Giovanni's room

Giovanni's Room (original title: Giovanni's Room ) is a novel by the American writer James Baldwin from 1956. It is about a young American in Paris who denies his same-sex love for the bartender Giovanni, which in the end contributed to a tragedy. The LGTB literary organization Publishing Triangle voted Baldwin's novel in 1999, behind Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, as number 2 of the best novels with a homosexual theme. The novel was published in German in 1963.

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Chapter One
David, a man in his twenties from New York who lives in France, wants to take a train to Paris from a vacation in the south of France . His girlfriend Hella, whom he proposed to marry, fled back to the USA. David painfully remembers a man named Giovanni who is about to be guillotined the next morning .

In the following flashback, David recalls his first sexual experience with a boy, Joey, which happened rather unexpectedly during an overnight stay as a teenager in Brooklyn . The next morning he left Joey and later made fun of him with other boys to make himself feel more manly. David's mother died early, so he grew up only with his wealthy, single father and aunt Ellen. After his nightly outings with alcohol and women, Ellen accused her father of not being a good and moral role model for the son. David later built a car accident while drunk. Since he did not see a clear goal in life for himself and wanted to find it, David persuaded his father to finance a stay in Paris for him.

After a year in Paris, David receives letters from his father asking him to return to the United States. Since he has little money left and doesn't want to ask his father, David calls his homosexual friend Jacques. David - considering himself straight - doesn't think much of Jacques, but he hopes to borrow money from the older and wealthy businessman. Together they go to Guillaume's gay bar, where the new bartender Giovanni from Italy is causing a stir among the regulars. David and Giovanni talk and enjoy each other. Giovanni tells David that he met Guillaume in a movie theater and, since he had no money, let him take him out to dinner and talk to him into a job as a bartender. At dawn, David, Giovanni, Jacques and Guillaume visit a restaurant in Les Halles with white wine and oysters. Jacques urges David not to be ashamed of his love, otherwise he would end up as lonely as himself in old age. While Jacques and Guillaume have fun with male hustlers, David and Giovanni go to his small apartment and sleep with him.

Back in the present, shortly before Giovanni's execution, David is in his vacation apartment in the south of France. The Catholic housekeeper, like Giovanni, comes from Italy, appears for the inventory and advises David, who is visibly worn out, to pray, marry and have children.

Chapter Two
A relationship develops between David and Giovanni and they live together in Giovanni's small, dark room. Hella stays in Spain for a long time and does not find out anything about her boyfriend's affair. Giovanni does not see Hella as a danger and explains to David that men must always dominate women. We learn that Giovanni left his home village when his girlfriend was stillborn. When Hella announced her early return in a letter, David again distances himself from Giovanni. To convince himself of his heterosexuality, David sleeps with a casual acquaintance named Sue. When he returns to Giovanni's room, he is desperate because he has just been fired from the jealous Guillaume because he did not follow his sexual advances.

When Hella returns, David leaves Giovanni's room and leaves no message for him. Instead, David sends a letter to his father asking for money for the wedding with Hella. Things get complicated when the lovers meet Jacques and Giovanni in a bookshop. Hella feels rather repulsed by the homosexuals and quickly returns to her hotel room. Giovanni and David have a final conversation in which David argues that they could never live together and that if he stayed with Giovanni he would lose his manhood. Later, however, David meets Giovanni several times in Paris, which repeatedly causes excitement and great jealousy for love, especially when Giovanni seems to be developing a relationship with Jacques. Nevertheless, David holds on to his engagement to Hella.

All of a sudden, Giovanni's image is in all the French newspapers: he murdered Guillaume when he asked for his reinstatement with him, financially burnt. David imagines that Giovanni slept with Guillaume because of the employment and must have degraded himself in his own eyes. After that, Guillaume would probably have refused to reinstate Giovannis because he achieved his goal of sleeping with him and Giovanni would no longer be an exciting secret for his regular customers due to his open homosexuality as it was at the beginning. Giovanni must then have killed Guillaume in his anger. While Giovanni is arrested after a short escape and sentenced to death, Hella and David travel to the south of France. They talk about their future relationship and Hella expresses the wish to listen to the man as a woman and wonders increasingly uncertain whether David can fulfill this role. David, plagued with guilt and unsure of his sexuality, leaves Hella for a few days and travels to Nice . The suspicious Hella travels to David and finds him kissing with a sailor in a bar. She leaves for the USA bitterly.

