Commentator: “When you were starting out as a writer, you were Black, impoverished, and homosexual. You must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged can I get?’”
James Baldwin: “No, I thought I had hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous, you had to find a way to use…”
On any given night, New York reliably offers an embarrassment of riches in terms of things to do, as entertaining as they are illuminating. This was certainly true catching Nicholas Boggs discussing his new James Baldwin biography “Baldwin: A Love Story,” with New York Times columnist John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and author of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
A collaborative public program hosted by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, it was held at the imposing CUNY Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue (the former landmarked B. Altman Store). An at-capacity crowd seemed to hang onto every word, and rightly so, as we were hearing from two excellent storytellers, who are two of the most distinguished scholars in their fields.
One false note seemed to be when Dr. McWhorter asked if Boggs, through a decade of painstaking research and writing, had come to “love Baldwin?” He wondered, “Because with some of the finest biographies I’ve ever read, after a while it’s clear that the author detests his subject.”
For me, it’s always seemed that the opposite is true, and especially in this case. An affinity with the subject always seems to enhance a writer’s understanding in a way that the best manage to convey to the reader.
Michael Henry Adams photos
In appearance, even with his long hair tied back, Nathaniel Boggs best resembles Albrecht Duer’s last, Jesus-like, self-portrait of 1500. 
Ms. Lana Turner, Harlem’s foremost bibliophile and swing dancer, and David Levering Lewis who wrote “When Harlem was in Vogue.” 
Joel Desouve described himself as “someone who admires James Baldwin’s writing!”
However dissimilar their circumstances, hearing of Boggs’ life, his empathic sympathy for Baldwin, the man he at one point characterized as ”The greatest American writer of the Twentieth Century,” was obvious. The son of a civil rights lawyer and a music teacher, born in Washington D.C., Boggs was acclaimed as a prodigy boy soprano and an exceptional athletic star. No, Boggs is neither Black nor poor, but he is brilliant, and he is also Queer.
His partner is Jamaican-born novelist Marlon James (the Dark Star Trilogy, “Moon Witch, Spider King”). Their alliance, a formidable, complementary, and intellectual coupling along the lines of Darryl Pinckney’s and James Fenton’s, seems to be just the sort of union we learned that Baldwin dreamed of. Boggs explained, however, that Baldwin’s desire was mostly a fantasy, as evidenced by recurring self-sabotage. Among myriad lovers, Baldwin obsessed most over white men whose heterosexuality made them, if not wholly unobtainable, most definitely unwilling to commit.
“His yearning for that sort of ongoing connection was very similar to his impossible love for America,” Boggs said. “He had to run away from and come back to it.” Boggs related his surprise when the greatest of Baldwin’s loves, visionary French artist Yoran Cazac, laughed at the suggestion that Baldwin had pined for the two of them to share an enduring domestic relationship. The painter had not blanched at what Baldwin had called, in letters to his brother, their “marriage.” However, Cazac did insist, “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 was at least one of the reasons why he sought out these relationships, where he could have the intensity of connection and then go away and write and come back…”
Professing greater admiration for Baldwin’s essays than his novels, lamenting about the doom and tragedy of his peripatetic wanderings, it was McWhorter’s turn to be caught off guard. Boggs replied that a big part of his mission was to disabuse us of seeing Baldwin as failed or alone and alienated. “People like to say he was not handsome … Have you seen what his lovers looked like? 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 it was alive with love and sex and pleasure and life…”
Were you aware that Baldwin wanted to write a triple biography about Medgar Evers, Dr. King, and Malcolm? For those of us who have failed to read all of Baldwin’s canon, we were informed that he was responding to the world and its rejection with love, that all his novels are love stories. As to Baldwin’s fiction versus essays, Boggs argued that to appreciate either, they are inseparable — the one explains the other.
I wanted to know more about Baldwin, the agent provocateur. During the questions, I asked, “Though I can find no historical documentation, William Styron’s ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner’ made the heroic martyr gay. While he was at work on this book, Baldwin was his house guest. Did James Baldwin make William Styron make Nat Turner gay?” “I would love to know too,” Boggs answered.
Writing about Will Marion Cook recently, John McWhorter wrote about the Black contribution to American popular song metamorphosis of the entire idiom: “After ‘Shuffle Along,’ the music of what had once been known as Black Broadway became simply the music of Broadway.” What Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story” does so well is to show how much James Baldwin’s life and work transfigured American thought.