Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin's second novel, is a masterpiece of narrative composition and constituted a literal and metaphorical coming out for the young author, although Baldwin had already indicated his interest in the profound connection between race and sexuality in his successful novelistic debut, the autobiographical, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). Giovanni's Room is narrated introspectively and retrospectively in the first person by a young, white American named David, who is trying to find himself in post-World War II France. It follows David's exploits in Paris, where he keeps company with the Saint-Germain crowd of homosexuals, while his official American fiancée, Hella, is traveling in Spain. The central focus is on David's struggle with his sexual identity and his tragic romance with Giovanni, a handsome Italian bartender, whose love David ultimately rejects in a fit of self-hating and homophobic rage. The narrative unfolds in a series of flashbacks into the immediate and more distant past, and periodically returns to a rented house in southern France, where David, as narrator, contemplates his story before a possible return to the United States, on the night before Giovanni's execution.
The novel opens with David staring into the night through his reflection in the window of the house in the south of France that he and Hella had rented in a futile attempt to maintain the illusion of their engagement. David is contemplating his origins as a rather generic WASP American, a descendant of European immigrants, who “conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past”. He is approaching thirty, his “face is like a face you have seen many times”, and he claims an unremarkable heritage in a middle class family. His mother died when he was five and his care was subsequently left to his father and his unmarried sister. The father, a heavily drinking and promiscuous man, has been David's model of masculinity and wants his son, “Butch”, to become a man, not “a Sunday school teacher”.
All through his life, David has been struggling to repress a memory of his first sexual encounter, a teenage summer affair with a brown-skinned friend, Joey. Although he had experienced deep love and a profound connection with Joey, he deserted him and shunned his friendship afterwards, filled with shame and fear, for his friend was “a boy”. His flight from Joey and their intimacy initiated a series of escapes from himself, his father, and ultimately his country. Having tired of imitating his father's manly behavior – “the joyless seas of alcohol […] blunt, bluff, hearty and totally meaningless friendships […] forests of desperate women […] work, which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense” – he leaves for France, with an inkling, however, that whatever he is trying to escape will never let him go.
In Paris, David meets Hella, another wide-eyed American seeking a meaning in life, and having decided that she's “fun”, soon asks her to marry him. She needs time to think and leaves for a long visit to Spain, while David takes up with the gay crowd, despite loudly proclaiming his heterosexuality and openly despising his two main elderly acquaintances: Guillaume, a scion of an aristocratic French family, and Jacques, a Belgian-American, both of whom are wealthy and loan him money when his father is slow in sending him his allowance. When David meets handsome Giovanni, a dark-haired, attractive Italian who tends the bar at Guillaume's establishment for gay men and drag queens, he experiences feelings akin to a religious revelation. Jacques recognizes the force between them and councils David to give in to love and abandon his inhibitions; a nameless drag queen foretells him great sorrow and heartache. Although he tries to resist him, David falls head over heels for Giovanni, “[w]ith everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes”.
The lovers live in Giovanni's “maid's room” on the outskirts of the city, which witnesses and reflects in its disorder both the ecstatic beginnings of their passionate affair and its tragic demise. Despite his initial happiness in a new relationship, David secretly awaits Hella's return, for he is afraid of the depth of his feelings for Giovanni; increasingly the room scares and suffocates him. Afraid and unable to make a commitment to his male lover, he has a distasteful one-night stand with Sue, another American lost in Paris. Soon Giovanni loses his job for having resisted Guillaume's dirty advances and the two lovers live on hope of David's father sending money from America. More and more confused about his sexuality and what he feels is expected of him as an American male and his father's son, David decides to follow through with his decision to marry Hella upon her return and writes to his father about it. Without letting him know about his decision, he deserts Giovanni and spends a few days with Hella, celebrating her return and trying to convince himself that he has chosen the right, respectable kind of life.
When Hella and David run into him one day, desperate and grief stricken Giovanni manages to convince David to return to their room for the last time, where they have a fight and make love. As he is about to leave, deaf to his lover's pleas, David realizes a truth similar to the one that has been haunting him since his encounter with Joey: “in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body's power over me. Now, as though I had been branded, his body was burned into my mind, into my dreams”. Soon after, Giovanni begins his downward spiral: jobless, he takes up with Jacques in order to survive, then joins the crowds of street boys, and when he is abused and humiliated by Guillaume, who takes advantage of him having falsely promised him his job back, he strangles him in rage and is soon captured and sentenced to death by the guillotine.
