← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: Baldwin's Work and Activism
00:25:23
James Baldwin's literary legacy, his activism, and his final years.
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- [00:08]
A
This is all of IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. I want to quickly preview some of the conversations we'll be having here on ALL of IT over the next couple of days. Tomorrow we will speak with former Shark Tank producer Jonathan Walton. After losing nearly $100,000 to a serial fraudster, he pivoted to making an investigative podcast called Queen of the now. He's published his first book, Anatomy of a con artist, the 14 red flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters and Thieves. He joins us to discuss and will speak with award winning filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. You may know him as the creator of the TV series Reservation Dogs. Now he has a new series and on Friday he will join us to discuss the Lowdown. It stars Ethan Hawke as an amateur sleuth who becomes obsessed with getting to the bottom of a mysterious death in Tulsa. That's in the future. Now let's get this hour started with the final chapter in this month's Full Bio conversation. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Nicholas Boggs has written a 700 page biography of one of literature's giants and James Baldwin. It's called Baldwin A Love Story. The book is full of detail from Baldwin's upbringing in New York City to his finding a home in Paris to finding a place to write in Turkey, all while holding different people close to his heart, his family, Buford Delaney, Lucien Hapsberger, Engin Cesar and Joran Kazak. And as I said, the book is about 700 pages long. So we're just touching on a few highlights. Today we meet James Baldwin, the celebrity and the activist. Hollywood came calling for Baldwin, as did tv. He appeared on talk shows, famously showed up for William F. Buckley in a debate and had a long interview with Nikki Giovanni that showed his intellect and his generational leanings. Baldwin became a civil rights advocate. His writing about the south in the late 50s and early 60s painted a disturbing picture. Here he is on FRESH AIR explaining a bit about how it started long.
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B
Before that when I first got south, first went south and tried to tried to begin to because I went as a reporter and I tried to get the story published. You know, the first few times I first few magazines when I came back did not want to publish the reports because they accused me of fomenting violence. Now I was describing violence which is not a violence which I was no way responsible. And I thought that people should know what is going on and why it's going on. And in the battle to do this, I became notorious. In any case, the battle I was fighting, it seemed to me, was not simply about black people, but also my position that concerns white America was, it's your country too. It's your responsibility too. You know, and the final time is probably the culmination of both of all those years. You know, it was when I was being called the angry young man on the white side of town and being called an Uncle Tom on the black side of town.
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He met with Attorney General Robert F.
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Kennedy, and the FBI kept the file on him. For more, let's get into our full bio conversation with Nicholas Boggs, author of a love story.
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C
About his time in Turkey. James Baldwin said, turkey saved my life. How so?
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D
Well, Turkey saved his life because this was a moment when he was once again really, really down, really feeling like his love life was a mess. He didn't know what he was really struggling to write another country. I mean, really struggling. And so he had gone actually to Israel for a trip and decided to go to Turkey to follow his friend Engin Jazzar. Engin Jazzar had played the role of Giovanni in an actor studio rendition of the play a couple years earlier. This is 1960. Arrives there and there's just a party full of Turkish intellectuals and artists. They make their own vodka. You know, they're artists, they're singing Turkish work songs. Then he sings Negro spirituals. He falls asleep on the lap of some famous Turkish actress and he just feels reborn. And within a couple of weeks, he has written the End of Another Country. And that's when he actually meets David Leeming at that party. And so again, it was, as he would say, from another place, you can see America more clearly. And that's what he used it for. That is where he wrote the Fire Next time. I mean, he was going back and forth. So as kind of scary and exhausting and exhilarating as the civil rights movement was, he would, throughout that decade, he would return to Istanbul. He really considered it his home. And in the end, he ended up directing a play there in the late 60s starring Engin, collaborating with this great friend of his we called his blood brother. He. He would direct. He really wanted to do more in the theater. And he had just come back from Hollywood where he tried to make Malcolm X do that. That's a whole other crazy story.
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C
Well, that's what my next question was like. Hollywood came calling for James Baldwin. How did he react? How did he think about possibly writing a script about Malcolm X.
