The event was recorded live on November 19, 2025.
Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on the complex forces within these relationships — cultural, political, artistic, and erotic — and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that spoke truth to power, indelibly impacting the Civil Rights Movement and Black and queer literary history. Boggs speaks about the revealing new biography with John McWhorter, a columnist for The New York Times, author of the bestselling Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, and professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
Presented with the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
For more information about our events, visit: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/public-programs
– Good evening, and a warm welcome to yet another biography event. My name is Kai Bird and I have the pleasure
of serving as director of the Leon Levy Center for biography, a wholly unique institution
hosted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and founded by Shelby White in the Leon Levy Foundation in 2007. I want to thank Shelby
for her steadfast support to the Biography Center. It is her vision that makes
this program possible. As some of you may know, last year, Shelby gave us $10 million
to our endowment fund, plus another 5 million in matching grants. So if any of you care
to drop a million on us, the Leon Levy Foundation would match it with another million, and we’d name one of the
four fellowships after you. Now I here’s some titters. You may think this is improbable, but let me reveal that
it has already happened. It is not official yet, so I’m not allowed to name the donor, but I can say that the mystery man is sitting quite modestly
among us tonight. (attendees claps) And in a nice coincidence, since tonight’s event is devoted to a discussion of James Baldwin, I can add that this particular fellowship will be devoted to biographers writing about figures
from the Africa diaspora. (attendees clapping) So that’s my pitch for the evening. Please note that our next event will be on Thursday, December 4th, when the Pulitzer Prize
winner for biographer, Megan Marshall will be in conversation with Martha Hodes about
the art of biography. Please mark your calendars. And if you have not done so already, please register your email address on our handsome new website so that you can be notified
of our future events. But tonight, I’m delighted
to be here this evening to introduce my friend Nicholas Boggs, who is here to discuss
his stunning new biography of James Baldwin. He will be in conversation with
the esteemed John McWhorter. Nick Boggs earned a BA from Yale and a PhD from Columbia University. He is co-editor of the 2018 edition of James Baldwin’s collaboration with the French artist Yoran Cazac, “Little Man, Little Man:
A Story of Childhood.” He received the 2019 Robert and Ina Caro Travel and Research Fellowship from the Biographers
International Organization. He won a Whiting Fellowship in
Creative Nonfiction in 2023, and a Leon Levy Biography
Fellowship in 2020. He also won fellowships from
the Schaumburg Center, the NEH, as well as residencies
in Yado and McDowell. Obviously, he’s very apt
at writing proposals. His writings have appeared in anthologies, such as “James Baldwin Now” and the Cambridge
companion to James Baldwin. His new book, “James Baldwin” is however his very first biography. John Hamilton McWhorter V is a professor of linguistics
at Columbia University, where he also teaches American
studies and music history. He has authored a number
of books on race relations and African American culture, and he currently writes a must-read column in the New York Times on linguistics. On a personal note, I’d like to explain that Nick Boggs was a fellow
at the Leon Levy Center in 2020/21, the year
of the great pandemic. As a result, this cohort
of five working biographers only met to discuss their work over Zoom. This was a great disappointment. On the other hand, the pandemic year forged a particularly close
bond for these biographers, and they all became extremely productive. In an extraordinary feat, all five of them have completed
their books this very year. And it is an extraordinary collection and I want to mention their names. Susan Morrison on Lauren Michaels, Lance Richardson on Peter Matheson, Francesca Wade on Gertrude Stein, and now Nicholas Boggs on James Baldwin. And finally, next spring, Miriam Horn, who is here with us tonight, is publishing a great
doorstopper of a biography on the naturalist and
explorer, George Schuyler. (attendees clapping) They are all to be warmly congratulated, it’s so hard to write a biography. And some of them take five years, some of them take 10. My first biography took 10 years. It’s a labor of love. Anyway, Nick and John
will be in conversation for about 40 minutes, and then we’ll take questions
from our in-person audience. This session is being livestreamed. At the end of the evening, Nick Boggs will be signing
books out in the lobby. Again, thanks to the Leon Levy
Foundation for funding this and all our other events. I now turn over the
conversation to John McWhorter. (attendees clapping)
– Thank you, Kai. Nick, I wanna start here. This book was absolutely luscious. I would come home every night, itching to get into what
I call my bourbon chair, and finish this wonderful, large, but wonderful book. Absolutely splendid job. But you know what, it left me, I thought I kind of knew
Baldwin, I had him down. Your book left me with
more questions than answers in some ways, and I’m honored to be able to actually
just sit here and ask you. And so one of them, and this
is gonna seem kind of naive, but really, I really need help on this. Here is the epitaph. Love is the only reality, the only terror, and the only hope. A lot of love with James Baldwin, that’s the big theme. What does that epitaph mean? I really don’t know what it means, I think the words are pretty. But can you break that
down a little for me? – So I’m gonna stall answering
that question for a second while I think about it by just thanking the Leon
Levy Center for Biography, thanking Shelby White, thanking Kai Bird, and who really pushed us to
keep doing our footnotes, which was amazing. And my fellow biographers, also Judith Thurman, who’s here tonight, and my partner Marlon. And just thank you everybody. There are other people
I’ll probably mention in the conversation. I love all these people,
so I guess that’s– – That’s the answer?
