we get this: “I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.” But not quickly enough, it seems, to do David or Giovanni any good.
Leave a Reply