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The Book Review
Nicholas Boggs on Writing a James Baldwin Biography
00:36:28
Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story,” is many things at once. It’s a comprehensive biography of James Baldwin. It’s a nimble excavation of Baldwin’s work. And, most pressingly, it’s an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin through the lens of love. Boggs joins MJ Franklin on this week's episode to talk about his new book.
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- [00:02]
A
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- [00:34]
B
Hello and welcome to the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review, and this week on the podcast we're talking to Nicholas Boggs about his new book, A Love Story. This book is many things at once. It's a comprehensive biography of Baldwin, the person, the writer, the icon. It's a really enjoyable excavation of Baldwin's work, filled with plenty of close reading of his books and and prose. And most pressingly, it's an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin. And that framework is love. The biography is structured around Baldwin's relationship with a series of men that, as Boggs outlines, shaped Baldwin's life in writing. And just personally, it's a book that completely captured me. I thought this biography was lively, inspired, persuasive, and formative. It's one of my favorites from the year so far, which is why I'm excited to talk with Nicholas about it today. Nicholas, welcome.
- [01:31]
C
So happy to be here.
- [01:32]
B
Thank you for joining us. And I'm so excited to dive into this book. But before we do that, I want to start with a broad, embarrassingly simple question, which is, who is James Baldwin? And that may seem like a silly starting point, but I wanted to start there because I think a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas about who James Baldwin even is for a few reasons. First, just as an artist, he was so multifaceted. He worked in many different modes, fiction, nonfiction, theater, film. Some people know him as a novelist who wrote essays. Other know him as an essayist and orator who wrote novels. Some people think of him as a political figure. So I wanted to set the table and define on your terms, who is James Baldwin?
- [02:14]
C
First of all, he was a human being. And I think that's something that sometimes gets lost right in the lionization of him or the malignment of him. Over the years. There's this image of him, which is an important one, as a kind of icon of the civil rights movement. And we see these in clips and memes and things like that. But what we often lose is that where was this voice coming from? How did he become who he was? And what I wanted to look at in this book was the people who sustained him, the people who enabled him, who made it possible for him to give all that he did to the world.
- [02:43]
B
And we were talking a little bit before, but you have very strong opinions about the greatness of James Baldwin. You said, I believe he's the greatest writer of the 21st century.
- [02:54]
C
I think he's the most important writer or 20th century. I think he's the most important writer of the 20th century. I think that the life that he lived, the issues that he was writing about, living through the civil rights movement, living through the women's rights movement, living through the gay and lesbian movement, even if he wasn't involved so much in the latter, he witnessed all of them and infused his writing. And because we see now he's so present with us because of Black Lives Matters, because of everything that's going on in the world. So I think in a way, it's very subjective to say the best writer. But if we look at the implications of what he was writing about and how he was able to do it, I think he is the most important.
- [03:28]
B
And can you introduce us to some of his themes, if not play by play? Here's every single book. But broadly speaking, what did he tackle in his fiction and nonfiction? What did he tackle in his work thematically?
- [03:39]
C
Well, he tackled love, of course, but we can return to that, really. I think what he was tackling was this false notion of innocence, that Americans were invested in white Americans in particular, this idea that the history didn't matter, that there hadn't been all these terrible things that had happened. There was this idea, he wrote about it in Stranger in the Village, that the innocence constitutes the crime. That as long as white Americans don't look at the past critically and sort of come to terms with it, that we'll never be able to solve the problems as they move forward.
- [04:08]
B
And do you see him more as a political figure or a literary figure and a nonfiction writer or a fiction writer? How do you see him?
- [04:16]
C
I see him as an artist. I see him as probably as close to an activist. I think Zadie Smith talks about this in a recent essay, as close to an activist as an artist can be. But I believe that at his core, he saw himself as an artist. That's what he said. And he saw himself primarily as a novelist.
- [04:34]
B
Two things. One, we love a recommendation on this podcast. What was that Zadie Smith essay titled?
- [04:38]
C
So her new book is out Dead and Alive, and there is an incredible essay in it called Craft and Conscience. I believe it's her. The last lecture she gave in as an NYU professor. And it's just brilliant on Baldwin.
