Writing about James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, first published in 1956, can be a daunting task. The novel is certainly not difficult to admire, but it seems to resist being packaged into a neat summary. Seventy years on from when this landmark text first hit bookshelves, Baldwin’s revered tale still feels modern, real, raw, and claustrophobic, as it continues to captivate readers a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Baldwin had already established himself as a major literary voice by 1956, and would go on to produce other formidable works. Yet, many look to Giovanni’s Room as his defining work of fiction. It refuses today to be read like a relic of literary history, instead remaining a formative and vital work of queer fiction.
Giovanni’s Room, shame and repression
Centred on the intense relationship between David, a young American in Paris, and Giovanni, an Italian barman, Giovanni’s Room still carries a timeless charge to its pages. Writing openly on desire in the 1950s was fundamentally taboo, and the book brought with it an unmistakable daring quality. Yet the contemporary essence of the novel does not solely derive from the fact that it was bold in 1956. What makes it feel so modern is Baldwin’s understanding of the kind of person who would rather destroy intimacy than be known by it.
David, the novel’s narrator, lives a drifting life in Paris, where he begins a love affair with Giovanni while his girlfriend, Hella, travels in Spain. The straightforward-sounding plot, however, is deceptive. Where one might expect a narrative of suspense, what we receive here is one powered by dread. David’s fear and self-deception lay the groundwork for the ensuing catastrophe early on, and the reader must hold on as the suffering gradually heightens.
Indeed, that self-deception is the book’s real subject. Baldwin reveals to us quickly what David’s deepest turmoil is: “I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.” His fear of intimacy is deep-rooted, and this is one of those lines that foregrounds all that follows. David is not incapable of deep feeling – if anything, he feels too much. But his terror of exposure, to love or to be loved, is, for him, to risk all – this is what makes Giovanni’s Room so devastating.
Often described as a novel of repression, or simply as a work of gay fiction, these terms risk sounding too tidy. Baldwin writes on something messier, with David’s evasion a way of life as he withholds and recoils, refusing to let love blossom outside of his prescribed definition. The emotional logic here feels horribly modern, one of many reasons why Baldwin keeps resurfacing. His work continues to circulate in my mind because of his incredible ability to name what people already seem to suspect about themselves.
Giovanni’s Room is a useful reminder that Baldwin is more than the neat and quotable version of himself that can crop up on social media. It is an account that offers no neatness, no comfort, plenty of shame and certainly nothing in the way of moral cleanliness. Social shame, masculine expectation and the false ideal of American manhood weigh heavily on the text; the prose is acutely aware of the codes of the world within which David moves.
But Baldwin does not excuse him on social grounds alone. A sharply painful aspect of the book is the manner in which David collaborates in the production of his own unhappiness – and Giovanni’s. He deepens his feelings of entrapment by vanity and cruelty, as Baldwin presents the curdling of tenderness in a man terrified of looking at his own reflection.
This is what keeps the novel from feeling like a period piece, as David’s panic cannot be confined to 1956. Recognisable now in an age that imagines itself as emotionally fluent (or at least more so than the world Baldwin wrote in), David and Giovanni’s peril cuts to the bone. The greatest barriers to intimacy, for them, are the private performative habits of self-protection that people hold inside themselves, alongside public prohibitions. For all the language of openness that exists in our present, David reminds us, as he refuses to open himself up to Giovanni, how easily a person may retreat from honesty and permit love to be distorted by fear.
If we look at the title, we see the central space of the novel and one of modern fiction’s memorable interiors, at once tender and oppressive. Giovanni’s room is a refuge from the outside world, yet for David it is also a locale within which he is compelled to confront his demons. It is an area of shelter, but also of suffocation. Baldwin’s description of enclosed spaces, such as bars, bedrooms, corridors, stairwells, cafés and streets, is one of the defining features of the book. Its sphere is relentlessly compressed, and the reader feels themselves sucked into David’s lie by the claustrophobic rendering of these places.
Compressed though it is, the writing is never static. Even in the most incarcerating passages, the prose moves with a strange fluidity. Emotions can shift from one sentence to the next, tenderness sliding into shame, desire into terror, longing into disgust and pity into contempt. The theme of water recurs as a tenacious motif throughout; at one point, David expresses that he feels “led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water”, a fitting image that captures the novel’s spirit. Desire is written here as something engulfing and immersive, capable of destabilising a person and undoing the self they had tried to preserve. Baldwin offers no moral lesson to steady us against that current.
Calling the book one of shame or repression is accurate but insufficient. The prose itself makes the novel impossible to reduce to a set of themes, and there is, too, something especially devastating in the way Baldwin writes Giovanni himself. He is not merely a tragic romantic figure or symbol of failed love, but a presence that is full and wounded, intensely characterful, with his pride, vulnerability, fury, neediness and other human qualities laid bare. The relationship between the two men is hard to romanticise. The fantasy of pure love crushed by the cruel, hostile world is not such in Giovanni’s Room, but destroyed from within, the bruising quality of the novel unable to allow the reader any comfort of innocence.
Baldwin’s resurgence
Perhaps that is why Giovanni’s Room still finds new readers, such as myself, who first picked up a copy a handful of years ago. An online resurgence, particularly in the midst and wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, has at times painted the writer and essayist as a dispenser of perfectly formed truths and soundbites. However, this seventy-year-old book reminds us that his greatness lies within his refusal of simplicity.
Giovanni’s Room still feels modern, not simply because of what it represented in the mid-fifties, but because the fear at its centre has not vanished. Baldwin understood with merciless precision that the prison most people inhabit is the one they have built themselves. All this time later, that understanding has lost none of its power to unsettle, Giovanni’s Room lodging itself in the conscience of each new reader it finds.
