Giovanni’s Room

“I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning.”

I read The Fire Next Time my sophomore year in undergrad. I had never heard of the book before and had probably only heard the name James Baldwin in passing. It was a professor and gay black man  who told me to read it as part of an independent study. I point out the race and sexuality of my professor to show how important diversity is. In my then 19 years on the planet nobody had told me to read anything by one of the foremost minds of the civil rights movement. I happen to have finished reading Giovanni’s Room during Pride Month and am writing this a few days before Juneteenth. The intersectionality of sexuality and Blackness has always been intriguing to me, Giovanni’s Room proves to be intriguing indeed.

 So What Had Happened Was…

 During a break with his fiancé David is left alone in Paris, while the bride to be explores Spain and her own feelings toward David. An American ex-pat on the brink of homelessness, David relies on friendships with a few Parisians to live day to day. While far from poor in America, David’s father refuses to send him more money in Paris. We come to find out that David doesn’t even like the people who have been  providing for him in France. At first this seems to be because these “friends” happen to be gay men, as David struggles to come to terms with his own sexuality. These friends frequent gay bars and David tags along under the guise of simply wanting to mooch off of the Parisians. That is until he meets Giovanni, a young Italian bartender.

 After countless small signs like a touching pinky or a chance glance held a little long David finally gives into the intimacy clearly between the two. David quickly moves in with Giovanni in a small room on the outskirts of Paris. With the two men already lacking money, Giovanni loses his bartending job and the two lovers begin to rely on each other financially. Until David’s fiancé, Hella, returns from her trip. David disappears without telling Giovanni anything, in order to be with Hella. However, David and Hella are discovered in the streets of Paris by Giovanni. Giovanni doesn’t understand the coldness by which David left. Giovanni understands having a mistress as he himself has had one in the past, and does not see that as an impedance to the intimacy that David and him share.  David, however, is unable to conceive of a world where he continues his relationship with Giovanni and chooses to pursue a traditional life with Hella (marriage, kids and a home in America).

 Heartbroken and destitute Giovanni tries his best to keep his life from falling to shambles, all while David watches from afar. One day David hears the news that Giovanni has been arrested for the murder of a “friend” of theirs. David becomes consumed by his thoughts of Giovanni and begins to neglect Hella. On the day that Giovanni is to suffer his capital punishment, David leaves without telling Hella in order to go to a gay bar that he knows. David finds a new man and is with him for days before Hella finds him in the streets and confronts him. Hella decides to leave David and return to America, to which David does not fight. The book ends with David alone in a small town in France.

 Aiight So Boom…

There is so much I could talk about with this book. It inspired conversations about first times with my gay homies. There is also the question of what is Giovanni’s room, is it home or is it the closet? Also a discussion of how radical it was to write this book in 1956 is necessary in today’s world in order to remind people of the ongoing fight for gay rights (reminder that gay sex was “decriminalized” in 2003 in Lawrence v Texas and gay marriage was legalized in Obergefell in 2015). However, although there is a gay relationship in the novel, Baldwin maintained that it is not a book about homosexuality. Instead it is about a man who cannot love.

 This is integral to how this novel fits into this blog. This blog was created for me to read Black classics, however there are zero Black characters in this novel. I thought about what it meant for Baldwin to write a novel about white people and at first was disappointed by the lack of melanin. However, I was reminded what an art critic once said about Mount Fuji in Japanese art. It is ever present, even the choice not to depict it says something about Mount Fuji. Thus what does it mean for Baldwin to forego depicting Blackness and instead choose to depict whiteness. The first and most accessible is that Black people can depict whole and human white characters and as such so should white authors. While surface level it is important to say. The heavier and more substantial point is that the American hegemony also hurts white people. In this you see a rich white man so fully encaged by the American expectation of him that he is not able to love either man or woman. For this recognition of a white man’s pain to come from a Black author is to me the point of the novel. It fits perfectly into Baldwin’s politic as he believed it key that we break away from the division of American hegemony and see ourselves in each other. He saw mutual understanding as the only way to defeat prejudice, which he saw as cowardice. In an interview towards the end of his life in 1987 Baldwin says “It is not a matter of prejudice. It is a matter of cowardice. It is easy to blame the nigger or the Arab or the Jew or the d*ke or the f*ggot. Anyone who isn’t you. You don’t want to see that you could be that person. That in some ways you are that person.”  As such, this novel is me a straight Black man, seeing himself in a rich closeted queer white man, written by a Black openly gay man almost 70 years ago. That cannot be dubbed anything else but genius.