- [04:49]
B
So go check that out. In addition to this book, but then also, that is Baldwin. We have introduced Baldwin Big Picture. And again, I wanted to just set the table and figure out we're not talking about just an iconic novelist. We're talking about a human. We're talking about an artist who had profound implications for American life in the 20th century and beyond. Now, I want to pivot and ask, what is this book, a love story?
- [05:17]
C
Well, this book is a biography because it tells his Life chronologically for 700 pages, but it does so through love stories. That's why it's called Baldwin a Love Story. The four great loves of his life, the men that he dedicated books to that he collaborated with, that really sustained him in his artistic practice. There are women throughout this book as well. Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou. But I focused on these men because I believed that by looking at them, we understood the core of his creative practice and process.
- [05:48]
B
Can you say more about that? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this book argues that one of the best ways, if not the very best way, to understand Baldwin and to appreciate him and his work and his genius is through the lens of love.
- [06:02]
C
I mean, I don't make an argument, I hope. I think I try to show through these stories how that's the case. So you. It begins when he meets Buford Delaney in Greenwich Village. And Buford is a black artist, painter. Baldwin is growing up impoverished in Harlem. He's a preacher's son. He's a preacher himself. He doesn't understand that there's this whole world open to him that's possible. Buford paints portraits of him. He introduces him to blues and jazz, which are outlawed in his house. And he shows him that a black man, as Baldwin put it, could be an artist. But he also wrote, baldwin says that all art is created out of love. This is something that Buford taught him.
- [06:36]
B
I found this love anchor, this love thesis, this love, not argument, but showcase and demonstration to be very quietly radical. And I think that because on the surface, one could argue that love and romantic relationships shape artists all the time, of all shapes and sizes and all different mediums. It shaped everyone from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf to Taylor Swift. But this thesis is more than that. The argument, or I guess the showcase here is that it was not only love that shaped Baldwin as it shaped all of us, but that the pursuit of love inspired Baldwin to write and drove him to particular novels and essays and projects, that he collaborated with particular people because of his complicated and or sometimes unrequited love for them. He made business and artistic decisions, in part to manage those relationships. And I think, most importantly, you show that love created the conditions of. Under which Baldwin made significant breakthroughs in and ultimately finished the masterpieces that we read today. And so it's more than that. Just Baldwin was animated by love, but love was a core thing that he tackled in his work. It was a core thing that drove him as a person. Am I framing that correctly?
- [07:50]
C
Absolutely. He had a politics of love, which is also worth discussing. But in terms of his creative process, he was not able to finish his first novel, Go Tell in the Mountain, until he moved to France. And Lucien Hapbersberger, this young Swiss guy, took him to the Swiss Alps with his family chalet, nursed him back to health, and created this kind of idyllic situation where Baldwin could listen to Bessie Smith records and remember the voice of his childhood, where he could feel loved and seen, as he said, by Lucien. And this allowed him to finish the novel he finished right there up in the Swiss Alps.
- [08:21]
B
And you point out, and I love this in the biography, that there is that double entendre of go tell it on the mountain as a title, that it's this black saying frequently in the black church, go tell it on the mountain. But then for Baldwin, too, he literally was on the mountain with this man that he loved. And there's a synthesis in that title that you might miss unless you know what to look for.
- [08:45]
C
Absolutely. They were going on a hike when Baldwin felt better. And supposedly this is what Lucien says. They were on a glacier, and Baldwin almost fell, and Lucien saved him. And it was at that moment he saw the light reflecting in the snow, and he said, that's the title.
- [08:57]
B
And maybe it was just me, but I felt like thinking about Baldwin and love in my mind to be a slight reframing, because when I thought of Baldwin before I read this book, I think I would have thought of his righteous fury, for instance, in his essays or with his fiction. I thought of, like, poetic somberness, and I felt like he was writing for the Lost Boys. I feel like there's a lot of angst and tragedy. And until this book, I don't think that love would have been the first word that came to mind. But after it, it Definitely is.
