The biographer’s Baldwin: A Love Story unpacks James Baldwin’s life and work through accounts of his four most significant relationships.
How did you decide which relationships would mark meaningful chapters in Baldwin’s life?
Beauford Delaney, the incredible Black American painter, was Baldwin’s mentor. They met when he was 16. It was very clear that, in terms of his early life, that had to be the figure. Then, as soon as Baldwin got to Paris, he fell in love with Lucien Happersberger and he ended up dedicating Giovanni’s Room to him, so it was obvious that Lucien would be second. And it was obvious that Yoran Cazac would be fourth. The trickier one, the one that didn’t come as quickly, was Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor. The ’60s were this massive time in Baldwin’s life, but he spent a lot of time in Istanbul, and it was Engin whom he followed there. That’s where he finished Another Country. It’s where he wrote The Fire Next Time. But the book doesn’t just focus on men. You’ll see that many women were important to his life: Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Mary Painter. I try to layer in all of these important relationships.
What light did the lens of Baldwin’s relationships shed on his civil rights work?
If you look at The Fire Next Time, which is divided into two essays, the letter to the nephew is really about the Black family and Black love. He’s writing to his nephew about the importance of self-esteem and finding a way to love white people despite their racism. Then he imagines Black and white Americans as lovers, as collaborators, who together have to figure out how to confront the past and present of white supremacy and together imagine a different future. He wrote about how he could not have come to these understandings if he hadn’t left America, so that he could reflect back on it, and if he hadn’t met Lucien Happersberger, who allowed him to really experience love outside of his family for the first time. These relationships enabled him to look beyond the false divisions of race and nation that he understood were strangling America at the time and continue to strangle this country.
What was the biggest surprise to you in researching Baldwin’s life?
I went to see Beatrice Cazac, who was the wife of Yurin Cazac, and she found an unpublished love poem that Baldwin wrote to her husband. I’ll never forget there was a rusty paper clip on it because she hadn’t looked at it in what must have been 40 years. We stood there as the sun set and she translated it to me. A seven-page poem and she read the whole thing, this beautiful moving love poem. It was about missing him. Baldwin was writing about waking up in the morning and wondering what he was doing all the way in Italy. It was a very intimate, moving evocation of distance and loss, which was a huge part of Baldwin’s writing.
