Bring me my arrows of desire

Book club choice Tim Robey on the searing honesty of a masterpiece of gay literature

Judging by the ardent, Oscarnominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, still on release, it’s as a social critic and chronicler of the 20th century African-American experience that James Baldwin is best known today. The Harlem-born writer was also a prolific essayist and some-time poet, with two plays and a handful of powerful novels to his name, including

Go Tell It on The Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962), which looked at the lives of black New Yorkers.

The shimmering, compact, and bleakly beautiful Giovanni’s Room (1956) was an anomaly – so much so that Baldwin’s publisher, Knopf, rejected the book, and thought it would ruin his career as a “Negro writer”. Not only are the main characters white – a young American in Paris called David, and Giovanni, an Italian bartender – but they are two men who fall self-destructively in love.

David, the novel’s narrator, is bisexual, and has a fiancée from Minneapolis, Hella, who is abroad when the men first meet, at a bar run by David’s terribly unhappy friend, Jacques. “He stood, insolent and dark and leonine, his elbow leaning on the cash-register,“David says of his first glimpse, before they get to talking. “I did not dare to mention Hella. I could not even pretend to myself that I was sorry she was in Spain. I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad.”

The book is about David’s divided self, and the shame and bitterness of treating lust as a kind of enemy. Giovanni’s face becomes “a stranger’s face” and their joy mutates into anguish and fear. Baldwin once said that the strain of handling “both propositions” – being black and homosexual in his time – would have been too much for the book to bear. But in reaching into David’s stricken soul, he confronted the crisis of desire with a searing honesty that made this a milestone in gay literature.