- [09:28]
C
We see those video clips of him where he's on the Dick Cavett show with William Buckley, and he seems very sermonic and angry. And these are the. This is the popular vision of him now. But in fact, Baldwin's life was full of joy and laughter and communion and connection with other people who are helping him create these communities where he could write. He went to Istanbul. That is where he finished Another Country. That is where he wrote the highly politicized the Fire Next Time. So these love relationships were also enabling him to write about political events back home. He needed this distance from America, as he put it, in order to write about it.
- [10:01]
B
And correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first major biography of Baldwin and how long in about 30.
- [10:08]
C
Years from a trade press.
- [10:10]
B
And I think you mentioned in the book that in previous biographies there hasn't been a Into his romantic relationships or into his queerness.
- [10:19]
C
I wouldn't say it. Not as deep as this one, no.
- [10:22]
B
Why do you think that is? Was it out of a sense of deference to him? Is it the homophobia of the time? Is it just that we didn't have the material or information or knowledge of these relationships?
- [10:36]
C
I think. I don't want to speak too much about prior biographers, but you have to remember when they were written. They were written right after he died. There were three important ones that came out, and David Leeming's. He was his personal assistant. David Leeming does write about these relationships, but he has to cloak some of their names in pseudonyms. That wasn't his focus, but he definitely integrates them. He knew these people, and that's really important. Except for Yoran Kozak. But this was 1994. Things have changed. There was the rise of, say, even, like, queer theory, which has impacted how people examine lives. And I think since Baldwin rejected these categories of gay and straight and queer, it deflected away from this deep dive. Because how do you talk about these relationships when he's involved with men who are mostly involved with women? Is that a gay love story? What kind of love story is that? And that's something that I had to address in this book, but that needed to be addressed.
- [11:24]
B
That is such a great question. How do you talk about those relationships? And one of the ways that you do that is by organizing this biography around them. The book is split into four sections, and there's a prologue and an interlude and all that stuff. But the main four sections are organized around each of the lovers. You've mentioned a few of them already but can you introduce me to our four anchors?
- [11:49]
C
Sure. So the first one is Buford Delany, extremely important painter. His paintings now sell for millions of dollars. But at the time he was relatively unknown except in the Village. He was an eccentric, well known character. He knew Marian Anderson, Canada Lee, jazz and blues musicians who he introduced Baldwin to. But most importantly, he introduced Baldwin to the idea of how to see the world as an artist. And he became his kind of spiritual father. Now, Buford was interested romantically in Baldwin, but he didn't push it. He took on this other role that was lifelong. The second figure is Lucienne when he moves to Paris and falls in love with him. The third figure is Engin Dzar, a Turkish actor that Baldwin met in Greenwich Village who played Giovanni in an actor's studio rendition. Baldwin fell in love with him, but they called each other blood brothers. They cut their arms and mixed their blood together. And Baldwin followed him to Istanbul, where he finished Another country, which he couldn't do and also wrote the Fire Next Time and spent most of that decade living there. He called it his home. He'd come back to march on Washington. He'd come back for political engagements. But mostly he was living and fostering this sustaining community in Istanbul. So that's a really important part of the book. And then the last one is Joran Kazak, the French artist who he dedicated. If Beeltree could talk to and collaborated with on a couple projects.
- [12:58]
B
We're going to continue with our conversation, but first I think we should take a quick break.
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C
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- [14:17]
A
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- [14:48]
B
And we're back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin and I'm talking to the author Nicholas Boggs, about his new James Baldwin biography, Baldwin A Love Story. This book is, I think, interestingly, provocatively, inspiredly. That's not a word, but I'm gonna use it here. Structured around these four men. Can you talk to me about that decision to structure the book that way versus another way either just a typical chronological walkthrough. Why structure the book that way?
- [15:21]
C
Toni Morrison has that famous quote that you have to write the book that you want to read. And so when I read these important early biographies of Baldwin when I was in college, they gave us so much important information. But it just seemed like there were these gaps around these love relationships that were very striking because to me, it seemed obvious that some of them were his lovers. But also it seemed like all of his writing is about love. His novels are all love stories. His political, his politics is rooted in this idea that black and white and Americans must come together, as he puts it, like lovers in order to change the world. So it seemed odd to have this bifurcation where we're talking about love in his work, we're talking about it in his life, but not really, and we're not bringing them together.
