On James Baldwin and the power of love
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Boggs conveys the sense that Baldwin believed so strongly in love because if he hadn't he would have gone mad. As it was he occasionally went mad anyway (or at least fell into some deep, dark places), in ways that often seemed inseparable from his creative process. 'Art without suffering seemed to be increasingly impossible for him,' Boggs writes of the time in which Baldwin was both gradually separating from Happersberger and writing his 1956 novel '
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Boggs grew enthralled with Baldwin in 1996 when he came upon '
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His timing is excellent. 'Baldwin: A Love Story' arrives a year late for the Baldwin centennial and attendant media coverage, but the current cultural climate makes it hard not to view Baldwin as a much needed and sadly accurate prophet for these times. As Boggs writes, Baldwin was concerned with 'the dangers of the myth of American innocence,' and 'the pernicious effects of white American masculinity.' He consistently observed that intolerance destroys the souls of the racist and intolerant. He was acutely, painfully aware of racism's insanity.
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He had no blinders, and he was no stranger to anger. But as time went on he increasingly proposed an antidote. That, of course, was love, expressed eloquently, practiced radically.
And yet Boggs has no interest in depicting his subject as Saint Jimmy. You didn't want to lend money to the Baldwin of these pages, especially when he was young; you would probably never see it again. Baldwin famously took down on one of his mentors, Richard Wright, with the essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel' (and, later and more gently, 'Alas, Poor Richard'); Baldwin would admit that 'he had used [Wright's] work as a kind of springboard for my own.' But the dynamic between Baldwin and Wright was complicated, and Boggs treats it as such. Baldwin saw Wright's novel '
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If Baldwin fervently believed in love, he also desperately sought it, across continents — New York, Paris, Switzerland, Istanbul — and decades, largely chasing what he had once had with Happersberger, who married and had a child (Baldwin had a habit of falling for unavailable men). Not all of the pivotal relationships in his life were sexual; the painter Beauford Delaney was an early mentor and a sort of platonic soul mate who was there for Baldwin in the crucial years after he moved away from being a boy preacher in Harlem and toward a life of letters. The process of writing his first two novels, '
Boggs comes about as close as anyone has to wrapping his arms around Baldwin, embracing him, if you will, in his entirety. This 'Love Story' is a reminder that we could really use James Baldwin right now, and his instinct for cutting through nonsense like a lithe, sharp sword — wielded, of course, with love.
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BALDWIN: A LOVE STORY
By Nicholas Boggs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 720 pages, $36
Chris Vognar is TV and pop culture critic at The Boston Globe.
Chris Vognar can be reached at
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