B (3:21)

You mentioned the difficulty of the task of writing as well as the task of going to the archive. I ask a question of all my guests on the show, and it's really to draw out that point of difficulty. What's a moment in your life up until this point in which you felt self doubt? And what's your greatest achievement?

A (3:49)

My achievement, I'm not my greatest, but just finishing this book, I mean, this book took me 20 years. So it was like massive in writing it didn't, but researching it did. And even writing it took me probably 10. I was a runner, I ran track in college. So I do often think of writing a book as like this endless, endless marathon. So I am very happy to have crossed that finish line in terms of self doubt. What a great question. My greatest moment of self doubt once I got the book contract. Before that, there were all kinds of doubts like what am I doing with my life? You know. But once I got the book contract, I still had a lot of self doubt about whether I was up to the task, whether I could find the voice to write this massive book. It's divided into four sections, four of his great loves. And the first one is for Delaney and I during the pandemic. It was early in the pandemic I wrote that part of the book. And it's funny because it's also the part of the book where Baldwin is struggling to find his voice as a writer, right? He's struggling to find himself as a person. And he's living in Harlem and then Greenwich Village, and just he's so frustrated. He can't. He can't get Go Tell the Mountains going. Doesn't even have the right title for it yet. And I was also struggling to write. So I finished that whole section and it was not good. And my editor basically told me that. But then as soon as Baldwin lands in Paris, suddenly I found my voice. I wrote a paragraph. I opened that part of the book with Baldwin meeting Lucien Habersberger, the second love of his life that I explore, who he dedicated Giovanni's room to. I write the scene where they meet each other in this Gay bar la Reine Blanche. And right away it just clicked somehow. And so I, I, it was still laborious, but once I found the voice, the doubt went away. It was still very tedious, but I no longer had this crippling down. And I did have to go back and rewrite that whole first part of the book about Buford.

B (5:45)

Wow. Well, I'm glad that you worked through it, because this is just quite remarkable biography and no less of James Baldwin. And so let's talk about Baldwin, the love story. But I want to begin talking a bit about Baldwin's philosophy on love. Baldwin once wrote, and it's the epigraph of the book quote, love is the only reality, the only terror, and the only hope. How did he live through love as both a principle and also a wound.

A (6:26)

Great question. So, yeah, the book begins with Baldwin going to the movies and seeing Bette Davis's eyes. That famous passage from the Devil Finds Work, where he realizes that his stepfather, who's been calling him ugly and frog eyes and other bad things, was wrong. That in fact Bette Davis had his mother's eyes and he had his mother's eyes. So he had Bette Davis's eyes. And in fact, they could be a source of power and beauty and they could be turned in, into weapons. So this was the beginning of a long journey for Baldwin towards, towards self love. And he had a long journey, I would say, also with his kind of conflicted love for America. He didn't believe that, you know, America was living up to its democratic ideals. He didn't believe that America loved him. And yet he continued to say that because he loved America, he reserved the right to perpetually criticize her in that other famous quote. So love is everywhere in his writing once you start looking for it a little bit. It's in his nonfiction, it's in his. All of his novels are love stories, as it turns out. But I do believe that it goes back to his desire for self love, moves forward to his core quest for love, which he found really through Buford Delany, a kind of platonic, spiritual, fatherly love. And then with Lucian Habersberger that I think ultimately allowed him to kind of come to a position where he found his voice as a writer and could write Go Tell it on Mountain. And, you know, the book, which I think is a very complicated dynamic for Baldwin, is the way that a kind of impossible love, whether it's for America or for a person like Lucien, who he breaks up with countless times, was a kind of creative engine for his novels. And his essays. He needed this distance, this alienation, and then to come back to the States. Right. Or to come back to a lover like Lucien and then sort of break up again. This kind of distance and yearning was immensely creatively productive for him.

B (8:23)

I want to talk about one of his earliest and most formative relationships, his mother.

A (8:30)

Yes.

B (8:31)

Emma Jones. How did Baldwin's love for his mother shape the kind of love that he saw in others and in himself?