– Right, yeah. – No, I chose that epigraph because it’s actually a letter he wrote to somebody not that consequential that I found in the Schwarzman Building. And love is the only reality, love is the only terror,
love is the only hope because all of his writing
is about love, right? Even though there’s this
sort of vision of him as this civil rights icon, this orator. In fact, all of his
novels are love stories. Even his political writings
are really rooted in the idea that Black and white
Americans must come together, like lovers, he says, in
order to make freedom real. But I think that quote
encompasses all the parts of him. We’ll start with the hope. He definitely found hope in love. He also was terrified by it. He was terrified by his
own project of self-love, which we felt menaced by sort of phobias around race and sexuality. So that’s part of the terror. The reality is just that
the whole world, you know, that was his reality. His world was spent constructing these alternative kinships structures and love relationships that
had been looked at before, but not with a kind of microscope that I hoped to bring to his life. – Yeah, what you did with the
microscope was invaluable. But to tell you the truth, I always took from that spate
of ’90s biographies of him that his life had been a kind of a victory that ended on the soon side. There were pitfalls, but
I always thought of it as, if it were a musical, it would end with
something in a minor key, I mean, a major key is what I thought. This is one of the
saddest I have ever read. And what I mean is that I didn’t know because in the ’90s
they weren’t positioned to really explain it
as clearly as you have. But basically, you talk about
him having four great loves, and it starts with Beaufort Delaney. But in terms of loves,
as in who he loved back, all three of them were
predominantly straight men who married and usually had kids. And he had three of these in a row. And that was his love life.
That was who he loved most. And it could never really work out. And he never got past it. And I found myself thinking,
wow, that is really hard. Do you have a sense, from having
actually met these people, why he kept running up against that instead of living out his
life with a Beaufort Delaney who was closer to his age,
and probably his color, and where the love was mutual? What was he running up against? – That’s a great question,
and it’s one that dogged me, not throughout the process
of writing the book, but throughout the
process of researching it. I think that’s something that was really hard for me to understand. I did understand that it was a big part of his creative process that this yearning for a kind of lost love
object or lost ideal was very similar to the
kind of impossible love that he had for America that he had to run away from
and constantly come back to and reconnect with. But I did have a moment in
terms of that explicit question that was kind of a lightning bolt moment. So Yoran Cazac was his final
great love who was married, Baldwin became godfather to his children. I met Yoran Cazac, I can
tell that story later. – [John] And you found him,
which is a great story. – Which is really how this
book began, in the early 2000s. But when I finally worked
up the courage to ask him with my translator there, ’cause my French was not good enough. And it was a very subtle question, how do you talk about this in a way that’s not invasive or salacious? But I really wanted to know what made their relationship tick. And there were two things that happened that let me figure that out sort of. And the first one is that I asked him, I said, “Well, you know,
it seems that James Baldwin wanted to have a long-term
domestic relationship with you. He spoke about your relationship
as a marriage, in fact, in some of his letters
to his brother David.” And I expected him to answer
me in a serious or somber way. And he burst out laughing. I’m in his studio in Montmartre,
and he burst out laughing, and I did not know how to respond. But he was laughing ’cause he said, “Jimmy may have said that he wanted that. He may have believed that he wanted that, but in fact he was
utterly incapable of that. He was married to his writing,
he was married to his art, and that’s one of the reasons that he sought out these relationships where he could still have
this intense connection and then go away, write, and come back, and it infused the plots of his writing.” But it was a shocking moment for me, I did not expect laughter. But it did explain to me finally
that piece of the puzzle. – All right. All right, wait, you’re gonna know this better than, at this point, almost anybody. One version of James Baldwin is there’s this delightful
photograph of him and Lorraine Hansberry in her living room, drinking and smoking and dancing. One of them, I forget
whether it’s her or him, has their arms out like
they’re an airplane, they’re clearly having a great time. That is happy Jimmy. – That’s actually not Lorraine Hansberry. It’s often misidentified that way. It’s a woman who works for
core, they’re in the south. – Are you sure?
– I’m serious, yeap. – Because I love that picture because it’s those two people. – [Nicholas] There are
other good ones of them. A lot of people think that,
it’s a common misconception. – I like that picture
of Zora Neale Hurston, that really looks more like
Florence from the Jeffersons. It’s a different woman. I’m gonna look when I go home. But anyway, you know as well as I do, they did used to hang
out and drink together and have a good time. And that’s Jimmy, but then, is that the real person or really, did he finish out his life as this melancholy person who
never quite rang the bell? Or is it really both
people at the same time? – Well, I’m glad you brought
up Lorraine Hansberry because I think one
thing we have to remember is how unconventional his life was. I mean, he had these impossible
relationships with men and then he had these
incredibly close relationships with men, but also with women,
like Lorraine Hansberry, like Mary Painter, who he wrote these
extraordinary letters to. This was a white American woman in Paris who became his best friend. Like Maya Angelou, Nina Simone as well. So he had a very, very, this is, you know, I’m sad that you’re sad because my goal in this
book was actually to show how much joy and kinship and communion and love he had in his life. I actually think it was
incredibly rich because it wasn’t, you know, we don’t look
at like somebody’s life and if they were married
and to a man or a woman and then they get divorced, we’re like, “And then they never marry again.” Oh gosh, what a sad life. People just say, “Oh, they got married.” I think Baldwin had an
incredibly rich, erotic, effective relationship life
with all kinds of people. People often say, oh, Baldwin, he wasn’t handsome or something. I’m like, have you seen
what his lovers looked like? I mean, he had some
absolutely gorgeous lovers. So I actually wanted to show that this was a misconception
of Baldwin’s life. Sure, it had suffering, it had difficulty, but actually it was incredibly alive with love and sex and pleasure and life. – Good. (attendees laughs) There is one thing I missed in your book, and it’s only because you
have the theme of the loves, and you wanted to get on
with it, I fully get it. But I got the feeling you kind of rushed through the childhood or
gave it to us in pieces. And you can get it the other books. But I did find myself wondering, ’cause I now read those
books half my life ago, who did he hang out with? Not his family, but who did he
hang out with in high school? So he has that thing
that they write in his, he writes in somebody’s yearbook, fame is the spur, but ouch. And I always thought, most of those boys were
white, weren’t they? Who were his running
buddies when he was 16? – So that was from his junior high school. the “fame is the spur, but ouch,” which I love that quote
because he did became famous and it did hurt. But that was junior high school. And in junior high school, he was at a mostly African
