The artist who brought young James Baldwin to his wings

All James Baldwin’s writings come back to one thing: Love in Primitive Man. No biographer has captured the fundamental truth of this important writer better since Baldwin’s hand-selected Boswell David Leeming than Nicholas Boggs’s basic truth, and Nicholas Boggs’ new, authoritative and comprehensive biographical framework Baldwin’s life is a series of love stories.

Boggs wisely breaks down Baldwin: Love Story In the style of Baldwin’s novels, it is divided into four different parts, or “books.” Each book centers on the people Baldwin loves throughout his life, like Baldwin’s novels, is a running, outbreaking event. In three cases, these “beloved people” are romantic lovers and companions: painter Lucien Happersberger (with Baldwin and 1948-55), actor Engin Cezzar (1957-70) and painter Yoran Cazac (1971-76). Each story ends with a noisy breakup.

But the first book of Biography tells the story of a longer lasting connection: Baldwin’s relationship with artist Beauford Delaney, whose colors still spin and shocked by the power made by the 1940s. Unlike the other three beloved people, it is unclear whether Delaney or Baldwin perfected their relationship, filling their story with special melancholy. Delaney weaves in and out for the rest of his life at Baldwin. He is the mentor, sight, golden ray and potential.

“I learned light from Beauford Delaney, everything, every surface, every face contains light,” Baldwin wrote in 1964 after twenty years of meeting with the artist. When a friend in his high school English class told Baldwin, he was only 17, “You have to meet this wonderful person in the village.” He was a painter. He is black. My friend thought he and Baldwin would definitely do it. They met one afternoon at a faded brick unit at 181 Green Street, which Henry Miller once described as a “park residence of canvases filled with colors.” Baldwin warmed the studio with a “Baldwin Belly”. During the painting craze, he discovered an ancient Vitrola photo where Delaney meets Delaney in his thirties and will play 45 seconds of blues and jazz music all day. The apprenticeship—the elder and his budding star—has recruited Baldwin’s film teacher, a young white woman named Bill Miller, who left Baldwin’s creativity. Baldwin will learn how to listen carefully to Blues and early jazz in Delaney’s studio and embrace it as part of his cultural heritage.

The intermediate nature of these courses won’t get lost on Baldwin anytime soon, and later wrote: “I’m no longer afraid when I realize that music, not American literature, is actually my language. Then I can really write.” The author will continue to boldly start his first essay, Notes of the Indigenous Son (1955), by condemning his chosen literary works as works in a “disastrous medium of language.”

Boggs brought his Delaney part to the ending text of Baldwin’s essay about the painter: “Maybe I shouldn’t be frank, I believe he was a great painter, the greatest of which was the greatest; but I do know that only love can create great art. The stubborn intellectual type would think that dirty, sensual concepts like “love” have no place in critical writing or history, and the worst sin is to confuse the artist with the artwork. But frankly, it’s overly formal, inhuman nonsense. Boggs’ biography shows why, reminding us that one’s life and art are inevitably intertwined. We learn that Delaney is on MacDougal Street, Manhattan Calypso, a West Indian restaurant on Street, served as Baldwin’s first show. He described the scene from Delaney’s Studio, where Baldwin “still wearing a robe and dressed” and “walking asleep while he played the guitar and sang to him. “He wrote that Baldwin “fightedly” needed Delaney to show him the life of shaping thoughts and souls through beauty. Just like Baldwin’s phlegm analyst, Boggs saw precisely how each part is associated with the entire part – love, novels, television appearances, black and white intellectuals, breakups, essays, prose, dramas of darts.

Perhaps, as Louis Menand New Yorker, Baldwin deviated from the expert’s consent and had a silent meaning, which Baldwin deviated from. He said it was “hard to deny” that Baldwin continued his writing career “deteriorated”. (It’s also easy to deny. Watch.) The good thing is, according to Menand’s bland indicators, Baldwin’s early, “autobiographical” novels (Tell it on the mountain, 1953 Giovanni’s room, 1856) and papers (collected in Notes of the Indigenous Son, 1955 No one knows my name. 1961). But for my money, Baldwin’s art journey really went to a still underrated, serious and commercial failure until Tell me how long the train has been (1968), sure to be with the outbreak of fanaticism, the climax of jagged and arias On top of my head (1979) – For me, his best achievement. Boggs’s book doesn’t indulge in boring rankings.

Through all this, Delaney endured it. Delaney faltered with the rise of Baldwin’s stardom, urging suicide hallucinations and voice tortures in the wake of a brutal attack on Washington Square Park, in which white youth attacked him and called him “n *** er queer.” As Boggs wrote, “The fear of rape or casting him evil white man would become a major part of his nightmare.” However, “painting is [Delaney’s] Defend the sound, escape and transform the social and psychological forces that entangle him. “It’s color, form and beauty, but Baldwin is still a loyal friend, and through these trials, he is one of the excellent stories. Unique vulnerability: “I don’t feel I have the right to object [Beauford]Or give up his old age under him. He was very, very nice to me when there weren’t many people. I owe him, but I actually pay it back more than I do. [and] Despite everything, he is still one of the cutest, even heroic people I know. ”

Of course, just as there will always be a bay that separates us from our love, we will not be the core of any artist, and we will never be able to get their core. Baldwin’s complete deal with four people – the Mali painter, Lucien, David Baldwin (his brother) and Delaney himself, blocking the public until 2037. Even when we can read these emotional hurricanes, we won’t find him there. But, no doubt, Boggs is closest to the point after Leeming (one of Baldwin’s own best friends), encapsulating the inner workings, allowing his writing to push the drive, deceive truth, destroy boundaries, destroy boundaries, and always long for this love, to the perfect feeling, which may forever hide from us.