GLR September-October 2025

BOOKS

Four Men and One James Baldwin

I N 2017, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired the papers of author and gay icon James Baldwin. Consisting of more than 81 boxes of mate rial, much of it previously unavailable, this archive chronicles Baldwin’s life from the age of fourteen in 1938 to his death in 1987. Author Nicholas Boggs took full advantage

regular socializing with artists, editors, and other writers in the Village established a lifelong pattern of late-night conversation and heavy drinking followed by writing into the early morning. In 1948, Baldwin left the U.S. for Paris, where he met Happersberger. He finished his semi-autobiographical debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in the Alps with Hap

R EGINALD H ARRIS

BALDWIN: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs Farrar, Straus and Giroux 720 pages, $36.

persberger, fulfilling “his need for both solitude to focus on writ ing as well as to be social, with friends and preferably a lover in order to get his work done.” The groundbreaking Giovanni’s Room mirrored many of his own conflicting emotions about being attracted to men. The novel, he said, “also simplified my life in a way because it meant I had no secrets, nobody could blackmail me. No, you didn’t tell me, I told you .” Baldwin often wrestled with his issues by writing about them. Boggs urges read ers and scholars not to separate “Essayist Baldwin” from “Nov elist Baldwin,” as often has been done. The Baldwin papers show how one project flowed into another, ignoring genre. “There wouldbe no Giovanni’s Room without ‘Stranger in the Village,’ just as ‘Nobody Knows My Name’ would not exist in the form it took without the fictional exploration that preceded it in Go Tell it on the Mountain .” Baldwin frequently returned to

of this vital material to write the first major biography of Bald win since 1991’s Talking at the Gates . A monumental work of research and literary analysis, Baldwin: A Love Story significantly expands our knowledge of the legendary author. Boggs structures his biography by focusing on the four men with whom Baldwin had his most significant relationships: his “spiritual father,” Black gay painter Beauford Delaney; his first serious lover, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, whom Bald win continued to obsess over for the rest of his life; and two creative collaborators, his “blood-brother,” Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, and the unorthodox French artist Yoran Cazac. Baldwin was routinely drawn to men who were by all ap pearances heterosexual. Both Cazac and Cezzar were married to women, and Happersberger

would marry while he was involved with the author. As Baldwin said late in his life: “My lovers, well, the word ‘gay’ wouldn’t have meant anything to them.” Many of Bald win’s men were also younger. Hap persberger was nineteen when he invited the budding 26-year-old au thor to his family’s chalet in Loèche les-Bains, Switzerland, the setting for his seminal essay “Stranger in the Village.” The eldest of nine children, Bald win grew up in poverty in Harlem. His stepfather David Baldwin was a Baptist minister, strict and often vio lent. Under his influence, the younger Baldwin became a popular Pentecostal preacher at fourteen. He left the pulpit at seventeen, never completely abandoning the biblical references, cadences, and style of the Black church. After meeting Delaney and moving to Greenwich Village, he worked a series of menial jobs while also writing and publishing work in progressive magazines. His Reginald Harris, a frequent contributor, is a writer and poet based in Brooklyn.

the U.S. in the late 1950s and ’60s to write about the Civil Rights movement. He befriended leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers and partici pated in the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala bama. Baldwin was on stage—but not asked to speak—at the 1963 March on Washington. The influ ential and powerful pair of essays on civil rights collected in the best seller The Fire Next Time landed him on the cover of Time maga zine, anointing him as a major spokesperson for the movement. Finding time for writing in America was becoming increas ingly impossible, so Baldwin ac cepted an invitation to visit Istanbul from Engin Cezzar, an actor he’d met in New York. Turkey turned out to be a perfect place for him to work, as Cezzar’s fiancée Gülriz Sururi quickly dis covered: “He said he was going to stay for three days, and he didn’t leave for months!” Baldwin’s

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