James Baldwin fascinates and is fascinated with Harlem. The confluence of writer and city meet in Baldwin novels, but not in the majority of them, as most readers might expect. That is the subject of the new book by Herb Boyd. The author knows Baldwin, knows Harlem and knows writing and shares them well with the reader.
In the book, Boyd shares Baldwin’s love of black people, writing, Paris and pure curiosity about life. He is the voyeur extraordinaire. The stories of his life, which he would novelize eventually, define Baldwin. The very words to clothe them yields fame.
Boyd admits that Baldwin’s Harlem is not a definitive biography of Baldwin nor was it intended to fill that niche. There are other biographers and biographies. And one can certainly read the works of Baldwin to inform and fill in the gaps of knowledge about Baldwin the writer, the student, the artist, the poet, the man and the immutable lover of (white) men.
The reader embarks on an odyssey about a man obsessed with other people, but not with himself. Perhaps he is obsessed with his pleasure as his early awareness of homosexuality might attest. He exorcises those fears of his sexuality in the critically acclaimed Giovanni’s Room.
Any the biographer would be remiss if he did not tell of Baldwin’s early homosexual orientation. Boyd too does not shy away from this aspect of Baldwin’s life, which include early warning that he is different, i.e., attracted to men and women.
His fervor for civil rights activism which leads to a famous, or rather infamous incident in Baldwin’s life: the New York City meeting Baldwin orchestrated for Robert Kennedy at Joseph P. Kennedy’s apartment. That meeting, which amounted to a Philippic attack on Bobby, along with Baldwin’s liaison with Malcolm “The Legend” X make for absorbing reading. Baldwin counts the likes of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Countee Cullen (a former teacher), Langston Hughes (rivalry), Marlon Brando and Bobby Kennedy as friends that he can call on the phone or whom he might find sitting and staring up at him from the audience.
Baldwin is a study in contradiction: He is ugly on a physical level, or so he thinks he is. Yet, he is later sought by the rich and famous. Harlem at the time is home to luminaries, many of which have yet to be outranked in order of brightness by black or white writers. His begins life with a rage/hatred towards white people, engendered by his step-father and later by his own experiences with Jim Crow and white people who wanted to kill him. Not surprisingly, James has a love-hate relationship with Harlem.
This fact intrigues the author. He questions aloud why James would sacrifice his brilliance and poetry that flow when he writes about Harlem and its people and its struggle to the mere flowery words that he manufactures when he writes about Paris, France. It does not ring true, according to Boyd.
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