MeMoMu_HOHI_020 THE LIVES AND LOVES OF JAMES BALDWIN
The New Yorker
Baldwin photographed in 1963 with Lucien Happersberger—“the one true love story of my life,” Baldwin maintained. Alongside the public crusade for civil rights, there was always a private search for a secure, loving relationship. His thesis about our fear of love linked the two.Photograph by Mario Jorrin / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
A Critic at Large
The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An older generation dismissed him as passé; a newer one has recast him as a secular saint. But Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than either camp recognizes.
By Louis Menand
August 11, 2025
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is true. People write because they have something to say. Baldwin had something to say, and he spent his life saying it. But many who thought they got his message didn’t get it at all.
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Most of his journalism and all his books were published by white editors who did not always share his ideas on race relations. He was naturally fearful, but he was on the road and out in public during a time when people like him, including people he knew, were getting shot. Putting his message out took an enormous physical and psychic toll.
That message was simple. We’re afraid of love, because we’re afraid of exposing our true selves. To manage that fear, we invent meaningless categories—Black, white, homosexual, heterosexual—and “other” the groups we don’t belong to in order to avoid a reckoning with ourselves. In America, this manifests as “the race problem.” Until white Americans—or Americans who “think they are white,” as Baldwin sometimes
put it—stop posing as innocents and confront who they are, until the country faces its history, until white people learn to love, there will never be genuine equality.
That’s pretty much all that Baldwin ever said, and he said it over and over in almost every essay, every book, every speech, and every interview. He had no interest in politics in the usual sense; he wasn’t interested in social programs, or civil-rights laws, or the equal-protection clause. If you asked his opinion on those things, he’d politely (usually) change the subject. He was quick, always ready with an answer, and it was always the same answer.
/.../ What has happened, in the time of my time, is the record of my ancestors. No promise was kept with them, no promise was kept with me, nor can I counsel those coming after me, nor my global kinsmen, to believe a word uttered by my morally bankrupt and desperately dishonest countrymen.”
Three years later, he was dead. He was only sixty-three, but he had long since lost his readership. In 1976, the Times’ daily book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt opened a review, “So James Baldwin is still here, still pursuing us, a ghost of 60’s past.” Three years before that, the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., had travelled to France to interview Baldwin for Time. When Gates filed the piece, editors told him the magazine wasn’t interested; Baldwin was “passé.” Just a decade earlier, he’d been on the cover. Even Gates, who’d once found Baldwin inspirational, came to believe that, in trying to keep up with the times, Baldwin had given up his critical independence. He had become an echo. He no longer mattered.
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The consensus formed early that Baldwin, who broke through with his first two novels, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) and “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), and the essay collections “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) and “Nobody Knows My Name” (1961), was a better essayist than novelist. The novels have their moments, but they have the humorless and fatalistic quality of literary naturalism. They are not books you are eager to get back to. Truman Capote, in a letter to a friend, called Baldwin’s fiction “crudely written and of balls-aching boredom.” Compared with much literary fiction of the time—“Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” “On the Road,” “Lolita,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Rabbit, Run”—Baldwin’s novels are less formally adventurous and far less entertaining.
Still, the early ones were well received. “Giovanni’s Room”—though it’s the story of a love affair between two men, a risqué topic for fiction in 1956—was a critical success, at least among white reviewers. It sold briskly and was a National Book Award finalist. Maybe setting it in Paris made it seem exotic rather than prurient.
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Baldwin’s nonfiction is first-person and autobiographical. That was how he established his authority as a “witness” (the term he preferred) to American race relations. He had walked those mean streets. In Harlem, where he was born, and Greenwich Village, where he moved at nineteen, he had known poverty, police brutality, sexual assault, and racial discrimination. He had fled the country, going to Paris in 1948, when he was twenty-four. He did not return until 1957.
Even then, he was semi-expatriated. From 1961 on, he spent more and more time in Istanbul, although he was often in the United States speaking on behalf of the civil-rights movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, basically ended that, and in 1970 Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul de Vence, in the South of France, where he lived for the rest of his life. This man who wrote obsessively about America spent half his life elsewhere.
It’s a life appealing to biographers, full of historical incidents and famous names, and featuring a complex, quotable, and slightly otherworldly human being. The first Baldwin biography, “The Furious Passage of James Baldwin,” by Fern Marja Eckman, a reporter at the New York Post, came out in 1966, when its subject was only forty-two. There have been a number since, including, most recently, Douglas Field’s “All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin” (2015), Bill V. Mullen’s “James Baldwin: Living in Fire” (2019), and now Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
There will be more. In 2017, Baldwin’s papers were acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, giving biographers access to an extensive archive. But a definitive life is still out of reach, because Baldwin’s correspondence with four people—including his brother David (Baldwin had eight siblings) and his Swiss lover Lucien Happersberger, whom he called “the one true love story of my life”—is under seal until 2037. (As was generally the case with the men Baldwin was attracted to, Happersberger was mainly interested in women. In 1964, he married the Black actress Diana Sands—while she was performing in Baldwin’s play “Blues for Mister Charlie,” something that Baldwin, understandably, regarded as a betrayal. That’s what I mean by “ended unhappily.”)