A (8:42)

I would say utterly. You know, one of the difficulties of. Of that relationship is that she worked so hard that Baldwin sometimes said he didn't have a childhood. Right. He almost became a father figure to his younger siblings. He was the oldest of nine siblings. So he also, you know, she really protected him in a way. There was the only book you could read in the house. Only book in the house was a Bible. So Baldwin read it, you know, again and again and again. And his mother was okay with that. But then he somehow got Uncle Tom's Cabin. And she had to hide it from him. Cause she was afraid it was hurting his eyes. So she was torn. I think this was. She didn't know quite what to do with this precocious child of hers. But she also knew, as she said, she knew that he had to write. She didn't know he was going to become famous, she said, but she knew that he had to write. But I think a really big moment was when Bill Miller, the school teacher, who wanted to take Baldwin out to see movies and plays when he was around 10 years old, because she'd recognized his brilliance at school, as many teachers did, she came to the house and sat down with Baldwin and his mother and father. And his father did not like her, did not want white people in the house. It was usually welfare workers or people trying to kick them out of their home. So there's a lot of negative energy. But Bertis sensed that this woman would be good for Baldwin, that these excursions would be good for Baldwin. What Bertis said in the living room where they were, was, oh, well, we can't have this nice woman come all the way here for nothing. So I think she knew kind of how to protect Baldwin within the confines of a difficult domestic life, to get him out into the world, to get him into these different schools as well. I mean, he ends up going to DeWitt Clinton School in the Bronx, a magnet school. And Baldwin spent the rest of his life writing these gorgeous letters to his mother. I was able to quote from one of them from. From Corsica, where he really writes about. He had just Actually contemplated suicide. He doesn't tell her that. But it's in the aftermath of that in 1957 that he really. You know, these are really intimate letters that he's writing to his mother. More intimate than most people, I think, would write to their parents. So she was a mother, but also a confidant and I think a source of sustenance and hope and inspiration because he wanted to help support her back home as well.

B (10:56)

Yeah. There was a moment in the book when he wins a fellowship and he gives, like, half the money to his mother.

A (11:06)

That's right. Or more. I mean, he. More.

B (11:09)

Yeah, more.

A (11:09)

It was. I think that was the one. The fellowship that he got to leave New York and move to Paris. Right. Was like, I think, $100. I'm glad you brought that up because this is one of those examples of, you know, there's still mythologies around Baldwin. So he said in a couple interviews that, you know, he only. He went to Paris with just $40 to his name because he gave the rest of his money, the money to his mother. And one wonders. That's a very sweet story, and I believe it's probably mostly true. But then one wonders, I mean, really, just $40. How did he. How did he survive? And he landed there, fortunately. He had. Richard Wright was there, who helped put him up in a hotel, I believe. And he had some connections. But. But. But this is not. I mean, he. Baldwin did this throughout his life. He would send money back to his mother. And his mother didn't like to get in airplanes. But he finally convinced her to go to Puerto Rico with him once. So that scene in if Be Could Talk.

B (12:03)

Yes.

A (12:03)

And the mother doesn't want to fly to Puerto Rico, but up doing it. That's sort of based on his mother. She didn't. She'd never gotten in an airplane before, and. But once she did, she enjoyed it and had a great time with him there.

B (12:16)

Let's talk about Buford. Delaney Baldwin once called Buford a great lover in the truest artistic sense. How did Baldwin's relationship with Beaufort either challenged or expanded his sense of self as a black man, as an artist and as someone still learning to love himself.

A (12:41)