- [16:03]
B
So I want to loop back around then based off of that and just ask what inspired this book in the first place. I know it's structured around love because there was that gap. But when you set out to start writing, was it because you saw this gap and wanted to fill it in, or was there a different starting point?
- [16:19]
C
There was definitely a different starting point in my unconscious. That probably was what was happening in college. I took a class on James Baldwin at Yale and at the Beinecke, I discovered this out of print children's book, Little Man, Little man. And I wrote an email to David Leeming asking him if he knew anything about this Yorin Kazak character. And he said, I never met him. I think he's dead. I don't know anybody else alive who Met him. But a few years later, I wrote to art historians in Paris in 2003 when I was in grad school, asking if they knew anything about him. A few weeks later, the phone rings in my studio apartment. It says, this raspy, French accented voice, I'm Yorin Kazak. I'm alive. Come to Paris. I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy. So organically, it grew out of meeting him, learning along the way the complications of his relationship with Baldwin, bringing Little man back into print. And it moved backwards chronologically from there.
- [17:06]
B
Interesting. Can you bring us into your head? You get this call, I'm Yourn Kozak, the long lost Yoram Kazzak. I have a lot of stories about Jimmy. What is going on in your head and what happens next?
- [17:18]
C
I sign up for my third credit card and I head over there and I see his exhibition and I meet him, and he's this intensely charismatic outsider artist. He lived in Tuscany with his wife with no electricity, no running water, trading paintings with the villagers. Really eccentric life. He'd been a protege of Baltus, just a really interesting guy. And the way that he talked about Baldwin was all about love. He said he was just a shaman and an actor. He loved to watch him reading his writing in front of a mirror. He joked about he had a brown Mercedes. They would drive around and Baldwin called it Baldwin brown. A friend of theirs had a black Labrador, and Baldwin would say to him, you don't call it black. You call it colored. His whole. Their relationship was a very jovial, jokey, loving, collaborative relationship.
- [18:05]
B
And did you know right away when you're talking to him and getting all of these stories, I have a book, or did that decision that. Did that come later in my journal?
- [18:16]
C
Coming back from that first time I wrote something like, this has been the most incredible experience of my life, but I have no idea what to do with it. I did know I wanted to bring Little man and Little man back into print, which we ended UP doing in 2018 with Duke University Press. Thank you. It was Duke University Press, and Baldwin's niece and nephew, Aisha and Tijan contributed Beautiful afterwards. And forwards. So that was a big moment. That was also around the time that the Schomburg archives became available in 2017. So that kind of confluence made me think, wait a second, Am I gonna write about just this one relationship, or is there more to talk about here?
- [18:49]
B
And when did you realize? When did you decide there is more there?
- [18:54]
C
I was talking to my agent. I was at an artist residency in Barcelona, and she said, what else is it about? It's not just Joran Kozak. And she was really almost berating me because she was so frustrated. And I said, well, it's about relationships and love. And she said, who else did he. And that's when I kind of realized, oh, wait a second. He loved Buford, he loved Lucien. And I hadn't realized about Enguin yet, but I realized that there was this obvious through line, queer life. We think backwards in some ways. We don't think in the same, all of us linear way, I believe. And that's, I think, what happened to me. I was backing into this story.
- [19:27]
B
Say more about that. What do you mean? We don't think linear for a queer life?
- [19:31]
C
The sort of normal life story that you're born, you get married to somebody else, you have kids. This is a very linear normative narrative, which is not one that Baldwin lived. For example, look at his life. He's constructing these alternative kinship structures with different men and women that circle back around, that come back into his life, that leave, that sustain him. And he wasn't thinking. He was really interested in children and wished that he did. But he understood that his contribution to the future wasn't necessarily a biological one, but was as this visionary as an artist.
