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It was 1996 and I was a junior in college, taking a class on James Baldwin in which we were reading pretty much everything he’d ever written: his groundbreaking novels, his controversial plays, his searing and celebrated essays. Everything, that is, except for one book my professor mentioned in passing—a children’s book, originally published in the UK in 1976 but now out of print, entitled Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. I looked it up in the index of David Leeming’s then recently published Baldwin biography and found a scant paragraph or two, including a reference to an obscure French artist, Yoran Cazac, who had apparently illustrated the book. Leeming referred to Baldwin’s relationship with him as a “friendship,” but the sentences that followed suggested there was more to the story: “Yoran was not a solution to Baldwin’s need for a full and lasting relationship. He was committed to his marriage and his children and spent most of his time in Italy.”
Leeming’s other bits of information only piqued my interest further: “When Baldwin went to Italy to stand as godfather to Yoran’s third child on Easter Sunday, he must have been reminded of another friend, another marriage, and another baptism of another godchild in Switzerland in 1952. He was to dedicate If Beale Street Could Talk to Yoran, as he had dedicated Giovanni’s Room to Lucien.”
I knew “Lucien” was Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss man Baldwin had called the love of his life; and Baldwin’s classic gay novel Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, was the first of his books I’d read, way back in the ninth grade. I’d borrowed my twin sister’s copy and pored over it in the secrecy of my bedroom, simultaneously thrilled and terrified by its exploration of a tortured love affair in Paris between David, a closeted American, and his Italian lover, Giovanni. I had hidden it beneath my mattress, afraid someone in my family would see it in my possession and suspect that I was gay, too—a reality I hadn’t yet been able to admit to myself.
Now, in college, as I recovered from the ending of my own secret relationship with another college student, my first with another man, I was finally in the process of coming out—and Baldwin was my North Star. How had he survived his own heartbreaks and wrestled with his own identity as a man who loved other men? And what role had this played in his journey to becoming a writer? For this was what I, too, hoped to become.
Soon enough, I was heading to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which I’d been told had a copy of Little Man, Little Man. Something electric passed through me when I held the book for the first time, not unlike how I’d felt when I first flipped through the pages of Giovanni’s Room. Yes, with its large type and colorful illustrations, it looked like a children’s book, but its jacket flap described it as a “children’s book for adults.” Instead of author and illustrator photos, Cazac had drawn an image of himself painting Baldwin, both men smiling at each other and Baldwin smoking a cigarette.
Soon enough, I was writing one of the first emails of my life (the technology was brand-new then) to David Leeming—who taught nearby, at the University of Connecticut—asking him if he knew anything more about Yoran Cazac. He wrote back politely informing me that he’d never met Cazac, that he didn’t know anyone still alive who had met him, and that he believed Cazac himself was likely no longer alive.
Seven years later, after I’d graduated from college and moved to New York City to study for my PhD at Columbia, I decided to write to some art historians in Paris, asking if they had any information about a deceased and little-known artist named Yoran Cazac. A few months later, the phone rang in my Brooklyn studio apartment. A raspy voice with a thick French accent on the other end of the line said, “This is Yoran Cazac, calling from Paris. I hear you have been looking for me.”
It was like hearing a voice from the grave. He invited me to come to Paris to attend an exhibition of his artwork and meet him in person. “I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy,” he said.
I didn’t hesitate to sign up for my third credit card and book the cheapest flight to France I could find.
That unexpected phone call would set in motion a journey lasting over two decades, and stretching from New York City to Paris, Tuscany, the south of France, and finally to Corsica and then Turkey, all in search of the truth about Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships with other men: Happersberger; Cazac; the Black gay painter Beauford Delaney, who became Baldwin’s lifelong mentor; and the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, whom Baldwin followed to Istanbul in the early 1960s, where he finished writing his bestselling 1962 novel, Another Country, and his epoch-marking nonfiction book The Fire Next Time (1963).
The phone call from Cazac would also be the first step in my quest to bring a new edition of Little Man, Little Man back out into the world—something that finally happened in 2018, 22 years after I first read it. Around the same time, I signed my first book contract to write a biography of James Baldwin. But there would be significant challenges along the way.
For one, how do you write about relationships that eluded easy categorization, such as the ones Baldwin had with these men? As Baldwin himself once put it in an interview, “the men who were my lovers, well, the word ‘gay’ wouldn’t have meant anything to them.” He was routinely drawn to people, like Cazac, who were primarily attracted to women and often married to them. (Happersberger would eventually marry the Black actress Diana Sands, beginning an affair with her when she was in rehearsals for the Broadway premiere of Baldwin’s 1964 play, Blues for Mister Charlie.) Much the same could be said of Cezzar: He played the role of Giovanni in an Actor’s Studio Workshop rendition of Giovanni’s Room before returning to Istanbul and marrying the Turkish actress Gülriz Sururi, who became a close friend, collaborator, and confidante of Baldwin’s. As for Delaney, the painter over two decades his senior, he had fallen in love with Baldwin when they first met in Greenwich Village. Baldwin was just 16. But Delaney had long accepted the role, in Baldwin’s words, of being his “spiritual father.”
None of these relationships fit squarely into conventional couplings, yet they nourished Baldwin over the years, informing his art, offering him respite from his demanding involvement in the civil rights movement back in the States and providing him a sense of kinship and community across several continents.
In one of the 20th century’s most profound essays on race relations, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which became a part of his book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin wrote, “If love will not swing open the gates, no other will or power can.” And all of his novels are, in a sense, love stories, from the protagonist John’s adolescent yearning for his friend Elisha in Baldwin’s debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1952), to Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. In fact, while his 1973 novel If Beale Street Could Talk was a Black heterosexual love story set in Harlem, the relationship between Tish and Fonny was modeled on aspects of Baldwin’s relationship with Cazac, to whom he would dedicate the book. I’d come to understand from my interviews with Cazac that he was not merely Baldwin’s friend; he was his last great love. If the obstacles that kept Tish and Fonny apart were rooted in the racism of the judicial system (Fonny was caught behind bars on trumped-up charges), the barriers between Baldwin and Cazac were more personal and cultural. Nonetheless, Tish’s words capture Baldwin’s sentiments about his eventual separation from Cazac with great emotional exactitude: “I hope nobody has to look at anybody they love through glass.”
Love, as it turned out, was Baldwin’s greatest subject. And when I finally finished my journey with Baldwin, these became my book’s last lines: “It would not be until close to the end of this voyage that I realized what I had actually been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story.”
