Biographer David Leeming on James Baldwin’s Teaching

(upbeat music) - Hello, my name is Ruzia Iqbal. Welcome to episode seven of our podcast notes on a native son about James Baldwin. This year, 2024 marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters. He was many things to many people. Novelist, essayist, activist, seer, icon. For Baldwin, though, such lists were meaningless. Who and what James Baldwin was and what is his legacy can't really be listed, but it can and perhaps should be found in his work. He refused any attempt to box him in. This podcast tries to get close to the idea of getting to know Jimmy Baldwin through his work and for those who love his words to return to them. (upbeat music) We've called it notes on a native son after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays notes of a native son. That essay clarifies with considerable power, what he is and what America is on his terms. In each episode of notes on a native son, we invite a well-known figure to choose a special or significant James Baldwin passage. The conversation that ensues often tells us as much about Baldwin's story as it does about the person who loves Jimmy, as he was known to all who loved him. Our guest on this episode of notes on a native son is the American writer David Leaming. Leaming was Baldwin's biographer. Now you may not immediately regard James Baldwin as a 20th century version of Samuel Johnson that towering essayist and writer from the 18th century. But it is interesting that Baldwin would tease Leaming and sometimes introduce him to people as his Boswell. That's James Boswell who wrote the life of Samuel Johnson, a book which became seen as a landmark in the development of the modern genre of biography. Leaming in his biography of Baldwin tells us that almost from the moment he met him, he recognized that he was in the presence of a highly complex, troubled and driven individual who was more intensely serious than anyone. He had ever met. David Leaming got his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and went on to become the head of English at the Robert College in Istanbul, where he met James Baldwin in 1961. Over the years Baldwin gave him permission to take care of his papers and he was Jimmy's companion during some of the liveliest years of his life. Leaming eventually became professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut. He has written several books on comparative literature and mythology as well as a biography of the painter Beauford Delaney, who Baldwin regarded as his spiritual father. David Leaming is now 87 years old and we met at his home in Stonington, Connecticut. My name is David Leaming. The quote from James Baldwin that I've chosen is from nobody knows my name and specifically from the essay in search of a majority. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. David Leaming, welcome to our podcast. What do you think he meant when he was talking about love in that way? I think he meant that love can't be sort of as simply having feelings for someone that the kind of love he's talking about can be reflected in a personal relationship but it extends into a much larger question of the relationship between people. So love for him means the opposite of safety. You can't be safe and have the kind of love he's talking about because the love he's talking about has to do with the breaking down of barriers which means it has to do with vulnerability. To really love you have to be vulnerable and to really love is crucial. These are the words of somebody who grew up in his teens as an apprentice preacher and a Pentecostal church where he might well have heard the phrase God is love but that did not satisfy him. In fact, it didn't seem to have much effect on his community and therefore he expanded that idea of love as a part of what you could call his own gospel after he left the church. And love is the central factor, I think, in that gospel and that good news that he hopes to be able to bring for example to race relations as well as personal relations. I think we're going to come back to this theme of love time and again in this conversation but I wanted to say first of all what a joy and a privilege it is for us that we're speaking with you. David, how old were you when you first met James Baldwin? James Baldwin. In my 20s, so 24 or something like that. 1961. Where were you? I was in Istanbul. And I guess I'd read almost nothing by Baldwin. Maybe Giovanni's room or notes of a native son. And there was a young man there named Engin Jazar who I knew quite well because he'd been a Robert College student. I taught at Robert College. In Istanbul. I went there immediately after graduating from Princeton. I met Engin. And Engin had become a good friend of Baldwin's. So Engin invited Jimmy to come. I keep calling Baldwin Jimmy but that's because everybody called him Jimmy all the time. So it seems artificial to me to call him Baldwin. We will continue to call him Jimmy. Yes, all right. So Engin's sister had a party for Jimmy in a little house along the boss for us. And I was invited to the party along with some other Robert College people. And I got to the party and someone said, I think it was Engin's sister said David go into the kitchen and meet Jimmy because he wants to see what Americans in Turkey are