American school in Harlem, where Countee Cullen
amazingly was his teacher. And that was incredibly formative for him. And then when he went to high
school at the magnet school, DeWitt Clinton in the Bronx, and that is where most of
his classmates were Jewish, Richard Avedon, Sol Stein, Emile Capouya, and all these men became quite
prominent figures in the arts or in publishing. So that’s where he joined
the school newspaper Magpie. So as he’s preaching, he’s a preacher at this
point, a child preacher, he’s also being surrounded
by these young men, who are as fascinated
and into art and culture as he is really inside of him. And that was a lot of his
conflict along with his sexuality during his teen years. But he also had a best friend from the
neighborhood, Arthur Moore, who he was in love with, who became sort of the
prototype for Elisha in “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” So he had an interracial group of friends, both in Harlem and elsewhere. – Okay, I would like you
Nick to help me understand something else about Baldwin. And I’m gonna do this modern thing where, instead of having memorize it, I’m gonna read it from my phone. So I want you guys to know that this is not me looking
at texts or something, but I took a picture of a page. And this is something, this
is a Baldwin statement. It’s kind of typical of him. And to be honest, I’ve always
pretended to understand it, but I don’t really, anymore than I fully
understand the love part. And it’s a certain point he makes that white people will not
be complete or truly happy until they acknowledge their inner racism and how racism is the
history of this country. And I’ve always kind of thought, really, no offense to anybody here who’s white, but I’ve often thought you
are giving the ordinary person too much credit. I got the feeling that
they feel pretty complete regardless of all of this. And yet, no offense, but I just always thought, you
don’t look incomplete to me. And so this is the sort of thing, I mean, and he writes
about it so beautifully with these lapidary sentences. And so white people who imagine
the history flatters them as it does indeed since they wrote it, are impaled on their history
like a butterfly on a pen, and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me most white Americans
find themselves, impaled. They are dimly or vividly aware that the history they fed
themselves is mainly a lie, but they don’t know how to
release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard
nowhere more plainly than in those stammering
terrified dialogues, which white Americans sometimes entertain with that Black conscience, the Black man in America. Great writing. He wrote that over and over
again in lots of beautiful ways. Do you believe it? And I know that’s supposed to be one of the main Baldwin things. And I’m a huge admirer of him, but I’ve never really
understood that point. – Do I believe that he believes
it, or do I believe it? – That he believes it. – I believe that one of
the fascinating things about writing about
Baldwin for so many years and looking at all these archives is that, he was really idiosyncratic actually. And one thing I admired about him is that he was willing to
change his mind about things. He changed his mind about gender, he changed his mind about Palestine, he changed his mind about
the civil rights movement. He moved further to the left. So I think when you look at his writing, especially sentences like
that, you have to understand that he is being an artist, which he was, but he’s also being
incredibly strategic, right? He is trying to convince
white people to feel that way or to be in order to move
them, to make social change. Whether he believes they
in fact feel that way, I’m not sure, but he wants
them to feel that way ’cause if they feel that way, then the Civil Rights Act can get passed. – That sounds so NPR. Talk a little bit about
the phase in the late ’60s where Baldwin starts to fall out of style with a certain type. Why in the world would a
genius, full of love as he was, why would people start to hate on him? What happened? – Can’t we stay on love? No, I’m kidding. So you’re talking about later in the ’60s when he gets sort of, after the publication
of “Another Country.” As a novelist, some people
were starting to say that he was a messy novelist. But a lot of the critiques
were really ideological. He was no longer the darling
of the white liberals. And he was also no longer saying, again, strategically or not,
that Black and white Americans needed to come together like lovers. He was now like, wait, Elijah
Muhammad has some good points. Malcolm X has some very valid points. Martin Luther King is too centrist. He was moving farther to the left. Thanks to people like
Lorraine Hansberry, in fact. So the critiques of him as an
artist, I think, had some root in actually just some
ideological differences with him. He was also just unwilling to be anybody’s mouthpiece. Think about the march on Washington. So he is in Paris. He puts together a speech there for African Americans in Paris who are supporting the
march in Washington. He comes back, he’s supposed
to read that speech, which is really about
global Black liberation. And they decide the powers that be and the civil rights
movement that he can’t read, whether it’s because of
his sexuality, as some say, I actually think Malcolm X
had it right when he said they didn’t want Baldwin to get up there because you can’t control
what he’s going to say. So guess who they had,
get up there instead and read that speech? Bert Lancaster. So this is what he was dealing with and you can find it on YouTube. It’s one of the oddest
things you’ll ever see. Bert Lancaster not saying that
he’s reading Baldwin’s words, getting up there and the crowd is sort of, does not understand why on earth these words
are coming out of his mouth. – “Birdman of Alcatraz” is
up there giving that speech. yeah, what about Eldridge Cleaver? What was the issue there? – Repressed desires and homophobia. I mean, if you read closely “Soul on Ice” where he says those nasty
things that I won’t say again, he starts by saying, when he started reading Baldwin early on, he lusted after his sentences. Oh, really, Eldridge? You lusted
after Baldwin’s sentences? – I never read it that way,
but you’re right, actually. So you think it was
partly just frustration and desires that he may have had? – Inability to, like,
have a kind of vulnerable interior life that Baldwin did have. You know, he came after Baldwin
saying he hates himself, not just because he
had homosexual desires, but because he wrote an essay early on about how his people
hadn’t created Shakespeare and how he was ashamed of
that when he was younger. When he was he younger. It’s an essay about sort of
moving through his consciousness as a young Black man in
a white-dominated world, so Eldridge had a problem with that. But that was actually a
very vulnerable moment, a complex moment. And Baldwin’s point wasn’t that, white culture trump’s Black culture. That was the opposite for him. He had to reconnect with Bessie Smith when he went to the Swiss Alps and wrote “Go Tell It on the Mountain”. Baldwin was a great lover of Black culture and Black art and Black
people, including Eldridge, even though that hatefulness, Baldwin still wanted to be
loved and accepted by Eldridge, and Eldridge still wanted Baldwin’s money, which he gave him in the ’70s when he was in St. Paul de Vence and Eldridge was going through a lot of trouble at that point. That was before the cod, before the presidential bid
and all that silly stuff. – Have you ever seen that
documentary with James Baldwin and Bobby Short hanging out in France and doing the blues and everything? I haven’t seen it since it came out, it must be on Netflix or
up in the cloud somewhere. But it’s a beautiful example
of how there’s no way that Baldwin thought Black
art wasn’t as important or good or something. – I think that’s the price of the ticket, which is a wonderful, that’s the documentary that
I think you’re talking about. – ’94, ’95? – ’89, Karen Thorson.