So when Baldwin arrived at Buford's studio for the first time, he was 16 years old. He was working at a sweatshop after school. He was a preacher. He was sort of repressing his queer desires. He was not writing as much as he wanted to because he didn't know how to become an artist. And then he sees Beaufort in the Studio, all these colorful paintings and just the life that he's leading. And that's when he says that it was Beaufort who taught him for the first time that a black man could be an artist. But it was also Buford who introduced him to blues and jazz, which he wasn't allowed to listen to in his house. It was Buforder taught him how to see the world as an artist. That famous story from looking down at the gutter. I also think that these paintings that Buford painted of him early on, but actually, actually throughout his life, were these kind of idealized reflections that Buford wanted Baldwin to see so he could see himself the way that Buford saw him as a young man worthy of love. So there's of course, the famous dark rapture, almost nude or semi nude portrait that also speaks to the complexities of their relationship. Buford actually fell in love with Baldwin, but he accepted this kind of spiritual father, this position that Baldwin wanted him to have. Because, you know, that quote earlier about the terror of love. Baldwin was very sort of terrified of his sexuality at this stage in his life. He knew that he was, quote, unquote, a bastard. He knew that he was different. He'd heard this from his parents, he'd heard it behind closed doors, but he didn't. He couldn't kind of understand how. What role his sexuality played in this. Buford provided this model of a black queer man who was an artist who would embrace him and not ask for anything from him or take advantage of him. And that created this beautiful kinship structure that. That lasted throughout his whole life. But he also taught him how, you know, Baldwin said, no greater lover has ever held a brush. And he doesn't mean that in the kind of physical love, but he meant that in the lessons that Buford taught him. That like only great, great art can only come out of love. That's what Baldwin said. And Baldwin, I think, stayed true to that throughout his life, as did Buford.

B (14:49)

There's no doubt that his role in Baldwin's life was significant. I struggle with the ways that mentorship can get messy and blurry. There's this larger issue that I have around relationships through mentorship where there is a huge age gap and, and the older one desires more than the other person.

A (15:18)

I think that's. That's a really important through line in this book, actually, is that, yes, we live in a world where these hierarchical relationships can get really messed up, as we've seen. But I actually think that Baldwin's life provides a model for navigating these Power differentials, these kinship structures in a. To me, a very productive way. And I'll give you another example. So there's this relationship with Buford, like, you know, a different world. Baldwin could have freaked out or Buford could have freaked out and that would have been the end. They wouldn't have had the courage, right, to find each other again and again, forge this different kind of relationship that they both desperately needed. And it was complicated. And we can get into that later in their life as well. Baldwin also had a complicated relationship, in a way, with someone he was a mentor to, in a sense, which was David Leeming, his personal assistant, who he met in Istanbul in the early 60s when Leeming was in his early 20s and Baldwin was older then. And Baldwin fell for Leeming romantically and that I explore in the book through their letters. But once again, they navigated those complexities and they worked towards a long term, kinship loving, you know, platonic relationship where Leeming became his personal assistant, his sort of best friend really, for a number of years there and then his appointed biographer. The trust that it took for Baldwin to kind of choose him. And they remained in each other's lives. And in fact, you know, Leeming became incredibly close to Buford. Baldwin sent Leeming to pick Buford up in Paris and drive him to Istanbul, almost like a kind of test. And this was a transformative experience for David Leeming in the world where often these kinds of mentoring relationships can be disappointing for some people. You know, I've had those experiences. I'm sure everybody pretty much has. I actually think that Baldwin's life and this web of relationships he created provide a way of looking for how you can build on the best parts of these relationships to create lifelong kinship structures.

B (17:35)

I'm going to go back to Buford for just one additional moment. What kind of permission did it give him when he saw Beaufort being that example for his life? And what kind of burden did that place on him?

A (17:53)

I'm not sure it placed a burden. I mean, I think it was immensely freeing. He'd had Countee Colon as his teacher in high school.

B (18:01)

That's right, yeah.

A (18:01)

Which is amazing too. And you. You just wonder what that. And he would imitate his poetry and what it must have been like for Baldwin to. To do that. And so he already must have had an inkling. But I think Buford was opening his arms to him in a way, his life to him. This was outside of a school setting. This. He was opening Greenwich Village to him. He took him backstage to meet Marian Anderson. You know, he met Canada Lee, he went to museums, he went to plays and opera. So Buford represented like a whole way of being that wasn't just confined to, like an English classroom as it had been with Kante Cohen. And Buford was also an outsider, a total outsider. He was like. People called him like a shaman, a Buddha. You know, he spoke in aphorisms. He was an aphorism. Utter original. And again, this is something that Baldwin was drawn to throughout his life. I would say the same is true of those other three figures. Yorin Kazak, total outsider artist. Engin Jazzar, a kind of wild Turkish guy, actor, revolutionary. And Lucien was also this kind of. This hedonist who didn't. Didn't follow any of society's rules. In a way, I think Buford was the first prototype that that was what Baldin was drawn to. That was what Baldwin found inspiring and sustaining in these kind of kinship relationships that he built. And Buford was the typified that more than any.

