the death of love

on Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say. (158)

Giovanni’s Room begins with a guilt-ridden young American man, David, in the south of France, wondering how he stands alone while his fiancee Hella returns to the US and his lover Giovanni waits beneath the guillotine. Baldwin sets up the story like a mystery; in chapter one, David’s tone is ominous, and the connection between David, Hella, and Giovanni is unclear. In subsequent chapters, David’s relationships are uncovered, but why he oppressed them remains unsolved.

The first-person perspective of the novel sustains that mystery. Because we only have access to David’s mind, you’re tempted to sympathize with him. I found myself looking for excuses for David’s behavior. Is his recklessness valid since he’s wrestling with self-hatred? Is his inability to love others excusable since he’s never received it? Haven’t we all been unkind to someone? I wanted David to win, to surrender to the part of him, deep down, that wanted love, but David never wanted that for himself. And so the story ends with him alone, reminiscing about the genuine love he received from two substantial humans and tormented by the ideation of what could have been.

*spoilers ahead*

David flees America to ‘find himself’ in Paris, but what becomes abundantly clear throughout the story is that David knows who he is but refuses to accept it. It is an American belief that to find yourself, you must leave all familiarity behind. It’s theorized that when you stand in an unrecognizable space, the essence of your being will rise to the surface and reveal who you are. It’s a charming theory but most often unsuccessful. Without familiarity and without the American social structures (good and bad) that raised him, David becomes the worst version of himself.

David’s time in Paris becomes an excuse to detach from reality. He does not search for his purpose but spends his days and nights drunk and disorderly. His decisions, alongside Baldwin’s beautiful prose, colored David’s time in Paris like a dream. The lack of expectations of him and the lack of consequences for him create a freedom in which David can be as reckless as he likes.

I am reminded of a quote by Toni Morrison from The Bluest Eye: 

‘The love of a free man is never safe.’

At first, I thought that David’s freedom was expressed through his pursuit of another man, but now I think that David’s freedom was expressed through his ability to live dangerously. Was he looking for love or individual autonomy?

To keep in conversation with Morrison’s quote, is it ‘love’ that David feels for Giovanni? Their connection is instant, but David struggles to understand whether he loves Giovanni, loves men, or if he loves anything at all. As a reader, you’re right there with him, trying to decode his actions.

My take: David never loved Giovanni. David loved that Giovanni saw every part of him and loved him anyway.

My take is best understood after analyzing David’s relationship with Hella. His proposal to her was unserious and a response to the heterosexual expectation to marry and have children. But even though he’s not attracted to her, we must ask why he is so cruel to her. There’s a reality in which the two coexist as friends, but instead, David sabotages their relationship until she can’t stand him anymore. His cruelty is baseless and unsettling.

There is one exchange between the two of them that stood out to me. Towards the end of the story, they’re in the south of France, mulling over the news that Giovanni has been sent to jail. They debate whether or not he’s guilty. Hella asks David, ‘You lived with him. Can’t you tell whether he’d commit murder or not?’ He replies, ‘How? You live with me. Can I commit a murder?’ David follows up by asking, ‘How do you know I’m what you see?’ Hella responds, ‘Because I love you’ (151).

Hella’s announcement that loving David means knowing David is heavy. I think this was when David understood he could not be in a relationship with her. David is repulsed, maybe heartbroken, at the thought that Hella doesn’t know him at all.

In the story's opening pages, when David talks about his tumultuous childhood, he admits: ‘I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him’ (17).

This line explains how David’s understanding of love includes distance. For David, Hella knew too little, and Giovanni knew too much.

I don’t think David is capable of real love. This is partly due to the lack of examples in his childhood but primarily due to the small margin he provides for connection. David doesn’t want love; he wants surface-level attraction, concealed hookups, and tipsy confessions. He doesn’t want to live in reality but in a busy city where he doesn’t know anyone and no one knows him.

And so, I ask you, why did Baldwin write this story from David’s perspective? Had the story been written from Giovanni or Hella’s perspectives, it would have been easy to care for and root for them. Yet, we are given the perspective of someone who only makes their life harder and has no intention to change.

Is Baldwin asking us to find sympathy for David? Should we blame someone or something else for his cruelty? Or are we supposed to accept that people like him exist: unredeemable, unsavable, unlovable?

In the novel’s introduction, Keving Young comments on the lack of racial identity in the story. He says:

Baldwin evokes color often in Giovanni’s Room, but he shies away from Blackness. The decision to write only of and as white characters seems his boldest choice and now seems completely right. It is clear that in doing so, Baldwin means not to confuse sexuality with Blackness … David— whose tragic flaws aren’t simply race or sexuality, but love (xiv)

We must remember that this story was written and published in the 1950s. Keeping the characters white most likely had to do with Baldwin’s desire to separate himself from the story. However, the lack of race does make for a notable experiment. David’s inability to love isn’t simply because he’s gay or because Giovanni is an immigrant. It’s a flaw that has to do with his character. I wonder, if Baldwin were alive and had written the story today, would he have made the same decision?

Young also argues that calling the story Giovanni’s Room rather than, for example, ‘David in Paris’ creates a separation that makes the story less about Americans or the politics of sexuality and more about the forms of love all humans are hesitant to engage with. I agree with Young’s argument and would add that using rooms as a metaphor for love is deliberate. The visual of Giovanni’s room was striking: the way David hated it but couldn’t stay away, how it was both ugly and charming, and how, at any point, he could leave it all behind. Love can be concealed, compartmentalized, and condensed.

One of my favorite lines from the story is:

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in, and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room (85)

This line shows that David is aware of the metaphor of Giovanni’s room. Part of me wonders if the novel is titled after what Baldwin imagined David would call this chapter of his life.

The ending of this story still stumps me. It leaves us with a lot of information but also a lot of questions. I wondered: has David really understood that his actions killed a man? Will David lament the loss of Giovanni and Hella? Will he make it back to Paris or return to the US? We’ll never know the answers to these questions, but I think we can say with certainty, especially by the final line, that David will always yearn for Giovanni’s room.