Honoring a Pioneer: "Baldwin: A Love Story" Book Talk

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[00:01:10]The text series aims to highlight recently published work by members of the Yale and the community probably speaking who have done their thinking and writing locally often with Yale's archives and collections. It is a forum in which we hope speakers and audiences can have a conversation about sustained modes of intellectual and creative inquiry in the process of researching and crafting arguments, ideas, and language in such a way that engagement with library collections results in a contribution to those collections in a book in other words. You can learn more about our continuing lineup by signing up for our mailing list which you can do at the refreshment table on the other side of the mezzanine.

[00:01:45]Um, it is amazing to see everyone gathered here today to talk and think about James Baldwin together. Um, it is a special honor to have Trevor Baldwin here with us today. Um, really thrilled to to continue this sustained connection between uh the Beinecke and Yale Library and Baldwin family.

[00:02:02]Um, and we are also thrilled to host a conversation about Baldwin, a love story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three years and one that endeavors to explore love as a central subject in Baldwin's life and work. It is premised around Baldwin's relationships, romantic and platonic, and tells the story of his life with a focus on how those relationships sustained him, impacted his work and thinking, and otherwise changed his experience as a human and a novelist. To that end, it is a remarkable work in its personal quality, submerging the reader in Baldwin's perspective and shifting frames of mind while also reflecting on the ways in which he was a thinker ahead of his time and his ability to link seemingly disparate human experiences as part of the process of making sense of his own life.

[00:02:43]To quote a glowing review in The New York Times by Hilton Als Baldwin, "The reader is immersed in the man of Baldwin, the chaos and the preternatural talent, the tragedy and the aching heart, the flesh that itches to be touched, and the voice that will not be suppressed." On top of its human as work biography, it is also a deep exploration of Baldwin's archives, including those portions housed here at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which first sparked the author's curiosity in his time as an undergraduate here.

[00:03:08]I think he will share the specifics of that encounter with everyone and how it contributed to the development of the work being discussed today.

[00:03:14]Uh, but Nicholas Boggs is a writer with many other notable achievements, including a new edition of Baldwin's children's book Little Man, Little Man, a story of childhood, which he co-edited and helped bring back into circulation after 40 years out of print. And he has contributed to anthologies including The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Beckett and Baldwin, The Arts of Gwendolyn and James Baldwin.

[00:03:35]He is the recipient of numerous writing honors, including a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Guilder Learning Center at Yale, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Walter O. Evans Fellowship, the Schomburg Center's Scholars-in-Residence Program, the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at the McDowell He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD from Columbia.

[00:04:01]Joining him in conversation is Jacqueline Goldsby, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and of English at Yale University. She specializes in African American literary criticism and cultural studies during the long century of Jim Crow segregation from 1865 to 1965. She is the author of the prize-winning The Spectacular Secret, which she American life and literature, and the widely acclaimed Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

[00:04:27]She's currently at work on a book about James Baldwin, The Business of Becoming Jimmy, and has founded two archival studies projects, Mapping the Stacks, a guide to Black Chicago's Hidden Archives, [clears throat] and the Black Bibliography Project, co-directed with Meredith McGill at Rutgers University.

[00:04:42]Nick and Jackie, it is a thrill to have you both uh with here to have you both with us here today. Please take it away. Thank you so much.

[00:04:52]>> [applause] >> First of all, this is so thank you everybody for being here. You know, we planned for this conversation to happen in February.

[00:05:05]Um, but a snowstorm blizzard kept us from coming together, but if this is better, this is better. It's a beautiful day.

[00:05:13]We're actually in the place where you did so much of the research for uh this book, and so thank you all for being here.

[00:05:20]And I want to start by saying thank you you to Nick for giving us a new view of Baldwin.

[00:05:28]Um, giving those of us who are reading for pleasure or for those of us who study and teach him as scholars, um, for giving us a new way to come at him in all of his complexities and all of the achievements that he carved out for us both in the way he lived his life and the literary legacy that he left us. I mean, you know, I I think I might be up here and say any one of the few people who's read the book cover to cover. All right, um, but I love that it's so big.

[00:05:59]I love that it's so long.

[00:06:01]Um, not only is it a testament to your own commitment and diligence and prowess as a researcher, but Baldwin's life is that complex, and you gave it the heft that it deserves.

[00:06:13]So, it's an honor reading it, and hopefully our conversation today will be a way into it if you have not already started the book.

[00:06:20]Um, but I thought I wanted to to begin our conversation with an interesting uh idea that that that you brought up in the interview, um, because it's such a massive, and I say this with absolute love and respect, such a massive talent that it really reads deftly from the first page to the last. It is a real page-turner.

[00:06:43]But you describe yourself as an accidental biographer.

[00:06:47]Like, how what was the accident that led you to write this this very brilliant and brave book?

[00:06:54]Well, you know, our sense were revised that because I thought it was an accident, but actually recently I spoke to my eighth grade English teacher in DC public schools where I first saw James Baldwin's face on the wall of the drawing, and I it's great to connect with him, but she told me that actually I repressed this, that I came in the next week in a suit and gave a presentation on his whole life in eighth grade. So, >> [laughter] >> I guess it was not an accident, but I just want to thank you, Jackie, for having me and so really honored to be in conversation with a scholar I admire so much. I want to thank Trevor Baldwin for being here.

[00:07:28]There are many friends and family here, so I'm not going to thank them, but I'm going to thank Beinecke Library, Walter O. Evans Fellowship, the Guilder Learning Center, Chelsea Sacks, and the Yale Library here. Thank you for all the support that got me through through Yale actually since way back in 1993.

[00:07:47]And that's part of the beautiful story of this book and for any rising seniors in the audience or graduating seniors, your whole entry into the world of Baldwin began as during your undergraduate years here, um, aiming towards a senior thesis. So, can you walk us through how Little Man, Little Man um entered into your academic training here at Yale and how it opened up to the book that we now have? Sure. So, I was an English major at Yale, and at that point African American Studies was not a department, it was a program.

