James Baldwin’s mid-century masterpiece, Giovanni’s Room

Our Cultural Milestones series focuses on influential books.

Although publisher Alfred A. Knopf published James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, it rejected his second. When editor Henry Carlisle received the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room in 1955, he declared it a failure and told Baldwin that the novel, if published, would damage the author’s reputation.

Carlisle insisted that the rejection had nothing to do with the book’s content, but Baldwin was convinced otherwise. Knopf, he thought, did not want a black man from Harlem telling a story about the homosexual love between a white American expat living in Paris and an Italian bartender.

When Giovanni’s Room was finally published by Dial Press in 1956, the reception was mixed. The novel was criticized both for its queerness and for not focusing explicitly on the struggle of black people in America, as expected from Baldwin. The critic Hilton Als characterized the bland reactions as follows:

The filth and sex you wrote about in “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and some essays. Can you give up your fantasy and be black for me?

Here, instead, was a story about David, the narrator, who, looking at his reflection in a windowpane, tells the reader:

My face is like a face you have seen many times before. My ancestors conquered a continent, traversing deadly plains until they came to an ocean that looked away from Europe into a darker past.

In this novel, Baldwin is interested in the privileges that come with David’s whiteness and the resulting belief that his own needs and desires are more important than the needs and desires of the people around him.

The novel also explores what it means to be queer when homosexuality is punished so cruelly by society that the punishment is internalized and self-imposed. What does it mean, Baldwin wonders, to be unacceptable to oneself?

Almost 70 years after its publication, Giovanni’s Room is rightly considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It is a novel about how hard it can be to endure love, and how hard it can be to really know yourself.

It’s about the inability to face our own desires and the terrible things fear makes us do when we shy away from ourselves and others to escape it.

Language sharpened on the pulpit

In the opening pages we learn that David’s fiancée Hella is returning to America, that the titular Giovanni has been sentenced to death – for what crime we are not told – and is awaiting the guillotine, and that we meet David on the worst morning of his life. Much of what follows happens in flashbacks as David tries to make sense of his relationship with Giovanni, their love and pain, and where things went wrong.

Colm Tóibín, in his New Yorker article on Giovanni’s Room, called Baldwin “the greatest American prose stylist of his generation.” The novel is indeed a work of astonishing beauty. Baldwin’s prose has the rare ability to put emotion on the page while remaining dazzlingly expressive, a language that is at once natural and elegant.

In his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin speculated that his style was characterized by a mixture of

the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the shop church, something ironic, violent and constantly understated in the language of the blacks – and something of Dickens’ love of bravura wit.

As a teenager, Baldwin became a successful preacher, like his father. In his masterful autobiographical essay “Letter from a Region of my Mind,” Baldwin writes that this newfound calling, for which he felt exceptionally gifted,

meant that there were hours and even days when I could not be disturbed – not even by my father. I had immobilized him. It took me a little longer to realize that I had immobilized myself as well and was running from nothing.

This linguistic gift that Baldwin developed in the pulpit—the power to persuade, to enliven, to elevate, to condemn—gives Giovanni’s Room a resonant metaphysical force, reminding us of the moral and aesthetic splendor that remains with us despite our human frailties.

This is related to the deep and paralyzing fear that comes with the realization that you have been behaving so extraordinarily eloquently only to avoid confronting a difficult truth.

David admits this as he reflects on the story he is about to tell:

I believe today that if I had had the slightest inkling that the self I would find would turn out to be the same self I had been running from for so long, I would have stayed home.

David’s narrative is an exercise in self-deception and self-discovery. He first meets Giovanni in a gay bar in Paris, and soon they begin sleeping together and living together in Giovanni’s shabby, cramped apartment.

Giovanni is beautiful and has an unabashed charm, and after inviting David to drink white wine and eat oysters in the Parisian morning sun, he embodies the wonders of Europe, its charm and its strangeness.

He offers David a way out, a chance to free himself from the burden of the American destiny. But at the same time he instills fear and terror in him. He shows David his many irreconcilable contradictions: as an American who is both repelled and fascinated by his homeland, and as a homosexual who is attracted to men.

In this stormy bond, David sees only himself. Overwhelmed by his own feelings, Giovanni is reduced to an instrument of lust and self-loathing and obscures the personality of his lover.

Paradoxes

Baldwin, who was born in Harlem 100 years ago this month, spent much of his early career in France, moving from New York to Paris in 1948 when he was just 24 years old.

He did this, among other things, to escape the oppressive miasma of American racism and to gain the freedom to write. Although he arrived in France with only forty dollars, he found the space and atmosphere he needed to write the books that made his reputation – Go Tell it on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son – as well as much of Giovanni’s Room.

In Giovanni’s room, the United States appears as an unignorable, looming entity, a monster from which one can flee but never escape. Just as Baldwin wanted to escape America, David is afraid of returning to America. To survive abroad, David relies on money sent to him by his father, but his father’s increasingly desperate pleas to bring his son home make David think of “sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.”

But as he drinks with Giovanni, dizzy at the splendor of Paris, he is overcome by an overwhelming nostalgia and the desire to return

home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people I would always, helplessly and in whatever bitterness, love more than anything.

This simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from America was a tension that preoccupied Baldwin throughout his life, with France playing the role of an alternative that was inevitably both wondrous and disappointing.

In an essay on the archetypal American student in Paris, Baldwin wrote, “From the standpoint of Europe he discovers his own country.” An American in Paris may have escaped America, but he will not have escaped his Americanism.

In 1957, Baldwin moved back to the United States (later he lived alternately in France and America). In a 1962 interview, Baldwin said that despite the many problems facing France, the people “had a certain greatness and freedom that is very difficult to achieve here (in America).”

Elsewhere, Baldwin notes that the legend of Paris as a city of romance and freedom “is limited, as legends are limited, since it is – in the truest sense of the word – unliveable and refers to the past.”

This paradox – the Paris of fantasy and the Paris of reality, which are at the same time irreconcilable and insoluble – plays a central role in the novel and provides the framework for a story full of paradoxes.

David is a coward who can beautifully express his own cowardice, but cannot undo the damage he causes. He recounts the great suffering he has caused, but can never quite escape the thought that this is his tragedy and not the tragedy of those who loved him.

It is David’s procrastination and indecision, resulting from his inability to acknowledge the needs of Hella or Giovanni, that ultimately lead to his ruin.

Giovanni’s Room is an intimate novel, both in the depth of the feelings it harbors for its characters and in its profound knowledge of how often we turn away when called upon to bear witness to ourselves and our capacity to hurt those we love.