Finding the Jimmy in James: How James Baldwin Discovered "Giovanni's Room" in Lambert Strether's Paris

Contemporary critics have been reluctant to accord novelists the freedom and authority to imagine the lives of racial others. James Baldwin’s life-long embrace of Henry James’s fiction, especially his early and most Jamesian novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), offers a revealing case in point. With its all-white characters and its Jamesian theme of the American naïf in Paris, the novel seems to some an errant excursion beyond Baldwin’s native literary environment, to others a misguided bid for artistic legitimacy via capitulation to white culture, or most recently, a novel that dramatizes the black experience nonetheless, if we only recognize Baldwin’s characters are in “white face.” These various approaches re-segregate the novelistic art in ways Baldwin vigorously rejected throughout his career, in no small part because of what he had learned from James’s The Ambassadors (1903). As read by Baldwin, James’s novel describes the prevailing fantasy of innocence by which Americans imagine themselves as pure by imagining the Other as corrupt. At a crucial point in Baldwin’s development, James reminded him that no matter our class, color, or sexuality, our “stink” always gives us away as brothers and sisters. Giovanni’s Room thus reflects the lesson of The Ambassadors as Baldwin understood it: our common humanity always precedes and transcends racial and gender identities. The leveling effect of this Jamesian lesson legitimized Baldwin’s claim to Jamesian kinship; in the most deeply personal and particular way, James’s story was Baldwin’s story, too, for both were embodied and suffering human beings before they could be anything else.