This piece is drawn from the introduction to a new edition of ‘‘Giovanni’s Room,’’ by James Baldwin, which is out from Everyman’s Library, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, on March 1st. Read Edwidge Danticat on ‘‘Go Tell It on the Mountain.’’

James Baldwin’s essay “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” published in 1959, deals with the fate of being an American as viewed from exile in Paris. Baldwin begins this piece by quoting Henry James directly: “It is a complex fate to be an American,” then goes on:

America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world . . . are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.

In November, 1948, at the age of twenty-four, Baldwin moved to Paris, where he would soon meet and fall in love with a young Swiss, Lucien Happersberger. In the winter of 1951–52, while staying in Switzerland with Happersberger, Baldwin completed his first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” which was published early in 1953. Over the next two years, living mainly in France, he worked on his second novel, “Giovanni’s Room.”

Some of the atmosphere in “Giovanni’s Room” came from close observation and experience, as Baldwin made clear in an interview in 1980. He spoke of using some of the people he met: ‘‘We all met in a bar, there was a blond French guy sitting at a table, he bought us drinks. And, two or three days later, I saw his face in the headlines of a Paris paper. He had been arrested and was later guillotined . . . I saw him in the headlines, which reminded me that I was already working on him without knowing it.’’

In that interview, Baldwin also stated that his book was ‘‘not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody.’’ Since “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” set in Harlem, had dealt with the African-American experience, it came as a surprise to Baldwin’s editors that he had written a novel in which all the characters were white. ‘‘I certainly could not possibly have—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’ The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it,’’ he said.

His American publishers, Knopf, however, wanted another novel about Harlem life. They told him that he was a ‘‘Negro writer’’ and that he reached a certain audience. ‘‘So they told me, ‘You cannot afford to alienate that audience. This new book will ruin your career, because you’re not writing about the same things and in the same manner as you were before, and we won’t publish this book as a favor to you.’ ’’ (The book was published in 1956, by the Dial Press in the U.S. and by Michael Joseph in the U.K.)

“Giovanni’s Room” begins in a tone that is grave, almost stately. The words in the opening sentences do not have the hushed tone of guilt or confession, which will come later, as much as a ring of certainty, a sense of finality. The voice is not whispering but speaking as though to a large audience. The tone is almost theatrical, mixing the commanding voice of a single actor onstage with precise stage directions. After the first sentence, ‘‘I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life,’’ it is easy to imagine the actor preparing to turn to face the audience.

Even though Baldwin did not acknowledge his debt to Hemingway, it is clear that, from the second page of the book, when the narrator, David, describes meeting his girlfriend, Hella, using simple words and hypnotic repetitions to evoke a time of easy and carefree pleasures, Hemingway’s shadow has been cast over the prose. But there are other shadows, too, competing ones, when the tone of voice moves away from remembering pleasure to a sound that is regretful, weary, rueful, wise. David is ready to judge himself and ready, also, to use these pages not merely to explain or dramatize but to expiate his sins, as much as he can, and to repent, as much as he can.

Baldwin’s creation of a confessional style has something in common with other texts where the narrator has been wounded or has caused pain and the motives are gnarled and require careful explanation and shifts of emotional gear in a time that passes for tranquility. David’s self-lacerating tone is close, for example, to that of Oscar Wilde in “De Profundis,” as Wilde, in prison, is trying to reconstruct what happened to him and his lover, what illusions, self-delusions, and failures of imagination were in place to wreak such havoc in their lives. Just as Wilde will compare himself to Christ in his suffering, David in_ “Giovanni’s Room”__ _will say, ‘‘Judas and the Savior had met in me.’’

Baldwin’s book is also close to Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier_”__ _in the slow and tortuous going-over of events in the past in order to come to some understanding of sexual treachery. This is not to suggest that Baldwin was influenced by these other texts, or that he even read them, but rather that the confession form itself, in a time when so much about sex and sexual motive was kept dark and hidden, can have a special and searing intensity. It is especially open to a heightened tone, the tone of self-awareness and self-knowledge being forced on to the page as though after a struggle, the tone of things being said for the very first time.

Baldwin, in this novel, made clear that he could work wonders with the light and shade of intimacy, that he could move easily and effortlessly into a whispered prose, into moments where David is frightened into sharp wisdom, and then, with equal facility, evoke the excitement of a crowded bar filled with sexual expectation.

As David and Giovanni meet, one can see the influence of Hemingway once more: ‘‘I watched him as he moved. And then I watched their faces, watching him. And then I was afraid. I knew that they were watching, had been watching both of us.’’ But he follows this, soon, with passages that are pure Baldwin, that have a gorgeous, fearless sound, tempered by dark knowledge and pain, that makes clear that he was ready to become the greatest American prose stylist of his generation, such as when, at the end of Chapter 2, the memory of Giovanni is evoked: