Giovanni’s Room: James Baldwin’s story is written between the lines
Artwork homage to James Baldwin on the side of a newsstand on Seventh Avenue, NYC.
The following is a transcript of my presentation at BGSQD on August 10, 2024.
It is my pleasure to talk about James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel, Giovanni’s Room. It is groundbreaking because it is about the queer experience, and at the same time, not about the queer experience, it’s about white characters, but not about white characters. It is complex in its simplicity. A gifted writer can get outside of his own skin and spin a tale about human relationships in their elemental forms so that we can apply it to our lives as we will. I believe that this was Baldwin’s intention with this book.
At the beginning we only meet one character, David, a white American. He is alone late at night, in the South of France, packing his bags to go back to the United States in the morning. He reveals himself in bits. There is a girlfriend named Hella, actually, a fiancé who has already left to return to the US., and there’s something about that relationship that has gone wrong but he is not willing to say what it is. He is not even sure that it was a serious relationship at all, if he ever loved her or if he had proposed to her for all the wrong reasons. As his mind wanders, he tells a bit about his upbringing in a middle class family. For awhile, when he was a teenager, he had a male friend named Joey, and the story of his sexual encounter with Joey, his rejection of that encounter and his subsequent cruelty to Joey is a foreshadowing of the main story of this novel: his relationship with Giovanni. As a teenager, David was still unsure of himself. He was self-conscious of being larger that Joey. He was also aware of being whiter than Joey who is described as dark and brown skinned and coming from a poor neighborhood. Since there is no indication that Joey was black or Hispanic, I think that the Coney Island Brooklyn setting would suggest that Joey was Southern Italian, with brown skin, like me, or like Giovanni in Paris. This is important because Baldwin is making it clear that there is an ethnic and class based factor in David’s relationships with other men. David has a clear sexual “type” that attracts him, and he takes comfort in being whiter and taller and from a higher social class than the men he has sex with. There is a dryness to David’s reminiscences that lays bare the fact that his reflections are not accompanied by any ability to recognize his own motivations or to learn from his experiences. Little has changed in him since his adolescence, except that now he is more confident and more set in his ways.
But that is not the immediate problem that David is facing. He has wrecked his relationship with his female fiancé, and now he must return to the US, face his disapproving father and pick up the pieces of his life.
Oh, and did I mention that, Giovanni, his Parisian lover, is on death row waiting to get his head chopped off in the guillotine in the morning, just as David is leaving the country? Yeah, there’s that too. David mentions it in a throwaway comment in the middle of his ramblings.
Baldwin tells the story as a first person narrator, I did this and I did that, so we naturally have the tendency to identify the main character with the author of the story. But that would be a mistake. It seems to me very clear that the narrator, David, is not James Baldwin. He is not a hero, not a victim and not able to tell the truth to himself or to us. We are lost at sea, stuck with an untrustworthy, self-centered narrator/protagonist, with no independent source of truth. The story that we read is not the real story, as the story is not contained in the words on the page, the story is written between the lines. It is for us to discover that David is, in modern parlance, a dick, incapable of caring about the people he hurts all around him, and that he will probably continue to be a dick for as long as he lives.
Giovanni’s room itself, is not some large, sunny apartment in Rome overlooking the Tiber and the Colosseum, and Giovanni is no fashionable playboy. As we soon see, Giovanni’s actual room is a dark, dirty and smelly hole in the wall no bigger than a prison cell, and Giovanni is a non-legal Southern Italian immigrant living in a grim section of Paris, with no working papers, and eventually with no job and no money. He is the grown up version of Joey, and David will inevitably treat him in the same way.
He is also David’s type, and David is immediately infatuated with the bartender Giovanni when he serves him his drinks. David develops the class based relationship that he is most comfortable with, that of the privileged American and the poor brown foreigner with limited options. Oh, and did I mention that David is cheap? He moves into Giovanni’s smelly room to save some money to go spend with his fiancé, Hella. He is fine living in Giovanni’s squalid room because it makes him feel superior. This goes on for a few months, but once Giovanni is faced with economic difficulties of his own, David begins to have his doubts about how much he is willing to invest in this gay relationship. The problem comes to a head when Hella returns from her lengthy stay in Spain, and he must decide his next step. He had ample time to figure out a strategy, but he hadn’t bothered. Instead of facing this situation with honesty and well thought out tact, David simply dumps Giovanni, leaving the apartment one morning without even a word of goodbye.
