JAMES BALDWIN
The Life Album
by Magdalena J. Zaborowska
Yale Univ. Press. 320 pages, $28.
IN HER NEW BIOGRAPHY of James Baldwin, Magdalena J. Zaborowska is hopelessly in love with her subject, but this doesn’t distract her from probing deep into the messy complexities and vulnerabilities that shadowed Baldwin throughout his life. She admits that she feels as if she has known him for a lifetime, though the two never met. She begins her book by thanking Baldwin for the “solace and salvation I have found in your vision of humanity.” She adds: “Like others, you strove to reconcile irreconcilables—grace, joy, and passion, loss, pain, and despair. You came from Harlem, a true native son, a Black man born into poverty, yet you redefined the norms of racial and sexual identity long before most of us accepted the possibility of doing so.”
Zaborowska delves into Baldwin’s early works, such as the autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and his essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), as well as later novels like If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), which contained more complex notions of sexuality that anticipated the explosion of genderfluid, trans, and nonbinary identities. We feel the author always trying to get closer to him and wondering how he was able to keep his heart pure and filled with love and hope despite the despair that often overtook him. Baldwin was devoted to the creation of a Black queer humanism that evolved as he did.
Zaborowska earned her master’s degree in Poland in 1987 and received her doctorate from the University of Oregon, where she began writing extensively on sexuality, gender, and race theory. The beauty of this book is that she leaves most of the academic jargon behind and focuses instead on Baldwin’s exuberant boisterousness. He is the superstar, and she wants to present not just the public man but also the “private, vulnerable, and messy man” that we don’t know about.
So, who was the real James Baldwin? He was an illegitimate child, which bothered him throughout his life. His stepfather was a preacher who was often violent with him and his eight younger half-siblings. Many remember Baldwin as charming and were smitten by his “rhetorical dexterity, charismatic delivery, scintillating wit, and sharp dress.” He smoked incessantly and drank whiskey while pounding his typewriter throughout the night. He was convinced that writing would tame the demons that haunted him. He abandoned the church as a young man, placing his faith in writing to take him to some sort of promised land.
Baldwin was a timid boy who was very close to his mother. He had bulging eyes and an a manner. His writing was immediately recognized for what Caryl Phillips described as his “gracefully lilting sentences … mutable words, and elliptical phrases, endlessly circl[ing]back on themselves.” He had dreams of becoming a painter, or a musician, or even an actor, but writing consumed him. He was offended by the stereotypical and sentimental portraits of Black characters in books and films, which he felt were dehumanizing, and he tried in his essays to reveal these persistent mythologies. He contradicted himself at times, and Zaborowska admits he was too slow in understanding the tremendous role that women had in his writing and his life. Zaborowska thinks he was fearful of alienating Black men.
Zaborowska shows us repeatedly how hard he tried to avoid inflicting harm on others, how much he wanted to do the right thing. Baldwin confessed: “I am not at all ashamed of having loved anyone I’ve loved, or of having been loved. I am ashamed of the times I’ve failed love.” Baldwin wrote about the horror of violence and machismo and always seemed to be encouraging us to be better with others and ourselves.
Baldwin alluded to certain dark occurrences during his childhood but recognized that his memory of these events was blurry, often unreachable. Zaborowska senses his frustration in trying to mine the traumas of his youth, imagining that he must have often thought about his past with a sense of loss and bewilderment. She imagines him thinking: “What was that injury and what caused it? Being born to an unwed mother? His bitter conflict with his stepfather? His ambivalence about his sexuality? A bodily or psychological trauma too unspeakable to name, or recall?” Baldwin channeled his confusions into his writing.
Baldwin felt a continual sense of distress at the fraught relationship between Black people and Jews. Many of his earliest mentors and supporters—Robert Samuel Warshow of Commentary, Sol Levitas of The New Leader, and Randall Jarrell at The Nation—were Jewish. He felt Black hostility to Jews was unwarranted and recalled fondly many Jewish friends, some of whom he had crushes on. One of his Jewish friends introduced him to Beauford Delaney, a queer, Black, bohemian painter who was older and loved and nurtured Baldwin for several years. Delaney introduced him to music, dance, paintings, textiles, and sculptures. They went to jazz clubs together and Delaney helped him adjust to the secular culture of Greenwich Village, where Baldwin began having several love affairs.
Baldwin spent years of his last decades in France, Turkiye, and elsewhere. He made friends with two women, the Norwegian journalist Gidske Anderson and the American economist Mary Painter. These women became pivotal to his new writing, thinking, and his emotional life. They advised him on love affairs and pointed out to him how his novels often contained stereotypical depictions of men and women that were without sufficient texture. These female friends opened his mind to considering what it might be like to inhabit a female body and the fluidity of gender, thoughts he hadn’t had before.
He began to find all binaries stifling and yet still struggled with guilt, shame, and sadness about his homosexuality. He recognized that men needed to understand female sexuality if they were to attain the humanity he longed for himself. He started to understand the undercurrent of connection between homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and how they acted on one another to keep women powerless and men like him fearful and ashamed. He realized how sad he was that he was never able to have his own children.
In 1985, in an essay for Playboy, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” he wrote: “We are rarely what we appear to be. We are, for the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment. But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helpless and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other.” Baldwin had clearly come to new reckonings about the complexities of sexual identity.
Born in 1924, Baldwin died in 1987 before seeing the ideas he was writing about reach a full blossoming. Zaborow-ska has written an extraordinary biography that exposes a certain tenderness in Baldwin that is sorely missing in our harsher times.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance writer based in New York City.
