Giovanni’s Room

Connecting

I WALKED INTO the library. My palms were sweating. Not because I was nervous about anything specific, but because at sixteen my palms were always sweating. They were permanently clammy. Just as my face was permanently spotty, studded with angry pimples in various shades of pink and red. My hair was floppy and loose and covered my eyes. I’d finally saved enough money to dump my thick plastic glasses for a cooler pair—dark and round, like the ones John Lennon had. But my palms betrayed my efforts to be cool.

It was a warm day, and all the other kids were out playing sports or pretending to study or listening to the Grateful Dead or smoking in the woods. I was the only one at the library. And I wasn’t sure what I hoped to find.

The library was a squat, stone building on a pond. Even without the air-conditioning turned on, it was always cool. The foyer held the card catalog and the desk of Miss Locke, the librarian. Past that was a grand reading room, with leather chairs and brass lamps. Beyond that, to the left, right, and center, were open stacks, with study carrels. There were more of these on the second floor, and a whole floor of open stacks below.

Though I would not have admitted it to myself, I was hoping to find Miss Locke at her desk. She always had the most amazingly delicious chocolate-chip brown-sugar brownies. She also always had a kind word for me—a funny, sly one, something that told me that we were on the same side, that we understood things others didn’t.

But today she wasn’t there. So I wandered around. I visited some of my favorite sections. I stopped by poetry, where I pulled from the shelf the collected works of Robert Frost. I went by drama, and pulled William Inge from the shelf, so I could flip to The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and revisit the monologue that always broke my heart, in which the boy, soon to die from suicide, remembers the time he was able to leave military academy to spend two whole days with his mother, and how he took her to dinner, out dancing, and to a show.

I was actually quite an outgoing kid, and I enjoyed the company of others. I knew this business of hanging out in the library and pulling favorite books from the shelves that had nothing to do with homework would make me seem aloof and pretentious and would puzzle most of my peers, so I kept it to myself.

And then I noticed the library cart, the one Miss Locke wheeled around as she returned to the shelves the books that kids had borrowed, or had simply taken down and then left out, like dirty dishes on a table, waiting for someone else to attend to them.

On the cart was a book. Just one book: The Little That Is All by John Ciardi. I picked it up and read the back of the book, which told me that this poet had “over the past thirty-odd years brought out ten volumes of poetry, a complete translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a collection of his columns, Manner of Speaking, with numerous volumes of children’s verse.” Ciardi had become famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when poets were still famous.

I read some pages at random and then checked it out. It was not verse for children.

The poems spoke to me in a way that I think I would have found hard to explain, if I had attempted to do so, which I didn’t.

There was one about washing your own feet. It includes the line “Washing my feet, I think of immortal toenails.” I instantly loved that poem.

A poem called “East Sixty-Seventh Street” about the poet Frank O’Hara’s death had a phrase that stuck with me: “suffering not to suffer / but because we are what we are and some of it hurts.”

Most of all I loved “A Poem for Benn’s Graduation from High School.” Its last stanza reads: “…It does not, finally, / take much saying. There has even been time / to imagine we have said ‘Goddamn it, I love you,’ / and to hear ourselves saying it, and to pause / to be terrified by that thought and its possibilities.”

I memorized as many poems as I could.

When I returned the book the next week, again I missed Miss Locke and her famous brownies. But again I found one book on the cart.

I wish I could remember what that book was, but I can’t. What I do remember is that the next time I went I did find Miss Locke there, and we talked at greater length than we ever had before, and from then on I would tell her what I was reading, often a book from the cart, but she would never acknowledge that she’d left anything there specifically for me. Sometimes in these conversations she would recommend a book to me. The books she suggested were usually vaguely apt, the kinds of books she suggested to lots of kids, books that most people my age at that school seemed to like. But the ones I found on the cart were different. They were books, I believed, that spoke directly and peculiarly to me. Sometimes they were books that you wouldn’t normally recommend to a young man in the 1970s at a boarding school, like The Loom of Youth by Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn, who made his name with this novel of a gay scandal at a British public school. Sometimes they were books of poetry, always very accessible, but not what everyone else was reading, not Frost, not e e cummings, but more volumes of Ciardi, and Marianne Moore, and H.D. Once it was, surprisingly, Our Bodies, Ourselves, that life-changing bible for liberated 1970s women. On reflection, maybe that wasn’t left on the cart for me.

It was a parallel curriculum to the one I was studying in my formal classes. And there was no particular thread—the works jumped around genre and history. But I believe that (Our Bodies, Ourselves aside) they were selected for me and only me.