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D
Well, he was devastated by Malcolm X's murder and he was very interested in being writing for the film. And he did all kinds of dreams that hadn't come to fruition already around that. But his brother David did say, don't go out there, they'll kill you. That's what he said to him. But out Baldwin went. And he was working on it with Columbia Pictures, but he was also ping ponging back and forth to do political events with Martin Luther King. I mean, this was a very heady time. Then when he was working on it, he was very close with Billy Dee Williams. He wanted Billy Dee Williams to. He sort of had a big crush on him. He wanted him to play Malcolm X. But Columbia wanted, unbelievably, Charlton Heston to play Malcolm X. And so this was, yeah, I'm sorry.
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C
I'm making a terrible face. And everybody at home listening. This is making that same face.
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D
Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. And then, not then, you realize actually this is what was going on out there. It kind of makes sense. But Baldwin wasn't gonna let that happen. But he ended up so up distraught that he swallowed some sleeping pills. He also got news of the murder of Martin Luther King while he was there. So a lot, a lot was going on. And he did attempt suicide, but fortunately he was able to have his stomach pumped. And then he said, I split to save my life. And that's when he went back to Turkey and kind of all that pent up frustrated energy from the screenplay he poured into directing Fortune in Men's Eyes with Engin and this troupe. And it was a sort of transformative experience for him and for Turkish theater. It was a kind of a play, John Herbert's play about penitentiary. It's kind of very complicated, I keep saying complicated, but it was play about sort of homosexuality and prisons and children and how boys are mismanaged by the state systems and all of that. So he did it and it was a humongous hit in this very socially conservative country. I mean, it was a smash hit and I think it was one of the best experiences of his life. But after that, it's almost like he had run its course. He had come to. It was sort of like his love affair with Istanbul had been consummated. And it kind of left him empty, wondering, well, what's next?
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C
He was a leading voice in the civil rights movement. What did he see as his role in the civil rights movement? Was he a communicator? What was it?
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D
I would say, at least in the beginning he was reluctant. He really saw himself as an artist. That's why he went to France. He wanted to write novels and plays. But he just, you know, after that visit south, he just understood that he had a responsibility. And Sterling Brown told him this and others, that he had a kind of unique position and that he. To not take advantage of that would be a loss for his people. So he saw himself, though, not as a spokesman, but as a witness. That's what he called himself. His job was to. To be a witness. So he went on the marches. He said he didn't like marches, but he went in the marches. But really, it was writing these speeches. He wasn't like Bayard Rustin, who was a brilliant grassroots organizer. That wasn't exactly what Baldwin did. Although Baldwin did do some grassroots organizing himself when his play blues for Mr. Charlie Got Canceled.
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C
Oh, we gotta talk about that. All right. Blues for Mr. Charlie. It was on Broadway. The producers at first asked him to soften it.
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D
Oh, yes, a bit.
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C
What did they want changed?
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D
Well, they thought that it was called blues for Mr. Charlie. And Mr. Charlie is the name for kind of a racist white man. Just, you know, colloquially. Colloquially. And it was a play that was divided into Blacktown and Whitetown. And Baldwin was doing some really. He was sort of influenced by Genet. He was doing some really interesting courtroom drama where he was kind of implicating the white audience members as members of a jury. I mean, he was kind of breaking that fourth wall. And they didn't like that. They didn't think that people would come out and watch it. They. You know, they. They also thought that Baldwin had his hand way too much in the production. In a sense, they had a point there. He wasn't the director, however, he knew that they wouldn't be able to do justice to what the police kind of political content. So that was like a very difficult chapter in his. In his career and in his life. I think he was, you know, drinking a lot and maybe taking some other stuff to kind of get through. He was also going through a breakup with Lucien, who was having an affair, ended up marrying Diana Sands. And so, you know, this was. This was a hard, hard period.
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But he fought back. He had this fundraiser because they were gonna close the play.