- [20:04]
B
What a incredible amount of pressure both to put onto yourself, but then also that ambition, too is, I think, just remarkable to know my role here is visionary.
- [20:16]
C
I don't know if he would say that. He called himself a witness and he wanted to be a writer, a novelist. That was his main goal in life. That's what he saw. And then when he went and Traveled south in 1957 and met Martin Luther King and saw the burning crosses, he understood, as Sterling Brown and others had been telling him, that with his skill as an orator and a writer, he had a unique opportunity to contribute to the future of this country and the civil rights movement. And he took that up somewhat reluctantly.
- [20:42]
B
How conscious was Baldwin himself of the fact that these men and the idea of love was what was shaping him?
- [20:51]
C
Oh, I think he was very aware of it. He writes about it in no Name in the Street. He writes about Lucienne and how falling in love with Lucien freed him from the trap of color. He writes about how in these letters to Mary Painter, it becomes very obvious that his creative process is completely wound up in these breakups. He talked about the writing process as a kind of giving birth. And it's almost like these relationships and their turmoil allowed him to give birth to his works of art, which, when.
- [21:21]
B
I was reading this in the book I found to be so fascinating and so jaw dropping. And at one point you. You mention and highlight that there's a passage in if Beale Street Could Talk that is like verbatim something that he expressed in a letter about. Is it Lucien that he's talking about for that?
- [21:42]
C
No, it was actually a draft of some other piece of writing from note papers in Mahomet, one of his late works. He had written this super, super explicit gay love scene. And then very, very similar language turns up in if Beale Street Could Talk. I put them side by side. And the reason I did that was to show this idea that. Not that looking at his love life is somehow salacious or something. No, we can't understand his creative process, how those sentences happen, how he transposed this interracial, queer, whatever you want to call it, queer love affair he's having with Euron into this beautiful black love story between Tish and Fani. That for Baldwin, all these different registers were always happening at the same time. And in order to understand them, we have to look at his lovers, his love life.
- [22:26]
B
And to get there, you mentioned you put them side by side. This early draft and then a scene from the final book. And that leads me to ask about research, because you can tell on every single page just the sheer amount of research that went into the construction of this book. We have letters, we have early essays, we have notes from FBI files, we have so much here. And I'm wondering first, am I missing anything? Is there anything that you're like, this was a document that was so hard to track down or find, but I got it. Is there anything that you want to shout out?
- [23:06]
C
Sure, there's a few. But the one that I think was really life changing for me was recall that Yoran Kozak died in 2005. But I'd interviewed him, but I hadn't been able to ask him all the questions I wanted to. We'd gotten man he done, but I was interviewing his wife as well, which was wonderful. And she invited me to come see her in Tuscany in 2018 to see the original drafts from Little man, but also any other documents she had. And I also wanted to ask her more questions. So we go there. She lives in Tuscany, and in her bedroom she's thrown out all these documents and images and the sun is setting over the Tuscan hills when she finds a love letter that Baldwin wrote to her husband in the early 1970s, that there was a seven page love poem with a rusty metal paperclip and she hadn't seen it in 40 years. And it was written in French, so she translated it back into English for me. And it was all about yearning. It's called Saturnia because they would go to this hot spring for their getaways. And then Baldwin returned to St. Paul de Vence, and Joran would go back to Tuscany. And so the poem is all about waking up. Baldwin's waking up and thinking about him. Have you eaten yet? Have you shaved yet? I'm reading your horoscope. I'm reading my horoscope. And the recurring line is, come to me, come to me, Come home. And when she finished reading it, the sun was setting. And she says, this poem makes me sad for Jimmy is how she put it. And that was a really touching moment for me, in part because I'd been resisting this narrative of Baldwin's life being sad and tragic. One thing I wanted to look at was how these relationships were full of joy, right? And collaboration. But in fact, the truth is, like all of us, and in his own unique way, he did have a challenging life, but he turned it into art. There was that great interview where somebody says, you were born black, poor and gay. What did you do with that? Wasn't that hard. And he said, I hit the jackpot. Cause look at the material.