Of course, Miss Locke must have realized that I was gay a short time after I finally began to fully admit it to myself. Nobody but a gay boy obsessively rereads the monologue from The Dark at the Top of the Stairs or any plays by William Inge—or really any plays at all, for that matter. Not at an Episcopal boarding school in the 1970s. And nobody but a gay boy attempts Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater, a book so stultifying it’s impossible to imagine anyone today getting through it. The only reason I even knew about it was because I had started reading everything I could about Oscar Wilde, including Son of Oscar Wilde by Vyvyan Holland, the second of his two boys, who were whisked off to Continental Europe after their father was arrested. Marius the Epicurean was a book Wilde dearly loved by a professor who had a deep influence on him. So I read it.

But, again, this was the 1970s. So I didn’t talk to anyone about Wilde or about my being gay. And Miss Locke didn’t talk about it. She just left books for me.

Eventually she would leave for me Gore Vidal’s gay novel The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, the 1956 novel about the love between two men: one American and one Italian. It’s narrated by David, the American, on the eve of Giovanni’s execution for murder—and tells in flashbacks its story of love, betrayal, and jealousy. The title refers to Giovanni’s one-room apartment in Paris, a place where he and David were for a time happy together.

I wept extravagantly over Giovanni’s Room, for Giovanni and for David. I was a dramatic fellow. Maybe that was my nature—and maybe it also came from all those afternoons in the school library reading William Inge and Oscar Wilde and the plays of Tennessee Williams. But even at my most self-absorbed, I was aware that, except with regard to being gay, my life wasn’t very similar to the lives of either of the characters in that book, or to Baldwin’s.

And yet having that gay thing in common was still something. It was a time of high stakes when it came to being gay. That year, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in America, was gunned down, along with San Francisco’s mayor; their killer would receive a sentence of just seven years, of which he would serve five, after his attorneys argued that his mental state was caused by eating too many Twinkies. The previous year, Anita Bryant had launched a vicious national crusade against lesbian and gay people that was enthusiastically embraced by millions. There were no gay characters on television or in mainstream movies, save for ones who wound up killing themselves or someone else. Discrimination of all sorts was totally legal, nationwide, and would be for decades to come. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people were publicly reviled, with the threat of violence always present. (Of course, many forms of legal discrimination are still intact to this day, and the United States can be a dangerous place for LGBT people, especially for transgender women of color.)

At my school, there had never been, as far as I knew, a single openly gay person in the student body or on the faculty. I believed that if anyone found out I was gay I would have to leave the school I loved.

It would certainly be too dramatic to say that the books Miss Locke left for me saved my life. But it has become clearer and clearer that these books helped me create a vision of a life that I could look forward to with something other than dread.

Baldwin writes, in the voice of his American character, David:

Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.

The life Baldwin promised in that one passage was something extraordinary. I didn’t have to imagine a life where I could live like that; Baldwin had imagined it for me. And even the grim words and scenes that follow didn’t diminish for me the magic of that promise.

Shortly after reading Giovanni’s Room, I would come across a quote from Baldwin:

You think your pain and your 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 were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I would continue to read books by Baldwin, including The Fire Next Time, and the essay it contained about racism in America and American history written by the then thirty-nine-year-old African American author as a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew. Reading this book, I felt horrified, saddened, complacent, and complicit. I still do. And rereading Giovanni’s Room as an adult helped me see that book in a much-richer light—as an exploration of masculinity in its many forms and as a meditation on lies, shame, and grief.

Miss Locke introduced me to James Baldwin. And James Baldwin made me see myself and the world differently. He still does.

—

After graduating, when I would visit my school over anniversary weekends, I would stop by and say hello to Miss Locke. Legend was that she remembered every student; it’s impossible to prove, but I’ve never met a student who says she didn’t.

Over the years her hair changed from brown to gray, but it was always immaculately waved. She wore the same kinds of sweater sets she always wore, favoring pastels. She spoke softly with the slightly nasal, broad-voweled accent of New Hampshire. And she always had a supply on hand of those pan-baked brownies. Kids continued to come to the library for these, which gave her the chance to put books in the path of those who might not otherwise seek them out.

During those visits we talked about the school, about faculty who had come and gone, and always about books we were reading. But our conversations weren’t long, as the weekends were busy, and there were always other alums waiting for their chance to see Miss Locke.

I hope I thanked her. But I can’t imagine I ever thanked her enough.

Miss Locke died in 2012 at age eighty-one, of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

I learned from her obituary that she had started at my school as an assistant librarian in 1963. She retired in 1995, fifteen years after my graduation. She left behind adoring nieces and a nephew and grandnieces and grandnephews. I knew about many of them, because she talked about them with immense pride. She also left behind thousands of students for whom she had provided, always, the perfect word, hug, and book, whether handed to us directly, recommended, or left on a cart.