“Baldwin: A Love Story” by Nicholas Boggs is the first major biography of author James Baldwin in three decades, and not one that abides by conventional modes of chronology. Boggs depicts Baldwin’s life through his relationships, including his muses, collaborators and lovers. He reads from the work Tuesday at the Harvard Book Store in conversation with author Ilyon Woo; we spoke with him first about his relationship to Baldwin and the discoveries he made in his expansive research and writing process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s your favorite work of Baldwin’s?
It’s so hard to have perspective on that after all these years. “Giovanni’s Room” is the novel that changed my life once I read it, because it sort of offered me a way to understand myself. But “Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood” has a special place in my heart because it’s what started this whole journey. It’s one of his least known books, and it’s a strange one – a children’s book for adults, is what he called it.
What is the compelling thing about Baldwin and his work?
It’s hard to say one thing. He lived this incredible, transatlantic life. He was caught up in some of the most important developments of the 20th century, like the Civil Rights Movement, and he had just a unique perspective and voice that hasn’t really been equaled since, and that’s one of the reasons why we keep returning to him even today, as we continue to face many of the challenges that he was writing about.
What was the most unexpected thing you learned writing this book?
I was tracking down Yoran Cazac, who died in 2005. I interviewed him for a couple years. It wasn’t until 2018 that I went to see his wife, Beatrice Cazac, in Tuscany, to see any correspondence or anything we hadn’t seen before or illustrations for “Little Man Little Man.” She was rummaging through her materials and the sun was setting in her bedroom, and she found an unpublished love poem that Baldwin had written to her husband, in French, because Yoran didn’t speak English. It was a seven-page love poem and she stood there and translated it back into English for me as the sun set. She hadn’t looked at this poem in 45 years. There was a rusty paperclip that fell to the floor. I felt like I had been waiting 20 years to hear this poem, to get more information about the contours and the depth of the relationship between Baldwin and Yoran Cazac.
What would you hope that readers take away from this book, regardless of their level of familiarity with Baldwin?
I hope it encourages people to read his work in its entirety. Sometimes people say “Oh, he was a great essayist, but his novels aren’t as good,” and there’s been a real change in that attitude the last few years. I hope that continues. He can get reduced to soundbites these days on Instagram or wherever. It’s great he can be disseminated in those ways, but what I want this book to do is to create a readable narrative of love stories that also takes you deep into his work and deep into all the facets of his life – as an activist, as a writer, as a friend, as a collaborator, as a citizen of the world. I hope that my book gives that sense of Baldwin in all his multiplicities.
And what do you think people can take away from his writing?
Right now, when a lot of history – like the history of race relations and the history of slavery in this country – is being erased, I think he allows us to understand the importance of truth telling and of reckoning with the past, not erasing it. He always said that the innocence constitutes the crime, and what he meant by that was that when white Americans pretend history doesn’t exist, or that bad things didn’t happen and aren’t happening, that this idea of innocence is a false innocence, and actually this kind of erasure and hatred ends up damaging the person who does the erasing as much as it does anybody else – because it’s such an act of hate, it’s such an act of self-contamination, self-strangulation. You’re strangling your spiritual self when you do that. Baldwin reminds us again and again of the importance of witnessing and truth-telling.
Nicholas Boggs reads from “Baldwin: A Love Story” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free. Pulitzer-winner Ilyon Woo joins.
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