Tone day, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but that wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already waning in his lifetime, diminished after his death in 1987. The publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories ten years later. Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained about his “intellectual intelligence”. He also released The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s 1963 diptych is about the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an “era” of radicalism. If such a sentence did not apply at the time, six years after the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, sadly short-sighted.
The inflection point in the Baldwin revival came in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro. (2016), depicting modern-day images of protests and racist police violence with excerpts from Baldwin’s civil rights-era speeches. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s mind as well as confirming his rightful place as an important witness in that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s favorite name for the writer-lawyer-famous outfit he took on in the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral commitment and confusion).
But Peck did not explore Baldwin’s view of the “myth of American masculinity”—the prison of perma youth that he believed kept American men isolated and unable to reconcile their private and public selves. Therefore, I Am Not Your Negro – narrated by Samuel L Jackson in a baritone far removed from the affected, transatlantic views adopted by Baldwin – is almost silent on his sexuality.
Baldwin’s closest and most lasting relationships were with men. Throughout his life he opposed gender labels, arguing that such categories were inherently dehumanizing. Where other biographies have ignored or downplayed the issue of his sexuality, David Leeming (Baldwin’s “Boswell”) sought to include it in his landmark 1994 film biography. But even there, the names were made up and the details were hidden. That a full account of Baldwin’s intimate relationships will help us better understand the writer is the thesis of Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story, the first biography published by a major press in more than 30 years.
Boggs divides his study into four “books,” each named after men who represented Baldwin’s central relationships: Beauford Delaney, a contemporary painter and his “spiritual father”; Lucien Happersberger, his first great love; Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor whose “romantic brotherly relationship” with Baldwin lured him to Istanbul; and the French singer Yoran Cazac, whose relationship with Baldwin is, until now, not well known. Apart from Delaney, who had a crush on Baldwin, these were the three straight men that Baldwin dated, but they themselves disagreed about their love for him. Baldwin’s “first principle of love”, Hilton Als wrote, “was love denied”. Boggs feels the same way. He writes: “If he had it, this was his culture”: men who “stand outside of social norms. all short” but they were especially interested in women, the English “made of an improbable material that also ensured that nothing or anyone could risk interfering with or surpassing his vocation as a writer.” A Love Story powerfully shows how this tension is painful but productive—inducing heartbreak; the way of his life.
The story of Love is not limited to the pictures of these relationships, however: in 600 pages, it is a comprehensive biography, which describes the chronological sequence of events from Baldwin’s childhood in Harlem until his death at the age of 63. Boggs’s research is complete, which enables him to carefully reconstruct the level of Baldwin’s high-biographical life.
Among many new items, she includes recently preserved letters written by Baldwin to his lifelong friend Mary Painter, which provide a fascinating glimpse into how he used the epistolary genre as a form of manipulation, grappling with practical and creative problems in correspondence. These letters also provide an indication that Baldwin tended to isolate himself as his work progressed. Boggs tells the story of a harrowing incident in which Painter, who wrote to Baldwin to say she had been sexually assaulted by a mutual friend, received a “woefully inadequate” response. Baldwin’s offhand response (“I don’t know what to say”), in Boggs’ estimation, is “lack of empathy”. It’s an important moment, showing Boggs’s resistance to the simplistic, cheapening appeal of psychology; it also reflects on Baldwin’s recent relationship with the emerging generation of Black women writers, which emerged from his seminal 1971 televised interview with poet Nikki Giovanni.
At 250 pages, the second book is the longest and most difficult, as Boggs explores Baldwin’s most prolific decade. Throughout the 1960s, his involvement with the civil rights movement deepened and grew. At the same time, his status rose, putting him firmly on the side of Hoover’s FBI and critics, who saw his rise to fame as a death knell for his art. There was heartbreak (Happersberger married; Delaney descended into paranoid psychosis; Cezzar was unreachable) and devastating grief, with the death of Lorraine Hansberry, the bombings of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. At the end of these years, it was a relief to find a bedridden Baldwin temporarily residing in Istanbul, his creative hub, directing John Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes.. With great affection, Boggs conveys the joy of Baldwin’s “teeth chatter” as he watches his first performance in the final week of the decade that nearly killed him.
Love Story switches gears completely in its final episode, as Boggs recounts his efforts to restore Baldwin’s “children’s book for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, in order to find the mysterious Cazac, who illustrated the text. The prose, here, is very quiet, cutting elegantly between Boggs’ research trips to France in the early 00s and beautiful portraits of Baldwin’s final years at his final home in Saint Paul de Vence. These chapters also provide an illuminating literary analysis of the book; in particular, the light of Baldwin’s unpublished work, which is intended to work, No Papers for Mohamet, which he used as a “portal” for much of his later creative output.
Boggs interjects a conversation he has with the affable, almost tyrannical Cazac of Paris, in which he tries to tease out the truth of his relationship with Baldwin. With the same care and respect that characterizes his entire performance, Boggs conveys what is undoubtedly the most emotional moment in the book. He asks Cazac when he last saw Baldwin. Cazac turns to look out the window, and replies, “I don’t think I can see him outside now.” In the end, the truth of their relationship is not in its life details, but in that image: a man looking out the window, believing that his feelings for another man are so strong that he may fall for decades and bring him back to life.
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