Great documentary still. Still the kind of standard bearer. I mean, Raoul Peck’s
documentary was important, but this one really tells
the most of his life story. Although it doesn’t have people like Beaufort Delaney in it actually. – More naughty questions about Baldwin, who I have always been an admirer of. Whenever I’m writing, not whenever, but often when I’m writing, I’m always thinking my sentences
will never be like his, for example, and I will
never be considered wise. I’m just considered prolific basically, and there’s a difference. But the novels, the essays. And I’m not bragging, I just read a lot. I’ve read every essay, I’ve
read most of the novels. I know that it’s considered
unfashionable in some circles to say that the novels are
not quite at the height of the essays, but it’s
what I have always believed. I’ve always found the novels beautiful, but often somewhat of a stretch, and often mining the same territory. Am I a bad man? What do you think? – Well, for a long time
it was very fashionable to say exactly that, that
he was a great essayist and just an okay novelist. And I still think that’s
fashionable in many circles. – [John] But you don’t think so? And I enjoyed your argument otherwise. – See, I don’t know if I made an argument. I think I tried through the stories to tell his life story. And I also tried by looking
at his creative process to show, in some ways, the question of essays
versus novels is moot because you can’t
understand either of them without reading the others. So for example, you can’t
understand “Another Country,” all about these messy,
interracial relationships, if you don’t read it with and
against “The Fire Next Time,” where he is using that
metaphor of the lovers. – [John] It doesn’t stand on
its own as just a found piece. You need to connect it to
what it was surrounded by it. – I think to understand its significance. I mean, I think “Another Country” is an incredibly significant
novel historically, and aesthetic judgments
are always gonna be aesthetic judgments that change with time. But if we’re looking at
historical significance, “The Fire Next Time” and “Another Country” have to be seen together. Similarly, “Giovanni’s Room,”
historically significant. You have to read “The
Preservation of Innocence,” right, and “Male Prison,”
where he’s writing about sort of the perniciousness
of internalized homophobia, et cetera, et cetera, white masculinity. And then he’s exploring
that in “Giovanni’s Room” in all of these important ways. As I wrote this book, this was something that
I was really reminded of. It wasn’t something I thought
consciously beforehand, but I realized, oh, I don’t
even care at this point. I don’t care which ones people
think are better or not. If you think the essays are better and you wanna understand
the essays better, then you should read the novels. If you think the novels are better, but you wanna understand them better, then you should read the essays. Or maybe you just love them all. – I remember reading “Another Country,” I was a little young, you know, I was probably like
25 or something like that, and thinking I enjoyed that,
but I’m not sure what it was. I found it unmotivated. I thought, where did he get that? What did he mean? Your point is very well-taken that if you do know where he got all that, it makes more sense, and then it’s easier to
understand it as great art. And I don’t think that
minimizes it at all. But that’s an important lesson that I learned from the book here. How hard was it to write? Or
did you just find it a joy? – Writing it once I figured
out what I was writing and the structure of the book,
that even was a biography. I mean, I worked on this
book in one way or another for over 20 years. I met Yoran Cazac, I discovered
“Little Man, Little Man” when I was an undergrad at Yale. I met Yoran Cazac and then his
family friend Judith Thurman. – [John] Is he a chain
smoker? A big smoker? – Which one?
