Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs; Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 654 pp., $35
In his 2005 book, Democracy Matters, Cornel West calls James Baldwin “this black American Socrates.” I’ve always liked this description of Baldwin. He was a man, after all, who—like Socrates—implored us to “drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question that it hides.” But there are also ways in which the comparison fails. Socrates, at least as he is presented to us by Plato, seems almost superhuman. He can drink all night with his interlocutors, and when the whole lot of them are passed out or gone away, he can walk off, seemingly unfazed. When the incredibly gorgeous and hungry Alcibiades tries to seduce him, Socrates has the iron will to resist. Whatever the truth of these stories, they describe a Socrates who does not fit well with Baldwin, someone who was all too human.
Nicholas Boggs’s masterly Baldwin: A Love Story captures both the Socratic and the not-so-Socratic Baldwin. Boggs plumbs the depths of his subject’s brilliant mind, taking the reader on a literary tour-de-force, from Baldwin’s earliest days as a student writer to his attempts to finish a play on his deathbed. But throughout this literary journey, the reader is confronted with the fact that “Baldwin was a human being, not just a face on a poster or a sound bite.” His achievement, Boggs asserts, was his ability to use “the messiness of being human” as the raw materials for his writing.
Baldwin: A Love Story arrives in the midst of a renaissance of works about one of the 20th century’s most important voices. Numerous monographs about Baldwin from scholars of African-American studies, literature, theology, queer studies, political theory, and history have been published, and more are on the way. An Academy Award–nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, has been released; a scholarly journal, James Baldwin Review, established; theatrical adaptations of Baldwin’s stories staged and filmed; moments of his life dramatized in various other media. The list goes on.
But Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story stands out. The book is being billed as “the first major biography” of Baldwin in three decades, the reference point being David Leeming’s James Baldwin: A Biography, published in 1994. Since then, there have been many Baldwin books that offer deep biographical insights, but none are quite the birth-to-death, door-stopper sort of a book that qualifies as a major biography. Boggs’s is also the first such work to have made use of the James Baldwin Papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, released in 2017. Access to the archive is highly restricted and permits no photography, scanning, or photocopying. Perhaps even more vexing, some of the most precious artifacts—including correspondence between Baldwin and his brother David; letters received by Baldwin from the American economist Mary Painter; and correspondence between Baldwin and the love of his life, Lucien Happersberger—are off limits to scholars until 2037.
Boggs makes expert use of Leeming’s own archive, but perhaps more significantly, he captures Leeming’s importance as a character in Baldwin’s story.
Given those constraints, Boggs’s accomplishment is magnificent. I was impressed, first of all, by how he dealt with writing this book in the large shadow cast by Leeming’s extraordinary precedent. Leeming knew and worked closely with Baldwin for a quarter of a century. He was Baldwin’s friend, present at the writer’s bedside when he died from stomach cancer in 1987, and at one point, close to becoming Baldwin’s lover. So when Leeming describes Baldwin as a “highly complex, troubled, and driven individual,” his words carry particular weight.
Boggs’s approach is important not only for the craft of biography but also for how he enhances the richness of his narrative. He cites Leeming liberally and makes expert use of Leeming’s own archive, but perhaps more significantly, he captures Leeming’s importance as a character in Baldwin’s story. I was especially moved by Boggs’s treatment of letters between Baldwin and Leeming in 1965, when Baldwin, writing from Istanbul, expressed interest in exploring a romantic relationship. At the time, Baldwin was stuck on various writing projects and still deeply depressed after the deaths earlier in the year of Lorraine Hansberry and Malcolm X. “This note turned into what I suppose is really a love letter—it may, indeed, be my first,” Baldwin wrote. He sent this plea across the abyss, knowing that he might not get the response he thought he wanted. “I know that you are very good for me,” he told Leeming. “I’m far from certain that I’m good for you.” Leeming, in turn, tersely encouraged Baldwin to stay in Turkey and focus on his work. In a heartbreakingly vulnerable reply, Baldwin wondered whether his love letters had been lost in the mail. One cannot help but feel a pit in one’s stomach on reading these lines. There’s nothing quite like that feeling—of pleading one’s love to another, only to have that love go unrequited. In this case, Leeming and Baldwin were able to reestablish their love on different grounds.
Boggs’s careful and thoughtful treatment of the Leeming-Baldwin relationship is illustrative of his approach throughout the book. He works with a vast array of source materials, but perhaps the most revelatory of these are Baldwin’s letters to Mary Painter, one of his best friends. To understand the closeness of their relationship, imagine yourself so depressed that you’ve taken an overdose of sleeping pills, only to realize moments later that it was a terrible mistake. Whom would you call? Baldwin’s answer to that question, when he did just this in 1956: Mary Painter. She was, in the parlance of our times, Baldwin’s “ride or die.”
His letters to Painter cover every possible subject, personal and professional. In them, we get a sense of his dramatic swings between elation and anguish. We see in these letters, so expertly explored by Boggs, a portrait of Baldwin as a brilliant and tortured man who desperately tried to do what he commanded of others: Face up to your suffering and figure out how to use it to create more love, more freedom, and more justice in the world. Baldwin knew that most of us, most of the time, cannot really bear this responsibility. On the page, for the eyes of one of his best friends, we see Baldwin grappling with that challenge. He was so desperate to live up to his ideals as a warrior poet. And yet, he was so often reminded of the fragility of his body, mind, and soul.
Baldwin was a giant of American letters, but he was also a human being. He had an extraordinary genius for joy and friendship, just as he likewise suffered spells of deep alienation from everyone around him. He felt, as he put it, like “a stranger everywhere.” Boggs has wrestled with this stranger, and the results are brilliant.