[00:08:23]Um, but I saw all these amazing graduate students walking around campus like I remember Bernard Sears, she was one of them. Others [laughter] and who we were having these incredible conversations, and so I had something to look towards.

[00:08:36]Um, and I took a class on James Baldwin, the first one at Yale ever devoted just to his work. We read everything he'd ever written um, except this out of print children's book. And David Leeming had written this very important 1994 biography which we all owe so much to, but there were only about two paragraphs about Lucien Happersberger, this French artist. So, I wrote him like the second email of my life, literally, uh saying, "Do you know anything about Lucien Happersberger?" I sort of suspected that they were not just collaborators but potentially lovers, and I was curious.

[00:09:05]How was he a candidate? Well, he became the godfather to his son, much as he had become the godfather to the love of his life's son, Lucien Happersberger, and just the language that that he was using was very elusive.

[00:09:19]Um, so I wrote him the email, and he said, "I've never met Lucien Happersberger. I don't know anybody alive who did, and I believe he's dead."

[00:09:26]And I notified Beinecke, and it was incredible. Scans just came in of this out of print children's book for adults and adults book for children. It was written in black English. It had mature themes like police surveillance, alcoholism, drug addiction. So, I was curious about the book as a formal literary piece but also as a biographical text.

[00:09:48]Um, and so a few years later in 2003, I'm getting my PhD at Columbia. I'm in New York, really broke, living in a studio apartment. I write to Arts Soirées in Paris saying, "Do you know anything about this dead French artist?"

[00:10:00]And he wrote back with me my phone number. This is before cell phones. A few weeks later, my landline rings and there's this raspy French-accented voice of this old man saying, "I'm Beauford Delaney. I'm alive."

[00:10:13]>> [laughter] >> in Paris. I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy." And that's what set me off. That was the accidental part, I will say. I wanted to bring Beauford back in print. I wanted to tell this one slice of Beauford's life. But the further I got into it, the more I realized that I would have all kinds of other questions.

[00:10:31]Why don't we look at a short clip that will give you a feel for what this amazing um children's children's book is? For adults and not adults or children. We brought it back into print in January of your birthday in 2018. This is the trailer, 2-minute trailer.

[00:11:08]Music all up and down the street. TJ wants it every day. Soon as he get a little bit older, he going to jump the ropes.

[00:11:33]Blanky, she's just looking from across the street. Them eye glasses blinking just like the sun was hitting you in the eye. WT7, he ain't no excuse for him at all skipping rope and falling behind Blanky.

[00:11:48]The worst thing you can tell a little kid is that you talk down to him. You talk to him like he's a baby talk.

[00:11:55]This street long and real long. It a little like the street in the movies or on the TV where the cop cars come from that end of the street and then they come from the other end of the street and the man they come to get be in one of the houses or he'll fire escape or he'll on the roof. He's sweating and running and ducking but he don't fool.

[00:12:16]He not going to get off this street alive. [laughter] There's some trouble on the books.

[00:12:21]They have to come up on the books.

[00:12:24]Yes.

[00:12:25]>> [laughter] >> TJ real happy on Sunday mornings when his daddy be home all day and TJ and mama and daddy all eat breakfast together in the kitchen. TJ's mama is the most beautiful woman in the world.

[00:12:41]"I want you to be proud of your people."

[00:12:44]TJ's daddy always say.

[00:12:46]"They boss people."

[00:12:58]>> [music] [music] >> Thank you so much.

[00:13:11]>> [applause] >> I'm wondering since you know you're covering a lost work is a really important contribution scholarly contribution contribution to the readers of Baldwin as a as an as an editorial project. I'm wondering can you say a little bit more about what do we learn about Baldwin as a children's book author? Like what does this book teach us about his vision and craft?

[00:13:36]Well, it's dedicated to his his nephew Tejan Perry who smart who visited him when he was young and whenever Baldwin would come home to their house he wanted to hang out on 127th Street his nephew would say, "Uncle Jimmy Uncle Jimmy, when are you going to write a book about me?" And he said, "I'm working on it."

[00:13:55]He wasn't. But eventually he wrote it and and he really was considered sort of like a father figure to to his his his nephews but also to the children of the world as Beauford told me.

[00:14:09]So, I think it reveals this kind of deep avuncular relationship that he had to his family but also to children in general. I mean, he has so many amazing quotes about the importance of of children. And also I think it's around the same time later he wrote his essay "Black English in the Language of the Tell Me What It Is". So, it's really about the celebration of black vernacular as as a form of survival but also as an aesthetic form. He kind of brings those things together in this book.

[00:14:40]But the other achievement of this um Baldwin lost story is the scale up to biography, right? The whole project of not just recovering underread works or differently read works and sources but amassing that evidence into a story about Baldwin's life. Um and since we are in the Baldwin and I thought it would be great because so many uh epiphanies in the story um that that anchored the book happened in what sources you had access to here.

[00:15:12]So, I wanted if you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so it all began when I was held up in the paper and went down to to the glass vault reading around and they brought out "Little Man". But that experience going into these archives here and also importantly at the Schomburg has been one of the you know honors and excitements of my life. And the archives here have grown over as you know over the decades. Um but one important very important aspect and I think Nancy put together a beautiful exhibition of drawing on these letters a couple of years ago.

[00:15:46]Here in my hand, he's writing to his best friend Mary Painter, the woman he says he would have married if he could have married a woman. She's a French economist that he met soon after he moved to Paris. They became basically best friends. And he these letters he wrote her from all over the world but importantly his first trip in 1957 to the South. He went there on a magazine assignment. At this point he really thought of himself as a novelist artist but this is when he realized just the depth of the issues facing America.

[00:16:16]And that he had a unique opportunity to become as he put it a witness. However, this letter is written from the aging Gaston Motel which of course became an important site for Martin Luther King.

