In a lecture delivered in 1962, James Baldwin asked what societies wanted from their artists: “societies never know it but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, to make freedom real”.
Nicholas Boggs, in this new biography, takes Baldwin at his word and looks at what Baldwin’s lovers – or more precisely, in some instances, his love interests – reveal to us about the American writer’s enduring passions and preoccupations.
Divided into four parts, the book covers four respective periods in which a particular figure looms large in Baldwin’s private and professional life: Beauford Delaney (1940-48), Lucien Happersberger (1948-55), Engin Cezzar (1957-70) and Yoran Cazac (1971-1976).
Chronological divisions are nothing new in biographies, but where Boggs pulls rank is in allowing the relationship rather than the biographical subject to become the principal unit of analysis. This move is partially motivated by Boggs’ belief that earlier Baldwin biographies have not given sufficient weight to the importance of homoerotic connections in shaping both Baldwin’s politics and his aesthetics.
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Parsing the African American writer’s sexuality is also linked to his campaign to get readers to pay more attention to Baldwin’s work as a novelist, which he feels has been unjustly overshadowed by the argumentative brilliance of the essays. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979) are discussed as part of Baldwin’s lifelong concern with the competing claims of race and sexuality.
On account of nervousness around his professed homosexuality, Baldwin was excluded from any public speaking role in the famous March on Washington in 1963 (the occasion of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech) and the bewildered crowd instead listened to Burt Lancaster intone Baldwin’s words in a listless monotone that made up in meaninglessness what it lacked in drama.
For Baldwin, both racism and homophobia had their troubled origins in conventional forms of white American masculinity that ritually denigrated or despised any perceived vulnerability involving attraction to other races or other men. In a 1949 essay entitled Preservation of Innocence, Baldwin took issue with the novels of Raymond Chandler and James Cain, where “that mindless monster, the tough guy, has been created and perfected; whose masculinity is found in the most infantile and elementary externals and whose attitude towards women is the wedding of the most abysmal romanticism and implacable distrust.”
Being black and openly gay meant Baldwin throughout his lifetime was under constant threat of physical assault in his homeland, in addition to attracting the persistent and unwelcome attentions of J Edgar Hoover’s federal goons.
James Joyce once remarked that the shortest road to Tara was through Holyhead. For Baldwin, the truth of this observation was borne out by his endless transatlantic commutes and his establishment of homes away from home in Paris, Istanbul and, towards the end of his life, Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France.
It was only when he was out of the US that he had the necessary remove to make sense of life in his native country. He needed the perspective and space of elsewhere to steady his nerves and not surrender to the ever-pressing chaos of events.
It was also in other countries that he got glimpses of more peaceable forms of coexistence, of tangible forms of interracial and sexual harmony, even if a homophobic and racist attack in Turkey and discriminatory treatment at the hands of the French police alerted him to potential trouble in paradise.
For Boggs, an ideal of Baldwin’s, which would continue to elude him, was the establishment of a long-term creative and emotional collaboration in conditions that approximated traditional domesticity. The period he spent working on his first novel in the company of Lucien Happersberger in Loèche-les-Bains in Switzerland, or directing a play in Istanbul with Engin Cezzar and Cezzar’s wife Gülriz Sururi, or co-producing a “children’s book for adults” with Yoran Cazac in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, were experiences of intense fulfilment that were at once creatively productive and emotionally enlivening.
Unfortunately for Baldwin, his more sustained sexual interest was in men such as Happersberger, Cezzar and Cazac, each of whom was primarily drawn to heterosexual relationships. The ultimate impossibility of these relationships may, on some level, have been the point.
The sheer velocity and intensity of Baldwin’s activities as a writer and public intellectual would have made the settled idyll that stoked his night-time fantasies an unrealisable ideal. His work rate was phenomenal and, at times, his capacity to sustain endless partying and the criss-crossing of oceans and continents courts disbelief. Fame may have many fathers, but it is not generally a group sport. It is hard to imagine a partner, no matter how understanding or besotted, who would have stayed the pace.
