But Giovanni’s Room has endured, I suspect, not because of how it fits into the era, but how it resisted such plots and definitions of gay love. You could say the tragedy of the story fits with the plotlines of gay characters in much of mid-20th-century American fiction. Both David and Giovanni had sexual and emotional relationships with women and men. In many ways the novel elides its labels. “It’s difficult to say when its love story became a gay love story,” wrote Christopher Bram in Eminent Outlaws. Perhaps calling Giovanni’s Room a gay novel is a misnomer. The novel ends with Hella leaving David to return to America, Giovanni executed for the murder of a wealthy gay man, and David alone in the South of France.
David struggles with his decision, and eventually Hella learns the truth about his relationship with Giovanni. When Hella returns to Paris, David resolves to build a life with her and leaves Giovanni, escaping without a word. This room, with its paradoxical meanings of protective isolation and prison, haunts the novel’s ending. David meets Giovanni in the café life of the Left Bank, and the two fall in love, spending days and nights in Giovanni’s one-room basement apartment.
David, living in the south of France, recounts his last year in Paris after his girlfriend Hella has left for several weeks in Spain. Baldwin’s materials,” wrote New York Times critic Granville Hicks, “one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them.” Eventually, Dial Press published the book, and the critics praised it for its prose and its honesty. His editor at Knopf was eager for a second success by the young and talented “Negro writer.” But a novel set in Paris about the white American David who falls in love with an Italian named Giovanni was not the book they were expecting-or prepared to publish. His first, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was a success with readers and critics. WHEN James Baldwin presented a manuscript of Giovanni’s Room to his agent, Helen Strauss, she told him to burn it.
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