– Cazac. – Yes, of many different kinds of things. And figuring out what kind of
book it was was the hard part. I had no idea. And when I figured out that it
was these four relationships, I could write it. But then a funny thing happened,
the pandemic was happening, that wasn’t funny, but that happened. And I was trying to write
the book one, “Buford” and I was really struggling with it. This is when Baldwin is
still in Greenwich Village. He can’t find his voice as a writer. And then I was at the James
Merrill House, a residency, on January 6th, the January 6th, and I was starting book two
when Baldwin rise in Paris and falls in love with Lucien. And as soon as the same
day that I started it, I found the voice and
it took off from there. And it’s ironic because
Baldwin had to move to Paris, you know, in order to find
his voice as a writer. And once I found that moment, it was still incredibly
difficult and laborious. But I knew what I was doing and I was also having a lot
of help from the Levy Center. – How did you do that passage you did, where all of a sudden, you’re like the movie “Touch of Evil” with that long camera shot, where you follow the hallway into the bar and there’s Baldwin, you know, declaiming, and it’s the night that he meets Lucien. How did you think of doing
it that way instead of, the way I would’ve done
it if I wrote a biography, which is they were all sitting at a table and Baldwin was talking that. How did you do that camera shot, What made you think of that? – Well, I thought of it as a film. I thought, yeah, you’re right,
I thought of it filmically. Not that I was thinking
of a film, at that point. But I also, Richard Olney,
who, it was one of his friends, the artist, had written a
book called “Reflections” where he described that
bar La Reine Blanche. And I found those descriptions, they just brought the place alive. So I was able to quote
a little bit from those to help set the scene. So basically what happens is, it’s almost like you’re
walking into this bar, La Reine Blanche in Paris, And it’s this long, dimly-lit tunnel. And you get there, and there’s this woman named Madam Elise, the bar’s patron, who has like
a face that looks like stone and her hair doesn’t move and she can throw you out of the bar. And then there are all
these men smoking throngs of men smoking cigarettes, white men. It’s called La Reine
Blanche, the white queen, but there was at least one
non-white queen there that night. And as you’re following it, you see these men are surrounding somebody on all the cigarette smoke. And then there is James
Baldwin smoking a cigarette, drinking his drink, speaking
in his so-so French, telling the story of the stolen bedsheet, which is the basis for his
important essay “Equal in Paris.” And this is the moment when
he meets Lucien Happersberger, who becomes the love of his life. – And then there’s the third
love of his life, who is Cazac. Tell us, and I know that
you’re probably doing this for the 65th time, but I would not be fair to the audience to not ask you to tell us, how did you find this man? He was lost to anybody who would be interested in
digging him up about Jimmy, and yet, you found him. – So 1996, I’m taking a
class on Baldwin at Yale. We read everything by him, except this outer print children’s book that happens to be at the Beinecke, so I go to the Beinecke. And I also read David Lemming’s really important 1994 biography
that had just come out. But there were only like two
paragraphs about Yoran Cazac, and they were very elusive. They were close friends, but he became the Godfather to his son, just like he become the
godfather to Lucien’s son. So I suspected that there was
something else going on there, but I also, when I found the book, it was just such an unusual, it was a children’s book for an adult and an adult’s book for children
illustrated by Yoran Cazac, written entirely in
what Baldwin celebrated as Black English. Very, very unusual
book, published in 1976. So I send like the second email of my life to David Lemming saying, do you know anything
more about Yoran Cazac? He writes me back a
very nice email saying, “I never met him. I don’t know anybody
still alive who met him, and I’m pretty sure he’s deceased.” So six years passed, I moved to New York, I’m getting my PhD at Columbia. I decided to send more emails
to art historians in Paris, do you know anything about
this obscure French artist, Yoran Cazac, but he lived
in Tuscany, and he’s dead, and left my phone number. And a few weeks later and broke in my studio apartment in
Brooklyn, the phone rings, it says raspy French accented
63-year-old man saying, “This is Yoran Cazac,
I’m alive. Come to Paris. I have many stories to
tell you about Jimmy.” And he also said, “But before
you come, go meet my son,” who’s Baldwin’s godson who was living in New York at the time, “and go meet this dear family
friend Judith Thurman,” who’s here tonight. So I distinctly remember,
you know, going up to her, I was so intimidated. I’m in my 20s, here’s
this New Yorker writer, a National book award winner, you know? And there I walked around
the block three times before I could knock on the door. And then I did and we
sat down and she just, with great narrative panache,
she told me everything she knew everything, she could tell me, but she left breadcrumbs so that I would have
to go over there myself and ask Yoran more questions
myself, which I did. – Is he with us now? – No. So that was 2003. And then very sadly, I went over that summer
in Paris and lived there. I went there a few trips, so
I got to know him quite well. But then he unfortunately died in 2005. And then I continued to
interview his wife Beatrice and other people. But I didn’t know that, I wanted to bring “Little Man,
Little Man” back into print and tell this little
story about his later life that slowly, organically
grew into a much bigger book over the course of two decades. – And that book now exists and is available from
your friendly bookseller? – Yeap, right here.
