Giovanni's Room

I enjoyed Giovanni’s Room so much.  James Baldwin was one of those writers who was so far ahead of his time that it’s almost unbelievable that he ever got anything published.  Following up on Go Tell It On The Mountain’s depiction of race, he wrote this; a book that sympathetically portrays a male homosexual relationship.  It was published in 1956; a time when it was still illegal to be gay in American (and a hell of a lot of other countries).  It’s staggering.  There’s more to it than just the achievement of not being super homophobic, though, this is a bloody good story.

Baldwin’s novel tells the story of David, an American man in Paris.  When his fiancée Hella leaves for the summer he begins an affair with Giovanni, an Italian barman in the club David frequents.  Naturally, this goes badly once Hella returns.  It’s such a simple story but it’s incredibly well told.  Post-affair Giovanni’s life falls apart and David is pretty unhappy too; the story is told as a flashback on the morning of Giovanni’s execution and, yet, the book doesn’t dwell on the misery.  It’s there, but it comes in every so often as a wistful melancholia rather than agony.  David no longer loves Giovanni at the time of the telling and it gives distance to the tragedy of the piece. 

The fact that both David and Giovanni are utter shits at times also helps.  David cheats on Hella more than once, always with men and yet still remains judgemental of the men he meets and sleeps with.  Giovanni just straight up belittles, “these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves to be equal to men… they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world.”  Despite this, I do like Giovanni.  He loves David who is too selfish and scared to love him back and this ruins his life.  He ultimately gives Giovanni up so that he can access his father’s money and then decides that Giovanni is pathetic when his heart is broken while he can still return to Hella.

Hella is another matter altogether.  I like Hella.  She doesn’t take David’s shit and argues with him just for the sake of it, to keep him sharp, to keep things interesting.  She is smart and she figures out the true nature of David and Giovanni’s relationship and she has the sense to leave.  She calls out misogyny when she sees it.  She is one of the only female characters that actually speaks and she is completely free.  It’s another case of Baldwin being ahead of his time.  Although she is bound by conventions of the period, she rules within those conventions. 

This book was written in 1956 and it could have been written today.  I can’t get over how ahead of its time it is.  I could tell you a thousand reasons why I was so blown away by Baldwin’s attitude to homosexuality, but it all can come down to one quote.  Jacques (a friend of David’s) is explaining his sex life, “You think… that my life is shameful because my encounters are.  And they are.  But you should ask yourself why they are… Because there is no affection in them, and no joy… Touch but no contact.”  Sex is not shameful because it is with another man, but because it is loveless and to say that in the 1950s is amazing.  I just wish that there were more authors like Baldwin around now, tackling the taboos that shouldn’t be in place. 

Now I’m reading The Lost Honour of Kathrina Blum by Heinrich Böll.