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Flanagan, Mary

Mary Flanagan is a novelist and critic. An Irish-American living in London, she has published three novels and two collections of short stories, and is currently at work on a third. Her most recent book is Adèle.

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20230210173343 Giovanni’s Room | Mary Flanagan on James Baldwin | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Giovanni’s Room | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where the office is much tidier than it has been in many months in preparation for the arrival of our new spring publications. As we’ve spent so much time of late looking forward, we thought it apt to delve back into the vast Slightly Foxed archive and landed in Issue 6, published in June 2005. There we meet Mary Flanagan reflecting on the summer of her second year of university and learn of her particular attachment to James Baldwin’s extraordinary novel, Giovanni’s Room.
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On the Loose

Mary Flanagan on James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

To compensate for this structural flaw, I went to Athens and had the adventure I wanted to have. Then I nipped back to Rome, found a seedy pensione and holed up there until he arrived. For two days I lived on peaches and pasta and read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Baldwin’s famous novel was published in 1956 when he was becoming not only America’s foremost Black homosexual writer but also a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin outspokenly held white America accountable for the racism poisoning its society. He insisted that, because whites could not love themselves, they could not love their Black brothers and sisters, and that they paid for their persecution ‘by the lives they led’. Yet Giovanni’s Room contains not a single Black character. It is as if Baldwin is writing above race and gender in order to draw universal conclusions. The boldness of the enterprise still astonishes me.

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