James Baldwin met Marlon Brando at an adjacent urinal in the men’s bathroom at the New School for Social Research when they were both 19 years old and dreaming of success as, respectively, a writer and an actor – just a few years before each became among the mid-century’s most famous Americans. They wound up life-long friends – and maybe something more, as author Nicholas Boggs speculates in Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 720 pages), the first major biography in three decades of James Baldwin (1924-1987), the Harlem-born writer and civil rights activist probably best known for his coming-of-age novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” and his collections of eloquent essays on race and racial justice, “Notes of a Native Son” and “The Fire Next Time.”
Boggs’ conclusion: The evidence for a sexual relationship between Baldwin and Brando is “inconclusive.” But this doesn’t stop him from bringing it up repeatedly, such as during his account of the March on Washington in 1963, because Baldwin and Brando were photographed holding hands near the Lincoln Memorial.
Boggs’ speculation about whether Brando and Baldwin had sex is an example in this biography of how Baldwin’s homosexuality serves as the prism through which we’re asked to view his life and art. Boggs’ approach is in part a reaction to previous Baldwin biographers who completely avoided the subject, or else presented it too gingerly, using pseudonyms, as if the people Baldwin loved needed protection. It also fits in with a literary argument that Boggs makes explicitly about Baldwin’s work — that his sexuality (more precisely, his grappling with it in print) is central to the enduring power of his fiction, producing an unprecedented depiction of Black same-sex love whose importance and influence “has not received its due.”
This is not to say that Baldwin’s homosexuality is the sole subject of the book. Far from it. Most of his interactions even with Brando (who is a relatively minor figure in the narrative) illustrate the breadth and depth of Baldwin’s interests and activities. There is much, to pick a prominent example, about his role as what he liked to call a “public witness” (what others called a spokesman) for Black people in America, in his public writing and public appearances, as well as in his private correspondence. Theater lovers might be surprised at how interested and involved Baldwin was throughout his life in writing and directing plays: In his high school yearbook he listed his desired occupation as “novelist/playwright”; he apprenticed to director Elia Kazan on two productions, Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth,” which he liked, and Archibald MacLeish’s “JB,” which he loathed, before writing his own two plays on Broadway, “Blues for Mister Charlie” and “The Amen Corner”; the final literary work of his life was a play entitled “The Welcome Table”
But “Baldwin: A Love Story” is framed by Baldwin’s intimate relationships with four men. Their names are used in the titles of the book’s four main sections:
Book I: Beauford: The Greenwich Village Years, 1940-1948
Book II: Lucien: The Paris Years, 1948 – 1955
Book III. Engin: The Transatlantic Years
Book IV: Yoran: The Saint-Paul-de-Vence Years, 1971 – 1976
Baldwin developed strong emotional bonds with each of these men; he also collaborated with them artistically. But their relationships revolved around sexual attraction, albeit in complicated ways. Three of the four married women and had families either before, during or after their romance with Baldwin, and the fourth’s sexual yearning for Baldwin was not reciprocated.
Boggs makes a persuasive case for each of these men having an impact on Baldwin’s life and his writing. I was far less convinced, however, that I needed to read so much minutia about their comings and goings. These details make this 700-page book harder to get through than a biography of Baldwin should be. Seven hundred pages is not inherently too long for a life so full and consequential, and there is plenty in it that’s fascinating. But “Baldwin: A Love Story” would be more readable if there were a lot fewer pages about his day-to-day and month-to-month interactions with these four, as well as with some of his other romantic partners.
