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Los Angeles Times
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Massive James Baldwin biography digs deep into the romances that shaped his writing
In Nicholas Boggs' lively and vigorously researched biography of James Baldwin, the great writer's search for the source of his art dovetails with his lifelong search for meaningful relationships. Black, gay, born without the benefit of money or guidance, repeatedly harassed and beaten in his New York City hometown, Baldwin physically removed himself from the turmoil of America, living abroad for long stretches to find proper distance and see his country plain. In 'The Fire Next Time,' 'Another Country' and 'Giovanni's Room,' among other works, Baldwin gleaned hard truths about the ways in which white people, white men in particular, deny their own sexual confusions to lash out at those who they feel may pose a grave threat their own machismo codes and their absolute dominion over Black Americans. In his novels and essays, Baldwin became a sharp beacon of hard truths. Baldwin was reared in an oppressive atmosphere of religious doctrine and physical violence; his stepfather David, a laborer and preacher, adhered to an quasi-Calvinist approach to child-rearing that forbade art's graven images in the home and encouraged austerity and renunciation. Books, according to Baldwin's father, were 'written by white devils.' As a child, Baldwin was beaten and verbally lashed by his father; his brief tenure as a religious orator in the church was, according to Boggs, a way to 'usurp his father at his own game.' At the same time, Boggs notes, Baldwin used the church 'to mask the deep confusion caused by his burgeoning sexual desires.' As a child, Baldwin is marginalized for being too sensitive, too bookish, a 'sissy.' At school, he finds mentors like Orilla 'Bill' Miller and the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who introduced him to Dickens and the 18th century Russian novelists. When his stepfather loses his job, it is down to Baldwin to support his mother and eight siblings. Taking a job at a local army base, he is confronted with virulent race-baiting from his white supervisor and co-workers. Baldwin leaves Harlem behind shortly thereafter and falls into the artistic ferment of Greenwich Village in the '40s. He shares ideas about art, music and literature with a fellow budding aesthete named Eugene Worth until he jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge in the winter of 1946. His death 'cast a pall over Baldwin's life,' Boggs writes, 'but it would also play a major and enduring role in his development as a writer.' Baldwin, who had developed strong romantic feelings for Worth but never made them plain to his friend, makes a promise to himself, vowing to adjoin his private life as a gay Black man to the public life of an artist, so that 'my infirmities might be forged into weapons.' Beauford Delaney, a respected painter and Village fixture, becomes Baldwin's lodestar and encourages him to confront his sexuality head-on in his art. What that art might entail, Baldwin doesn't yet know, but it would have something to do with writing. Delaney would become a lifelong friend, even after he began suffering from mental deterioration, dying after years of hospitalization in 1979. Baldwin's life as a transatlantic nomad begins in 1948, when he arrives in Paris after winning a scholarship to study there. More importantly, he meets 17-year-old Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter, and a relationship blossoms. Happersberger shares deep artistic and sexual affinities with Baldwin, but Lucien is also attracted to women and becomes a kind of template for Baldwin's future partners, most notably the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, that he would pursue until his death in 1987. Baldwin held these romantic relationships in tantalizing suspension, his love affairs caught between the poles of desire and intimacy, the heat of passion and long-term commitment. The love triangles these relationships engendered became a rich source for his fiction. Boggs asserts that many of the author's most enduring works, including 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' and his breakthrough novel about gay love 'Giovanni's Room,' sprang from these early, formative encounters. 'The structure of a not fully requited love was a familiar and even eroticized one for Baldwin,' Boggs writes, 'and would come to fuel his art.' Away from the States, Baldwin was freed 'from the trap of color,' but he was pulled ever deeper into the racial unrest in America, taking on journalism assignments to see for himself how systemic racial oppression worked in the Jim Crow South. In Atlanta, Baldwin meets Martin Luther King Jr., who invites him to Montgomery to witness the impact of the bus boycott. Entering a local restaurant, he is greeted with stony stares; a white woman points toward the colored entrance. In Mississippi, he interviews NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who is busy investigating a lynching. Baldwin notes the climate of fear among Black citizens in the city, speaking to him like ' the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power.' These eyewitness accounts would feed into Baldwin's impassioned essays on race such as 'Down at the Cross' and his 1972 nonfiction book 'No Name in the Street.' For Boggs, Baldwin's nonfiction informed his fiction; there are 'continuities and confluences between and across his work in both genres.' The throughline across all of the work was Baldwin's ire at America's failure to recognize that the 'so-called Negro' was 'trapped, disinherited and despised, in a nation that … is still unable to recognize him as a human being.' Baldwin would spend the rest of his life toggling between journalism and fiction, addressing racism in the States in articles for Esquire, Harper's and other publications while spending most of his time in Turkey and France, where a growing circle of friends and lovers nourished his muse and satisfied his need for constant social interaction when he wasn't wrestling with his work, sometimes torturously so. Boggs' book finds Baldwin in middle age poised between creative fecundity and despair, growing frustrated with America's failure of nerve regarding race and homosexuality as well as his own thwarted partnerships. Despite a powerful bond with Engin Cezarr and, later, the French painter Yoran Cazac, who flitted in and out of Baldwin's Istanbul life across the 1970s, the picture of Baldwin that emerges in Boggs' biography is that of an artist who treasures emotional continuity