B (19:24)

I love the phrase that you used of the web of relationships, but also think a transformative figure in Baldwin's life was Lorraine Hansberry.

A (19:33)

Right.

B (19:34)

Lorraine was one of Baldwin's most endearing intellectual companions. How did her presence and her premature loss reshape Baldwin's relationship to women and to grief?

A (19:50)

Thanks for asking that, because, you know, the book explores these four major love figures, but woven throughout, very importantly, are Baldwin's relationships with many women. Lorraine Hansberry, Mary Painter, Bill Miller, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, the list goes on and on. Lorraine was so important to him because she was the one who was there for this actor studio workshop rendition of Giovanni's Room. And Lee Strasberg didn't like it and nobody liked it except she was there in the stands and she came down and spoke positively about it. Baldwin was also there at the, I think, the previews for A Raisin in a Song in Philadelphia. Sidney Potier gave him one of his sort of house seats. And Baldwin came on stage with her afterwards. And I think he was very thrilled by seeing her success. And he said, you know, he wrote in a letter, I believe it was to Mary Painter, how thrilled he was to see black life represented the way that it was like a real living, breathing tradition on stage. And he wanted that too for himself. So I think he was inspired by her as an artist. I think he felt supported by her by an artist. I think he respected her greatly.

B (20:57)

He.

A (20:57)

She definitely, I think, impacted his politics. She was more left than him. You know, you think about that meeting with rfk that she attended and Lena Horne and Jerome Smith and Harry Belafonte. She was really instrumental in taking it to the powers that be in that meeting and making it the kind of media bonanza that it needed to become in order to have the impact on the civil rights movement that it ended up having. He was gutted, absolutely gutted by her death, for sure. And he writes about it in that terrific essay, Sweet Lorraine and elsewhere. So I don't think you can underestimate the importance that Lorraine Hansberry had on Baldwin's life. I think. I don't know if he would have made the moves as a playwright he did in particular, without example.

B (21:46)

One of the beautiful things that you really paint vividly in the book is you kind of get a sense that Baldwin witnessed her star rising when A Raisin premieres. And there's the moment when after the last scene and the play is over, all these people point out Lorraine Hansberry and they say, like, look, there's. There she is. They all want autographs of her. And Baldwin is there smiling and just letting her, you know, do her thing. And he holds her pocketbook. And I was just like, oh, this is just quite a sweet moment to witness, to see, like, in the moment, the success of that play in her just skyrocketed.

A (22:36)

Exactly. And that you can be an artist and a social activist as well. I mean, that's something she was doing and would have done more of, I bet. You know, she lives. And I think that this was sort of before he made that. That big move in that direction. He was startled to move that way, but she took him further.

B (22:56)

And another person that took him further, I think, or at least attempted to, was Audre Lorde. She tried to push Baldwin on his views around gender. How did Baldwin struggle with the rise of black feminist and queer thought in the 1980s? Was he afraid of being left behind, or was he still evolving his understanding of love across difference?

A (23:28)