– That’s very good. No, not this book, but
the Cazac and Baldwin. – Yes, Duke University Press, they did a great job. My co-editor, Jennifer
DeVere Brody of Stanford, we got Baldwin’s niece and nephew, who the bulk of the book is inspired by, they wrote the afterward and the forward. And it’s a beautiful book and we’re gonna do an exhibition of the original illustrations from it hopefully in France this summer. – Oh wow. That’s wonderful. What got you into James Baldwin, as opposed to James Joyce or Wallace Stevens or, you know. – I love James Joyce as well. But I grew up in Washington DC, and my father was a civil
rights attorney, an activist. And I went to the DC public schools and I was one of the few
white students at that point in that school system and had this great teacher Mrs. Miles. And on the walls of her classroom, she had drawings of famous Black writers, and Baldwin was one of them. And I saw his eyes, and I was immediately just taken with him. I thought that was the end of the story. But recently we reconnected and she said, “No, Nick, then you came in a suit and gave a presentation
on Baldwin’s life,” which I completely repressed that. But I guess I did that, so I’ve been writing this
book for 40 some years. – Wow. What do you think of the
Campbell biography of Baldwin, which I liked so much
that I read it twice. – James Campbell did it, I mean, James Campbell and David Lemming and William Weatherby
and actually Fern Ekman all deserve like so much
gratitude from anybody interested in Baldwin because
they were doing this work. I’ll start with Fern Ekman
because she was like a, really a journalist like here in New York. And she wrote this book called “The Furious Passage
of James Baldwin” in the ’60s. She followed him around everywhere and she got him to talk unlike anybody else has
ever gotten to talk. So that was incredible. Parts of that were reprinted
recently in the New Yorker, thanks to Eddie Glaude. So that was an important source. And then Weatherby came out, I think, first, or was it Campbell? But Campbell did incredible research, especially on Baldwin’s
early years in Paris. You know, he really captured
that moment in his life, and all of them who are still– – [John] Not as well as
you did, and I mean it. But still, he was a good precursor. – Yeah. And I drew on, I
drew on his work very much. But I went back to like Otto Friedrich who wrote this incredible essay about Baldwin called “Jimmy.” Otto was his friend of his in
those early years in Paris. You know, going to those kinds of sources, which I found through prior biographies. So I’d read James Campbell’s biography, or I’d read David Lemmings and I’d see where their sources were, which is why the end notes
are so important, Kai. And I would go back to
the primary sources, and then I would do more
with them if I could because they were so incredible. But James Campbell, you
know, he shares that idea that you do, and that some people do, about this bifurcation between his fiction and his nonfiction. So that book is kind of
marked by that approach. – [John] Yeah, that’s true. – But you know, David Lemming’s biography is not marked by that approach. David Lemming’s biography is
different in a way because David was his friend
and personal assistant. And of course David Lemming
becomes a character almost, or he does in my book, because he was so important to Baldwin and has been so incredibly
generous to me, sharing archives, sharing stories, sort of teaching me Baldwin’s philosophy of love ’cause David was part of
that world that he was in. – I wanna phrase this question in a way that won’t be a repeat of what I’m sure you’ve been asked before. My partner is Russian. And I said that I was doing this tonight, and you know, very literate,
very erudite person, didn’t happen to have
heard of James Baldwin. And so she said, “Well, honey, who is he?” And I was challenged. I was thinking, what is
the one-liner on him? Like if she had asked Hemingway, I know what I would’ve said. If she had said, who’s Richard Wright? I would have two sentences
and just say that. With Baldwin, I had to work at it a little because he’s such a large, ambiguous and eccentric in a positive way figure. So I said some stuff, but
what would you have said? – I do believe that he’s
the most important writer of the 20th century. That’s what I would say. That doesn’t mean I think he’s the best. Again, that’s not my place to judge. I’m not saying anything, I’m not making any claims like that. I do think historically, he is the most important
writer of the 20th century for a whole bunch of reasons
that we could talk about. But that is the line that I would say. – The most important. Give me one reason. I’m not skeptical, but
that is a bold claim – Because he was exactly
what he called himself, which was a witness. People wanted him to be a spokesman. People wanted to pigeonhole him as this, that, or the third. And he was exactly what he said. And he witnessed so much and had the facility to write about it. He witnessed the end
of Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression. He witnessed the civil rights movement. He witnessed the women’s rights movement, he witnessed gay liberation. Even if he wasn’t explicitly
involved in some of these, they infused his writing,
he witnessed them, and he changed this country,
and hopefully still can – You mean that he opened people’s eyes to new ways of looking at things? And that he had an actual major impact on what now would be considered the default Mr. and Mrs. America perspective on race. – Yeah, if people had
really listened to him, we might, you know, we’ll never know, but we might not have
landed where we are now. I think that’s what makes it important. I also do think he was
a first rate artist, and that stands on its own. But the fact that what
he was writing about were the most pressing
issues of the 20th century that are still with us, that he was still writing
about in the ’80s. I mean, he died too young at 63. He was still writing
about, you know, androgyny before we were talking
about trans identities. He was writing about in “The
Evidence of Things Not Seen,” he was already writing
about kind of what it means to have a media cycle that is saturated with images of Black suffering, which is what we have seen now through all the cell phones and the images that
teenagers are inundated with. He was writing about all of this. He was starting to write
about the aids epidemic even in his last play that he was doing. He always actually had his finger on the pulse of what was happening
because he was a witness. – What was another project that maybe he was working on at the end? Like, George Gershwin
was working on an opera about a Jewish figure, the Dybbuk. That’s what he would’ve done
if he hadn’t died young. What do you think Baldwin’s
magnum opus maybe would’ve been if he had had another 15 years? Or was he not giving enough
indication of that to say? – I don’t know about,
I mean, he had so many. You know, he still wanted to
write that triple biography of Medgar Evers and Martin
Luther King and Malcolm X. He was working on this extraordinary play, “The Welcome Table,” which
was based on his life in St. Paul de Vence, but turning himself kind of into this diva
singer, aging diva singer. And a character comes to
visit him, to interview him, who’s clearly based on Skip Gates. And all these relationships
that are happening are based on his own
relationships, that’s very clear. I don’t know if that’s his magnum opus. I think some people would say that “Just Above My
