Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 720 pages, $36
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In Nicholas Boggs\u2019 lively and vigorously researched biography of James Baldwin, the great writer\u2019s search for the source of his art dovetails with his lifelong search for meaningful relationships. Black, gay, born without the benefit of money or guidance, repeatedly harassed and beaten in his New York City hometown, Baldwin physically removed himself from the turmoil of America, living abroad for long stretches to find proper distance and see his country plain. In \u201cThe Fire Next Time,\u201d \u201cAnother Country\u201d and \u201cGiovanni\u2019s Room,\u201d among other works, Baldwin gleaned hard truths about the ways in which white people, white men in particular, deny their own sexual confusions to lash out at those who they feel may pose a grave threat their own machismo codes and their absolute dominion over Black Americans. In his novels and essays, Baldwin became a sharp beacon of hard truths.<\/p>\n
Baldwin was reared in an oppressive atmosphere of religious doctrine and physical violence; his stepfather David, a laborer and preacher, adhered to an quasi-Calvinist approach to child-rearing that forbade art\u2019s graven images in the home and encouraged austerity and renunciation. Books, according to Baldwin\u2019s father, were \u201cwritten by white devils.\u201d As a child, Baldwin was beaten and verbally lashed by his father; his brief tenure as a religious orator in the church was, according to Boggs, a way to \u201cusurp his father at his own game.\u201d At the same time, Boggs notes, Baldwin used the church \u201cto mask the deep confusion caused by his burgeoning sexual desires.\u201d <\/p>\n
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As a child, Baldwin is marginalized for being too sensitive, too bookish, a \u201csissy.\u201d At school, he finds mentors like Orilla \u201cBill\u201d Miller and the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who introduced him to Dickens and the 18th century Russian novelists. When his stepfather loses his job, it is down to Baldwin to support his mother and eight siblings. Taking a job at a local army base, he is confronted with virulent race-baiting from his white supervisor and co-workers.<\/p>\n
Baldwin leaves Harlem behind shortly thereafter and falls into the artistic ferment of Greenwich Village in the \u201840s. He shares ideas about art, music and literature with a fellow budding aesthete named Eugene Worth until he jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge in the winter of 1946. His death \u201ccast a pall over Baldwin\u2019s life,\u201d Boggs writes, \u201cbut it would also play a major and enduring role in his development as a writer.\u201d Baldwin, who had developed strong romantic feelings for Worth but never made them plain to his friend, makes a promise to himself, vowing to adjoin his private life as a gay Black man to the public life of an artist, so that \u201cmy infirmities might be forged into weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beauford Delaney, a respected painter and Village fixture, becomes Baldwin\u2019s lodestar and encourages him to confront his sexuality head-on in his art. What that art might entail, Baldwin doesn\u2019t yet know, but it would have something to do with writing. Delaney would become a lifelong friend, even after he began suffering from mental deterioration, dying after years of hospitalization in 1979. <\/p>\n
Baldwin\u2019s life as a transatlantic nomad begins in 1948, when he arrives in Paris after winning a scholarship to study there. More importantly, he meets 17-year-old Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter, and a relationship blossoms. Happersberger shares deep artistic and sexual affinities with Baldwin, but Lucien is also attracted to women and becomes a kind of template for Baldwin\u2019s future partners, most notably the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, that he would pursue until his death in 1987.<\/p>\n
Baldwin held these romantic relationships in tantalizing suspension, his love affairs caught between the poles of desire and intimacy, the heat of passion and long-term commitment. The love triangles these relationships engendered became a rich source for his fiction. Boggs asserts that many of the author\u2019s most enduring works, including \u201cGo Tell It on the Mountain\u201d and his breakthrough novel about gay love \u201cGiovanni\u2019s Room,\u201d sprang from these early, formative encounters. \u201cThe structure of a not fully requited love was a familiar and even eroticized one for Baldwin,\u201d Boggs writes, \u201cand would come to fuel his art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Away from the States, Baldwin was freed \u201cfrom the trap of color,\u201d but he was pulled ever deeper into the racial unrest in America, taking on journalism assignments to see for himself how systemic racial oppression worked in the Jim Crow South. In Atlanta, Baldwin meets Martin Luther King Jr., who invites him to Montgomery to witness the impact of the bus boycott. Entering a local restaurant, he is greeted with stony stares; a white woman points toward the colored entrance. In Mississippi, he interviews NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who is busy investigating a lynching. Baldwin notes the climate of fear among Black citizens in the city, speaking to him like \u201c the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Nicholas Boggs tracked down a previously unwritten-about lover of James Baldwin for his new biography. <\/p>\n
