Review: New bio offers bold take on literary giant James ‘Baldwin'

Miami Herald

a day ago

As a child in Harlem, James Baldwin (1924-1987) hewed to his family's strict Baptist beliefs and would have known I Corinthians 13, the New Testament's famous "love chapter," verse by verse.
Nicholas Boggs' magisterial "Baldwin," the first biography of the author in 30 years, employs love as the organizing principle, depicting his métier through the prism of intimate (mostly non-sexual) relationships with four men - queer Black artist Beauford Delaney; Lucien Happersberger, a perennial muse; Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor; and Yoran Cazac, a French painter. They grounded him emotionally and powered his literary work.
Boggs' book passes from man to man like a baton, each embodying a phase of Baldwin's life, but with ample space to detour among other friendships and flings, travels and travails. Delaney mentored the youth amid Greenwich Village's postwar flowering, encouraging him to transform a poor self-image - "Too bookish. Too sensitive. Too undersized. Too effeminate."- into creative jet fuel.
Happersberger, then 17, met Baldwin in a Paris club and haunted him for decades, flitting in and out of the author's sphere. Cezzar, a literal "blood brother," (they once cut their arms and pressed the wounds together) and his wife provided food and lodging in their Istanbul sanctuary. And in the 1970s Baldwin reconnected with Cazac, a former acquaintance, also married.
Boggs underscores a fundamental dynamic: "The push and pull of a distant, lost love he perpetually sought to retrieve and could sometimes manage to achieve, at least partially, only to lose it again, was becoming integral to Baldwin's creative process."
Around this axis of characters Boggs structures his book. A social butterfly with a taste for scotch, Baldwin adored his celebrity and accomplished more when away from New York. He composed his debut, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," in Happersberger's family's Swiss chalet and struggled through "Another Country" during an Istanbul sojourn. Both a perfectionist and a procrastinator, he was sluggish with fiction, defaulting to screenwriting and essays for income.
The Civil Rights Movement drew Baldwin back stateside, where he clashed and collaborated with figures such as the Kennedys, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Lena Horne, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boggs argues for the author's talent across genres, but it's Baldwin's political criticism that soars highest.
Boggs offers fresh insights throughout his final section, based on interviews with Cazac. He serves up a feast of gossip and speculation, which succeeds brilliantly as narrative, less so as morality tale. Boggs targets our nation's myths and hypocrisy with dead-eyed accuracy, yet keeps aloof from his protagonist's dalliances with vulnerable young men, some teenagers. He bathes Baldwin in a halo of light while stopping shy of hagiography - there are too many juicy stories to tell!
And he tells them with relish. "Baldwin" is a fiery, fiercely researched biography worthy of an American genius, an indictment of enduring racism and "homosocial panic." Boggs teases out the aura of the divine that suffused Baldwin's oeuvre, echoing the apostle John.
"'Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace,'" Baldwin observed mid-career. "The tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
Did he ever succeed at bridging the sensual with the sacred? Boggs' achievement is that he allows us to make up our own minds.
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Baldwin: A Love Story
By: Nicholas Boggs.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 710 pages.
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