The Artist Who Took a Young James Baldwin Under His Wing

All of James Baldwin’s writings come back to one thing: love in the raw. No biographer since David Leeming, Baldwin’s hand-selected Boswell, has better captured that basic truth of this essential writer than Nicholas Boggs, whose new, authoritative, and comprehensive biography frames Baldwin’s life as a series of love stories.

Boggs has wisely broken down Baldwin: A Love Story into four distinct parts—or “books,” as he calls them—in the style of Baldwin’s novels. Each book is centered around a beloved in Baldwin’s life, and like Baldwin’s fiction, is a run-on, burst-dam flow of incident. In three cases, these “beloveds” were romantic lovers and partners: the painter Lucien Happersberger (whom Baldwin was with from 1948–55), the actor Engin Cezzar (1957–70), and the painter Yoran Cazac (1971–76). Each story ended in a clamorous breakup.

But the first book of the biography tells the story of a more enduring connection: Baldwin’s relationship with the artist Beauford Delaney, whose colors still swirl and shock with the force they did in the 1940s. Unlike with the other three beloveds, it is unclear whether Delaney or Baldwin consummated their relationship, making their story thrum with a particular melancholy. Delaney weaves in and out of the rest of Baldwin’s life. He is mentor, sight, ray of gold, and potential.

“I learned about light from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in every thing, every surface, every face,” Baldwin wrote in 1964, two decades after meeting the artist. He had been only 17 when a friend in his high school English class told Baldwin, “You have to meet this wonderful man in the Village.” He was a painter. He was Black. And he and Baldwin would surely, thought the friend, get along. They met one afternoon at the faded brick tenement on 181 Greene Street, once described by Henry Miller as a “heavenly abode full of canvases mad with color.” The studio was warmed, Baldwin remembers, by “a black pot-bellied stove.” Amid the craze of paintings, he spotted an old Vitrola photograph, from which Delaney—who was thirty-something when they met—would play scratchy 45s of blues and jazz music all day. This apprenticeship—the elder and his budding charge—took up where Baldwin’s cinephile teacher, a young white woman named Bill Miller, left off, stoking a lit wick of creativity within Baldwin. Baldwin would learn in Delaney’s studio how to listen carefully to blues and early jazz, and to embrace both as part of his cultural heritage.

The intermedia nature of these lessons would not soon be lost on Baldwin, who would later write that “when I realized that music rather than American literature was really my language, I was no longer afraid. And then I could really write.” The writer would go on to boldly start off his first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955), by decrying his chosen métier of literature as work within “the disastrously explicit medium of language.”

Boggs prefaces his Delaney section with the closing lines of Baldwin’s essay on the painter: “Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe—that he is a great painter, among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.” Hard-hearted intellectual types would have it that a dirty, sentimentalized concept like “love” has no place in critical writing or in history, that the worst sin one can commit would be to confuse the artist with the artwork. But frankly, that’s overly formal, dehumanizing bullshit. Boggs’s biography shows why, reminding us that one’s life and one’s art are inevitably intertwined. We learn that Delaney got Baldwin his first gig as a waiter at the Calypso, a West Indian restaurant formerly on MacDougal Street in Manhattan. He describes scenes at Delaney’s studio, where Baldwin, “still clothed in his robes,” would “fall asleep nestled at his mentor’s feet as he played guitar and sang to him.” He writes that Baldwin “desperately” needed Delaney to show him that a life shaping the mind and soul through beauty was possible. As Baldwin’s phlegmatic analyst, Boggs sees with precision how each part connects to a whole—the loves, the novels, the TV appearances, the drama with Black and white intellectuals, the breakups, the essays, the darting round the world.

Perhaps, as Louis Menand suggests in his pedantic, irritating little review of this big book in the New Yorker, there is a silent doxa of significance, agreed upon by experts and the taste-afflicted, that Baldwin deviates from. He says that “it is hard to deny” that Baldwin’s work “deteriorated” as he went on in his writing career. (It’s easy to deny, too. Watch.) The good stuff is, per Menand’s bland metrics, Baldwin’s early, “autobiographical” novels (Go Tell it on the Mountain, 1953, and Giovanni’s Room, 1856) and the essays, (collected in Notes of a Native Son, 1955, and Nobody Knows My Name, 1961). But for my money, Baldwin’s artistic journey didn’t really get going until the still massively underrated, critical and commercial failure that is Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Going (1968), and surely climaxes with the howlingly sustained bursts, jags, and arias of Just Above My Head (1979)—for me his finest achievement. Boggs’s book does not indulge tedious rankings.

Through it all, Delaney endures. As Baldwin’s star rises, Delaney’s falters, afflicted by hallucinations and voices in his head urging suicide after a brutal assault in Washington Square Park, in which white youths attacked him and called him a “n***er queer.” As Boggs writes, “Fears about evil white men raping or castrating him would become a major component of his nightmares.” Yet “painting was [Delaney’s] defense against the voices, an escape and a transformation of the social and psychological forces that dogged him.” It was color and form and beauty, but it was hard won. Baldwin remained a loyal friend, sustaining him through these trials. Here, now, is one of several remarkable stories Boggs unearths by making use of extensive unearthed correspondence, including a letter explaining his plan to help Delaney recover. Wracked with guilt over abandoning his friend at times when work and the dubious pluses of fame came knocking, Baldwin wrote out his thoughts with his distinctive vulnerability: “I don’t feel I have the right to turn against [Beauford], or abandon him as old age stretches beneath him. He was very, very good to me when not many people were. I owe him, really, more than I can ever repay [and] he is still, in spite of everything, one of the most lovable and, even, heroic people that I know.”

Of course, just as there will always be a gulf separating us from our loves, we won’t get to the heart of any artist, and we’ll never be able to access their core. Baldwin’s full correspondence with four people—Mary Painter, Lucien, David Baldwin (his brother), and Delaney himself—remains sealed from public access until 2037. Even when the great day comes when we can read those emotional hurricanes, we won’t find him all there. But Boggs has undoubtedly come the closest after Leeming (one of Baldwin’s own best friends) to encapsulating the inner workings that make his writing propulsive, truth-revealing, boundary-breaking, and perpetually hungry for that love, to that sense of completion, which may forever elude us.