As a child in Harlem, James Baldwin (1924-1987) hewed to his family\u2019s strict Baptist beliefs and would have known I Corinthians 13, the New Testament\u2019s famous \u201clove chapter,\u201d verse by verse.<\/p>\n
Nicholas Boggs\u2019 magisterial \u201cBaldwin,\u201d the first biography of the author in 30 years, employs love as the organizing principle, depicting his m\u00e9tier through the prism of intimate (mostly non-sexual) relationships with four men \u2014 queer Black artist Beauford Delaney; Lucien Happersberger, a perennial muse; Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor; and Yoran Cazac, a French painter. They grounded him emotionally and powered his literary work.<\/p>\n
Boggs\u2019 book passes from man to man like a baton, each embodying a phase of Baldwin\u2019s life, but with ample space to detour among other friendships and flings, travels and travails. Delaney mentored the youth amid Greenwich Village\u2019s postwar flowering, encouraging him to transform a poor self-image \u2014 \u201cToo bookish. Too sensitive. Too undersized. Too effeminate.\u201d \u2014 into creative jet fuel.<\/p>\n
Happersberger, then 17, met Baldwin in a Paris club and haunted him for decades, flitting in and out of the author\u2019s sphere. Cezzar, a literal \u201cblood brother,\u201d (they once cut their arms and pressed the wounds together) and his wife provided food and lodging in their Istanbul sanctuary. And in the 1970s Baldwin reconnected with Cazac, a former acquaintance, also married.<\/p>\n
Boggs underscores a fundamental dynamic: \u201cThe push and pull of a distant, lost love he perpetually sought to retrieve and could sometimes manage to achieve, at least partially, only to lose it again, was becoming integral to Baldwin\u2019s creative process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Around this axis of characters Boggs structures his book. A social butterfly with a taste for scotch, Baldwin adored his celebrity and accomplished more when away from New York. He composed his debut, \u201cGo Tell It on the Mountain,\u201d in Happersberger\u2019s family\u2019s Swiss chalet and struggled through \u201cAnother Country\u201d during an Istanbul sojourn. Both a perfectionist and a procrastinator, he was sluggish with fiction, defaulting to screenwriting and essays for income.<\/p>\n
The Civil Rights Movement drew Baldwin back stateside, where he clashed and collaborated with figures such as the Kennedys, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, Lena Horne, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boggs argues for the author\u2019s talent across genres, but it\u2019s Baldwin\u2019s political criticism that soars highest. <\/p>\n
Boggs offers fresh insights throughout his final section, based on interviews with Cazac. He serves up a feast of gossip and speculation, which succeeds brilliantly as narrative, less so as morality tale. Boggs targets our nation\u2019s myths and hypocrisy with dead-eyed accuracy, yet keeps aloof from his protagonist\u2019s dalliances with vulnerable young men, some teenagers. He bathes Baldwin in a halo of light while stopping shy of hagiography \u2014 there are too many juicy stories to tell! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a child in Harlem, James Baldwin (1924-1987) hewed to his family\u2019s strict Baptist beliefs and would have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-60659","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}