but creatively feeds on inconstancy. In fact, Cazac had never been cited in any previous Baldwin biography. Boggs discovered him when he came across an out-of-print children's book called 'Little Man, Little Man,' a collaboration between Cazac and Baldwin that prompted Boggs' search. After following a number of flimsy leads, he finally finds Cazac in a rural French village, and they talk. The novels that Baldwin penned during his last great burst of productivity, most notably 'If Beale Street Could Talk' and 'Just Above My Head,' have been maligned by many Baldwin fans as noble failures lacking the fire and dramatic power of his early work. Yet Boggs makes a strong case for these books as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism. The contours of Baldwin's romantic engagement with Cazac, in particular, would find their way into 'Beale Street,' the first time Baldwin used a female narrator to tell the story of a budding young romance doomed by a gross miscarriage of justice. Boldly experimental in both form and content, 'Beale Street' and 'Just Above My Head' were, in Boggs' view, unjustly criticized, coming at a time when Baldwin's reputation was on the decline. Only novelist Edmund White gleaned something special in his review of 'Just Above My Head,' Baldwin's final novel, finding in his depictions of familial love a Dickensian warmth which 'glow with the steadiness and clarity of a flame within a glass globe.' A literary biography needn't be an artful accretion of facts, nor should it traffic in salacious gossip and cheapen the subject at hand. Boggs' even-handed and critically rigorous biography of James Baldwin is guilty of none of these things, mostly because Boggs never strays from the path toward understanding why Baldwin wrote what he did and how his private and public lives were inextricably wound up in his work. Boggs has dug much deeper than his predecessors, including Baldwin's biographer David Leeming, whose book has been the standard bearer since its 1994 publication. 'Baldwin: A Love Story' is superlative, and it should become the new gold standard for Baldwin studies. Weingarten is the author of 'Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.'
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Sport
- Yahoo
Florida State needs to find consistency to bounce back in 2025
Josh Pate previews the Seminoles' season after an awful 2-10 campaign in 2024. View more Video Transcript Consistency is the name of the game, and I don't know that I can count on it from them. Offensively out of the gate, they were 12 for 50 on passes of 20 plus yards in the air last year. Three touchdowns, five picks. They feel better about the offensive line, we'll see on that. But they're gonna have anywhere between six and eight true freshmen, and they're too deep. Boggs is probably gonna start at wide receiver, probably the third wide receiver. It's just they gotta face Bama out of the gate. I really wish they didn't. I really wish they had East Texas A&M, Kent State, and just throw Bama somewhere later in the year or don't play them. You know, adopt the SEC scheduling model as some people in rural Indiana call it, but they gotta face Bama out the gate. I don't like the matchup. I just hope it's not the kind of game I hope Mike Norvell was right in what he said to us when we went down there in the spring because he was on the show and he said, I think we made the right moves. I think we got the right people in the building. And I believe that he believes that he wasn't BSing us. But then you gotta play the games, and if you're competitive with Bama, win or loss, if you're competitive, everyone believes. But after last year, a million dollar question around there is how mentally tough is Florida State football, and that's up to Mike Norvell and his staff. But ultimately, it's up to those players because if it doesn't go your way in week one, you got eleven more of them, and you died as a team last year, and you can't have that happen two years in a row. So, the consistency thing, that's the big question there. Close
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
On James Baldwin and the power of love
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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 ' Related : Advertisement Boggs grew enthralled with Baldwin in 1996 when he came upon ' Advertisement 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. Related : 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 ' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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
Buzz Feed
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
The Best Land Of Boggs Character Quiz
Think you have what it takes to be a citizen of Boggville? Let's see how many of these Land of Boggs characters you can name: If you want more Boggs, you need to check out the Land of Boggs YouTube channel. But a warning — you might not be able to stop watching! It's that fun. Run, Dash, Decorate! The Land Of Boggs: Decor Dash is coming soon. Follow @thelandofboggs for more updates!
Buzz Feed
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
BuzzFeed's The Land Of Boggs Wins 2025 Webby People's Voice Award
New York, NY – April 22, 2025 – Today, BuzzFeed Animation Lab's The Land of Boggs channel won the People's Voice Award in the Video/Film Animation category for Series & Channels at the 29th Annual Webby Awards. The Webby Awards is the leading international awards organization honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites and Mobile Sites; Video; Advertising; Media & PR; Apps & Software; Social; Podcasts; Games and AI, Metaverse & Virtual. Selected for the People's Voice Award by the Webby online voters around the world, The Land of Boggs is an animated web series created by Brent Sievers and Lizz Hickey about two best buds learning to embrace the wondrous chaos that comes with growing up. The show follows the comical friendship of Boggo, an introvert with debilitating anxiety, and Boe, an extrovert who is allergic to responsibility, as they weave in and out of trouble. Whether it's public speaking, embarrassing yourself in front of your crush, or simply trying to keep your plants alive, the Boggs team is here to reassure you aren't alone. Masters of the short form content space, the Boggs' concise, charming stories resonate with audiences and add a playful sense of shared humor to experiences we can all find a little uncomfortable, awkward, or confusing. In addition to the People's Voice Award, several brands across BuzzFeed, Inc. were recognized for their great work and selected as Webby Honorees this year: About BuzzFeed, Inc.