Giovanni is devastated, fearful that something terrible has happened to David. Clearly, Giovanni has invested much more in this relationship than David has, and the disappearance and subsequent cruelty of David when they do meet again sends him on a downward spiral that ends up in murder. When we met David at the beginning of the narrative, feeling sorry for himself in the South of France, Giovanni was in prison in Paris, waiting to have his head chopped off in a guillotine. (a side note: France still used the guillotine for capital punishment until 1977 ). We gradually become aware that David seems little bothered by that fact. He says nothing to defend Giovanni when Hella jealously calls him “a sordid little gangster,” echoing the tabloid newspapers of Paris, and he has not so much as lifted a finger to help Giovanni, to give him comfort or to advocate for him in the judicial process. He has simply abandoned Giovanni to his fate on death row, while he and Hella escaped to the South of France.
Does David fail to see that his hurtful behavior is at least partially responsible for Giovanni’s meltdown? Yes, just as he fails to see that when sailors eye him on the street and make lewd comments, it’s not because he has been randomly targeted, but because he himself has invited that behavior. There is always a way to blame someone else for his failures, so when Hella discovers him in a Marseilles hotel with several sailors, he faults Hella for not comforting him as the victim of his own dishonesty, rather than apologizing for his dishonesty to her.
It is David’s despicable behavior that drives this entire story, and feeds the central betrayal in the story, his betrayal of Giovanni.
And now, for the personal application of this tale. It reminds me of an occurrence in my own lifetime that mirrors this in some way. When I was young, my family lived in a poor section of Brooklyn. I had few friends, but my best friend was a black boy named Butchie that lived down the street.
He had a sister, Leatrice, who was the same age as my sister and the four of us spent several summers together every day just playing and running around on the sidewalk, completely unsupervised and aimless. It was the most significant friendship of my childhood. When I was about 10 years old, Butchie and his sister moved away, probably not more than a few blocks away, but far enough that we would never see each other again. Except for one afternoon the following summer, when I was about eleven years old, so around 1961. I was watching cartoons on TV in the living room. My sister came running into the house and she said to me, Butchie and Leatrice are here! They are sitting in the playground at the projects right across the street. They want you to come outside and sit with us. I turned around and said, “Nah. I’m watching cartoons.” She tried again, but when I said no a second time, she turned around and ran back outside. I went upstairs to the front windows where i could see the playground across the street. There was Butchie and Leatrice and my sister sitting on a park bench talking. It made me sad, but not sad enough to go outside. In the course of that one year in 1961 away from our friends I had learned something. That black boys and white boys could not be best friends. Even if we lived on the same block, we lived in different worlds, and I wanted to be in the white world that I was just learning about. So, with a few regrets, I went back to my cartoons, and forgot about Butchie.
In later years, I reflected on all this, and thought, oh my God, I hope that Butchie did not know what had happened, that I had rejected him, because I had somehow become aware of how race works. But then in further years, I came to realize, of course he knew. And certainly he would know immediately, every time it would happen to him again for the rest of his life. James Baldwin did not have to tell the story from Giovanni’s point of view, his readers knew that story of betrayal. They knew it quite well. He told it from the perspective of the privileged, in all its abysmal cruelty. David, the narrator would just step over the chopped off head of Giovanni, and go home, to continue his life as a closeted gay man. I feel like he is saying to Giovanni, That’s too bad, Giovanni, but you know, you brought it on yourself, you didn’t have to put all of yourself into being gay, and into being with me. You didn’t have to come to Paris to look for a job, bringing all that drama with you. So later for you, and your head. ‘Cause right now, I’m going back to my life, looking forward to some bearded straight marriage and some street corner hustlers. I don’t know where you’re going, but I’m going back to my cartoons.
