Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Title: Giovanni’s Room
Author: James Baldwin
Published: 1956
Type: Fiction
Pages: 169
“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? Since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty – they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better – forever – and you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe… you play it safe long enough, and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever.”
In Brief:
A slim but powerful book – Baldwin masterfully creates intense and nuanced characters and a richly evocative sense of place, while boldly exploring questions of identity, love, gender, and sexuality.
Rating: 4.2
Synopsis:
Giovanni’s Room follows several months of the life of David, an American man living in Paris, whose girlfriend has gone off to Spain to decide whether to marry him. David is broke, and one night he reaches out to an older gay acquaintance to ask for money. The two of them go to a gay bar, where David meets the bartender Giovanni, a beautiful Italian man. They immediately and obviously hit it off. Even though David has reservations and originally offended, he ultimately goes home with Giovanni and sleeps with him, reluctant but relieved. They begin an intense relationship.
David moves in with Giovanni into his small, dark room, which he always talks of remodeling. They live a sort of leisurely lifestyle in spite of their poverty, drinking to excess and reveling in their time together. However, Giovanni becomes increasingly dependent on David, revealing his deep depression, while David holds back. Eventually, David learns that his girlfriend Hella is coming back to Paris and he must soon end things with Giovanni; to prove to himself he isn’t gay, he goes out and sleeps with a woman. When he returns, Giovanni is a mess, having lost his job at the bar due to the owner’s jealousy. He’s more attached to David than ever, becoming suspicious and jealous, claiming that he wouldn’t be able to live without him.
When Hella returns, David leaves Giovanni and spends days with her without saying anything to Giovanni. David and Hella eventually run into him at a bookshop, and he learns that Giovanni had been desperately looking for him. When David goes back to get his things, Giovanni pleads with him to stay, telling him his terrible life story, but David refuses and returns to Hella.
Despite making wedding plans with Hella, David continues to keep track of Giovanni, who falls in with some poor street boys. He eventually gets his job back at the gay bar, but shortly after the manager is found strangled, and Giovanni is accused. When he’s discovered, he pleads guilty and is sentenced to death.
Overcome, David convinces Hella to leave Paris with him, and they spend time in the south of France. Hella is confused about David’s strong reaction to Giovanni, until she discovers him picking up a sailor and discovers his bisexuality, which she had suspected. She goes back to America and leaves David alone, where he contemplates Giovanni’s impending death.
Where I’m At:
The most impactful thing that affected my reading of this book was my own experience with a toxic, dependent relationship. The other members of my book club stipulated that the narration was set up to make the reader like Giovanni a lot at first – that was not my experience. He was too charismatic, too confident, for me to trust him from the beginning. I could physically feel my stomach twisting with dread when I read about their introduction. Though it’s been a few years now, reading about Giovanni put me right back into that place, made me feel helpless and angry. I’m hoping that means that I’m better at recognizing warning signals now, not that I’m incapable of trusting anyone at all. I hated Giovanni, and in a way, I hated David too, for falling for him in a way as I did. I’ll get into it, but I think Baldwin did a really accurate job describing the dynamics and details of such a troubled relationship.
This was also my first Baldwin book; we read it together with The Fire Next Time for my book club. I read it in early June, around when the Black Lives Matter protests across the US were starting. It was one of the first books I read by a Black author as a deliberate step to educate myself, diversify my bookshelf and the perspectives I ingest. With this in mind, I felt a bit embarrassed when I started the book and realized that although Baldwin is such a prominent Black voice in this country, it neither takes place in America nor has a single Black character. More on that in a moment; though not what I expected, it’s still an education.
Getting Into it:
So I’ll start with the obvious, and kind of dumb – I was surprised that David was white. Early on, I read
My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. 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.
and I sort of squinted at it. I went back and re-read the passage. I even looked it up online. He was indeed white.
Obviously I know that just because Baldwin is Black doesn’t mean he can only write about Black people. God knows how many white novelists have written about people of color and no one bats an eye (well, maybe they’re starting to). As if Black novelists don’t have the privilege of using their imagination to become someone else, as if they’re only entitled to write about the Black, urban, poor experience. I don’t believe that, but I still have to admit – it threw me off in the beginning.