Head” is his magnum opus. That’s one that people have, not his final novel published in 1979. – That wasn’t received very well, was it? – It wasn’t. Edmund White
received it very well. Margot Jefferson gave
it a positive review. But you have to understand, this was 1979. This was the year when he went
to go on tour for this novel, 2020 was gonna do a piece on him. And they have extraordinary
footage in his home on the Upper West side that
he bought for his family. His mother’s there, his kids are there, and he is laying it down about America, and they decide not to air it. Joseph Lovett, the late Joseph
Lovett, who recently died, was a gay producer who wanted to do it. And they said to him, “Nobody cares about a gay Black has-been.” That’s the same thing that Time
Magazine said to Skip Gates in early ’70s when he had
an extraordinary interview with Baldwin and Josephine Baker. He didn’t publish it. These are has-beens. So that’s what they were dealing with, and that’s why this narrative
of his decline and the essays, and the novels, blah, blah, blah, it’s very hard to ever see them clearly because it’s so saturated by
the zeitgeist of that moment of looking at Baldwin as a has-been. They have to be reassessed by scholars, by readers, by teachers. And I think that’s happening now. – Definitely. We’re at that time when we’re
gonna open it up to questions. I’m told that the idea is that you go to the microphones on the side. And so do you have
questions for Nicholas Boggs about the magnificent James Baldwin? – [Attendee] I wanna ask the
same question you asked before in a different way. In “The Fire Next Time,” he
makes this quote where he says, “Life is more important than art, that’s why art is so important.” So it’s in another way the same question you heard earlier on. But I would venture to
say, is it the paradox that goes through all of this work what do you call idiosyncratic? How would you explain that quote from everything you’ve written? – Yeah, thanks for that. I think that kind of
what I was saying before, his life was art. I mean, that was his life. That’s why I think he said that in part, and this is why the call to
arms that he did was called on to become a spokesperson for the civil rights
movement was so hard for him. And it really took a lot out of him because he wanted to be
in the south of France writing novels and plays. He wanted to be on
Broadway directing plays. He did not want that. This was not something that he chose. He’s so incredible in the
spotlight on television that it’s easy to think that
this was his goal in life. And he did wanna be famous. It’s not that he didn’t want to be famous, and he wanted to be a bestseller and he was ambitious in all those ways. But he did not want to be a spokesperson. He said he didn’t like going to marches, but march he did because he understood that he had this unique opportunity. There’s that famous interview
where somebody says, you grew up Black, poor, and gay, like that must’ve been horrible. And Baldwin says, I hit
the jackpot, you know, because I have all these perspectives. He knew that not only
did he have, you know, those intersectional, we
now call intersectionality, but he also had the facility with language and the ability to witness the world that was very, very unique. – This microphone here. – [Attendee] Yes, oh, that’s loud. Was Baldwin, how shall I put this, sort of marginalized or shunned by the civil rights leadership, however you wanna define
it, in the early ’60s, in the way that Bayard Rustin
was, for the same reason? – People have, yes, for very similar. Bayard Rustin, I mean, they
were both brilliant men, Black men, in different ways. Bayard Rustin, just brilliant grassroots organizer and strategist, Baldwin, brilliant writer and orator. How do you not have
James Baldwin, you know, giving a speech on the
march on Washington? And it’s for the reasons
that we just discussed. So yeah, there was definitely talk. I think the Kennedys called
him Martin Luther Queen, you know, there were all kinds of reasons that he was not appropriate
as the lead race man. But that actually ended
up giving a lot of, once he left, walked away from that, and that’s why the ’70s and the ’80s, the writing is so interesting because “No Name In The Street,”
which a brilliant essay, where he really looks back on his life, but he also looks at the failures of the civil rights movement. He no longer had to take up that mantle, and it was very freeing for
him as a writer and an artist. – [Attendee] Thank you
for your gorgeous book. it’s beautifully written, and it’s also like a beautiful
object, I have to say, it’s really gorgeous. – Thank you. – [Attendee] So I have a question. I hope it’s okay to ask about
the craft of writing it. I’m working on a biography myself, and so I’m curious. I heard an interview with you where you were talking about having to, you felt like you wanted to see, you were working almost
like an artist, right, visually, with the materials as you were working on the manuscript. So could you say a little
bit more about this? How did you do it? What did you do as you did that? – Yeah, when I was doing it, I was like, Nick, remember what you’re doing. Remember how you’re doing
this so you can tell people or just do it yourself again, but I never wanna write a
book like this ever again. So I much like that presentation
when I was in eighth grade. I’ve repressed the writing of this book. But what I do remember is
going to artist residencies, including McDowell, where Baldwin went, and I stayed in the exact
same studio that he stayed in. And it hadn’t been renovated yet, so like the bathroom was so tiny that I couldn’t sit on the toilet. I had to go like this,
but it made me remember that how small Baldwin was
and that he probably could. You know, those kinds of, I went to a lot of the
places that he went, so that really helped me. There’s of course like a story that I’ve told a million
times that I could tell, but I’ll wait on that. So first of all, I went
to a lot of the places. What Bob Caro says, turn every page and go to all the places. But when I got to McDowell
and my pickup truck, the other writers just
brought their computers and all the artists would
show up with trucks full of, you know, all their stuff. I don’t really work digitally, so I had all of these books with me and arc boxes of archives, and so people thought
I was a visual artist. And in a way, I’m not a visual artist, but I would storyboard
the whole thing for weeks. Sometimes I wouldn’t write the whole time. I’d go for a month and I
would spend the entire month taking archives out and figuring
out where this letter went and just where the hell he was. The FBI files are evil, but they followed his
movements really carefully, so they’re incredibly
useful for a biographer to know where he was flying. So it was color-coded and all these, and then moving things around. And you know, it was kind of fun. Once I realized it was working, you know, so later in the book I was like, ooh, I get the storyboard now. But in the beginning, it was sort of like mad
scientist situation. – Sir. – [Attendee] Gentlemen, thank you for an engrossing discussion. I’d like to ask you about
Baldwin as a provocateur. William Styron made Nat Turner gay, but I’ve never found any
historical evidence of that. James Baldwin was his house guest at the time he was writing it. Was Baldwin responsible
for Nat Turner being gay? – That is not the question I expected, but I appreciate it very much. And I actually had the
