This was gut-wrenching. Short, powerful, thought-provoking. And unutterable sad.

It's by James Baldwin (1924-87), and it was published in 1956. As Elif Batuman pointed out, in the last month of last year, 1924 was not only the year Kafka died (as The Velvet Cushion has noted), but also the year James Baldwin was born. And his associations with Henry James and with Turkey would by themselves make him an author I really need to read more of.

I listened to the audio-version of Giovanni's Room, which was very sensitively read by Matthew Bomer. There's a detailed summary here.

The central character is David. A young white American, who lost his mother at a young age, and is emotionally estranged from his father, has gone to live in Paris. He has had some early homosexual experiences, but is in complete denial about his sexuality. While in Paris, he met Hella, and wants to marry her. Unsure, she goes off to Spain to figure out what she wants, and while she is away, David gets to know Giovanni, a magnetic young Italian who works in a bar owned by another of David's acquaintances, the obnoxious Guillaume.


There are many Parises...

David and Giovanni feel an instant mutual attraction, and David, low on funds, goes to live with his new friend in the room of the title. It's not a pleasant place. It doesn't function as a haven for the young men. It's cramped, dirty, and untidy, an ad hoc work-in-progress, its windows curtainless and whited out. Soon, when Giovanni loses his job, and both are poor, and David still can't accept what he feels for Giovanni, the room becomes a prison.

Hella returns. David abandons Giovanni, determined to lead a "normal" life. Giovanni, devastated, spirals downwards, ending up living off Jacques (an older patron of young men), and then killing Guillaume, who has humiliated him once too often.

When the book opens, David is in the south of France, Giovanni is awaiting the guillotine, and Hella has left for America. When he hears of Giovanni's arrest and trial, David feels desperately guilty about the way he treated him, sensing that he drove him to desperation, and his last crazy act. But throughout his time with Hella in the south, he was unable to confide in her. He grows to hate her, and eventually, he leaves her too. She tracks him down to a bar where he has begun an affair with a sailor. The circumstances confirm all her unspoken suspicions, and she heads off across the ocean.

So many lives ruined...

What could have been different, you have to ask, if society hadn't still been punishing homosexuality? If David could have acknowledged what he felt as legitimate, and not an instance of what he calls "vileness"?

We listen to David's confession with a kind of awed horror. The author makes sure we know from the beginning how bad things are going to get. There's never a point when we think there might be a happy ending. So it's like watching the proverbial slow-motion train wreck, flinching as it unfolds.

And we're drawn throughout to ask the question that all good books push us to ask: What would I have done?



Colm Toibin explains that some of the book was based on what Baldwin himself had lived: "In November 1948 at the age of twenty-four, James Baldwin moved to Paris where he would soon meet and fall in love with a young Swiss, Lucien Happersberger. In the winter of 1951–2, while staying in Switzerland with Happersberger, Baldwin completed his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was published early in 1953. Over the next two years, living mainly in France, he worked on his second novel, Giovanni’s Room. Some of the atmosphere in Giovanni’s Room came from close observation and experience, as Baldwin made clear in an interview in 1980. He spoke of using some of the people he met: 'We all met in a bar, there was a blond French guy sitting at a table, he bought us drinks. And two or three days later I saw his face in the headlines of a Paris paper. He had been arrested and was later guillotined... I saw him in the headlines, which reminded me that I was already working on him without knowing it.'"

Toibin is also informative about potential stylistic resonances: Ernest Hemingway at the beginning, as David sets the scene; then perhaps Oscar Wilde, in David's "self-lacerating tone"; and then Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, "in the slow and tortuous going over of events in order to come to some understanding of sexual treachery". Toibin is not claiming Baldwin was directly influenced by these authors, but rather that he was, in different portions of the book, striking similar notes.

Whatever his influences, Toibin concludes, it's "clear that Baldwin was ready to become the greatest American prose stylist of his generation".



I admit I found it difficult to understand the character of Hella. Giovanni is dismissive of this "little girl". But, then, he's jealous. He's bound not to like her.

But what of Hella herself? She's definitely feisty, and she's intelligent. When David first encounters her, she's drinking -- and watching. Very much her own person. Then she does her solo trip around Spain. It's there that she recognizes -- with reluctance -- that society recognizes women only in terms of their relationship with men.

But then she seems to undercut all this cool strength by pleading with David, when things start to turn sour: "Please let me be a woman... I don't care what it costs." Part of that "woman" package, as she perceives it, is growing her hair, giving up cigarettes, and throwing away her books... Later, when she realizes there's no hope of an honest relationship with David, she takes back her autonomy, leaves, and won't even let him accompany her to the station.

Part of the desperation of that middle, "unmanned", phase must surely be explained by her later recognition that she has deliberately lied to herself. Once the truth can no longer be denied, she tells David: "But I knew... I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then. Don’t you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you -- women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn’t you heard?" that attempted submission -- that last, desperate offer to make everything right -- is not Hella. Thank goodness.

She certainly does a good line in tragic irony. Here she is at the end, about to leave: "'Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.'"



It's easy to criticize David. And he certainly criticizes himself. He deceives Hella; he abandons Giovanni; he was cruel to his friend Joey in his early days, again because he couldn't accept his own sexuality; he bluntly uses poor Sue, while Hella is still away, in a desperate attempt to prove his masculinity. None of that is excusable.

Dan Dixon sums up the cruelty to which David's self-hatred reduces him: "Giovanni is louchely charming, beautiful and, having invited David to drink white wine and eat oysters in the Parisian morning sun, stands in for the wonders of Europe, its allure and strangeness. He offers David an escape, the potential to be unburdened by the weight of American destiny, but also evokes in him terror, bringing to David’s attention his many irreconcilable contradictions, as an American at once repelled and enthralled by his home country, and as a gay man petrified by his attraction to men. In this tumultuous attachment, David sees only himself, the magnitude of his own feelings reducing Giovanni to an instrument of pleasure and self-loathing, obscuring his lover’s personhood... David is a coward with a magnificent ability to articulate his own cowardice, but an immobilising inability to undo the harm he causes. He recounts the significant suffering he has inflicted, yet is never quite able to escape the notion that this is his tragedy, rather than a tragedy for those that loved him."

But how difficult it must have been... When there's a whole element of your being that is judged wrong by those around you, but won't -- can't -- simply be dissolved away, what do you do?

As Maria Popova points out, "Baldwin wrote [this book] in his early thirties against enormous resistance from American publishers, at a time when the DSM -- the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s Bible -- classified homosexuality as a 'sociopathic personality disturbance.'"

But there's a broader underlying theme. Popova quotes Baldwin himself, as he nails the essence of the book: "Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality... It’s about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody... If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all."

And this is where David went wrong.