Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books. Despite publishing James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain , publishing house Alfred A. Knopf rejected his second.
Upon receiving the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room in 1955, editor Henry Carlisle pronounced it a failure, telling Baldwin the novel, if published, would damage the author’s reputation . While Carlisle insisted the rejection had nothing to do with the book’s content, Baldwin was convinced otherwise. Knopf, he thought, did not want a story of homosexual love between a white American expat living in Paris and an Italian bartender being told by a Black man from Harlem.
When Giovanni’s Room was finally published by the Dial Press in 1956, reception was mixed. The novel was critiqued both for its queerness, and for not, as was expected from Baldwin, focusing explicitly on the struggle of Black America. Critic Hilton Als has characterised the insipid response as follows: The dirt and sex you wrote about in ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ and some of the essays.
Can you forgo your imagination and be black for me? Here, instead, was a story about David, the narrator, who, observing his reflection in a windowpane, tells the reader: My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past. Baldwin, in this novel, is interested in the privilege David’.