(Noah Loof)<\/p>\n
These eyewitness accounts would feed into Baldwin\u2019s impassioned essays on race such as \u201cDown at the Cross\u201d and his 1972 nonfiction book \u201cNo Name in the Street.\u201d For Boggs, Baldwin\u2019s nonfiction informed his fiction; there are \u201ccontinuities and confluences between and across his work in both genres.\u201d The throughline across all of the work was Baldwin\u2019s ire at America\u2019s failure to recognize that the \u201cso-called Negro\u201d was \u201ctrapped, disinherited and despised, in a nation that \u2026 is still unable to recognize him as a human being.\u201d <\/p>\n
Baldwin would spend the rest of his life toggling between journalism and fiction, addressing racism in the States in articles for Esquire, Harper\u2019s and other publications while spending most of his time in Turkey and France, where a growing circle of friends and lovers nourished his muse and satisfied his need for constant social interaction when he wasn\u2019t wrestling with his work, sometimes torturously so. Boggs\u2019 book finds Baldwin in middle age poised between creative fecundity and despair, growing frustrated with America\u2019s failure of nerve regarding race and homosexuality as well as his own thwarted partnerships. Despite a powerful bond with Engin Cezarr and, later, the French painter Yoran Cazac, who flitted in and out of Baldwin\u2019s Istanbul life across the 1970s, the picture of Baldwin that emerges in Boggs\u2019 biography is that of an artist who treasures emotional continuity but creatively feeds on inconstancy.<\/p>\n
In fact, Cazac had never been cited in any previous Baldwin biography. Boggs discovered him when he came across an out-of-print children\u2019s book called \u201cLittle Man, Little Man,\u201d a collaboration between Cazac and Baldwin that prompted Boggs\u2019 search. After following a number of flimsy leads, he finally finds Cazac in a rural French village, and they talk.<\/p>\n
The novels that Baldwin penned during his last great burst of productivity, most notably \u201cIf Beale Street Could Talk\u201d and \u201cJust Above My Head,\u201d have been maligned by many Baldwin fans as noble failures lacking the fire and dramatic power of his early work. Yet Boggs makes a strong case for these books as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism. The contours of Baldwin\u2019s romantic engagement with Cazac, in particular, would find their way into \u201cBeale Street,\u201d the first time Baldwin used a female narrator to tell the story of a budding young romance doomed by a gross miscarriage of justice. Boldly experimental in both form and content, \u201cBeale Street\u201d and \u201cJust Above My Head\u201d were, in Boggs\u2019 view, unjustly criticized, coming at a time when Baldwin\u2019s reputation was on the decline. Only novelist Edmund White gleaned something special in his review of \u201cJust Above My Head,\u201d Baldwin\u2019s final novel, finding in his depictions of familial love a Dickensian warmth which \u201cglow with the steadiness and clarity of a flame within a glass globe.\u201d<\/p>\n
A literary biography needn\u2019t be an artful accretion of facts, nor should it traffic in salacious gossip and cheapen the subject at hand. Boggs\u2019 even-handed and critically rigorous biography of James Baldwin is guilty of none of these things, mostly because Boggs never strays from the path toward understanding why Baldwin wrote what he did and how his private and public lives were inextricably wound up in his work. Boggs has dug much deeper than his predecessors, including Baldwin\u2019s biographer David Leeming, whose book has been the standard bearer since its 1994 publication. \u201cBaldwin: A Love Story\u201d is superlative, and it should become the new gold standard for Baldwin studies.<\/p>\n
Weingarten is the author of \u201cThirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Baldwin: A Love Story By Nicholas BoggsFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 720 pages, $36If you buy books…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[7605,7604,7602,2584,359,7606,834,18,117,7610,4870,19,17,3255,7611,7603,7609,7608,7607,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-7478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-art-dovetail","10":"tag-baldwin","11":"tag-book","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-cazac","14":"tag-child","15":"tag-eire","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-failure","18":"tag-fiction","19":"tag-ie","20":"tag-ireland","21":"tag-life","22":"tag-meaningful-relationship","23":"tag-nicholas-boggs","24":"tag-novel","25":"tag-same-time","26":"tag-street","27":"tag-work"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}