[00:16:27]So, headquarters in the South.

[00:16:29]This is in Birmingham and and Baldwin is actually writing on the stationary to Mary about having these psychosomatic illnesses from from fear, you know, from uh never been South before seeing the burning crosses reading the KKK pamphlets. And when he arrives back in New York City I just came from Grand Central. And he writes about arriving back in Grand Central with his suitcase full of manuscripts and documents and it just burst open in the middle of Grand Central.

[00:16:55]He did too emotionally. Kind of disappeared for four days. So, it took a lot out of him. This was a turning point when he realized that the South was important and that the black church which he had sort of rejected seeing Martin Luther King in the South reminded him that actually the black church was a place of community but also political mobilization. And those that kind of evidence you were able to tap into with there in his correspondence with Mary.

[00:17:19]He goes into great details about how he and Martin Luther King but also the fear all the fears that Beauford confronted there.

[00:17:27]So, Mary Painter becomes an important kind of ideologue here for you and for Baldwin as he kind of lands in Paris in 1948 and is deciding to make his way as a writer.

[00:17:38]Um and it's it's it's interesting that your biography really picks up with Baldwin as as an adult more so than the beginning of the the cradle story. Um which is to say if you could talk a little bit about the structure of the Um I hope you can it's it's small but if if you can walk us through the table of contents and how you've organized this book. Absolutely. So, the book is organized in four major sections. I call them books and each one probably probably is as long as one of those books. So, um there is a prologue where I began in his childhood but I don't begin like James Baldwin was born in 1924. Instead I begin with this pivotal moment when he's taken to see Betty Davis by his school teacher and he sees her eyes.

[00:18:22]It's this transformative moment for him.

[00:18:25]He realizes that he's actually not ugly and that actually his eyes are a source of power and they can be weapons. So, he harnesses it and puts it to use. But I do cover his childhood. But the first book one is Beauford and this begins when Baldwin moves down to Greenwich Village. Beauford Delaney you know now is a very well-known and important African American painter who's making himself for millions of dollars but at the time he was an eccentric figure in the village who took Baldwin under his wing and became his spiritual father as he put it. And they ended up constructing this intense lifelong bond.

[00:18:58]Kinship Beauford eventually followed him to Paris followed him to Istanbul.

[00:19:04]Painted these extraordinary portraits of him throughout his life.

[00:19:08]And he really taught Baldwin two things that a black man could be an artist as he put it and also how important love was to the artistic process and practice. So, here we have not the first portrait but an early portrait of Baldwin. He's moved to Greenwich Village and basically Beauford is trying to reflect back to Baldwin how he sees him as a young man worthy of love, right? And then the second one is actually never really been seen before thanks to to that archive preservation photographer. This is Beauford in 1966 work on paper when he visited Baldwin in his Istanbul estate with him for a summer. This is actually their living room in the house where they where they were saying.

[00:19:52]And what was You were the last in Baldwin's life as as a father, truly, as a spiritual mentor.

[00:20:01]But is there anybody else that Baldwin loved romantically? No. I'm curious to know what How How did that teaching play out in the course of your life with him?

[00:20:10]How do you understand Baldwin's greater desire, perhaps, to keep to understand Bu- as a mentor, as a spiritual leader, an artistic model? Yeah, I think this is a good example of something that happened frequently in Baldwin's life where you have these relationships that might be laced with some erotic interest on his part or on the part of the other person, but Baldwin was remarkably able to kind of transform his relationships into the ones that worked for both parties, but also that he needed creatively, right, in order to produce his works. All four of these figures, he dedicated novels to them, he collaborated with them, or as he put it, they saved his life. And he saved their lives as well. He credits Bu- with basically saving his life as well.

[00:21:00]But yes, Bu- was interested in him early on, but Baldwin said he couldn't have handled that at the time, and Bu- was a very reticent guy, actually. And so it quickly changed into this spiritual father, but like all familiar relationships, I can say this with some of my family here, it was complicated, right? And so they had moments where Bu- would get very envious of Baldwin's actual lovers, right? And would get into arguments and fights. You can see this reflected in the letters in the archives. But at the end of the day, it was an incredibly beautiful, uh, sustaining relationship that went all the way up through Bu-'s death in 1979.

[00:21:42]And then another chapter, another book that you constructed in the book. Right.

[00:21:51]Right. And I should note that though I structure the book through these four major relationships with men, Baldwin's relationships with important women are threaded throughout, like Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison.

[00:22:02]It tells all of these stories, but it focuses on these four because they had been undertold before, and because they were so important to the creative process.

[00:22:10]Baldwin, um, Baldwin would go through breakups, and then he would turn it into art. And it wouldn't just be I'll talk talk about Lucien in a second, but this happened around the same time. Baldwin's mentor, Richard Wright, Baldwin broke up with him, right, sort of ideologically and aesthetically in order to, right, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Very creatively productive for him to have these somewhat fractious breakups.

[00:22:34]Lucien has this breakup when he meets, uh, a year after he moves to Paris, uh, and Lucien is a young Swiss guy who wants to be a painter, and Baldwin falls ill cuz he can't finish his novel, really get started. And Lucien takes him away to his parents' uh, Swiss chalet.

[00:22:51]He pretends he has tuberculosis and gets some money from his father. And they go several times over the course of a year and a half. The first time he nurses Baldwin back to health, Baldwin doesn't have a title for the novel. He's the only white person in this Swiss village. He writes about it brilliantly in Stranger in the Village.

[00:23:08]But at this point, Lucien, uh, nurses him back to health, and then they go on a hike.

[00:23:13]And Baldwin almost slips, supposedly, and Lucien catches him, and then Baldwin looked at the light reflecting on the sun on the glacier, and that's when he came up with the title for the novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. The second time he went back, he found a voice for the novel because he brought Bessie Smith records with him, two of them, and played them. So, the third time he went back, uh, he finished the novel, but he also found out that Lucien's girlfriend was was a girlfriend and was pregnant, and they broke up, and that became kind of a model for later for Where do you see those the elements in Baldwin's life?