That's a great question. You know, I was sort of surprised. I forget where in the archives I was, but I saw that he had a copy of Guy Hockenham's the French Early Queer Theorist book Homosexual Desire. I think it was when he was in the south of France. So this means Baldwin must have been reading, you know, sort of the early queer theory types, St. Paul de Vance, which is. Which was sort of fascinating to me because for people who are very familiar with Baldwin, we know that he was not that involved in the gay liberation movement. We know that he did that interview with Richard Goldstein of the Village voice in the mid-80s, where he knew almost nothing about the AIDS epidemic, where he talked about how homosexuality is a verb, not a noun, which, come to think of it, does kind of sound like the French queer theorist. But he was not involved so much in gay liberation, in the gay liberation movement, and that's just a known fact. Although he was, I think, starting to think about and write about AIDS later in his life in terms of gender. That's also such a complicated topic for Baldwin, and I think he evolved around it. I think that meeting with Audre Lorde, you know, he said some unfortunate things. Same thing with the Nikki Giovanni. Yes, I think they really impacted him because he started to speak differently in the 80s. I mean, he would talk about how. And he became. He was great friends with Toni Morrison. He supported the career of. Early career of Gail Jones in important ways. And he said that it was this wave of black women writers led by Toni Morrison, who were excavating the nation's past in this urgent way that had never been done before. So I do think that those conversations with Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni and others were pushing him towards a more complicated conception of gender. You know, later in his life, he was writing about androgyny, how each contains the other, male and female, female and male, black and white, white and black. This is all, I think, in part because of these conversations he was having with. With black feminists. However, there is that interesting dynamic and his public performance, especially on television, where he would say things like, you know, I have to protect my wife, my children. And he's taking him to task for that. Saying he's. He's. He's being macho and he's trying to pass as. As heterosexual or something. But I think that he was being rhetorical, he was being symbolic. He understood that he. He had this role to play on the kind of American public stage. But there's no question that his gender politics were not what they could have been. But at the same time, I would say, okay, tell me another writer, male, black or white, gay or straight or whatever, who was seriously engaging with black feminists and black feminist thinking at that way that Baldwin was starting to. So while we can critique him, of course, I also think we have to see the larger context in which actually what he was doing was pretty unique.

B (26:19)

You mentioned Nikki Giovanni, and I'm glad that you did, because I want to zoom out a bit and talk about, like, the next generation of black writers. When Baldwin looked at the next generation that followed him, did he feel a sense of continuity or rupture like what kind of love or perhaps apprehension did he hold? But those who came after him.

A (26:46)

I'm glad you asked this because this is something I kind of reference in the book. But I think it bears more exploration by other writers and scholars in the future. Cecil Brown came, you know, came to Visit Baldwin in St. Paul DeVontaine State. And Baldwin was sort of nervous to meet him because he would been talked negatively about some of the younger black male writers. But Cecil Brown loved Baldwin's work, Baldwin loved his work. And Baldwin put him up in the south of France and they partied together as well. Carl Phillips would come later. Well, since they became incredibly close, I think there was real continuity. I think Baldwin was trying to support male and female, the next generation of black writers, but they also supported him. I mean, Toni Morrison wasn't quite his generation. And she was instrumental in him to find the voice in if Beale Street could talk. She came St. Paul de Vence, it went in the early 70s. And he made them some popcorn, took them down to his torture chamber, as he called it, and he read the entire novel out loud to her to see if he was getting Tish's voice. Right. I believe Tawni Morrison said yes. But one of the things that I find interesting about this, going back to gender in a way and I explore in my book is if Beale Street Could Talk was very controversial in a way because some thought it was sort of perfect and captured this voice. It's a first person voice of Tish who's pregnant. Joyce Keller Oates thought it was seamless and wonderful. But then June Jordan thought it sounded much more like Baldwin himself. And what's interesting is that I think it's actually doing both. It's kind of like drag, right? Drag you are sometimes looks real and sometimes there's a kind of rupture or a slippage where you. Where it reveals. Right. That's constructed, it makes sense because this novel was this beautiful black heterosexual love story between Tish and Fani. But it was also dedicated to Joran Kazak. So it was also based on this kind of love affair he was having with a married French painter. So when looking at Baldwin's life and work, you always kind of have to look at all these elements together. And I think around questions of gender, he was like really working through his own sense of his own gender in that novel. He often talked about writing novels as giving birth. I mean, this was his dominant narrative. So if this is a novel that's written about a woman who's pregnant, there's also sort of Baldwin in the background there, giving birth to the book itself. And these dynamics are always cross, cutting each other in Baldwin's writing.

B (29:14)

One of the things that I felt was underlying theme in the biography was throughout all of the recognition that he would get, Baldwin grappled with loneliness. And he once said, you become famous because you're lonely. You're more lonely when you're famous. What do you think Baldwin was really longing for in his loneliness?

