Giovanni’s Room (1956)

I like to collect nice-looking hardcovers of classic books, so whenever I hit a used bookstore, I’ll scrounge around and see what I can find. However, between the amount of time I generally make for reading and the fact that I read a mixture of both classic and contemporary literature, I have a lot of books that I picked up some time ago and haven’t gotten around to reading yet. (Much like my watch lists on my streaming subscriptions somehow never seem to get shorter.) As such, I own two James Baldwin titles that I hadn’t read, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room. The last time I was between books, I knew I wanted to read one of them, and since this was during Pride Month, I went with the latter (a few spoilers.)

David, a young American living in Paris, begins a reckoning with himself when his fiancée travels to Spain without him. He meets and falls in love with Giovanni, an immigrant from Italy working in a gay bar. The two men’s relationship is charged and deep, but as Giovanni begins to hold on more tightly, David resists the true emotional intimacy that Giovanni offers alongside the physical intimacy that they share.

First off, let me begin by saying that I can understand why this book would be considered dated by 21^st-century standards. There’s an era of literature (along with an era of cinema, television, and other stories) in which same-sex relationships – particularly between men – were only “allowed” if they did not end happily. There are some majorly-tortured themes in this book, and we’re told pretty much from the beginning that we’re not going to get a fairytale ending here. That said, the characters and insights in this book are searingly-honest and the prose takes my breath away at multiple points. This is an instance where I can see and acknowledge the elements that make me uncomfortable while also recognizing the tremendous work it does within the time in which it was written. It reminds me a little of The Boys in the Band in that way, even though the two works are tremendously different.

There’s a lot to grapple with in this book. Throughout, we see how David might be happy but continually fights against the things that could make him so. Like so many other stories about closeted people, he has a particular vision for his life, and if the person he is doesn’t align with that vision, he has no real intention of allowing himself to be that person, not entirely. His time with Giovanni is a dream, an outlier, something that he can’t allow himself to perceive as true. He carries a lot of internalized homophobia and effeminophobia that are of course in part shaped by the society around him that rejects LGBTQ people and forces them into the shadows, and he in turn directs both in judgment of other queer men, viewing them as weak and unmanly even though they’re more honest in who they are than he is.

I didn’t realize until I started the book that David and all the other major characters are white; the foreword includes the note that, at the time, Baldwin didn’t know how to address both parts of his identity as a gay Black man within the same story, and so his writings divided that existence in twain, writing about either straight Black men or queer white men. But within that, there’s still something special in writing David as white, because it’s done in such a way that a white author wouldn’t. In the very first paragraph of the book, as David is describing his reflection, he states, “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.” Whereas, by and large, the average white author doesn’t even use the word “white” to describe their white characters.

Which brings me again to the writing. While I read a little of Baldwin’s non-fiction in college, excerpts from essays, I just adore the stunning prose he writes here. His command of language is extraordinary and heartfelt, and I love how the style of the sentences and paragraphs shift according to David’s emotional state. It’s so beautifully written, and it makes me excited to read more of Baldwin’s work.

Warnings

Violence, sexual content, drinking/smoking, language (including homophobic slurs,) and strong thematic elements.