[00:23:52]Cuz that That That actually invites the a question about how do you understand the role of autobiography in Baldwin's fiction? Yeah. Right. And if Lucien gives us a way to think about a novel that many of us have probably read, Giovanni's Room, how do you see that tension playing out in the in the text itself?

[00:24:11]Yeah, but I mean, I think it's always dangerous for a biographer to turn to a literary text or a literary critic turn to a literary text and say, "This equals this equals this." I don't think that works. However, at the same time, unlike many novelists, Baldwin was not coy about the relationship between autobiography and fiction. In many, many interviews, he talks about how John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain is based on himself, that aspects of David and Giovanni are based on him.

[00:24:37]Particularly his later novels, which we'll get to, are very, very autobiographical. And Baldwin was very upfront about that. At the same time, he was making key changes and transforming them into art, obviously. Giovanni's Room is narrated by a closeted white American male. So, it's not Baldwin, right? He's turning it into something else, something different kinds of insights. Same thing with If Beale Street Could Talk, narrated by a pregnant black woman, Tish. That's not Baldwin, but it's very much based actually on his personal life as well.

[00:25:10]Istanbul.

[00:25:12]And then you see Istanbul, which chapter?

[00:25:15]Many of us are are aware of the sort of lore of Baldwin going to Paris in 1948 to 1957, transatlantic Atlantic communion, return and back to Berlin.

[00:25:26]Um, but Paris kind of organizes our sense of Baldwin leaving America. But Istanbul becomes very important to him and the relationships he builds there. So, can you talk about that? Sure. So, there's an interlude where we have book one, Bu-, and book two, Lucien. There's an interlude where Baldwin makes his first trip south. He's also in Corsica, which is a whole other interesting story.

[00:25:49]Uh, book three is about Engin Cezzar, a Magali brother-in-law that Baldwin wrote an incredibly important book about in the Turkish decade.

[00:25:56]Uh, so that's that's always the go-to text. But I did go over to Istanbul and spent a lot of time researching. My research assistant was Turkish. I took it very, very seriously as an important part of Baldwin's life because in fact, if you look at the letters or the FBI files, you learn that Baldwin spent like three quarters of the '60s in Istanbul. So, he finished Another Country out there. The Five Next Time, perhaps the economical 20th century text of American race relations, was primarily written in Istanbul. And And why did he go there? Well, because a lot of reasons, but one of them that he fell for Engin Cezzar romantically, but they became blood brothers instead. Uh, and he had played Giovanni in an Actors Studio rendition of Giovanni's Room in Greenwich Village. Baldwin shows up, you know, drag roll 1961, and within a week, he finished Another Country. He goes back there for write Find Next Time. He writes, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, and he ends up directing a play, Fortune and Men's Eyes, after returning from Hollywood, where he had a whole debacle that we could talk about. But Istanbul became this respite he needed. He talks about this. He needed to go to France in order to get away from American fascism.

[00:27:12]And he needed to sort of linguistic alienation, too. He never learned Turkish because he learned French. I think he enjoyed He says, "It's only from another place that he could write about America cuz when you're in America, there's nothing to compare America to." So, this was his, as you said, transatlantic journey. Yes. Yes.

[00:27:30]Yes. But the importance of Baldwin being able to turn into English as a different kind of resource when he's in Istanbul, when he's in Paris, when he's able to speak French, I think is very profound.

[00:27:42]With him, he writes about it in the essay, this um, this middle danger. Mhm. I love how the essay returns to this kind of the um, origin stories that that give it in balance of himself by the by the mid '60s, and he he rethinks what it meant for him to go to Paris and to learn and to have and to land in Paris and not knowing French, right?

[00:28:07]And how that turns him back into English and he gets to hear the language and what it's able to do in different kinds of ways. And so, um, I think that, you know, the ways in which Istanbul and Paris bring him back into into English in different ways is really remarkable.

[00:28:24]But he's also there to explore the world of theater, which is Engin So, I'm wondering, how do you make sense of Baldwin's writing in relationship to other mediums, and how those men, his relationships with them, the intimacies he developed developed with them, opened him up to different mediums? Bu- Delany is a painter. Lucien happened to Engin Cezzar is a painter.

[00:28:46]Cezzar is an actor and a theater producer, and Yeah. Well, Baldwin had some really, uh, awful experiences, actually, uh, dealing with theater world and the film world in the '60s. Blues for Mister Charlie was on Broadway, but it was a kind of a nightmare dealing with sort of racism of theater world. And even worse was when he went to Hollywood in the late '60s.

[00:29:07]He was hired by Columbia Pictures to write a screenplay. He was working on it up there. He wanted to do If Beale Street Could Talk and Malcolm X, but Columbia wanted John Huston to write it.

[00:29:17]>> [laughter] >> So, this was not a, uh, this was not a good thing. But even sort of more sadly is when he was out there, he got the phone call that, uh, that Malcolm X had been shot and killed.

[00:29:29]And so, it was one of the moments where he almost took his own life.

[00:29:34]And so, he knew that he had to get back to Istanbul to kind of stay ashore. And when he got there, he directed this play, Fortune and Men's Eyes, John Herbert's, a Canadian.

[00:29:44]This This is a really out there play about like homosexuality, homosociality, and prisons. being performed in a very socially conservative country at that time in Istanbul. And being was in it and Baldwin called it an act of love.

[00:29:58]And this was kind of a very healing experience for him where he was so used to the racism of America of the film and especially drama to have the freedom to connect with these actors and to direct this play. Really kind of saved his life in a way.

[00:30:15]Um I want to come back to that.

[00:30:22]Now, the last book in a way brings us back to how you began this project. So, can you talk about Baldwin's relationship with with Kozak?

