Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs review – the relationships that drove a genius
A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centre
Today, James Baldwin’s legacy seems assured, but this wasn’t always the case. His critical reputation, already on the wane in his lifetime, declined after his death in 1987. On the publication of the Library of America’s Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories a decade later, Michael Anderson, writing in the New York Times, complained of his “intellectual flaccidity”. He also dismissed The Fire Next Time – Baldwin’s searing 1963 essay diptych on the US’s legacy of racial injustice – as an overly emotional “period piece”. If such a verdict was out of touch then, six years after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, it seems, now, pitifully shortsighted.
An inflection point in the Baldwin revival arrived in the form of Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), which juxtaposes footage of modern-day protest and racist police violence with clips of Baldwin’s civil rights-era speechmaking. It’s an effective technique, capturing Baldwin’s prescience as well as reasserting his rightful place as a key witness to that bloody era (“witness” was Baldwin’s preferred name for the writer-spokesperson-celebrity mantle he had assumed by the mid-60s; a title that captures something of its moral obligation and frustrating passivity).
But Peck didn’t explore Baldwin’s excoriation of “the American legend of masculinity” – the prison of perma-adolescence which he believed kept American men isolated and unable to reconcile their private and public selves. As such, I Am Not Your Negro – narrated by Samuel L Jackson in a baritone far removed from the affected, transatlantic intonation Baldwin routinely adopted – almost entirely omits reference to his sexuality.
Baldwin’s most intimate and lasting relationships were with men. Throughout his life he resisted labels of sexual orientation, arguing that such categories were dehumanising by their nature. Where some accounts of his life have ignored or diminished the subject of his sexuality, David Leeming (Baldwin’s “Boswell”) sought to integrate it into his important, cinematic 1994 biography. But even there, names were pseudonymised and details obscured. That a fuller 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 separates his study into four “books”, each named after the men who represented Baldwin’s central relationships: Beauford Delaney, the modernist painter and his “spiritual father”; Lucien Happersberger, his first great love; Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor whose “eroticised fraternal bond” with Baldwin enticed him to Istanbul; and the French artist Yoran Cazac, whose relationship to Baldwin has, until now, gone relatively unremarked upon. Excepting Delaney, who harboured his own unrequited feelings for Baldwin, these were three straight-leaning men with whom Baldwin was in love, but who were, themselves, equivocal about their romantic attraction to him. Baldwin’s “first principle of love”, Hilton Als wrote, “was love withheld”. Boggs takes a similar view. “If he had one,” he writes, “this was his fetish”: men who “stood outside society’s norms tout court” but who were primarily attracted to women, a fetish “structured around an impossibility that also effectively ensured that nothing and no one would ever truly risk interfering with or superseding his calling as a writer”. A Love Story powerfully demonstrates how this painful but productive tension – the stimulus of heartache; the necessity of solitude; the pursuit of the unattainable – shaped the geographic, artistic and emotional trajectory of his life.
A Love Story isn’t limited to portraits of these relationships, though: at 600 pages, it’s an expansive biography, charting a more-or-less chronological course from Baldwin’s childhood in Harlem to his death at 63. Boggs’s research is exhaustive, enabling him to meticulously re-stage Baldwin’s life in something like biographic ultra-high-definition.
Among much fresh material, he incorporates a cache of recently unarchived letters written by Baldwin to his lifelong friend Mary Painter, which provide a tantalising glimpse into the way he used the epistolary form as a sort of diarising, muddling through practical and creative problems via the medium of correspondence. These letters also give an indication of the self-absorption Baldwin was prone to as his career took flight. Boggs tells the story of a shocking incident in which Painter, having written to Baldwin to say that she had been sexually assaulted by a mutual friend, receives a “woefully inadequate” reply. Baldwin’s handwringing response (“I scarcely know what to say”) is, in Boggs’s estimation, “preposterously insensitive”. It’s a crucial moment, signalling Boggs’s resistance to the easy, ultimately cheapening allure of hagiography; it also lends texture to his appraisal of Baldwin’s late-career relationship to an emerging generation of prolific Black female writers, epitomised in his productive, occasionally bull-headed televised 1971 dialogue with the poet Nikki Giovanni.
At 250 pages, book two is the longest and most challenging, as Boggs dutifully ploughs through Baldwin’s most prolific, cyclonic decade. Across the 1960s, his involvement with the civil rights movement deepened, then grew fractious. In tandem, his profile rose, placing him firmly in the crosshairs of Hoover’s FBI and the critics, who saw his ascent to celebrity as the death knell for his art. There was heartache (Happersberger married; Delaney descended into paranoid psychosis; Cezzar was out of reach) and all-consuming grief, with the death of Lorraine Hansberry, the 16th Street Baptist church bombings and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. At the end of these years, it’s a relief to find a bedraggled Baldwin temporarily rehoused in Istanbul, his creative haven, directing an adaptation of the John Herbert play Fortune and Men’s Eyes. With great affection, Boggs conveys Baldwin’s “teeth-chattering” excitement as he watches his play premiere in the final week of a decade that nearly killed him.
A Love Story shifts gear completely in its final section, as Boggs narrates his own efforts to bring Baldwin’s curious “children’s book for adults”, Little Man, Little Man, back into print, itself a quest to track down the mysterious Cazac, who illustrated the text. The prose, here, is significantly pacier, gracefully cutting between Boggs’s research trips to France in the early 00s and lushly illustrated scenes of Baldwin’s latter years in his final home in Saint Paul de Vence. These chapters also provide the book’s most illuminating literary analysis; chiefly, a gloss on Baldwin’s unpublished, auto-fictive work-in-progress, No Papers for Mohamet, which he used as a “portal” for much of his later creative output.
Boggs interleaves interviews he carried out with a gregarious, somewhat recalcitrant Cazac in Paris, in which he tries to tease out the truth of his relationship to Baldwin. With the same care and respect that undergirds his whole project, Boggs conjures what is unquestionably the book’s most touching moment. He asks Cazac when it was that he last saw Baldwin. Cazac turns to look out of the window, and replies, “I can’t imagine that I can’t see him outside there, now.” In the end, the truth of their relationship is not in its biographical details, but in that image: a man staring out of a window, believing that his feeling for another man is so strong it might collapse the decades and bring him back to life.
• Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs is published by Bloomsbury (£30). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.