Another biographical challenge is that the source for a lot of what we know, or think we know, about Baldwin’s life is Baldwin. He told many stories about himself, particularly in the book-length essay “No Name in the Street” (1972), and also in interviews. The difficulty is that Baldwin tended, as we all tend, to dramatize—not to dissemble, necessarily, but to highlight the significance of an experience. When most of us do this, it doesn’t matter. If an event wasn’t quite the way we’ve chosen to remember it, who cares? But we’re not James Baldwin.
/.../ When he stepped off the train at the Gare des Invalides, two Americans were there to meet him and bring him straight to Les Deux Magots, where Richard Wright was waiting.
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A lot of people write about Baldwin because they have cathected with him along some dimension. For Boggs, it was Baldwin’s sexuality. In ninth grade, Boggs borrowed “Giovanni’s Room” from his sister and never returned it. Later, in college, he discovered in the Beinecke Library, at Yale, the manuscript of a children’s book that Baldwin had written with the French artist Yoran Cazac. It took Boggs more than twenty years, but he was able, in 2018, to bring the book into print. Meanwhile, it bothered him that earlier biographers had downplayed Baldwin’s love life, and he set about to fill in some of the blanks. Hence his subtitle, “A Love Story.”
/.../ There’s heavy use of the correspondence; unfortunately, Baldwin’s letters, at least the ones currently available, tend to disappoint—they are typically eloquent, sometimes anguished, but rather formal and rarely gossipy. They don’t capture what the Life reporter called the “amusing bitchy bon vivant” side of Jimmy.
Still, Boggs’s 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. Alongside the public crusade for civil rights, there was always, as Boggs shows us, a private search for a secure, loving relationship. /.../
Boggs sometimes strains to detect homoeroticism in Baldwin’s relations with men he was friendly with. Marlon Brando and Baldwin, he writes, “may have had an intermittently sexual relationship.” Sure, maybe. But there is no evidence for it. /.../
One of his last pieces, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” published in Playboy in 1985, concludes, “We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”
Baldwin was an enemy of identity politics. His message wasn’t an imperative to declare your Blackness or your queerness. It was simply to live your life. His favorite writer was Henry James, another expatriate. (A visitor to the house in Saint-Paul de Vence reported seeing a wall of books on James.) A key text for Baldwin was “The Ambassadors,” and the key line in it was Strether’s advice to Little Bilham: “Live all you can.” Baldwin had “The Ambassadors” in mind when he wrote “Giovanni’s Room.” “ ‘Giovanni’s Room’ is not really about homosexuality,” he told Goldstein. “It’s about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.”
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Some Black writers missed the message, too. Soon after “The Fire Next Time” came out, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka, but then known primarily as a Beat poet) published “Brief Reflections on Two Hot Shots,” in the magazine Kulchur. The hot shots were the Black South African writer Peter Abrahams and Baldwin, whom Jones called the “Joan of Arc of the cocktail party.” Baldwin and Abrahams, he said, “will not even open their mouths to say anything but that they are well-dressed, educated, and have feelings that are easily hurt.” They “want the hopeless filth of enforced ignorance to be stopped only because they are sometimes confused with the sufferers.” Which was pretty obtuse. Had he actually read the book?
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In 1964, with his high-school classmate Richard Avedon, Baldwin published a deluxe slipcased coffee-table book, “Nothing Personal,” featuring Avedon photographs of assorted random figures including Dwight Eisenhower, Bertrand Russell, the Everly Brothers, and the inmates of a mental hospital. Baldwin’s accompanying essay offered lines like “When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents.” In The New York Review of Books, Robert Brustein, soon to become the dean of the Yale School of Drama, compared Baldwin to “a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie, to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem.”
/.../In 1973, Baldwin wrote and narrated a show for the Newport Jazz Festival called “The Life and Times of Ray Charles,” at which Charles performed. The Times’ reviewer wrote that “the molehill that this mountain of talent produced was shocking.”
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On January 20th of this year, the page turned again. We are now in a looking-glass world in which whites are cast as the ones in need of government support and protection. This Administration—along with this Supreme Court—doesn’t even want to see the word “race,” or any of its cognates, like “diversity.” Baldwin, too, had hoped for a world in which nobody talked about color. This is not the form he imagined such a world would take. There’s not a lot of love out there. 
Published in the print edition of the August 18, 2025, issue, with the headline “The Messenger.”
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