[00:30:32]Yeah, so Yoran Kozak was the illustrator for Little Man. Little Man and I went over there in 2003. I spent a couple of years, went back and forth interviewing him. And he died in 2005.

[00:30:44]Um and with his blessing, uh the estate's blessing, we moved forward trying to get Little Man published, which was very hard at that time. 2005, we need diverse books was still sort of growing and publishing industry didn't understand black English as a possibility for a children's book or a book for adults. But Yoran Kozak, if you look at the archives in particular at the Schomburg, you realize like what an important figure of Baldwin I mean, he was to Baldwin's creative process. He dedicates uh If Beale Street Could Talk to him which is sort of I mean, it's not saying it tells this beautiful black heterosexual love story between Fonny and Tish, but in some ways it's very much based on his conflicted relationship um with Baldwin with with Yoran Kozak he dedicates it to. How so?

[00:31:31]Well, at the time um you uh Yoran's wife is pregnant uh with the child that will become Baldwin's godson and the novel is narrated by a pregnant uh black woman Tish who sort of sounds a lot like James Baldwin if you read it.

[00:31:48]And Baldwin often wrote about how writing was like giving birth. And so, it's clear that in a way this children's book is this kind of child, this kind of attempt to keep Yoran back inside um and and this is the text of love line what I'm saying.

[00:32:07]I think one of the one of the more powerful passages in your book um occurs when you were writing these chapters about uh and because you turn your archival into almost like an ethnography.

[00:32:20]Um the ways in which you enter into this to the narrative itself and you're making us privy to the kinds of ways you're building relationships with the family. So, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that shift in method from kind of archival literary critic to ethnographer. How do I enter into and make relationships with the people that I'm learning about?

[00:32:43]Yeah, it's important to do so for a couple of reasons. So, basically you know, it reads like a like a narrative.

[00:32:50]It's narrative It's narratively driven biography for the first like four three books. And in the fourth book you I suddenly emerge.

[00:32:59]Um and why? And and and and and it's something that I thought about over the course of many years and tried different things. And there's a couple of reasons.

[00:33:06]The first is that you know, we sometimes read biographies and we're supposed to believe that they're these objective third-person accounts of a life that are just sort of seamlessly put together.

[00:33:16]Clearly, I you know, that's not the case and I felt as a white man writing about a black figure it was important to sort of lay my cards on the table in that way. But I also felt more importantly that it was important to show when you're writing about black figures, queer figures, marginalized figures, whatever you want to call them, that that that that recovering these stories is takes a lifetime and that it's an active it's an active thing. It's not a passive thing.

[00:33:44]And so, I included those moments too.

[00:33:46]There's there's this model of critical tabulation which I you know, is very interesting. But in my case, I was like, wait, I don't want to make anything up. I'm finding these stories that have never been told. But how do I get at what critical tabulation gets at which I part which is the difficulty of this kind of archival recovery. This was my solution to that.

[00:34:07]Could you possibly tell the story that it's it's in the book, but it's really beautiful um about how you your relationship with Beatrice Kozak um because that allowed you to really again connect the dots between how you began the project with Little Man Little Man and your interest in Yoran's relationship with James and then her understanding of it through some of the archival material that she possessed. Yeah, this was a really crazy story. I felt the for me the kind of emotional crescendo of the uh of the book, but I don't have to tell anybody else, but um you know, I'm not going to cry about it.

[00:34:45]>> [laughter] >> Um Uh so, 2003 I met with Yoran Kozak and Beatrice Kozak. Spent many years trying to get it published in 2018.

[00:34:57]In 2017, the Schomburg archives became available and that's when I realized I was going to write a larger book.

[00:35:03]And so, I go back over and see Beatrice Kozak and she lives in in Tuscany near the house that she lived in in Paris with with her husband.

[00:35:11]And I'm trying to see if she had original illustrations for Little Man Little Man which she should have, but also she had any other archival material. Because I had many conversations with Yoran Kozak, but I never had any written correspondence between him and Baldwin. There was no kind of tangible archival evidence of the texture of their relationship. Um he told me some things which he could get back to, but I've never seen anything archival. So, I get to Tuscany and she lays all of these documents out on her bed and the the sun is setting over the rolling hills and I see a seven-page manuscript with a pedal metal paper clip and it's an unpublished love poem that Baldwin had written in free verse to his attorney at law, which she had not seen in 40 over 40 years. And it was written in French because Yoran did not speak English. And basically so, attorney at law is a hot spring that Baldwin would go to with Yoran and then Yoran would go back to his family and Baldwin would go back to sleep and they bought a house and Baldwin wrote this love poem from there saying it's about waking up in the morning wondering if he's woken up, has he shaved yet, has he had breakfast, while Baldwin reads his own horoscope, he reads Yoran's horoscope, the things they won't do.

[00:36:21]But it's also really about yearning, right? About how he wants him to come home to him, come home to him even though the fact is that is home. So, at the end of reading it, he also writes out the camp and that was very intense stuff. And after she finishes reading it, you know, Beatrice says, "Oh, you know, I've never read this, but reading this makes me sad for Jimmy." And this was a complicated moment for me because what I was in part setting out to do in this book was to push back at that against a couple of narratives about Baldwin. One is this sort of artistic decline narrative that we know all about, but the second one is this kind of vision of him as a tragic figure who never found love and homosexual and blah blah blah. I wanted to look at these networks of relationships that were quite sustaining and complicated and real, but quite you know, important and beautiful in some ways. So, but this was an important moment for me to to grapple with the fact that yes, Baldwin did have these difficulties and not turn him into a different kind of saint, right? So, and then the full circle moment I went to the Schomburg and they had the copy of Saturn in But you raise the question of creativity in the Baldwin and love and and a very powerful argument that the book is making about about Baldwin's creativity and about the literary literary legacy he left us. It really does hinge on how you understand love, right? As as a creative fuel. And I want to share a couple of quotes from the book so that people really get a feel for the argument.