- [24:49]
B
Wow. So we have this letter, and I'm just thinking about that phrase. I feel so sad for Jimmy. There's a line in a YA novel that I love where a character has died and he was queer and closeted. His grandmother says, do you think he loves someone the way he wanted to? And it just like cuts to the core. And just this phrase. You see this poem, and I feel so sad for Jimmy. It feels really powerful and moving to me. But back to the research question. You have all of this research. You have all of these stories. How do you distill that down? I'm curious about just craft and how you sort it through everything and how you made sense of just the sheer trove of material that you had. I think the source notes section in the back of the book is 40 pages of just citations of this came from here, and this came from here. How did you make sense of it all?
- [25:37]
C
I'm a paper guy, so I do almost nothing digitally. So I have boxes and boxes of archives. I have tons of hardcover books in some cases that I've written, written on and have sticky notes. So I would go away to artist residencies. Actually, the ones that Baldwin went to, I went to McDowell and stayed in the same studio where he stayed. And I showed up there in my pickup truck full of boxes. So everybody thought I was a visual artist. And in fact, in a way, I was acting like one. Cause I got there and I wouldn't write for two weeks. I would just storyboard the whole book, and I'd have the different sources, whether it's a letter or something from his novel or a secondary source from another biography or a scholar. And I would move them around. It was crazy making. And as I was doing it, I said, nick, you should really remember how you're doing this. But I didn't. I repressed it because I don't ever want to do it again. And I'll never have a book with footnotes ever again either.
- [26:23]
B
Really?
- [26:24]
C
No way.
- [26:24]
B
Oh, my gosh. I find that that is very fair. But also one of the things I loved about this book, and I'm grateful to this book for, is just how you took that sheer amount of research, gave it to someone like me, someone who loves Baldwin but is not a Baldwin scholar. And this book felt so accessible and readable, but still smart and scholarly at the same time. Was that something that you were conscious of while you were writing? Were you thinking of the reader? What kind of reader were you thinking of? Can you tell me more?
- [26:57]
C
Again, I think it's that Toni Morrison quote, write the book that you wanted to read. This is the book that I wish I could have read when I was coming out in college, when I was reading Baldwin. What I wanted to. I definitely wanted it to be accessible. I wanted it to be told through stories. But I didn't want it to lose the kind of depth and rigor that Baldwin's work demands. So I'm really gratified to hear that you had that experience because it was very hard to find that balance. I wrote the whole first book, one Beaufort, and I really struggled. And it was ironic because Baldwin was struggling to find his voice in that section, right? And then he moves to France, and suddenly he finds his voice, and so do I. I just started that section where he meets Lucien in that gay bar, and suddenly the voice took off. So I. Once I found the voice and once I had that structure with the kind of all the different storyboarding, it was still laborious, but it wasn't as anxiety provoking. At first I was like, I don't know if I can finish this book. I have no idea what I'm doing.
- [27:49]
B
That's so interesting. You mentioned that you struggle with that part. Are there other parts that you struggle with, or are there other parts that just came to You. That you're like, oh, this. This image. I get it. I have the perfect place for it. Yeah. Talk to me about the struggles and triumphs as you were writing.
- [28:04]
C
Well, that. That scene where he meets Lucien was so fun to write because he's a. It's a gay bar. And I tried to make it almost like a film. Like, you enter this long tunnel, and you don't realize it, but you're going through. And then finally you see these. Someone's telling a story, and it's Baldwin, and you. You see him. There he is, smoking a cigarette and speaking in his French. So that was really just fun to write. And that really got me going. Also, the last part of the book, I kind of enter as a character, and that was stylistically challenged. And I also felt important. I wanted to show that when you're writing a biography, it's not just a seamless narrative that unspools, especially if you're writing about marginalized figures, whether because of race or sexuality. When I had to go into the archives, like, I had to spend my entire life basically going into these archives, put it as this neat, easy narrative, I think would have done a disservice to the reality of Baldwin's life and how difficult his life was in some ways, but how challenging it is to tell these stories that have been erased or hard to unearth.
- [29:03]
B
You mentioned you're not doing it again, but I think you did it superbly here. Was there anything that you learned about the art of biography, about yourself as a writer, through the process of crafting this book?
