'Baldwin: A Love Story' frames James Baldwin's life through the lens of his relationships

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: It’s the first major biography of James Baldwin in more than three decades.

Writer Nicholas Boggs offers an intimate portrait shaped by the people who inspired him. Drawing on archival research, original interviews, and newly uncovered documents, Boggs traces four of Baldwin’s transformative relationships that depict him not just as a fearless social critic, but as an emotional, vulnerable man shaped by love.

I recently spoke with Nicholas Boggs about his book “Baldwin: A Love Story.”

Thanks for being here.

Nicholas Boggs, Author, “Baldwin: A Love Story”: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Geoff Bennett: In this book, you structure Baldwin’s life around four pivotal relationships. Tell us about them.

Nicholas Boggs: Well, the first one, really the origin one, is the painter Beauford Delaney, who he met in Greenwich Village when he was 16. Delaney was 37. He came to call him his spiritual father. He changed his life. He allowed him to see, as Baldwin put it, that a Black man could be an artist. He’d never known that.

He also introduced him to blues and to jazz, music that was godforsaken in his household, but that he said actually taught him how to be a writer. He saw it was actually Black music more than American literature that gave him his voice. So Delaney was an important lifelong figure. He went all the way through until his death in 1979.

Baldwin would sort of go back to him for advice. Baldwin often would save him. He would save Baldwin. And they really formed this kind of alternative kinship structure that he needed. He was very close to his family, but Baldwin lived so much of his life abroad, as did Delaney, who followed him to Paris.

But Delaney was that sort of that original, I would say, pivotal love figure outside of the family.

Geoff Bennett: And what led you to frame his life and work through the lens of love, rather than the more familiar focus of civil rights or the politics of the time?

Nicholas Boggs: Well, I think love was politics for him. I mean, I think love is everywhere in his writing. It’s in his essays, right?

“The Fire Next Time,” he talks about how white and Black Americans must, like lovers, come to understand each other and confront the country’s past and present. All of his novels are love stories, from “Giovanni’s Room,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Another Country,” “If Beale Street Could Talk.”

So I really wanted to understand why it was that we sometimes think of him as a great essayist, but the novels aren’t as good, when, in fact, you have to read them together. You couldn’t understand “The Fire Next Time” without reading what he just did before that in another country, where he’s looking at these interracial relationships and complexities.

And then he called for those kinds of coalitions “In The Fire Next Time”. “Giovanni’s Room,” he wrote “Preservation of Innocence,” kind of about the perniciousness of homophobia. He couldn’t have written, “Giovanni’s Room” without having written those essays.

So you have to look at everything together for Baldwin.

Geoff Bennett: And what about his personal connections to women like Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Mary Painter?

Nicholas Boggs: Thank you for asking that, because the risk, of course, in structuring the book to these four great loves with men is that it overlooks the very important fact that Baldwin was extremely close and influenced by many women.

Mary Painter, the American economist he met in Paris and wrote these incredible letters to there at the Beinecke that detail his creative process, his love life, their intersections. Maya Angelou was also very important.

Toni Morrison came to the South of France, and he was writing “If Beale Street Could Talk,” his first novel written from the first-person perspective of a woman, pregnant Tish. He made some popcorn, took her down into his torture chamber, and read it out loud to her to get her opinion.

So she had a big influence on him, as did many Black feminists in the ’70s and the ’80s later in his career.

Geoff Bennett: How do his relationships, both romantic and platonic, how do they intersect with the civil rights and social justice themes that continue to make his work resonate today?

Nicholas Boggs: Baldwin, they were the — they were the relationships he had with others and also the relationship he had with himself.

So his journey to self-love was very complicated. He writes about how love is a battle. Love is a growing up. It was for him because, growing up, he was told that he was ugly, right, that he was a sissy. So he had this long journey to sort of seeing himself as worthy of love.

And so he knew that love was hard-earned. It was hard-won. And he kind of used this insight about himself and in his own relationships — he was hard on his lovers — he asked a lot from them as well — to also say to Americans in general, right, this project, this — of Americans grappling with their past was a love project, that only love, as he put it, would throw open the gates to kind of truly coming to terms and truly kind of meeting the moment of the civil rights movement.

Geoff Bennett: As you were writing this biography, how did you navigate the tension, assuming there was tension, between honoring his public legacy and then sort of revealing his private, sometimes difficult emotional interior?

Nicholas Boggs: Well, because Baldwin had a — even though he died too young, he had a very long career, and he changed his mind about many things.

So, for example, early on in his nonfiction, he was not writing about his personal life that closely, right, especially not his love for other men. But by later in his career, in his late essays of “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood, “To Crush the Serpent,” both in “Playboy.”

And then his introduction to his collected essays, “The Price of the Ticket,” he’s delving deep into his private life. He’s no longer being held up as the kind of race man. He’s no longer being held up as a spokesman. This gave him a freedom to go back and look at his early relationships with men, the Spanish racketeer who fell in love with him when he was 16, the lovers he had in Greenwich Village.

So, here, he’s able to — he is writing about his private life. So in a way, that was very freeing because it would have been different if I hadn’t felt that he himself was heading in these directions later in his life.

Geoff Bennett: James Baldwin’s relevance in many ways is at an all-time high, not just in the U.S., but around the world. What is it about his message, his ideas on race, identity, love that speak so urgently to the present moment?

Nicholas Boggs: Young people love Baldwin, and it’s a wonderful thing to see. And sometimes it gets simplified. People say, well, they don’t — they’re sound bites. It’s just sound bites. They don’t really read Baldwin.

I’m not sure that’s true, but I do hope this biography helps more young people get introduced to Baldwin and read him. I think what they love about him is that he’s a truth-teller. He tells it like it is, and he also speaks across so many constituencies. Listen, this is a different era.

White people and Black people are friends. They’re hanging out in college, OK? They’re hanging out on the basketball court. They’re hanging out in life. This country has become an incredibly multiracial country. So I think Baldwin, the intersections that he was — I think there was an interviewer who said, well, you’re Black, poor, and gay. Like, how did that impact you?

And he said, I hit the jackpot because he had all of these perspectives. There’s a lot of people out there who are having these conversations about the intersections between queer people, Black people, women, immigrants. I mean, so Baldwin enables people to kind of attach to these various parts of him where we’re all really speaking to each other as well.

Geoff Bennett: Well, I will tell you, the book, at nearly 700 pages, it’s a triumph.

Nicholas Boggs, congratulations, and thank you for being here.

Nicholas Boggs: Thanks so much for having me.

Geoff Bennett: “James Baldwin: A Love Story.”