Beauford Delaney is the most vivid and significant of the four, a Black, gay painter who was beset with mental health struggles throughout his life, but was widely beloved, and greatly respected professionally (His portrait of opera star Marian Anderson hangs in the National Portrait Gallery; Georgia O’Keefe painted his portrait.) Delaney was in his late 30’s in 1940, when 15-year-old Baldwin, at the urging of his best friend from high school, paid a visit to Delaney in his studio in Greenwich Village. The painter became Baldwin’s most prominent mentor – but not his first. Growing up the oldest of nine siblings in a financial and (thanks to his stepfather) emotionally impoverished family, Baldwin had impressed several of his teachers who found him extraordinarily intelligent and well-read. They in effect helped him to escape. The drama teacher at PS 24 began taking him from age ten to attend plays, Including the famous Orson Welles all-Black production of Macbeth.
Delaney introduced Baldwin to jazz, and taught him how to see. (“I learned about light from Beaufort, the light contained in everything and every surface and every face.”) Baldwin would say that Delaney guided him to understand that “great art could be created only out of love.” (Delaney fell in love with Baldwin, Boggs says, but assures us that the relationship stayed platonic.)
It was Delaney who helped Baldwin get a fellowship that allowed him to travel to Paris, a destination from which he never quite fully returned; he primarily resided abroad for the rest of life, although keeping homes in New York. Delaney would soon join him in France, and stay there. In later years, the relationship reversed, with Baldwin trying to take care of his often ailing friend.
Once in Paris, in a gay bar called La Reine Blanche (the White Queen), Baldwin, at age 24, met Lucien Happersberger, who was a 17-year-old aspiring painter from Switzerland. Baldwin declared him the love of his life, and credited him with helping him finally finish his first novel, “Go Tell It On The Mountain.’ He did this both by the calming effect their romance had on Baldwin, but also by providing him with the proverbial room of one’s own in which to write in peace and solitude, having invited him to stay in his mother’s (otherwise empty) chalet in a small scenic Swiss village. (When the publisher Alfred Knopf expressed interest in the novel, but wanted to meet its author in New York, it was the now rich-and-famous Brando who paid the plane ticket from Europe for his not-yet-solvent friend.)
Happersberger soon got a woman pregnant – they named their first child Luc-James – and, after that marriage fell apart, married Diana Sands, who was a star in the first of Baldwin’s two Broadway plays, “Blues for Mister Charlie,” which greatly upset Baldwin, seeing it as a betrayal. This is just a small sample of The Drama of Jimmy and Lucien, decades (and pages) filled with hope and heart and heartbreak.
Baldwin next fell hard for Engin Cezzar, a young actor whom he met while seeking to cast for the play he was writing based on his second novel “Giovanni’s Room.” Cezzar was from Turkey, and became a breakout star there playing “Hamlet,” which scuttled plans for their collaboration on Baldwin’s play (which never got out of workshop), but led to other things. Visiting Cezzar in Istanbul, Baldwin fell in love with the city, frequently traveling back there – not least because Cezzar (and soon his new wife) provided a supportive atmosphere (much as Happersberger had) that helped him work on his writing, starting with his next novel “Another Country.”
Cezzar and his wife made it possible for Baldwin to direct a production of John Herbert’s “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” in Istanbul, in Turkish, which was a huge hit, although an eventual target of government censorship.
Boggs’ writing comes alive in recounting Baldwin’s involvement with the final of the four men, the French painter Yoran Cazac, because the biographer got to meet Cazac – and his wife, and his kids, in what reads initially like a kind of detective story. Boggs was responsible for rediscovering and republishing “Little Man, Little Man,” an unusual “children’s book for adults” that Baldwin wrote and Cazac illustrated.
It was Boggs’ discovery of that book as an undergraduate that led him to a research project into Baldwin‘s life and art that wound up lasting three decades. Baldwin and his books had fascinated him even before that, as a gay kid growing up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Washington, whose teammates on the high school basketball team nicknamed him “Politics,” because they felt the only reason the coach had put him on the squad was so that it wouldn’t be all-Black.
It was only after many years and many conversations, Boggs writes, “that I realized what I had been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story.”
But love according to Baldwin’s definition: In one of his essays, initially entitled “Down At The Cross,” but appearing as “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in the New Yorker magazine in 1962, James Baldwin wrote:
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth”
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