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D
They were gonna close the play. And somebody said this to me. I won't name her, but she's somebody who blurbed my book. She said that. That was one of the funniest parts of the book to her. Because here Baldwin was acting like the closing of the play was the March on Washington, right? And he got a pamphlet going and he got all his famous friends involved. And it is kind of funny. Although, you know, the truth is Broadway was racist. He knew what he was, what he's contending with. I mean, you know, so eventually they did keep going. Some rich patrons gave some money and it kept going. And then he went to Istanbul and they kind of closed it behind his back. But he got the last word because he ended up lampooning Strasbourg and the other folks involved in that in his next novel, Tell me How Long the trade's been gone.
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A
We're talking to Nicholas Boggs. The name of his book is A Love Story is our choice for full bio. I want to talk about the meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Sort of this famous, infamous meeting where Baldwin, along with Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, they met with Kennedy to discuss race relations. And it's like they were speaking different languages. Quite honestly. What was it that Baldwin wanted Kennedy to understand?
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D
In Baldwin's words, he wanted Kennedy to take moral responsibility for the conduct of the country towards black Americans. That was the word moral. He really, really. And they refused to sort of say that he wanted him to walk into Birmingham with little girl when they got spat upon. Know what that felt like, see what that was like up close? Was he being a little bit rhetorical there? Of course. But you know what was fascinating. Now, this episode has been written about a lot, but what I tried to do by looking more closely, and again, it sort of has mythological proportions at this point, so it's hard to know what really happened. There are differing accounts by Kennedy, different accounts by Baldwin, by Kenneth Clark, who was there. But Baldwin had met that same day with Louis Funke at the New York Times about blues for Mr. Charlie. And he'd sort of snuck into the end of the conversation that he had. But he was going to have this secret meeting with Kennedy and Funky said, oh, that's a big news story. Can I tell somebody in the New York Times? He ended up telling someone named Leymond Robinson, who was one of the few black reporters at the Times. And the way that Baldwin, I think very smartly, I don't know this for sure, but this is my feeling that there was something very strategic about getting these big name people like Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte and leaking the fact that this was happening. He wasn't going to have some secret meeting with them and tell them how to handle what they were calling, quote, unquote, the Negro problem. Right. He had other ideas. He was Going to. He was going to deal with the white problem, and he was going to bring his people to help do that. And so it became a kind of huge media circus, which is what he wanted, because eventually, I think that really did help lead to the Civil Rights Act. The President started using the word moral. Not that long after that, they started hiring more African Americans in the government. So this was an example. You know, it's not the same as what he did with the pamphlets for blues for Mr. Charlie. But Baldwin was, you know, so when you say he was a witness, he was a witness, but he was also, I think, a very canny and strategic organizer in his own way.
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C
The FBI was following him.
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A
Was he aware?
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D
Oh, yes, he was aware. He would joke about it on the phone. He'd say, well, you know, give my regards to J. Edgar when you try to reach me. You know, he was aware. And, you know, the FBI, you know, it was a terrible thing, obviously. But as a biographer, there were good things about it, which is that, you know, Baldwin lived this crazy, peripatetic, transatlantic life, and it'd be hard to keep track of where he was. The FBI knew exactly where he was. So the files, you know, I know when the plane landed, on what date?
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C
That's so interesting.
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D
So, yeah, they got a lot of things wrong, like, about him. Like, they thought he was married to his sister for a while. They got the titles of novels incorrect, and they thought he was way more aligned with Elijah Muhammad than, in fact, he was. So a lot. I mean, most things they got wrong. In fact, all they got right were kind of plain logistics. But those were helpful for me.
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C
JVIR Hoover was likely queer, right. How did that shape the way the FBI files read to you?
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D
Well, there are many scholars who've written about it really productively. William J. Maxwell, he also compiled them into an edition. Maurice Wallace has written about it.
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C
Beverly Page, we interviewed her for this.
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D
Beverly Page, although she doesn't really write.
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I know much.
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D
Yeah, she doesn't really. And that was interesting to me because I think everybody has a point, but I think what she was sort of saying was that he didn't. He wouldn't have focused too much on Baldwin's sexuality because he wouldn't want it to come blow back on him.
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C
Ah, interesting.