Guillaume's death causes a national scandal, and the accounts of his murder in the press emphasize the respectability of his family while stressing the link between Giovanni's foreignness, “perversity”, and his crime. David and Hella leave for the south, presiding over the inevitable dissolution of their union in the big house there, for David cannot stand her body any more and runs away one day. Hella finds him and his male companion at a gay bar and they part after a fight; she leaves to go back home bitter and disillusioned. As David is packing and cleaning the house before leaving himself several days after her departure, he is imagining Giovanni's last night in prison and his execution; he has received a note from Jacques informing him about its day and time. As he closes the door of the house behind him after his vigil is over, there is a glimmer of hope that he might one day be free from his past and the pain that he has wrought. Yet, as the wind blows back fragments of Jacques' letter about Giovanni's execution back on him, he realizes that Giovanni's face and body – the only true love of his life – have been forever branded on his flesh and his memory, that he will never be free, for he has renounced freedom by renouncing love when it came into his life.
The conclusion takes David outside of the claustrophobic house for a brief moment, but suggests as well that he remains forever trapped in his own “room”, closet, or hell of his irreconcilable identity. Like the whole narrative of Giovanni's Room, its tragic ending is written with gripping economy and stylistic mastery. The novel offers a twentieth-century alternative, in every sense of the word, to traditional western heterosexual romances – Tristan and Isolda's or Romeo and Juliet's. Like those of other mythical lovers, the fates of David and Giovanni are inextricably woven together; they die together literally and metaphorically. Although it is the “dark” stranger Giovanni who pays the highest price, he at least finds relief in death. “White American” David's rejection of love and the “room” where he and Giovanni attempted their life together, his guilt for having caused his lover's downfall, constitute a life sentence; David will never experience love or its freedom with another human being. He ends up emotionally dead and hollow, unable to love not only others, but foremostly himself, and in this his story illustrates Baldwin's creed that self-knowledge and self-love are necessary prerequisites if one is ever to be able to truly touch and love others.
In its focus on David's failed journey of self-discovery set against the background of the often clashing American and European cultures, the book also explores the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality have impact on performances of national identity. Although he loses his innocence, David remains American to the core and his whiteness and national culture largely determine the outcome of his story and, in a sense, doom Giovanni. For a man descended from the Founding Fathers, a model citizen of the New World – of the world superpower – must be a heterosexual WASP, Baldwin seems to suggest, otherwise he faces expulsion from the Promised Land into the margin occupied by minorities and foreigners, no matter that his fulfillment and freedom may have lain in that direction.
Due to its focus on almost exclusively white characters and a homosexual romance, Baldwin's American editors feared that Giovanni's Room would be a career suicide for the “Negro writer” that the white literary establishment wanted to see in the author of the instantly successful, all-black first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). After a British house had decided to publish it, however, Dial Press took it on and the book came out to very good reviews, praised strongly by such renowned critics as Alfred Kazin, Mark Schorer, and Philip Rahv. Its success proved to the writer and his readers that he was able to undertake a variety of styles, topics, and subjects, thus defying the labels placed on him by the American publishing market. Subsequent scholarship, however, would tend to treat Baldwin as either a black or a homosexual writer; some of the most recent interdisciplinary approaches have successfully begun to breach this divide.
Soon after its completion, Baldwin reworked the novel into a script for a stage production with the help of a young Turkish actor, Engin Cezzar, who attended Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio at the Yale Drama School. Cezzar turned out to be a perfect actor to play Giovanni, whose real life model was the love of Baldwin's life, a darkly handsome Swiss man, Lucien Happersberger. The workshop production was received well and there were also plans to turn Giovanni's Room into a film, but none of them saw fruition.
Despite the fact that Baldwin never intended it as simply a “homosexual novel”, Giovanni's Room has been somewhat of a cult classic for, mostly, white gay men in post-Stonewall American culture. Baldwin's friend and biographer, David Leeming, stresses that it was meant as a “modern parable”, “a vehicle for prophesying and witnessing […] his philosophy of life”. Although soon to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the novel retains its overall power as a literary masterpiece; its currency, seductive appeal of style, plot, and setting, will certainly ensure that it remains one of the most important contributions to twentieth-century Anglo-American letters.
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Citation: Zaborowska, Magdalena J.. "Giovanni's Room". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 June 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4964, accessed 21 November 2024.]