like. So a little bit nervous after that introduction. Well, he was an American in Turkey. Yes, he was. But I think he meant the other kind of American. But anyway, I went into the kitchen and he was sitting on a kitchen stool and on a counter scribbling on a yellow pad. And I looked over his shoulder and he scribbled at the end. Is Istanbul December 19th, I think 1961? And he turned around and he said, who were you? And I said, I'm David. And he said, I like that name. I'm Jimmy. And his brother's name was David. His brother's name was David. The main character in Giovanni's room was David. The main character in the amen corner was David. Stepfather was also David and his favorite brother was David. So I was lucky. And he said, I'm a good name. If I hadn't had that name, I probably never would have become Baldwin's biographer, right? Because. Well, there we are. That's an interesting thought. If he had disliked the name. Who knows? So he was writing on a yellow pad. He'd clearly finished something. He was just finishing the novel, another country. So I watched him write the last words of another country. And then that night after the party, we talked a lot of the party. And then he said he'd like to go out to have a drink. So we, I knew places to go to have a drink. And so I took him to this little bar that I knew down in Istanbul. Well, let's back up a bit before we talk about where you took him and how that evening went and how you became friends. How did he strike you? People have asked me that and it's awfully difficult to describe it. except to say that he was magnetic. The eyes were very large. The smile was very large and one was drawn to him. I fell in love with him, not particularly in a sexual sense, but I fell in love with who he was with what he was with his magnetism. That night? Yes, almost immediately. Love it for a sight, because that was cough. That is so fascinating. I mean, what you're describing is somebody who occupies a room in a very particular way that he is deeply charismatic. Yeah, he was. And you hadn't read very much by him. No, I didn't. Didn't know about his reputation. No, not much. I think I've read Giovanni's room and found it a bit terrifying because, well, it was it's a terrifying novel. How do I put it? Because the person who is loved does not return that love, even though the person who loves him has opened himself to the possibility of a real non-holmarx card relationship. And this in a complicated way leads to the lover's death. The same sex relationship. Is that also part of the fear in that novel? I mean, is that because it was radical in some ways? Yes, it was. And in fact, modern himself told me that he didn't think of that novel as a homosexual novel so much as it was a novel about the cost of refusing love. And at the time, I didn't understand what he really meant, which had to do with the whole question of social love, love of peoples for other people. It was interesting also that he told me that in many ways, David represented his own ambivalence at the time. The fact that he was wrestling with his sexuality with who he was and what that meant. The time about which he's writing in Giovanni's room was the time that he spent in Paris as a young man. And during that time, he had relationships with both men and women. And this was something that concerned him. Tell me a little bit about yourself and why you went to Istanbul and how because clearly that decision led to things that changed your life in all kinds of different ways. Definitely. I suppose that night changed my life. And my life was changed in many ways through my relationship with Baldwin and with other people such as the painter of Bielford Delaney who was very close to him and through my became very close. So Delaney was the painter who really introduced Jimmy to downtown New York, you know, the village. And actually changed his way of seeing the world. He did. Yeah, definitely. At a very young age. I mean, I think he met him when he was 15 still a teenager. He was having trouble in school and also was bothered by lots of things that were happening in his family life. And he was leaving the church. And so he was somewhat at Lucense and a friend of his, Emil Kapoevo, his name, gave Jimmy Bielford's address. And he knocked on what he called the unusual door using a phrase from an old spiritual. He knocked on the unusual door and was greeted by Bielford Delaney. And that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, which was probably the most important relationship. I mean, one could argue it was the most important relationship that Baldwin had with anyone. Again, not a sexual relationship, but a relationship of deep love. The kind of love we're talking about. Love is a battle. Love is a war. Love is a growing up. And indeed to go back to the kind of love, the quote that you have chosen, you were absolutely at the center of that relationship. In fact, Baldwin entrusted you to bring Bielford Delaney to Istanbul. Well, along with meeting Baldwin on that night in 1961, the other event which changed my life was taking Baldwin's instructions that I should bring Bielford from Paris to Istanbul. This was after I came back to the state's work for Baldwin in his New York office, finished my graduate work, and then went back to Istanbul with Baldwin. During that