[00:38:02]As you put it, Baldwin you know, the the emotional part of this is really Baldwin wanting a soulmate and consistently wanting a different kind of love.

[00:38:11]At the same time, the structure of a non-fully requited love was a familiar and even eroticized one for Baldwin and would come into Yoran Kozak, and even more boldly you put it this way that the that the allure of same-sex unrequited love was for Baldwin a fetish, structured around an impossibility that also effectively ensured that nothing and no one would ever dream of interfering with or superseding his calling as a writer.

[00:38:43]That's a very bold and powerful uh claim to make.

[00:38:48]Um and I'm curious can you unpack how you see that working? How the structure of Under the Linden finds its way and fuels the kind of not just the the writing or the themes that we get in Baldwin's fiction especially, um but the structure. Like what experiences, what chances is he taking?

[00:39:05]Because that's a lot of risk to carry into the project.

[00:39:09]Yeah, I based that on the interview that I did with Yoran Kozak before he died where I said, "Baldwin wanted a long-term relationship with you.

[00:39:17]What happened?" And he burst out laughing, which shocked me because I didn't see that coming. He said he maybe said he wanted that, thought he wanted that, but in fact he was incapable of that. And in fact his he was his his love was writing and he would do anything to keep doing that.

[00:39:36]And I believe that that's I believe in a sense that that's the truth. I also believe, you know, I'm not going to psychoanalyze but I believe that there was this kind of this this complicated relationship with his stepfather, but I also think that his love for America was an impossible love.

[00:39:53]And he kept breaking up with America. He kept going back, trying to get back together with him, trying to fix the relationship, and then he'd have to leave and go back and leave and go back.

[00:40:02]So, they don't map onto each other perfectly, but there's no question. I mean, he went to the artist residency Yaddo, and he had just broken up with Lucien like the 75th time.

[00:40:13]And these letters are extraordinary from there because he gets in a lot of trouble because he drank he he runs up this huge phone bill, right? Like $350.

[00:40:21]And there's another story there about how they were treating him, I think, because he was one of the first African American artists to come there, but he did rack up this huge phone bill. And clearly, he was calling Lucien or calling people about Lucien. And it was in at Yaddo that he then writes a letter to his agent, I believe, or ending, where he says, "I was working on this dreadful short story, and now, gosh, I'm here, and I'm realizing it's actually a novel. It's called Giovanni's Room."

[00:40:51]>> [laughter] >> So, clearly, this breakup with Lucien was powering this this this creativity.

[00:40:58]So, that that is what I was getting at.

[00:41:00]Right.

[00:41:01]Okay. But once he's once he's there and once he's they made the breakthrough of turning a short story into a novel, let's speak about the arguments that you're making for Baldwin as an experimental writer. Where the essays aren't So, is there a distinction between comparing Baldwin the essayist versus Baldwin the novelist, especially with the late fiction? Yeah.

[00:41:24]You know, to to push against the you say the narrative of decline. So, for the for people who might think, well, I've I've read Another Country. I've read If Beale Street Could Talk. I've read Just Above My Head, and I don't see any decline there. Can you explain what the narrative of decline was, and then let's talk about how those those late works push against that actually? Yeah, so the narrative of decline was one just just put in bold terms because of racism and homophobia that that affected the liberal establishment, especially in the mid-60s and onward, he was sort of too black for white liberals and too queer for black some black critics. If that's oversimplification, but that's essentially what was happening.

[00:42:09]And so, they decided that his novels were getting worse or that But what's, you know, what I really tried to look at in the book was how much you have to read the novels with the nonfiction. And even if you look at his later drafts at the Schomburg, he's actually No Papers for Muhammad. He's working on essays and novels that come out of these these these these anthropomorphic manuscripts that turns into Just Above My Head, that turns into this really important late essay, "Freaks and the American Idea." And so, I really wanted to push against not just the decline, but also the idea that we that we need to look at him as one thing or the other, that in fact, he was both an important novelist and an important nonfiction writer, and that they help explain his genesis. Yes. Yes. Yes. Cuz one of the things that strikes me about Baldwin reading in the manuscript that I published from comes from Tell Me How Long the Gone, a novel.

[00:43:27]Giovanni's Room stretches out a short story a novel. Go Tell It on the Mountain, a children's story, and then I change it to a children's book, then a children's book for adults. You're right. Yeah.

[00:43:38]So, I think that the ways in which you can comment on this is that you have to analyze how he describes Baldwin's creative process as almost like a Jackson Pollock painting, where he's all over the place because he's able to move in and out of so many different genres and registers at once. And I think he's capable of that, but I also think he's very aware of what the different resources of the different medium or the different genre have to offer.

[00:44:03]And that's why I think And I was curious to hear what you had to say a little bit more about how you think about his relationship to to literature and to cinema, I guess.

[00:44:13]You know, the the project with the Mountain screenplay was a debacle with Columbia in every kind of I want to say infrastructural sense. But Baldwin always is looking to turn his fiction into films. He was always being solicited to to adapt his novels into film. So, there's some kind of rapport between him and the project of writing fiction and these other mediums. So, there's cinema, photography, painting. I'm curious to know how do you see Baldwin as an experimentalist across the mediums? Again, given that some of these these formative relationships were with artists. Yeah, I think that the theater was his in some ways his first passion. I mean, that's what he Junior High School yearbook that's what he said he wanted to be. He also said "Fame is the spur, but ouch." Right?

[00:45:06]Fame did hurt him in certain ways. Um, but I think you're right. I think when you look at those especially those later archives, you see how his final play, The Welcome Table, is very much coming out of No Papers for Muhammad, which ends up being Just Above My Head. The final play, The Welcome Table, is set in the South of France, and it's about LaVerne, a blues singer from New Orleans, who's clearly based on Baldwin again. And it's cast of characters very similar to his friends. But he was, you know, I think he the drama, whether it was, you know, an actual play or kind of the drama of these sometimes you could say how dramatic love affairs they in in Another Country or Giovanni's Room. I think the drama was important to him in all of the nonfiction. Yes. Yes. Yes.