The choice seems especially meaningful from Baldwin, who said in interviews that he didn’t feel he could address both racism and homophobia at once. Maybe he also thought that if he made the relationship between David and Giovanni interracial, that would just be too much. Maybe he thought that making the main character white would help a white audience understand what he was getting at, force them to identify with the main character and grapple with the issues he faced. Maybe he’s intended to draw parallels between the discrimination faced by gay people of the time and Black people, point out that not even David’s whiteness could save him. Maybe he wanted to imagine a world where he could be a full party to the bohemian ex-pat community he witnessed during his own time in Paris.
Anyway - lesson learned. Though not at all the novel about Black America that I might have expected, it was still deeply powerful and compelling.
The main focus of Giovanni’s Room deals with sexuality and gender. David and Giovanni are both apparently bisexual, which even now is often erased and ignored in contemporary art/literature. From the beginning, David has a strong disgust towards gay men, even when he uses them to get money, and compares them to animals in his observations –
His utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not – so grotesquely – resemble human beings.
As he begins his relationship with Giovanni, David continues to feel this way, struggling with internalized self-hatred. He’s unable to open himself to the relationship, believing it impossible to have a “normal” kind of love with a man. This is sharply contrasted with Giovanni, who fully embraces their relationship with gusto and joy and apparent fearlessness.
The titular room also becomes something of a symbol for this. David hates Giovanni’s room, dismissing it as disgusting and dark, a place where he feels trapped. Giovanni, on the other hand, is devoted to it, always planning for its future and trying to make it beautiful, a place for the two of them.
The homophobia is also bound inextricably with perceptions of gender. David has long conversations with Giovanni and (separately) Hella about a woman’s role, about the meaning of masculinity, that are decidedly toxic and misogynistic. He grows wildly resentful of Giovanni when he imagines that he’s trying to turn David into a “housewife,” which he insists he can never be as a man. Unable to cope with all of this, David becomes a sort of tragic figure, completely miserable and isolated, unable to accept himself or really experience love, either with Giovanni or Hella.
I really appreciated the way Baldwin wrote about David’s isolation, as he reflects –
But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something that broken in me to make me so cold and perfectly still and far away.
Despite never having gone through anything like David, this still resonated with me, felt painfully accurate. During and for some time after the time I was in the relationship I referenced earlier, I felt broken and cold and distant from everything. Like David, I felt trapped in my head and overwhelmed by the hatred I turned towards myself, so was unable to return love, even to those who loved me earnestly and harmlessly.
Again – a lot of this book resonated with me. I guess I’ll get into that.
Giovanni’s character, and his relationship with David, was absolutely devastating. Giovanni has this incredibly forceful personality that sweeps up David, renders him helpless. The toxicity of their relationship escalates rapidly from their first flirty interaction, and David doesn’t know how to cope. As David, Baldwin writes:
[Giovanni] could not endure being very far from me for very long. I was the only person on God’s cold, green earth who cared about him, who knew his speech and silence, knew his harms, and did not carry a knife. The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.”
That passage made me cry. I sympathized with David, and I was furious with him, leveling the same accusations I often make at my past self. Didn’t you see what you were getting into? Who he was? Why didn’t you leave?
Of course, it wasn’t that simple, and of course, David did eventually leave, in the same way that I did. Suddenly, without confronting the issues, running away, grabbing onto the next person like a life vest. It was weak and I hated it, but I also understood. Sometimes that’s all you can do.
This post is already intolerably long – obviously, I have a lot of feelings about this book and love for Baldwin’s passages. I haven’t gotten into many of the things I wanted to – more about Hella and the characters’ misogyny, the depiction of heartbreak, the beautiful way Baldwin was able to evoke nostalgia for a place and time I’ve never experienced, how race still plays an underlying role in spite of all the characters’ whiteness. But I’m edging onto my fifth page, so I’ll stop now.
Obviously, I recommend this book. It clearly had a lot of personal meaning for me, but I think that many people would be able to get something out of it. Furthermore, Baldwin’s writing is exquisite and demanding and utterly worthwhile. It doesn’t take long, but it really leaves an impact.
