Episode 13: Nicholas Boggs on James Baldwin

“They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yoran Cazac put it, they were ‘eating the same substance,’ and they happened to be of different nationalities and races and even sexualities. I appreciate that they had these complicated relationships where they saw each other across difference for who they were and what they shared. It’s what sustained Baldwin. It’s what enabled him to write. It’s what he wrote about.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949