period, Baldwin asked me to go to pick up the car in Paris, but also to pick up Bielford Delaney. I didn't really know who Bielford Delaney was. So, and in a way, this says something about Baldwin's idea of love because he loved Bielford and he wanted me to love Bielford. But he wanted me to love Bielford in the kind of love that he's talking about in the quote I just gave, a kind of love which is hard work and and involves vulnerability. He didn't tell me that Bielford was clinically schizophrenic and powerful. He heard voices and he heard voices who called him a black faggot using the N word not the B word. I didn't know that when I meant Bielford. He did also give you an instruction, didn't he? He said don't lose him and I of course was confused by that. I found my way to Bielford Studio apartment and not on the door. He opened the door and everything was draped and white and he was all dressed and white and a white Tashiki and all I could see was sun coming through the window after he opened the door on this brown black face or brown face. So that was my introduction to Bielford Delaney and he said won't you lie down? Not won't you come in or how are you? Won't you lie down and he pointed to these two cups which were head to head on one wall and so I got down on the cup and he got down on the other cup and we stayed in that position except to get up to use the latrine and the outside in the hallway or to eat a can of tuna fish or something. We stayed on those cups for three days while we got to know each other and he told me about his life which is interesting because eventually years later I would write a biography of him. So obviously this was a very useful three days even though I didn't know it was very useful. I was just confused. I was a 20 something lying on a bed by this crazy guy who was saying what I lie down and I had to lie down for three days. It's a good question. I have no idea. There was some part of me probably that said you really should get out of here while you can but again Buford was hypnotic the way that Jimmy was. But it interests me that you trusted the part of yourself that didn't make you flee. Yes I was learning about love wasn't I? I was learning that if I really wanted to have an interesting life then I had to let love come in and love coming in met being vulnerable and open to all sorts of possibilities. Both good and bad. After three days and three nights he said okay we can go to Jimmy now as if Jimmy were you know crossed town in Versailles. He didn't realize what this [BLANK_AUDIO] was going to involve driving through the Iron Curtain to Istanbul at that time was not easy. And we began our drive. During the drive, he tried to get out of the car while it was moving at 60 miles an hour because he said to the people in the car coming in the other direction at 60 miles an hour, we're talking about him. That's when I realized Jimmy had asked me to do something that was bigger than I had understood it to be. We stopped one night at one of the transit hotels that existed in Yugoslavia at the time for people who were driving through and you were expected to go through in a certain amount of time and be out of the country. I woke up in the middle of the night, our cats were next to each other in a men's dormitory. And I looked over and Beaufort's cat was empty. And it suddenly dawned on me. What did he say? Don't lose him. That's what Jimmy had told me not to lose him. So I got out of bed and went out into the village to look for him. And there he was talking to villagers who I guess had somehow become personifications of the voices that spoke down. So he was harranging them. And I got in to come back into the dormitory and then suddenly dawned on me that I had to go to sleep and that if I went to sleep, people do the same thing again and I would lose them again. So what could I do? I had to do something which was out of the ordinary for the kind of life I had lived up to that time and the kind of training I had. I got into bed with him and put my arms around him because that was the only way I could go to sleep and he would have to stay there. And all I can say is that somehow in the course of that night and three or four nights after that, when we got to Istanbul, when he said he couldn't sleep unless I stayed with him. - And his arms, his arms. - So I did stay with him. And in some strange way, I heard the voices too or in some way I heard the voices too. And I realized much later when I did the biography of Baldwin, he was probably by sending me to Paris to get beautiful Delaney and he knew that it would not be complicated. And he somehow knew that I needed to learn something that I could only learn in an unusual way. I too had to go through the unusual door to find out something about myself and something about what love was because I fell in love with you for it too. And this was a, I realized the love I had for both of these men was much more than a hallmark card kind of love. It was a kind of love that demanded everything. Demanded vulnerability demanded a battle, love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. All of these things get demanded. - Everything that you're saying suggests that you are imbuing James Baldwin with a kind of wisdom. - A kind of wisdom. Also he was a natural teacher. And when he loved someone, as I think you did love me and I loved him, again, not as lovers in the usual sense, but in a more important sense. I think he as a natural teacher was trying to teach me something about what love really was and what it meant and what it required in terms of a life experience. Meeting Beaufort Laney and hearing his voices changed the way I looked at life and it therefore changed me radically. We'll take a short break more from David Leaming when we come back. This is notes on a native son with me, Razia Ikbar. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life. - I've never been a big fan of FEMA. Who does he get the job done? - FEMA's a disaster. - FEMA's a dirty word. - People are waking up in groves to the FEMA camps. - How did the agency tasked with saving us become so distrusted and despised? - Listen to American emergency, the movement to kill FEMA on this week's on the media from WNYC. Find on the media wherever you get your podcasts. - Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. - Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. - You're listening to notes on a native son with Razia Ikbar. Our guest is the American writer, David Leaming. It's so interesting to me that he regarded you as, in fact, introduced people, you to people as his Boswell. He immediately casting himself in the role as a writer of the stature of Samuel Johnson. I mean, I wonder what you made of that. - I thought of it as being funny. I mean, it was a joke we had. I had no intention of writing a biography at that time when he was beginning to use those terms. But I was often with him in New York, when I was working at his office in New York. I'd go with him to places. I went with him to meet Malcolm X, or I went with him to meet Sydney Poitier, or I went with him to meet Miles Davis. And jokingly, he referred to me, who's this white kid that's following me around his Boswell. And we both joke about this. But it wasn't until years after that, that I took that seriously in any sense. - Of course I'm listening to that list of names. And my jaw is dropping internally in my mind and in my heart. How aware were you that you were in the middle of these people who have made such an enormous impression on American culture in the 20th century? - Well, I was aware that these were famous people, especially people in the black world. Okay, this is before I met Viewfront Lenny. I was a graduate student in English at New York University at this time. So even my thesis advisor was impressed that I was meeting all these people. I was writing a thesis on Henry James, who was one of Baldwin's favorite writers. I was just gonna say, of course, so influential in Baldwin's writing. - So I was very much aware that these were famous people. But still, I wasn't thinking, I'm gonna write about this. If I had been thinking that, I would have taken notes which would have been useful as his Boswell. But as I said, I didn't take very seriously the idea of being his Boswell or doing a biography. That happened quite a bit later. - Will see a compelling companion. - Oh, yes, of course. He could be a terrifying companion. - Because? - Because he was a prophet in the Old Testament sense of that, not in the sense of predicting the future, although he does that a little bit in the fire next time. But in general, as a living human being, he, more than any other human being, I've ever met, resembled what I think of when I think of let's say Ezekiel or Isaiah. Whenever the opportunity arose or whenever the necessity arose, he turned into a different kind of being that he had been two minutes before. That could be terrifying because he'd be having a very nice dinner and he loved eating and he was very delicate with his knife and fork and very elegant. There was a man actually who said, "My sister in the Bahamas says that the racial situation is much better there than it used to be." Suddenly, the person I was sitting with, Jimmy, at this day, a table where this person said that literally seemed to explode. His eyes became large, his face became angry, and he became Ezekiel, you know, or Jeremiah, performing a Jeremiah. And he started by saying, "Fuck your sister in the Bahamas, baby." And went on for, I'd say, a good hour and a half, haranging this person for having said that things were better in the Bahamas and straightening him up in terms of race relations in our world. I mean, both James Baldwin and Buford Delaney are such huge figures in your life. I wonder how you reflect on Jimmy's demise because you were with him until the very, very end, almost the very end. I mean, how describe that for us a little bit, that his, him becoming ill and then it's seeming inevitable that he would pass? Well, by the time he was sick, by the time he was back in Sam Paul dying, he had given me, in fact, some several years before that, he had given 10 years before that. He had given me in writing permission to write a biography. This was several years after I'd stopped working for him and had my own academic life and family life and children. And this was going to be an authorised biography? Yes, authorised by him. He wrote a letter authorising the biography. So when I, when I had a phone call from David Baldwin, by then David and I had become good friends, and David said, "If you want to see Jimmy, you'd better