David has to face his guilt alone that if he hadn't left Giovanni, Giovanni would never have committed the murder. On the morning of Giovanni's execution, David receives a letter from Jacques concerning Giovanni and tears it up. He wants to throw the pieces of the letter in the fireplace, but the pieces of paper blow back to him.

characters

• David , the blond-haired American, is the main character and also acts as the first-person narrator of the novel. He grew up with his father and aunt in New York under quite wealthy circumstances. His mother died when he was five years old. Although he is over 25 years old, David is still undecided about his goals in life.
• Giovanni , a young Italian who left his home village after his girlfriend had a stillbirth. Since his arrival in Paris, he has mostly only found insecure or poorly paid jobs; now he works as a waiter in Guillaume's gay bar. Giovanni lives in a small, somewhat shabby room that gives the novel its title.
• Hella , David's partner. They met in a bar in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district . Hella, who comes from a wealthy family in Minneapolis , studied painting in Paris, but dropped out.
• Jacques , an older Belgian-American businessman and a regular in Guillaume's bar. The lonely Jacques flirts with young men and spends generously on them. David doesn't like him, but possibly also because the reflective, observing Jacques tells him some unpleasant truths about his sexuality and his behavior towards other people.
• Guillaume , the owner of a gay bar in Paris named after him. Guillaume shows sexual interest in the younger Giovanni and presses him intensely, ultimately with a fatal outcome.
• The Flaming Princess , an older gay man in Guillaume's bar, warning David that Giovanni can be very dangerous.
• Madame Clothilde , the owner of a restaurant in Les Halles that David, Giovanni, Jacques and Guillaume go to after a party in the early hours of the morning.
• Pierre and Yves , young men in Madame Clothilde's restaurant, hooking up with Jacques and Guillaume.
• The Caretaker , David's housekeeper in his holiday home in the south of France. The native Italian moved to France as a child and is strictly religious. She and her husband Mario lost their savings in World War II, in which two of their three sons died.
• Sue , a blonde from a wealthy Philadelphia family , with whom David has an affair that is as short as it is unpleasant.
• David's family . David's relationship with his widowed father is kind, but not close. The father is apparently worried about whether he raised his son properly. When the grown-up David lives in Paris, the father is married for the second time and is mainly contacted by David about his financial worries. The father always transfers the money to him, but asks him to return to the USA. An important role in David's upbringing also took on his junior aunt Ellen , who often had arguments with David's father about his upbringing - among other things, because the father often met a woman named Beatrice during his time as a single widower .
• Joey , a childhood friend of David's Coney Island , with whom he had his first same-sex sex experience. David later self-denied the event and annoyed Joey along with other boys.
• The Fairy , a homosexual who made advances to David in his army days and was later dishonorably dismissed for his homosexuality.

History of origin

James Baldwin in 1955, while the novel was being written

After Baldwin had achieved his literary breakthrough with his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain , he stayed mainly in Paris, where his financial situation slowly deteriorated again. His publishing house Knopf requested another novel from the USA, preferably a work based in Harlem in the style of Go Tell It on the Mountain . As a writer, Baldwin did not want to be thematically tied to his skin color, so Giovanni's room plays completely under white figures. One of the inspiration for the plot was Baldwin's fleeting encounter with a blond-haired French man who bought him and a few friends a few drinks in a bar, then was arrested for murder a few days later and was ultimately executed for it.

Nevertheless, there is the connection to Go Tell It on the Mountain , that Baldwin also devoted himself to another outsider issue with homosexuality. In an interview he later stated that the question of the treatment of sexual minorities and that of the treatment of blacks had always been linked ( "the sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined") . Similar to Go Tell It on the Mountain , the novel is a kind of allegory : the characters are tortured by their personal weaknesses on the one hand, but also a larger social problem on the other. He continued:

“ Giovanni's Room isn't really about homosexuality. It is the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain , for example, is no more about the church than Giovanni's Room is about homosexuality. It's about what happens when you're afraid to love someone. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality. "

Before the release of Giovanni's Zimmer , Baldwin was nervous, as he was only now increasingly perceived as a homosexual and feared that the romance theme would further strain his already difficult relationship with his religious family. Baldwin did not present Giovanni's room to his American publishers until it had already been written. They advised Baldwin against publishing it as they believed the book would destroy his career. The first publication of the novel took place in England, because its publisher Michael Joseph had found the novel more fond.

reception

After long confusion, Baldwin's novel was published in the USA in 1956. Almost no reviews discussed Baldwin's autobiographical background or speculated about his sexual preferences, as he had previously feared. He was certified by Leslie A. Fiedler that, with Giovanni's room, he had gone from a “black writer” to a “writer” who also dared to tackle other topics. Overall, however, the reviews were rather mixed, as many contemporary critics had apparently expected another work with a black theme. This is why Giovanni's room with its unusual milieu for Baldwin (there are no black figures) has long been regarded in the USA as “a kind of youthful sin” of the writer, which “is all the more forgiving because the book, like the first Go Tell, testifies to it drop from the great word artist and stylist Baldwin ”.

