Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

New York : The Dial Press, 1956

When James Baldwin was asked about Giovanni's Room in a 1980 interview, he said that it was "not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody." 

Giovanni's Room is, at its heart, a psychological novel whose focus is an analysis of masculinity through the lives of its characters. We are first introduced to our narrator, David, a young blond man from Brooklyn who is now living in Paris. By providing the story of his childhood—a mother who dies while David is young, a womanizing father, and an early gay experience after which David effectively ends the friendship—Baldwin sets up the psychological parameters within which David attempts to live.

Now living in Paris, David's girlfriend Hella has taken some time away from the relationship traveling through Spain. Being short on funds, David reaches out to Jacques, an older gay man who can surely afford to help David out. When they go to a gay bar owned by Guillaume, David's inner dialogue about those in the bar says a lot about how he relates to gayness and his own inner struggle with his masculinity and sexuality. There are the older men who take younger men under their wing, young men who are selling their wares, and those who dress and act in a more feminine manner. David struggles in his own mind to understand why a man who is interested in other men would be interested in an effeminate one. It becomes obvious that  Jacques has become very interested in the new bartender, Giovanni. As the night progresses, however, it is clear that Giovanni, on the other hand, is interested in David. David's internal dialogue continues, wondering what it says about his own masculinity that Giovanni is so masculine. Nonetheless, that night, David begins living in Giovanni's Room. 

As Hella's return to Paris grows closer, David does nothing to prepare Giovanni for what David sees as the end of their relationship. With Hella's return, David abandons Giovanni without a word, kicking off a cascade of events that will affect nearly everyone.

In his 2019 New York Times article, 'Giovanni's Room' Revisited, Hilton Als discusses the initial rejection of Giovanni's Room by the publisher Knopf. "In his letter, the esteemed editor Henry Carlisle ... said the company was turning down 'Giovanni’s Room' not because it lacked fine writing, but because it had so few credible characters and would do nothing to serve Baldwin’s reputation. And that the book’s failure had nothing to do with its subject matter."

Carlisle's inability to see the characters as credible says a lot about the lack of understanding of gay life in America. In addition, gay life in Europe, especially in a major city like Paris was quite different than anything in the U.S. and this is really in many ways at the center of the problems between David and Giovanni. In post-war Paris, homosexuality wasn't illegal, although it would have been considered a moral problem. The openness of the sexuality and the normalization of the various ways gay men got by financially would have been seen as very foreign, a bit vulgar, and maybe not believable from a U.S. editor's perspective. That's the beauty of what Baldwin's experience living in France brought to this story.

Bibliographies & Ratings: Cory (IV); Garde (P, 141***); Mattachine Review (IV); Young (158*)