Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’ full of heartbreakingly beautiful prose

“Somebody should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished and are perishing every hour – and in the oddest of places! – for the lack of it.” — “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York. He was a self-taught scholar who spent his life dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement by writing essays, novels, plays and poems, and delivered the most passionate speeches. 

Baldwin consumed books. He spent hours and hours at the famous 135 Street Branch Library in Harlem. He wrote, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who are alive, who had ever been alive.”

He taught himself French with the hope that one day he would spend time in France, which he achieved. He was disillusioned by the “daily indignities of racism” in the United States, so he traveled to see how Black people were treated in other countries. This is where “Giovanni’s Room” begins.

“Giovanni’s Room” is a story about a young, white, adult man named David who is engaged to a woman named Hella. She goes to Spain to find herself and decide if she wants to marry David. 

David goes to Paris to do some exploring himself, and while there, meets a waiter named Giovanni. They end up in a relationship and David is grapples with his feelings towards men. Giovanni is unfortunately working for an older French businessman who brings in young men to work, taking sexual advantage of them, and holding their jobs over their heads knowing that they can’t get jobs anywhere else. 

The story does some flashbacks where Giovanni is awaiting is execution due to murdering his predatory boss, while David is continuously confused about his feelings of love for Giovanni and his committed relationship with Hella. David can’t seem to get past the fact that he needs to be in a “normal relationship” in order to be accepted in his family and society. Giovanni, who is Italian, doesn’t understand why David just can’t let go of those norms and be with him.

Baldwin wrote “Giovanni’s Room” as a story about homosexuality at a time when homosexuals were criminalized and at a time when homosexuality was underrepresented in serious literature. It’s a story about society and how it shapes our fears. It points to how we sometimes abandon things that are natural to us, so we don’t suffer at the hands of societal judgments so that societal order is maintained. Baldwin’s prose is heartbreakingly beautiful. While his articulation operates at a deeply psychological level — he does it so effortlessly, and in a way that reshapes one’s understanding, all the while creating a deep empathy of what people are going up against.

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”

Deborah Condit is the owner of Books on the Bosque, 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane, Suite A-2 or at booksonthebosque.com.