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D
You know, but the fact of the matter is, the files themselves reflect something quite different. He says all the time, like, you know, is he a pervert? You know, he's this. That third. So, you know, he was definitely. He called Baldwin, called hoover, like the 20th century's. You know, greatest voyeur, something like that. I mean, so I think Hoover and others think that Hoover was kind of titillated by Baldwin in a certain sense.
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C
He had such. Baldwin had such a great vocabulary, just like just his. The pull out of voyeur as a way to describe J. Edgar Hoover. It was beautiful listening to him talk.
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D
Yes, indeed.
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C
Part four of your book is a bit of a discovery for you. You entered the book a little bit. It's beautiful. On the desk in front of me, you have a copy of Little Man. Little man, which was described as a child story for adults, written by James Baldwin. Tell us the story of this. I don't even know what the question is to ask because there's so much that could be asked. But initially, tell me the origin of the book and then how you got involved.
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D
So the origin of Little Man. Little Man.
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C
First start with that.
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D
Yes, sure. So Little Man. Little man was a children's book that he worked on with a French obscure French painter named Joran Kazak. The subject of the fourth part of the book in the early 1970s. And when it was written in black English, Baldwin called it a children's book for adults. It was really sort of just very subversive for its time. Baldwin wrote that important essay, if black English isn't a language, then tell me what is? This was kind of putting that into practice, right. For children. This was well before the era of Ebonics and the kinds of arguments that came up later. And it talks about the pleasures and the joys and the resiliences of these kids in Harlem, but also the dangers, drug addiction, police surveillance. So people didn't know what to do with it. And this was in. Baldwin's reputation was sort of going on the decline. So it went out of print and it was totally forgotten until I was in college at Yale and I was taking a class on James Baldwin. We read everything he'd written except this children's book. So David Leeming's biography had just come out in 1994. He had a couple paragraphs about it and about Joran Kazak. Sort of unclear if they were friends or lovers. And so I wrote, like, the second email I ever wrote in my life was to David Leeming. And he wrote back. This is 1996. He wrote back very nicely. I never met Joran Kozak. I don't know anybody alive who did. And I believe he's dead as well. So the trail kind of went cold until seven years later, I'd moved to New York to get my PhD. I was completely broke, and I decided to send more emails to art historians in Paris saying, do you know anything about this obscure, deceased French painter? No answer. But I left my phone number. There are no cell phones yet. Weeks later, the phone rings in my studio apartment. This is Yoran Kozak calling from Paris. I'm alive. I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy. This was 2003, so I signed up for my third credit card. I used all my dissertation funding. You know, my dissertation never became a book. It became, I guess, this book. And I went over to Paris and I interviewed him. And thank goodness, because he died just two years later of cancer. But I spent a whole summer interviewing him, his wife Beatrice. He was an incredible man. And, yeah, that was the origins of this book, actually.
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C
It's so interesting to think about. All these great biographies were written so long ago, but before the Internet, before we could have communication with one another. It almost seems like everybody's biography should be written again.
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D
Yeah. Do you know what I mean?
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Because they thought he was dead.
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D
Yeah. I don't know how they did it. I mean, David Leeming's biography is a gift to humans.
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C
It's a beautiful, beautiful book, but that's a serious. That's not serious. I mean, that's a big issue.
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D
It is. He knew him personally, though, so that helps. Right. We can only know him virtually through the Internet.
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C
We're getting towards the end of James.
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Baldwin's life, and it appeared that James Baldwin, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that he wrote about HIV and AIDS just once.
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D
He only really wrote about it once. He spoke about it a couple more times.
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A
I'm wondering, back to our early. Earlier in our conversation, we talked about generational differences. Do you think that was part of it?