Many critics of the 1950s, however, reacted in principle with reserve or even hostility to the romance theme: One critic saw homosexuality as "tasteless" and the characters as rather "more crudely funny than tragic". David Karp praised Baldwin for being more honest about the physical aspects of male love than most writers who have written on the subject, while at the same time maintaining “a very delicate sense of good taste” so that the “hideous” characters never “ annoy "would. In addition to the issue of homosexuality, many American critics also referred to the comparisons between European and American culture and way of life that Baldwin draws in the novel, and compared him to Jean Genet .

Baldwin's novel was published in Germany in 1963. There were fewer blanket rejections because of the subject of homosexuality, but the critics were generally rather cool, with both clearly negative and positive reviews. In contrast to the US critics, the German literary critics of the post-war period often complained that sentimental pathos occasionally stole into the dialogues. With regard to the novel setting and Baldwin's stay in Paris, Der Spiegel wrote that a generation after Hemingway the “French metropolis still serves American nonconformists as a place of maturity”. However, Der Spiegel had a negative opinion of the novel, in which the main character “purifies himself as a homosexual” : “The partly romanticizing, partly joyless Freudian psycho-report of the first-person narrator is too constructed to be able to engage the reader's interest in the long term . "

Horst Bienek and Siegfried Lenz saw the outsider topic as outstanding in their reviews of Giovanni's room . In the end, according to Bienek, the outsider roles of a black and a homosexual are so similar and at the end of the novel David has to admit to being human and his homosexuality. Fritz J. Raddatz , on the other hand, was more important in his review of the characters' inability to love and self-hatred: "(...) two people whose ability and possibility of love have been decomposed, whose pre-stress does not allow what Baldwin typically calls' strange innocence and familiarity '". The search for identity and the “interweaving of isolation, self-alienation and self-hatred” are the main themes for Baldwin, according to Raddatz.

Today, Giovanni's Zimmer is widely regarded as one of the greatest classics in gay literature. Gareth Greenwall wrote on the occasion of the novel's 60th birthday in The Guardian that Baldwin's novel works as an " antidote to shame". Most of all, he admires the novel for its “lyrical conception of time”: the mixed settings of the present and the past succeed in preventing an artificial build-up of tension. All major plot points, for example Giovanni's execution, are clear to the reader after the first few pages, which allows Baldwin's narrator to wander freely between the time levels. At the same time, the novel is a reflection on America and Europe, for example when David's typically American belief that he can freely make all decisions and choose what is “good” is destroyed by the discovery of his homosexual tendencies.

Adaptations

A film adaptation of Baldwin's novel has not yet been shot. But there were also some theater adaptations of the play in German-speaking countries, for example in 1993 in the Brotfabrik Berlin with the actors Jens Schmieder and Michael Laricchia .

Translations

• Giovanni's room . Translated by Axel Kaun and Hans-Heinrich Wellmann. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1963.
• Giovanni's room . New translation by Miriam Mandelkow . dtv Verlag, Munich, 2020.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Publishing Triangle. Retrieved May 21, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Leeming, David: James Baldwin. A biography. 1994, p. 90.
3. ↑ Pratt, Louise; Standley, Fred: Conversations with James Baldwin, Mississippi 1989, p. 205.
4. ↑ Interview with Richard Goldstein
5. ↑ Leeming, David: James Baldwin. A biography. 1994, p. 123.
6. ↑ Interview with Richard Goldstein
7. ↑ Leeming, David: James Baldwin. A biography. 1994, p. 115.
8. ↑ Interview with Richard Goldstein
9. ↑ Leeming, David: James Baldwin. A biography. 1994, p. 116.
10. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, pp. 132-134.
11. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, pp. 153-154.
12. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, p. 136.
13. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, p. 143.
14. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, p. 150.
15. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, p. 175.
16. ↑ NEW RELEASE: James Baldwin, "Giovanni's Room". In: Spiegel Online . tape 43 , October 23, 1963 ( spiegel.de [accessed May 21, 2019]).
17. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, pp. 161/162.
18. ↑ Grädel, Peter: James Baldwin's novels in the USA and in the German-speaking countries of Europe, 1953–1981. Zurich, 1985, pp. 162/163.
19. ↑ penalerc: Homosexuality in Giovanni's Room |. Retrieved July 9, 2019 (American English). 
20. ↑ Why James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room' Is a Must-Read for Queer Millennials. May 25, 2016, accessed on July 9, 2019 . 
21. ^ Garth Greenwell: James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room: an antidote to shame . In: The Guardian . November 19, 2016, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed July 9, 2019]).
22. ^ Editing of new germany: attempted self-discovery (new germany). Retrieved May 21, 2019 .