Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin, "Giovanni's Room"

Giovanni's Room is, on closer examination, a more unusual novel than it appears at first glance: its author, James Baldwin, is routinely counted among the greatest African-American novelists, and yet if one were asked to read the book blind and guess who wrote it, one would scarcely imagine the author to be African-American. The lion's share of the novel is set in Europe, and in a cast which includes a hulking blond protagonist and various American and European supporting characters, there is not a single African-American depicted. But Giovanni's Room avoids the thorny topic of race only to address an (arguably) even thornier topic in the year of its publication -- 1956 -- which is male homosexuality. As the book begins, though, it is not immediately evident that this is even going to be the topic, as David (the aforementioned hulking blond protagonist) is dealing with Hella, a European woman to whom he has recently proposed, yet he is feeling adrift as Hella departs for the U.S.A.: as David (who narrates the novel) puts it: "I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to."(p. 4) In other words, David senses that a conventional marriage to a woman will make him more grounded and less deracinated than pursuing the more transitory relationships of the homosexual demimonde.

The presentational manner in which David first meets Giovanni gives us the sense that Giovanni is "striking a pose" in a feminine manner, as David describes him working as a bartender in a gay bar: "Giovanni placed himself before me again and began wiping the bar with a damp cloth"(p. 34) This gay bar is owned by a man named Guillaume, whom it seems is Giovanni's patron or lover of some sort. David's friend Jacques finds Giovanni to be worth flirting with immediately and suggests that David should feel free to feel love and attraction for Giovanni. So they go to an oyster bar all together, and this is where David's love for Giovanni is first felt. Quoting from the lyrics of a romantic song, David says of Giovanni's entrance into the restaurant in Les Halles: "And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars."(p. 58) It is here that the novel achieves a formal end -- in the conclusion of Part One -- with the curtains drawn decorously over the entry of the narrator David and Giovanni back to the "Giovanni's Room" of the book's title.