MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A hefty new biography of James Baldwin is asking us to read the celebrated writer and civil rights leader through a new lens. "Baldwin: A Love Story" by Nicholas Boggs centers Baldwin's male lovers, along with his family and many friends, in order to better understand him and his works. To learn about the book, we took a trip to Harlem, New York, where Baldwin was born, with author and scholar Nicholas Boggs.
NICHOLAS BOGGS: Here we are at James Baldwin Place at 128th Street and 5th Avenue. He and his family moved around a lot in this area.
MARTIN: Yeah, like a lot of people without money.
BOGGS: Yeah, exactly.
MARTIN: You got kicked out of places. You got to move. Plus, they had a lot of kids in that house. He was - what? - the oldest of - what? - nine?
BOGGS: The oldest of nine.
MARTIN: Nine.
BOGGS: Yeah. Yes.
MARTIN: So...
BOGGS: And I believe this is his school, P.S. 24, down here, where he met Bill Miller, and she's the one who took him to see plays and movies and really changed his life. And they would be...
MARTIN: How old was he when he was in her class?
BOGGS: Ten.
MARTIN: He was 10 years old.
BOGGS: Ten. And he was reading "A Tale Of Two Cities," and so was she. And she was blown away by his intelligence. And - but she also recognized that he wasn't being challenged in school because this was an overbooked school, too many students. So she took it upon herself to take him out. And eventually, she became part of the family, even. She was...
MARTIN: Just a few blocks from Baldwin's elementary school sits another cornerstone of his education, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which was expanded from the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library.
BOGGS: Well, he may have been exaggerating a little bit, but he said that by the time he was, like, 15, he had read everything in the library. And so it was a sanctuary for him and it was life-changing.
MARTIN: The Schomburg is now home to the James Baldwin papers, a vast archive documenting Baldwin's career. Nicholas Boggs and I sat down for our conversation there.
For people who aren't as familiar with James Baldwin as others might be, just situate him for us. Why was he such a towering figure?
BOGGS: James Baldwin's face was on the cover of Time magazine in 1963, OK? And this is the sort of - the height of the Civil Rights Movement. So he - if for no other reason, he's important because he is a titan of that movement. He was the voice of Black America. He was appearing on television all the time.
MARTIN: Here's James Baldwin on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1969.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE DICK CAVETT SHOW")
JAMES BALDWIN: The word Negro in this country is - really is designed, finally, to disguise the fact of when he's talking about another man, a man like you, who wants what you want. And insofar as American public wants to think there has been progress, they overlook one very simple thing. I don't want to be given anything by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself.
MARTIN: He was what we called a public intellectual. I don't even know if we used that term back then, but he was what we'd call a public intellectual.
BOGGS: He was an absolute celebrity. I mean, he was best friends with people like Marlon Brando, Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte - you name it. I mean, he - when it came to Black America, there'd never been anything quite like that in this country.
MARTIN: What was his message?
BOGGS: Well, his message was a message about love and that is part of why that's the focus of this book. His message was that, as he put it in "The Fire Next Time," only love will throw open the gates to liberation. And he thought that Blacks and whites had to come together like lovers, as he put it, and really excavate the past and the present, come to a kind of mutual recognition and understanding by really confronting the past - not erasing, not pretending that slavery and its legacies were somehow gone.
And he had - the concept that he used was innocent. He said, white Americans have to not pretend that they are innocent. The innocence constitutes the crime.
MARTIN: He's known for his incisive, hard-hitting commentaries about race. But one of the points that you make in the book is that he talked about how race as a form of oppression doesn't live alone. It's connected to all these other forms of oppression, around sexuality, around gender. And, you know, we have words for that now. We call it intersectionality. But I don't think that too many other intellectuals were thinking in those terms or talking in those terms at that time. I mean, how was that received?
BOGGS: Well, his essays early in his career, and for most of his career, were really about, you know, race relations, right? However, his insights into sexuality were key. He felt menaced by his sexuality - right? - by these categories. So he really had to think about it, and he had to think about the way that miscegenation - right? - at the heart of enslavement in this country, was to sexualize dynamically.
But he said - when he asked why he wrote "Giovanni's Room," he said, if I hadn't written this novel, I don't know if I could have ever written again. This was something in himself that he had to confront - right? - his own sexuality. And he said, no one could blackmail him then. You didn't tell me. I told you. That's what he said. So this is how he kind of rejected these systems of domination in terms of these identities.
MARTIN: We look at his body of work now and we think, oh, my gosh, he was so productive, but he had many periods where he was really struggling. He was struggling to get published. He was struggling to get his career off the ground. He had many projects that never saw fruition. Do you think that those are all related? How do you understand that?
BOGGS: Listen, I think Baldwin was a human being, and that's one of the things that I really tried to sort of explore and get across in this book. And in some ways, yes, he had some difficult relationships, shall we say. But what struck me as I wrote the book was actually how incredible it was that he had these relationships that sustained him for so long and came in and out.
So Baldwin loved his family here in Harlem, but he was living most of his life abroad, so he had to construct these alternative kinship structures, right? So Beauford Delaney was his spiritual father. Then Lucien Happersberger, his first great love in Paris - they were together on and off for years. Yeah, they had some really rocky times, but it was Lucien who came to his bedside and was there when he died.
I mean, they became like family. The same with Engin Cezzar, who I also explore, his Turkish friend - Yoran Cazac, as well. So while his - he had these frustrations, he also provides a model for, like, a kind of expansive, sort of erotic and platonic life with other people that can move in and out of these different iterations. However, there is no denying that difficulties of racism and homophobia had a very, very negative impact on him.
MARTIN: What would you say is Baldwin's legacy?
BOGGS: It is a legacy of love. It's a difficult love. It's a risky love. It's not a - it's not, like, this easy, romantic love. He always said that love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. And that's because his journey to self love was difficult, right? But the journey that we're on now in America to reclaim our humanity is also going to be a battle and a war.
And I don't mean that in terms of weapons. I mean that internally, inside of us, as Americans, coming to really trying to truly see each other as human beings.
MARTIN: Nicholas Boggs, thank you so much for talking with us.
BOGGS: It's great to be here, Michel.
MARTIN: Nicholas Boggs is the author of "Baldwin: A Love Story."
(SOUNDBITE OF CHASTITY BELT'S "IT'S OBVIOUS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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