Baldwin never knew his birth father, and his preacher stepfather was unkind and cruel to a son he never accepted. The painter Beauford Delaney became something of an adoptive father for Baldwin, a role that was often complicated by the strong feelings Delaney had for his precociously gifted protege.. Baldwin never forgot the early support and guidance from his Greenwich Village companion, and when Delaney moved to France, Baldwin was unstinting in providing for his fellow artist, particularly in the difficult later years of Delaney’s life.
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As detailed in Boggs’ biography, Baldwin’s generosity to family and friends and his epic hospitality speak to a largeness of spirit that did not exempt him from intractable inner turmoil. He made several attempts on his own life, and in his final years, had to contend with the active disdain of the cultural commentariat that classed him as a writer past his prime.
Lingering homophobia often masqueraded as high-minded critical dismissal of Baldwin’s later work, and young bloods within the African American literary community inevitably engaged in their own Oedipal slaying of a cultural titan. Only Edmund White, in a markedly positive review in The Washington Post, praised the way in which Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head, had “successfully placed the black, male homosexual back into the context of black society”, not as a pariah but as a beloved member of a family.
This was also a novel where Baldwin dealt more pointedly with androgynous forms of identity, navigating a way through the binaries that had traditionally drawn up the plot lines for gender politics. While not immune to the hurt caused by the ritual trashing of his last novels, Baldwin invoked the Turkish notion of life as a water wheel: “It turns. The trick is to hold your nose when you’re under and not get dizzy when you’re up.”
Boggs’ biography is compulsively readable. Although deliberately bringing Baldwin’s life as a gay man into much-needed focus, Boggs never loses sight of his subject’s all-consuming interest in and commitment to racial justice.
If, at times, there can be a flat-footed pedagogical earnestness in his over-zealous championing of the novels, Boggs is surely right to remind readers of how central they were to Baldwin’s attempts to work out of his sexual and racial politics.
Boggs also avoids the anachronistic scolding that informs certain strains of contemporary biography where biographers are more akin to small-town gossips than material witnesses. He displays great tact with sensitive subject matter and uses the biographical form not to put down or exalt but to broaden the reader’s appreciation of the scale and complexity of Baldwin’s writings in their many forms.
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There is an uncanny timeliness in the appearance of this biography, as the constituent failings of American governing structures that Baldwin so clinically and remorselessly described are once more casting a dangerous shadow over US domestic politics and the troubled geopolitics of our planet.
In 1963, reacting to the assassination of John F Kennedy, Baldwin observed: “the America of my experience has worshipped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on earth. The violence has been perpetrated mainly against black men, though; the strangers; and so it didn’t count. But, if a society permits one section of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.”
Watching the Black-and-Tan antics of Ice or the “tough guy” flouting of international law is a reminder that, as Baldwin rightly observes, no one is safe when violence becomes the only currency of contact.
Baldwin’s love stories are not, in his own definition of love, about the infantile sense of being made happy but about “the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth”. Boggs is the most admirable of witnesses to that quest and growth and, in the process, makes Baldwin the most daring of our contemporaries, consistently testing the conditions that make freedom a reality and that make tyranny a collective failure of the capacity to imagine love not as a private pursuit but as a collective project.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
Further reading
Letter to Jimmy (Soft Skull Press, 2014) by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Sara Medi Ansari. The Congolese writer’s engagement with the legacy of Baldwin takes the form of an extended letter where Mabanckou explores Baldwin’s literary and political development. Mabanckou is particularly interested in Baldwin’s experiences as an expatriate writer and his relations with other black American writers.
An Autobiography (Penguin, new edition, 2023) by Angela Y Davis. Davis and Baldwin were both particularly exercised by the mass incarceration of black Americans. An Autobiography is an absorbing account of Davis’s lifelong commitment to racial and social justice and a chilling indictment of a system that sought to crush her spirit in every way conceivable.
The Anti-Racist Media Manifesto (Polity, 2024) by Anamik Saha, Francesca Sobande and Gavan Titley outlines steps for working towards an anti-racist media future. Echoing Baldwin’s concerns with the concrete consequences of bias and misrepresentation, the manifesto looks at how media systems can be changed in ways that actively challenge the production of racism.