[00:45:58]Um I think we could talk forever.

[00:46:03]Really. So, I'm going to put you on speed dial on my cell phone.

[00:46:07]If any of you who are here if you have questions or comments that you want to raise, there'll be a couple of staff people But [clears throat] that compulsion perh- if I heard you correctly, it's the true love. Yeah. He can't stop.

[00:46:50]>> Can't stop.

[00:46:51]Can you give more examples of that, how that manifests?

[00:46:57]Not just to him, but to people around him.

[00:47:00]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, I mean, I I We'll talk in a I'll talk in a minute about his process because that gets a little bit to what you're saying, but I think we have to start and go back and see that it wasn't just a compulsion to write. It began as a compulsion to read the Bible. It's the only book in his house, and he By the time he's 4 years old, he's read it back and forth so much that his mother is deeply concerned.

[00:47:21]Somehow, he gets his hands on Harriet Beecher Stowe. She's afraid he's hurting his eyes. She has to hide it way up high in the bathroom, right? Teacher He reads his way through the Harlem Library. He gets taken by a teacher down to the 42nd Street Library. He looks at the lions, he vomits cuz he's nervous to go inside, but then he reads his way through that.

[00:47:39]So, he was a compul- He was reading at 9 years old, he was reading A Tale of Two Cities, and the teachers were like he could out smart them about these books.

[00:47:48]So, I think the compulsion began with a compulsion to read as it does for I think many writers.

[00:47:55]And then I think, you know, there's always something ineffable about what makes an artist tick, but it was so built into his social life. I mean, he would stay up with his friends, you know, whether it was Marlon Brando or Miles Davis or Maya Angelou or Nina Simone, whoever.

[00:48:12]And he would be drinking and eating and talking, sometimes reading his work out loud to them as well. But and then he would stay up all night until the birds came up, and then he would sleep half the day away, and the process would go on. When he was living in Istanbul, he and his wife were in the theater, and they would be out performing that night, and they'd come back and eat with him, and he'd read what he wrote that day, and then they'd So, this just this was just this was just in his in his entire way of moving through the world, which is part of why he had to get away because how do you do that and also, you know, be organizing marches and so on and so forth? So, that's part of why I think he lived such a bifurcated life. He even wrote some of those letters in the air.

[00:48:58]On airplanes. Oh, yeah, on airplanes. He took typewriters with him, you know, on these trips on airplanes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:49:16]I I can't Yes.

[00:49:18]I can't I can't wait to read this. It sounds so beautiful and and and so exciting. I in the way you tell the story, it sounds like the body of Baldwin's fiction was an autobiography in itself or thinly veiled autobiography. And I wonder how you grappled with the story he was telling about himself and the one you recovered through archives, are they the same? How did they diverge? What Where Where are the differences between the way Baldwin may have seen himself and you saw him?

[00:49:44]Good question and great to see you. I think is this Hussein? Oh my god, great to see you. We were undergrads here together many years ago.

[00:49:55]Here's the thing about Baldwin that it isn't just his fiction. I mean in some ways I think I relied way less on his fiction to like sort of say for clues into his life because I think that actually can be a fallacy as a biographer, but I relied a lot on his letters which are extraordinary and I relied a lot on his essays. And what's so interesting about him as a writer even though he died too young, he did have a long career because he started publishing early. So by the time he gets to his later life he's writing these I mean No Name in the Street, he's looking back at his earlier life, but even later that's 1972. In his final essays like his introduction to The Price of the Ticket, his collected essays and especially To Crush a Serpent and Freaks in the American Ideal of Manhood, he's going back to his own childhood and re-examining everything including love, including his early sexual encounters.

[00:50:49]It's part of why I was People ask me why are you comfortable writing about this aspect of his life? And I say yes because he was and he was publishing about it. I mean he sort of changed his opinion. People will say well earlier in his life Baldwin said, you know, I don't It's my private life. I don't want to to write about it. That was different by the end of his life and I think if that hadn't been the case, my own approach probably would have been different. But by reading these letters and reading everything sort of with and against each other, there are times when you have to see that Baldwin was a human being and was lying to you know, deceiving himself like anybody else. So it's not like a direct transcription of what happened. I mean there are times that he misremembers things. Remember Dorothy Counts, he thought that he was in Paris when when when she was spat upon, but actually it was a different time. He misremembers all kinds of things because he's a human being and that's a lot of what the book was getting at. It's Baldwin the writer, but also Baldwin the human being. Right right right. Can I say I mean it's really interesting to think with you about this because it's uh you know, again in any number of accounts he will tell us about his um his coming to Jesus, right? Coming into the church, right? Um that we could argue gets fictionalized in John's time on the threshing floor in Go Tell It on the Mountain, but how he tells that event differently by the time he gets to to Crush a Serpent >> Yes.

[00:52:08]where he's he's willing to think about his own interior experience differently.

[00:52:14]Right.

[00:52:14]>> And I was wondering then is there a difference that Baldwin is makes between interiority and disclosing interiority versus privacy?

[00:52:24]Hm. Right?

[00:52:26]Because I think he I think he's committed to an idea of interiority as as the means of truth.

[00:52:31]>> Yes and vulnerability.

[00:52:32]>> And vulnerability.

[00:52:33]>> Yeah. Um but privacy can become commodified in the market that the way it does and these are the tensions he's playing out um you know, in his public life as well. So And in his writing. I mean his last novel, not his last novel, but Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is all about sort of what it means to become a famous black figure internationally. I mean he was an actor in the novel. His last play is also similarly about that. These were things that he was actively thinking through later in his life, right?

[00:53:09]Thank you so much. I wanted to tell you that the book was amazing and I have been waiting to meet you even before the snowstorm. I hadn't finished.