pleasure of meeting Rose Styron for the first time just a few weeks ago, where she corrected somebody
else’s book about Baldwin saying that Baldwin had
stayed in a guest house when, in fact, she told me
it wasn’t a guest house, it was like a shack or something. And I was like, oh no, in my book, I also called it a guest house. But I have no idea. I mean, Baldwin was a
provocateur for sure. I have no idea. I do know, you know,
from that documentary, Styron is in that talking about, you know, when Baldwin was staying there, the liberals, they’d all
get together around the fire and Baldwin would say, you know, we’re gonna burn your
mother (beeps) house down. So yes, he was a provocateur. – [Attendee] Thank you. – Here. – [Attendee] I have a question. And then through a lot
of the conversation, I’ve heard instances of talking
about place and location, but I was just wondering if
you can speak a little bit more how important plays figures in Baldwins and the love stories that you’re
telling and how that works. – Thanks for that. Yeah,
place is everything. I mean, place was everything, not just in his love stories,
but in his development. So his first trip south in 1957
was utterly transformative. This was when he met Martin
Luther King for the first time. This is when he’d been
so outside the church, but he came back to the church and he saw that the
church could be a space of not just community, but
political mobilization. So it was very politically
transformative for him. These different spaces
that he would go to. He went to Switzerland,
that’s where Lucien took him. And he wrote “Go Tell It In The Mountain” and he came up with the title. And he went to Corsica. He went there and he
contemplated taking his own life, as he did several times. And he had a kind of an
epiphany that he had to go back to the US and he had to get more involved. This was in 1957 as well,
and he had to go south, so right before he went south. So these different places. He wrote a letter to Engin Cezzar saying his dream in life
was to build a house by the side of the mountain
or the edge of the sea, where he could write. He had that in Istanbul, which we haven’t even talked about. Like, Istanbul was… Some people know this and some don’t, he basically lived there for
the entirety of the 1960s. I mean, he wrote there, but he also had this whole world there that he called it his home. If you count it up with
the letters and everything, he would spend more than half of his ’60s living in Istanbul. And he loved that city. He loved the kind of
post-imperial, melancholy kind of matched his mood. So place was very important. St. Paul de Vence when he
finally created that house by the side of the mountain
or the edge of the sea, that was where he was happy. But then he became so famous there that he had to run elsewhere. He was a transatlantic commuter, truly, so place was vertiginous for him – Here. – [Attendee] Can you hear me? Okay. Thank you for this work. It’s wonderful. I wanted you to talk about
“Little Man, Little Man” because when that was first
published, I read about it, and I’ve been giving it
to younger people I know who are having kids as a gift, and I think that’s a good idea. It’s a great book, I
love the illustrations, and you revived it from not being known. – So yeah, I mean, I was part
of the push to revive it, like I said, Duke University Press. But you know, I’ve written a lot of more academic pieces about it. But I had an interesting
conversation recently with Michelle Norris because one of the
resources that Baldwin gave, so Yoran Cazac had never been to the US, he’d never been to Harlem. Yet here he is, this white
French painter in Tuscany painting African American
children in Harlem. So Baldwin shared with him
photographs of his own family. He shared with him, you know, he’d read out loud from his own novels, but he also gave him “The Black Book,” the book that Tony Morrison edited. And Michelle Norris was… So it’s a children’s book for adults and an adult book for children. So I often say to people, you know, they’re like, “I got it
for my four-year-old.” I’m like, read it with them, you know? You should read it together. And then Michelle Norris said, well, actually, “The Black book,” when she was growing up, her parents read it to her, with her. And in a sense, “The
Black Book” I realized, is also a children’s book for an adult and an adult’s book for children ’cause it’s like “Little Man, Little Man,” it’s a beautiful book
that has mature themes. I mean, it’s like exploring lynchings. Lynchings, exploring like Sambo imagery, as well as, you know,
famous Black inventors. And “Little Man, Little Man”
has, you know, alcoholism and police violence and all this stuff. So it’s interesting to
think of “The Black Book” as being the same genre as “Little Man,” I’d never thought of that before. – [Attendee] Thank you for that really stupendous conversation. So Nick, your book is organized
around the theme of love. As a biographer in the process of writing, did you feel like you came
to love Baldwin yourself? – You know, some people, I think one of the big differences between say the David Lemmings or James Campbell’s biographies,
which were so important, that were written 30 years
ago, is that they knew him, and I think they did love him. And some people now say, you know, they talk about Baldwin, they
say, Jimmy this, Jimmy that. I never did that, you know? I tried to write Jimmy
way early in the draft, if you remember, and it just didn’t work. And I never talk about him as Jimmy. I think having a little bit of distance has actually been good for
me in writing this book. So I don’t know if I love him, but I know that people
have often asked me, you know, do you hate him? You’ve been working on this forever. It’s like, destroyed your life. And I definitely don’t hate him. – [Attendee] It’s been
occurring to me lately with the current political situation. Some days I wake up and think, thank God Jimmy’s not here anymore. But how do you think he would be managing this backward slide that
we’re enduring currently? – Well, first of all, I just wanna say, how this is Mary Painter’s niece and Mary Painter was
Baldwin’s best friend. These letters that they
wrote to each other are extraordinary. And Carolyn has been so generous with me throughout this entire process. – [Attendee] I did get to go
to St. Paul de Vence once too. – Yeah, exactly. That is such a difficult question that I don’t feel comfortable
speaking for Baldwin. But I will say sort of what I said before is that he’s such an
idiosyncratic thinker, that’s part of another reason
why I wouldn’t prognosticate. But he was willing and able to change his mind. And I think that’s something
that would be helpful for people to think about in this country and the world when
things are so polarized. Of course, they should change their mind to be the same as my mind, but we do need to start
being willing, you know, as a world to really see each other, witness each other the way
the Baldwin called on us to do and to change our minds. – Nick. (attendees clapping) Thank you so much for being here. Even though this isn’t my venue, this has been a great conversation. And the time has come for me to say that thank you to Shelby White and Leon Levy for your generous support of this event and institution. (attendees clapping) Thank you to this institution
for allowing me to do this. And with that, may you
all have a good night. (attendees clapping)