A (29:46)

Loneliness is the condition that I think he felt growing up and associated, I think, probably with forms of his early creativity and writing, you know. And I think he wanted to have these bonds and this connection. He also had to kind of sever it. So in order to be alone and in order to have this kind of yearning system that I think he built up. So I think loneliness was something that he sought out to a certain degree and then regretted so much. Like fame, right? He sought out fame. In his junior high school yearbook, he wrote, fame is the spur, but ouch. Like, he wanted to be famous, but he already knew that it was gonna hurt. And I think the loneliness that came with fame, he would also. Then. So he became famous in the US So he was in France, so he'd go back to France. Then he became so famous in France that he had to go to Istanbul. But then he became so famous in Istanbul that he had to move to St. Paul de Ven. So he was constantly kind of moving around and reenacting this kind of movement between obscurity, alienation, and fame and recognition. So it was a very restless life in that sense. And it was a lonely one that was also full of joy and community and kinship. And that's one thing I wanted to underline in the book, is that Baldwin suffered. There was suffering. He wrote about it. But he also had tremendous love and tremendous kinship and tremendously sustaining relationships. They were just complicated, and they had many ups and downs like anybody else's life. But he used them as part of the creative engine.

B (31:32)

What did love and loneliness cost him?

A (31:36)

Well, I think he would say that the only love for him that is worthwhile, he would say, he wrote, this is a kind of risky, difficult love, right? A real love. Not a kind of saccharine kind of romantic sense of love, but a deep one rooted in really, really seeing another person or trying to see. To sort of, you know, witness another person, as he put it. And that can be lonely if the other person isn't capable of that or isn't up for that or doesn't want that. And that I think he experienced, you know, time and time again. And yet at the same time he. His love. He was tremendously devoted to the people that he was in. In love with, even if they couldn't match him. There's many lovers, Lucienne among them, but also Arnold and Alen in the book. These are younger people that he was involved with. And even when they broke up, he had this commitment to seeing them through on the other side. Even if they were hurting him and leaving him. He made sure that. That he helped them find a place to live or a job or got them safely to back to the country where they needed to be. So he had a tough and difficult love, but also this love that was sort of. Once he loved somebody, it never stopped for him, which I don't think is always true for people.

B (32:56)

You know, one of the other themes that I walked away with after reading this book was how love and loneliness are one the same side of the coin. The last question that I have for you, Nick, is, so tell me if there are any new works that you are currently in the works and tell us a little bit about them.

A (33:21)

Right now. I'm catching up on my reading. Throughout these years, many books that I wanted to read came out. So I read Monte Perry's Black and Blues, which is terrific.

B (33:32)

Yeah.

A (33:33)

I read Anil Joseph's Book of the Freedom Season, which is excellent. And I read Danzy Senna's novel. I hadn't read novels in ages. I read her hilarious Colored Television. So I've been doing a lot of, like, some of it pleasure reading. Finally, after every. Everything I read before had to be linked explicitly to Baldwin or explicitly to a particular time period that I. That I was looking at. So right now this book tour is taking most of my energy, so I'm not really thinking too much about. About next projects. I do have something in the works, but I can't really talk about it quite yet. But what I am enjoying is looking at just the breadth of work that's being done around or adjacent to Baldwin is stunning right now. And that's very, very exciting to see. Magdalena Zaborowsko's Baldwin book that came out recently. These are all part of this broader conversation that it's just so exciting to see people having around Baldwin's life and work. That was certainly not. Not happening, you know, 20, 30 years ago when I got ensnared.

B (34:39)

I was exposed to Baldwin in his writings in a deeper way when I took a course on him in my master's program back at Yale. Taught by Clarence Hardy and it was Baldwin as a religious writer. We read a number of his works and his essays, and I think about that class often. I imagine if Professor Hardy is still teaching this course, how he would incorporate this just seminal biography in this course. So thank you so much for writing this.

A (35:21)

Thank you for reading it and thank you for this conversation.

B (35:25)

Dr. Nicholas Boggs is the author of Baldwin A Love Story, published by fsg. Special thanks to Stephen Wilde and Lauren Hutton. If you found this episode intriguing, please rate it and review the show and include the host's name in your review. I'm Dr. Nikaziotz. Thank you for listening.