BALDWIN: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
720 pages, $36.
IN 2017, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired the papers of author and gay icon James Baldwin. Consisting of more than 81 boxes of material, much of it previously unavailable, this archive chronicles Baldwin’s life from the age of fourteen in 1938 to his death in 1987. Author Nicholas Boggs took full advantage of this vital material to write the first major biography of Baldwin since 1991’s Talking at the Gates. A monumental work of research and literary analysis, Baldwin: A Love Story significantly expands our knowledge of the legendary author.
Boggs structures his biography by focusing on the four men with whom Baldwin had his most significant relationships: his “spiritual father,” Black gay painter Beauford Delaney; his first serious lover, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, whom Baldwin continued to obsess over for the rest of his life; and two creative collaborators, his “blood-brother,” Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, and the unorthodox French artist Yoran Cazac.
Baldwin was routinely drawn to men who were by all appearances heterosexual. Both Cazac and Cezzar were married to women, and Happersberger would marry while he was involved with the author. As Baldwin said late in his life: “My lovers, well, the word ‘gay’ wouldn’t have meant anything to them.” Many of Baldwin’s men were also younger. Happersberger was nineteen when he invited the budding 26-year-old author to his family’s chalet in Loèche-les-Bains, Switzerland, the setting for his seminal essay “Stranger in the Village.”
The eldest of nine children, Baldwin grew up in poverty in Harlem. His stepfather David Baldwin was a Baptist minister, strict and often violent. Under his influence, the younger Baldwin became a popular Pentecostal preacher at fourteen. He left the pulpit at seventeen, never completely abandoning the biblical references, cadences, and style of the Black church. After meeting Delaney and moving to Greenwich Village, he worked a series of menial jobs while also writing and publishing work in progressive magazines. His regular socializing with artists, editors, and other writers in the Village established a lifelong pattern of late-night conversation and heavy drinking followed by writing into the early morning.
In 1948, Baldwin left the U.S. for Paris, where he met Happersberger. He finished his semi-autobiographical debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in the Alps with Happersberger, fulfilling “his need for both solitude to focus on writing as well as to be social, with friends and preferably a lover in order to get his work done.” The groundbreaking Giovanni’s Room mirrored many of his own conflicting emotions about being attracted to men. The novel, he said, “also simplified my life in a way because it meant I had no secrets, nobody could blackmail me. No, you didn’t tell me, I told you.” Baldwin often wrestled with his issues by writing about them. Boggs urges readers and scholars not to separate “Essayist Baldwin” from “Novelist Baldwin,” as often has been done. The Baldwin papers show how one project flowed into another, ignoring genre. “There would be no Giovanni’s Room without ‘Stranger in the Village,’ just as ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ would not exist in the form it took without the fictional exploration that preceded it in Go Tell it on the Mountain.”
Baldwin frequently returned to the U.S. in the late 1950s and ’60s to write about the Civil Rights movement. He befriended leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers and participated in the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Baldwin was on stage—but not asked to speak—at the 1963 March on Washington. The influential and powerful pair of essays on civil rights collected in the bestseller The Fire Next Time landed him on the cover of Time magazine, anointing him as a major spokesperson for the movement.
Finding time for writing in America was becoming increasingly impossible, so Baldwin accepted an invitation to visit Istanbul from Engin Cezzar, an actor he’d met in New York. Turkey turned out to be a perfect place for him to work, as Cezzar’s fiancée Gülriz Sururi quickly discovered: “He said he was going to stay for three days, and he didn’t leave for months!” Baldwin’s “visit” began a decade of transatlantic shuttling back and forth to the U.S. He admitted: “I think I must reconcile myself to being a transatlantic commuter—and turn to my advantage, and not impossibly the advantage of others, the fact that I am a stranger everywhere.”
Boggs himself enters the story here, outlining his search for Yoran Cazac to help him in bringing back into print Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, which Cazac illustrated. According to the artist, this “child’s story for adults” was for Baldwin “self-analysis, like a Fellini movie. He was working on himself.”
Baldwin settled into what would become his final home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France in 1970, writing what was to be his last novel there. In discussing this story of a Black gay gospel singer, Baldwin remarked: “What I’ve really been feeling is that I’ve come full circle. From Go Tell It on The Mountain to Just Above My Head sums up something of my experience—it is difficult to articulate—that sets me free to go someplace else.” Still at work on a play set in a home like his own, The Welcome Table, Baldwin died in 1987. Among the family and friends surrounding him was Happersberger, “the one true love story of my life.”
Baldwin: A Love Story is enriched by Boggs’ access to the Schomburg’s Baldwin papers. The author’s previously unavailable letters reveal “how essential the epistolary form was for his self-interrogation.” Poet and University of Georgia professor Ed Pavlić, who was given partial access to them in 2010, has said: “The private record, for me, just amplifies and confirms and makes more dramatic the public messages he was out to convey.” Boggs still had to rely on Pavlić’s brief quotes and glosses of Baldwin’s letters to his brother David, however. While some correspondence is available in other archives, the letters to David Baldwin, Delaney, Happersberger, and lifelong friend and economist Mary Painter remain under a Baldwin estate-established twenty-year seal at the Schomburg.
Baldwin: A Love Story is a vivid journey into Baldwin’s often difficult private world. Boggs luxuriates in well-chosen details but doesn’t overwhelm the reader with unnecessary minutia. Even the inclusion of a Turkish recipe for bathtub vodka doesn’t feel excessive, as it highlights the type of revelry that occurred during Baldwin’s time in Istanbul. Rewarding and smoothly written, Baldwin: A Love Story recalibrates our understanding of this important writer. It may prove to be the definitive biography of one of the literary giants of the 20th century.
Reginald Harris, a frequent contributor, is a writer and poet based in Brooklyn.