[00:53:19]The book it it's been a long winter, but I do want to talk with you about love because James Baldwin represented an endless reservoir of love. And uh you with many many pages and information that you shared with us touched on love in so many aspects.

[00:53:43]But what really uh struck me was the selfishness of his love. He always gave so much. So as we think about civil rights uh the battles going on here in the states and uh his own personal battles, things that were going on with his life. He was never never never too busy to come back home and work for the betterment of love of his country.

[00:54:15]And with that said, his cultural iconiness in that particular era and even to this particular day, I can remember how my parents talked about Jimmy. Everybody called him Jimmy and that smile. I just want to know if you could elaborate just a little bit more possibly if it was something that you did not include in the book. I just to talk about the love as he was conflicted when he came home. Obviously he had to love on his family, but the love that he had to give the country, the love that he gave the civil rights movement and sometimes the pushback that he was able to accept to not be in the forefront, but still be the leader. If you can talk to that a bit. Sure. Thank you so much.

[00:55:06]That's a great point because you know, he he was he always said that he you know, in ways that today I have a hard time even because he said, you know, I love my country more than any other country in the world. He was an American exceptionalist in some ways. He said I love my country more than any other country in the world and that's why I reserve the right to critique her perpetually, you know. So that was the kind of love that he was talking about was a tough love, right? A difficult love, a love where you're forcing your beloved as he puts it to see themselves as you see them, right? Instead of just their their own project self-projections, right? And fantasies about who they are which is of course the whole problem with the American white American innocence etc. etc. that he that he was exploring.

[00:55:51]So love for him was like a battle. It was a war. It was a growing up. That's that's how he put it.

[00:55:59]And when I when you first said the question, I actually thought you said his selfishness in love. I didn't hear She guys she said selfishness just to be just to be clear which is interesting because as important as I think everything you're saying is, the love aspect of him, he actually could be selfish in love and he could be So for example, his letters to Mary Painter here like we all can be selfish in love, right? His letters to Mary Painter are striking in to the extent that they and we only have access to his side of the letters right now, but it's striking that he seems in these letters he's using He loves Mary Painter, but he's kind of like utilizing these letters as a place to work through his ideas about his novels and his essays and you don't get the sense in these letters that he is really um asking her about her life, you know?

[00:56:55]Um so and he loved her, no doubt, but but he you know, again I think because he was so obsessed with writing and with this with his call as a witness that he was willing to to kind of turn to these friendships um as epistolary lifelines for his writing.

[00:57:13]Mhm.

[00:57:15]I think we have time for one more question.

[00:57:20]That's always difficult.

[00:57:22]>> [laughter] >> Um I'm wondering what um you can tell us about his mentoring and relationship with relationships with American white writers.

[00:57:35]Um I guess I'm thinking particularly about William Styron >> Yeah. and what part he may have played in the finishing and publishing of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

[00:57:48]Great question. Yeah, so Baldwin stayed at his house in Connecticut and finished a few a couple books there, worked on them there. And he was one of the few people to support that book, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

[00:58:03]You know, I don't think Here's what's I don't think I correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that Baldwin was that concerned with the younger generation of white writers. I think what Baldwin did which is extraordinary actually, doesn't get enough credit is that he broke out of this this narrative that had been going on for a while that there could only be one famous black writer, right? It was going to be Richard Wright, him. And Baldwin participated in that for sure, sort of like slaying Richard Wright with those essays. But by the end of his life, he is actually mentoring younger black writers like Cecil Brown, Carl Phillips, Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones. He's breaking out of this very gender dynamic where there can be one man has to be a man and there can be one black writer and I think that's something he doesn't get quite enough credit for is what he was doing later later in his career. But it went both ways. These women especially also transformed him. He was transformed by black feminists, these conversations that sometimes got fractious with Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni. But he was he was very influenced for example by Toni Morrison's dictum, you know, don't write for the white gaze. Well, he stopped writing for the white gaze pretty much start the start of the 70s. So I think he was way more concerned about about fostering the next generation of black American writers than than the younger generation of white writers. Although he was not, you know, dismissive, right? No, he wasn't dismissive. If anything, they were envious of him.

[00:59:31]>> [laughter] >> Or admired him.

[00:59:34]Which is what I'm learning tracing Baldwin through his publishers records.

[00:59:39]Um You know, people are paying attention to him even in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Right. Um she notices Baldwin, right? In the various essays about the Black Panther, she sees him in the room. And actually when she passed, um the night she had a list of the 19 books the 19 writers whose books influenced her the most and this was a self-curated list.

[01:00:03]And uh Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son were on that list, too. He was the only author for whom there were two books on her 19. Right? So, I think that white writers of his his peers were paying attention to him. Yeah. Truman Capote.

[01:00:20]Truman Capote, yeah, yeah.

[01:00:22]>> jealous.

[01:00:23]>> [laughter] >> Yeah. And Elia Kazan actually wound up writing a novel The Arrangement that became a best seller and he's writing Baldwin these very excited letters about what it means to break through into another medium and to become successful as a novelist. And people artists at that time see him as a success.

[01:00:41]>> Yeah, we shouldn't talk. We won't talk about Norman Mailer. That's a whole other can of worms. Yeah, yeah, >> [laughter] >> yeah.

[01:00:47]But are there any >> you for your question.

[01:00:50]>> questions? It would It would be We would love to continue all these conversations about love and jealousy throughout the rest of the evening.

[01:00:56]Um thank you so much for having this rich conversation with each other and with all of us. I also need to shout out the AFM Cultural House for partnering with us today, running the live stream, getting the word out about the event.

[01:01:06]It's wonderful to have you here.

[01:01:10]And thank you all for coming. Thank you for being here. Um if you are able to walk this way around the other way around the other side of the mezzanine, that is where we have refreshments, book sales, and signing for you all to enjoy for the rest of the evening. Thank you so much for being here.

[01:01:29]>> [applause]