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D
I do. Although, again, thanks to David Leeming, who shared with me an unpublished interview that one of Baldwin's last love interests, a younger black man named Shawn Henderson, interviewed him extensively and he asked him some questions about aids. So that's in the book. So there was an earlier interview with Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice where Baldwin sort of said that he didn't really know much about AIDS. This was in the 80s, mid-80s. He didn't know much about or how it was transmitted or anything like that. But then this interview with Sean, which I think happened in like, 86, a year before Baldwin died, or maybe even 87, the year that he died. He asked again, and Baldwin had more. More to say. And at this time, Baldwin had also been incorporating the historical Reality of AIDS into his play, the welcome table. So I think it was very much actually on his mind at this point. But what he said was really interesting because he said, you know, all this hysteria around aids, as he put it, he said, obviously, AIDS is something that we have to deal with. He's like, but it also is another opportunity for scapegoating of African Americans, Scapegoating of gay people. He was saying, you know, this is another opportunity. You know, white America, basically dominant culture, thinks that this is never going to come for straight people. That, as he put it, gay people only have sex with gay people. Africans only have sex with Africans, Asians only have sex with Africans. This idea, this kind of ridiculous, again, innocence, right, that America has to disabuse himself of. And what he said, he said, it's going to be a chance where we're going to have to do what he always said. It's going to test love, it's going to require love. And of course, love is exactly what did not happen in the early AIDS era with Reagan and others. There was hatred, there was scapegoating. So he was very, I think, prescient and very right about what was happening and sort of the psychological and the psychopolitical dimensions of how HIV and AIDS was mobilized against communities of color and queer communities during that time period.
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C
He died of stomach cancer. And, you know, I read several obituaries.
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And they didn't seem like enough at the time.
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C
How do you think his obituaries would be written today? What would be different about them?
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D
Oh, what a great question. I've never had that question before. And who would write them? You know, one of my first jobs out of college was at the Washington Blade, and I wrote obituaries, so.
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A
Oh, really?
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D
Yeah. So I'm not saying I should write it. Definitely not. But, I mean, Toni Morrison has such a beautiful eulogy for Baldwin that I almost feel like that should be his obituary. Yeah, I feel like a writer. You know, obituaries can be so dry. You know, much like biographies can sometimes be too dry. And I think if we thought of an obituary in a broader sense, in a bigger sense, in an artistic sense, what would it look like to think of Toni Morrison as her memorial being the obituary, but in terms of sort of assessing his legacy, I believe it would be completely different. Now, I mean, I think, you know, I don't remember what his obituary said, but it was sort of. Was like prominent, but it wasn't.
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C
I was like, wah, wah, wah.
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D
It was a little, you know, I think now it's fully understood in this country and across the world, you know, that he is one of, if not the most important writer of the 20th century. So I hope that that would be expressed fully in obituary today.
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C
Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wanted to talk about?
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D
Oh, gosh. When did you first encounter Baldwin?
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C
In college. Yeah, in college.
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D
Children's book. You found the children's book too, right?
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C
No, in college I was an English and American lit major at Brown. And you were able to create your own concentrations and so I did African American literature. But I did go pick up Giovanni's room in reading this because I read it so long ago and I think I'll have a different reading of it once I get around to reading it, but it's sitting on my desk right now.
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D
Terrific.
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C
What has the response been to the book so far?
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D
Overwhelming. I mean, really, I worked on it for so long and I didn't know I did it. It really is a labor of love. I mean, I worked on it for so long. There are other projects that I put aside and debts I've gone into. But it's such an honor, I mean, to be able to write about. To write about him and to talk to all the people that I've met. I mean, Maureen Freeley, who knew him there. The Leemings have been so generous. You know, Baldwin family members like Aisha and Tijan who spoke to me about Little Man, Little man years ago. You know, people have been just so. Anybody who met him and knew him, you could just tell that there was this deep love. So it really felt right for it, for it to be a love story. So it really has kind of been a love fest since it came out. And I can't complain.
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C
The name of the book is A Love Story. It is by Nicholas Boggs. It was our choice for full bio. Thank you for spending so much time with us.
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D
Thank you so much.
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A
That was Nicholas Boggs, the author of Baldwin A Love Story. Nicholas will be on a panel at the Brooklyn book festival on September 21st at 5pm Full bio was engineered by Matt Mirando, post production by Jordan Loff and written by me. The full full bio will be on our website this weekend.
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C
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