by Nicholas Boggs
“Love was a crucial subject for James Baldwin,” said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe, so it’s appropriate that this first major Baldwin biography in 31 years “can be seen as an act of love.” Author Nicholas Boggs “has no interest in depicting his subject as Saint Jimmy,” but he “comes about as close as anyone has to wrapping his arms around Baldwin, embracing him, if you will, in his entirety.” Boggs has organized his book by presenting the life of the revered Harlem-born writer as defined by a string of intimate, mostly nonsexual relationships with four other men, starting with a mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney. Boggs also shows that Baldwin was fiercely committed to the idea that love is the cure for bigotry and hatred, and his book is “a reminder that we could really use Baldwin right now, and his instinct for cutting through nonsense like a lithe, sharp sword.”
Baldwin (1924–87) makes an attractive subject in many ways, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker. His life story is “full of historical incidents and famous names,” and features as its protagonist “a complex, quotable, and slightly otherworldly human being.” But Baldwin also poses challenges, because many of the claims he made about his life are hard to verify, especially given that a few key correspondences won’t be unsealed until 2037. “Still, Boggs’ biography makes a hugely important contribution, because it takes us to the heart of Baldwin’s message—the fear of love—and shows how urgent that problem was for him.” In everything he wrote, including 1963’s The Fire Next Time, his most impactful book, Baldwin stressed that people create meaningless categories such as Black and white because doing so is easier than loving, and he predicted that there’d never be equality in America until white people learned to love.
As Baldwin moves through life, trading in one core relationship for another, said Hamilton Cain in The Minnesota Star Tribune, his life story “passes from man to man like a baton.” After Delaney came the Swedish painter Lucien Happersberger, the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, and the French painter Yoran Cazac, who allows Boggs to turn the book’s final section into “a feast of gossip and speculation” that “succeeds brilliantly as narrative.” Baldwin clearly enjoyed the peak years of his celebrity. And though Boggs “keeps aloof from his protagonist’s dalliances with vulnerable young men,” this is no hagiography. Instead, “Baldwin is a fiery, fiercely researched biography worthy of an American genius.” Because it simultaneously dissects our nation’s myths with “dead-eye accuracy,” it’s also “an indictment of enduring racism and homosocial panic.” | 