- [29:19]
C
I think I became a writer because of this book. In order to write that book that I wanted to read, I had to become the writer who could write that book. I got my PhD from Columbia, and when I finished it, I knew I didn't want to write an academic book. And then I went and got my MFA afterwards, which was a little bit crazy, but I feel like not that school. You need to go to school to do these things. But I did, and I was able to bring the skills that I was gaining as a kind of narrative nonfiction writer, which is where I'll be heading in the future, and bring in the scholarly stuff that led by the narrative nonfiction, led by the stories. So it's a somewhat unique situation where someone who was a scholar kind of left it behind, but dragged that skill along with him into a biography. There are many biographies that are unconventional. Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf biography is beautiful, and it does it through place, and there are others, but I haven't seen one done quite this way and I really felt like Baldwin demanded it.
- [30:14]
B
And similarly to learning about yourself as a writer in the process, was there anything that you learned about Baldwin that changed your thinking? You mentioned going to the places where he wrote and going to the writer's name, writer's residency. I'm just wondering, as you were doing this deep dive, did anything change in your thinking about Baldwin?
- [30:37]
C
I don't think I fully understood how tough he was. There is this image. I don't mean the image of him when he's an orator and he's speaking the perseverance. He has this quote. He says writing is not about talented. I know a lot of talented ruins. It's about love and perseverance. Now I do think talent matters, but I take his point. I think what he had to do as a very small man to go down south into this kind of racist environment, collect this information, come back transmuted into these essays, into these novels, that took toughness, it took bravery and it also had a real cost. And I think he died too young in part because that lifestyle, in addition to the drinking and all of that, which was in some ways response to the traumas that he experienced, I think he was a tenacious person.
- [31:24]
B
We are running out of time. But before I go, I have a few last questions. First is this book has been out for a few months and there has been a book tour. Have you learned anything on that tour either about how people think about Baldwin or about how people are receiving this book? Have you learned anything through talking to people?
- [31:49]
C
It's been incredible. I've been in California, I've been in the UK a little bit. I've been up and down the east coast. I'm not surprised people love Baldwin, but the response has been so overwhelming and so positive. It just shows how badly people need and want Baldwin right now. There's also been experiences of I was in LA and in the audience was an 80 something year old friend of Baldwin's, David Moses. David Moses is an actor and he is the person who called Baldwin to tell him that MLK had been shot. So to meet that person, to have him there in the audience, to hear me talk about the book with Lena Waithe was really moving to meet him afterwards. But some people seem to just have a story about when they met Baldwin in college or when they first read this book or that book. So we've done Q and A sometimes, but I find myself more enjoying signing the books and getting to conversations with people who have read it before we go.
- [32:43]
B
I just want to do it like a lightning round James Baldwin recommendation guide for readers. Given that everyone has their own connection. I'm curious about your connection to Baldwin. What was the first James Baldwin book that you read?
- [32:57]
C
The first James Baldwin book I read was Giovanni's Room. I stole my twin sister's copy of it in ninth grade and I never gave it back.
- [33:04]
B
Something we're gonna talk about offline is that I am also a twin. I didn't realize you were twins. Go twins. Go Twins. Okay, so Giovanni's Room. Do you remember what you thought of it when you first read it?
- [33:13]
C
I thought I better hide this under my mattress because I was not fully understanding who I was. But I knew I wanted to be a writer. And then here it was this My desires. Remember, it's written about a closeted white man, much like myself for early on. And so it really spoke to me, but it also absolutely terrified me.
- [33:32]
B
What's your favorite James Baldwin book? Both favorite fiction and favorite nonfiction.
- [33:37]
C
Oh, gosh. You're really gonna ask me that question.
- [33:40]
B
On a hot mic too? I'm sorry.