come and see him now because he wants you to come and see him. He's not going to live for a long." And so I went right away and was shocked to see him. I hadn't seen him in, I guess a year and he was lying on the bed and I got on the bed next to him and said hello and when we chatted a little bit, he could barely talk, however. And I said, "I brought you some presents because when I talked to him on the phone, I didn't say I asked him what he would like me to bring from New York." And he laughed and he said, "Bring me some Antrimiome of Pancake mix." So I said, "I brought you the Antrimiome of Pancake mix and I also brought angelic beans and I don't know there are a couple of other things." And he said, "Oh, I know, I brought a rare rabbit, a syrup, I think." And he laughed and he said, "We can escape our cultures." I imagine that that whole period was very, very difficult for you. It was. Although again, it's difficult that things could be in various aspects of life with Jimmy. There was always something beautiful and always something to be learned. I remember that during one night when I was sitting up with him because his brother and I took turns sitting with him during the night, two day of it. And I was reading in order to stay awake and suddenly out of the darkness came this voice. He wasn't talking much then and said, "What are you reading?" And I was sort of shocked that he had seen me or what I was doing. And I said, "I'm reading a book I found on your bookshelf, which one?" And he said, "Jane Austin, pride and prejudice." And he said, "Which chapter?" And I think it's chapter 16, but anyway, it's when Elizabeth is being proposed to my Mr. Collins. It's a fabulous scene. And he said, "Would you read it?" So I did. I read the chapter alone at the end of the chuckle, and he said, "So devastating, so economical." I mean, it was the writer responding to another writer and respecting her. Such different writers. And a sign, of course, also of the the breadth and the depth of his own reading. Yeah, well, he was a voracious reader. I had a set of Dickens in our house in Istanbul that my father had given me. And Jimmy would pick up a volume each day and read it and put it back. I think he must have read all of Dickens that year in Istanbul. But I don't know. I wonder how, given how well you knew him and how much you lived with him. And in some ways, from everything you say, that he lived in you, how would you describe the place he occupies in American culture? It's a big question, I know. I think he was a voice. And that voice kept us aware of some of the realities that we as a white culture have tended to prefer to ignore. And this is, again, is the question of love. He was demanding that we break down those barriers and accept the fact of his role as a writer to be a carrier of love, to be a projector of love. And I think he succeeded in doing that. Do you think that in his lifetime people understood the emphasis that he placed on the centrality of love in art as well as society and in political life too? Well, I think that it comes out in his work. I mean, you feel that if you're capable or willing to feel it, you can feel it. Does it surprise you that he is still taken up by a new generation that there are young people who turn to Baldwin, that his words, even if they're taking out taken out of context, as they often are, remain relevant to another generation? It's very interesting, that four years, for several years after he died, one heard very little about him. But in very recent years, you hear quotes, Baldwin quotes. I don't know how many people are reading his novels, but they should. One could learn a lot about who one is and who one could be by reading just your body's room and another country, for example. When James Baldwin died in 1987, I refused to come out of the bathroom and I was living with my family in London and my mother was banging on the door and saying, "You've been in there a very long time and I shouted at her." I said, "Why don't you understand? We've lost somebody really important." I'd lost a profit. I wondered how you felt when you found out. You were there with him right up until a couple of days before he died. I left one day before he died because we didn't think he would die that day and I had to take some things to New York and then I was going to come back, which I did. But when I came back, he had already died. How did I feel? It was like being whole in my being. In Buford, it already died by then. So there was already one empty space and now there were two empty spaces. David Leaming, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. [Music] (music) This has been Notes on a Native Sonny Podcast about James Baldwin. In the next episode we'll hear from the award-winning Irish writer, Colin Tobin, in conversation with me, Razzia Ikbal, that's next week. (music) This podcast is brought to you by WNYC Studios and sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. It is a sea salt and mango production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher is Navanie Ratchimalu. The executive producer for WNYC Studios is Lindsay Foster Thomas. Karen Filman is our editor. Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer is Axel Cacoutier. And our special thanks to Dean Amani Jamal of Princeton University. (music)