Giovanni's Room (Penguin Modern Classics)

‘It’s Giovanni,’ she said. I watched her. ‘Isn’t it,’ she asked, carefully, ‘that you think you’ve done something awful to him by leaving him in that room? I think you blame yourself for what happened to him. But, darling, nothing you could have done would have helped him. Stop torturing yourself.’ ‘He was so beautiful,’ I said. I had not meant to

The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

‘People invent categories in order to feel safe. White people invented black people to give white people identity… Straight cats invent faggots so they can sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves.’

Hella and I went to a lot of movies, and found ourselves, very often, sitting in empty, fifth-rate bars. We walked a lot, in silence. We no longer seemed to see things to point out to each other. We drank too much, especially me.

‘I wish, any way,’ I said at last, ‘that you’d believe me when I say that, if I was lying, I wasn’t lying to you.’ She turned toward me with a terrible face. ‘I was the one you were talking to. I was the one you wanted to come with you, to this terrible house in the middle of nowhere. I was the one you said you wanted to marry.’ ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘

‘What is it you’re not telling me? Why don’t you tell me the truth? Tell me the truth!’ I turned and faced her. ‘Hella—bear with me, bear with me—a little while.’ ‘I want to,’ she cried, ‘but where are you? You’ve gone away somewhere and I can’t find you. If you’d only let me reach you—!’ She began to cry. I held her in my arms. I felt nothing at a

Baldwin memorably described his flight to Paris as ‘a leap into visibility’.

Some years later, in a reply to an interviewer’s question, James Baldwin made plain his feelings about the connectivity between race and sexuality: ‘The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined, you know. If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.’

I don’t know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time.