- [33:42]
C
My favorite fiction and what I think is the best fiction. These aren't the same thing necessarily. I should underscore that I think my favorite novel became another country, Especially that first quarter of it where Rufus Scott is descending into a bad place. I just think it's a beautiful and important part of the book. And I just think that book was really groundbreaking. Of course. So is Giovanni's Room my favorite nonfiction? I really love all of it because he's such a master of the form. But I'm really interested in his later essays. So three in particular. To Crush a Serpent, Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood. And the introduction to His Price of the Ticket. Because this is where but an elder Baldwin is going back and looking at his life. And this is where he's writing about coming to terms with his sexuality in Greenwich Village and Harlem. And he's writing in these honest ways that were really important in this book in particular.
- [34:34]
B
I love that. But then also the answer. All of it. I feel like it's fair. One of my favorite of his books and one that I keep on my desk at home is the Price of the Ticket. Cause it's this giant omnibus collection that collects what, 40 years of his essays. It's tremendous. And it's essentially all of it. So I like that answer, too. If anyone is new to James Baldwin, where would you recommend they start?
- [35:00]
C
I recommend they start with Notes of a Native Son. Because this is, I think, one of the most important, quote unquote, personal essays that they've read. And it's autobiographical in the sense that it tells the story of his father's death, his father's funeral. But it also helps us understand the kind of the roots of Baldwin grappling with American racism and why he had to leave the country and why eventually he became the writer he was.
- [35:24]
B
Is there a hidden gem, an underappreciated Baldwin work that you wish had more shine?
- [35:32]
C
Some people, like Robert Jones have talked about this and John Keene. But I do believe that his novel Just Above My Head is a forgotten gem in a way. It was written about pretty negatively when it came out. But there's some absolutely gorgeous writing in it, and it's, again, really groundbreaking. It's a story, a black queer love story, but it also. The story about a black family accepting their queer son, which was. This is 1979. So I think this is historically important, aesthetically important, and I think people are returning to it these days.
- [36:01]
B
One of the things I love about a love story is that it teaches you how to read Baldwin. For instance, you have a passage when you're discussing a fire next time you write. Finally, in what will become some of his most famous lines, with their canny slippage between the us and we of black Americans, white Americans and all Americans. A rhetorical strategy he had been building for years. That idea, the slippage of the US and the we. That close reading made me think, I'm gonna go back and read everything Baldwin has written and keep an eye out for specifically that. Given that I'm curious, for anybody who is reading Baldwin, what's something that you think that they should look out for in addition to the US and the we? But what's something that you think, oh, Baldwin was really experimenting with blank or this was a strategy that he perfected throughout his work. What should people be looking out for?
- [36:56]
C
There was a book club around the centennial, so they read all of Baldwin's work almost, and then they read my biography. So it was fascinating to get their questions. I think they need to look out for the connections between the fiction and the nonfiction. How does he render this problem of American innocence in his essays versus how does he turn it into narrative? Through David, for example? David cannot accept him sexuality, but he also can't really come to terms with his whiteness. Baldwin says, you're only white if you think you're white. And David was deeply invested, not only in his heterosexuality and his whiteness. These were things that he was writing about in his essays too. So that's what I would be on.
- [37:33]
B
The lookout for, the connections between both. And then my last question. This is not about Baldwin's work overall, it's about your book itself and its content. Going to be a strange one. But bear with me. If your book could talk, what would it whisper to someone who is walking past it from the shelf to entice them to read it?
- [37:52]
C
I think it would whisper to them the epigraph from the book, which is Love is the only reality, the only terror, and the only hope.
- [37:59]
B
Beautiful. Beautiful. Nicholas, this has been great. Thank you so much for this book for talking to me. This has been super, super fun from you too.
- [38:07]
C
Thanks so much. Mj.
- [38:10]
B
That was my interview with Nicholas Boggs about his new James Baldwin biography, Baldwin A Love Story. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. Running a business means I wear lots of hats. Luckily, when it's time to put on my hiring hat, I can count on LinkedIn to make it easy. I can post a job for free or pay to promote it and get three times more qualified candidates. Imagine finding your next great hire in 24 hours. 86% of small businesses do with LinkedIn. I can also easily share my job with my network. No other job site lets me do that. Post your free job@LinkedIn.com Pandora that's LinkedIn.com Pandora. Terms and conditions apply.