Razia Iqbal: Hello, my name is Razia 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 letter 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.

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 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 Leeming.

Leeming 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 Leeming 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. Leeming, 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 Leeming 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. Leeming 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 leeming is now 87 years old and we met at his home in Stonington, Connecticut.

[music]

David Leeming: My name is David Leeming. 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."

Razia Iqbal: David Leeming, welcome to our podcast. What do you think he meant when he was talking about love in that way?

David Leeming: I think he meant that love can't be thought 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 in 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. Therefore he expanded that idea of love as a part of what you could call his own gospel after he left the church. Love is the central factor, I think, in that gospel, that good news that he hopes to be able to bring, for example, to race relations as well as personal relations.

Razia Iqbal: I think we're going to come back to this theme of love time and again in this conversation. 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?

David Leeming: In my 20s. 24, something like that.

Razia Iqbal: 1961. Where were you?

David Leeming: I was in Istanbul. I guess I maybe had read-- I'd read almost nothing by Baldwin, maybe Giovanni's Room or Notes of a Native Son. There was a young man there named Engin Cezzar, whom I knew quite well because he had been a Robert College student. I taught at Robert College.

Razia Iqbal: In Istanbul.

David Leeming: in Istanbul. I went there immediately after graduating from Princeton. I met Engin. Engin had become a good friend of Baldwin's. Engin invited Jimmy to come. I keep calling Baldwin Jimmy, but that's because everybody called him Jimmy all the time. It seems artificial to me to call him Baldwin.

Razia Iqbal: We will continue to call him Jimmy.

David Leeming: Yes. Engin's sister had a party for Jimmy in a little house along the Bosphorus. I was invited to the party along with some other Robert College people. 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. A little bit nervous after that introduction, I--

Razia Iqbal: He was an American in Turkey himself.

David Leeming: He was, but I think he meant the other kind of American.

[laughter]

David Leeming: Anyway, I went into the kitchen and he was sitting on a kitchen stool at a counter, scribbling on a yellow pad. I looked over his shoulder and he scribbled at the end, Istanbul, December 19th, I think, 1961. He turned around and he said, who are you? I said, I'm David. He said, I like that name. I'm Jimmy.

Razia Iqbal: His brother's name was David.

David Leeming: His brother's name was David. The main character in Giovanni's Room was David. The main character in The Amen Corner was David. His stepfather was also David, and his favorite brother was David. I was lucky I had the good name. If I hadn't had that name, I probably never would have become Baldwin's biographer, because if he had--

Razia Iqbal: There we are. That's an interesting thought.

David Leeming: If he had disliked the name-

Razia Iqbal: Who knows?

David Leeming: Who knows?

Razia Iqbal: He was writing on a yellow pad. He'd clearly finished something.

David Leeming: He was just finishing the novel, Another Country. I watched him write the last words of Another Country. Then that night after the party, we talked a lot at the party. Then he said he'd like to go out to have a drink. I knew places to go to have a drink, and so I took him to this little bar that I knew down in Istanbul.

Razia Iqbal: 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?

David Leeming: 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.

Razia Iqbal: That night?

David Leeming: Yes, almost immediately. Love at first sight. Is that what it's called?

Razia Iqbal: That is so fascinating. What you're describing is somebody who occupies a room in a very particular way, that he is deeply charismatic.

David Leeming: He was.

Razia Iqbal: You hadn't read very much by him?

David Leeming: No.

Razia Iqbal: Didn't know about his reputation?

David Leeming: No, not much. I think I read Giovanni's Room and found it a bit terrifying.

Razia Iqbal: Because?

David Leeming: 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-Hallmark-card relationship. This in a complicated way, leads to the lover's death.

Razia Iqbal: The same sex relationship. Is that also part of the fear in that novel? Is that because it was radical in some ways?

David Leeming: Yes, it was. 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. 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. During that time he had relationships with both men and women. This was something that concerned him.

[music]

Razia Iqbal: Tell me a little bit about yourself and why you went to Istanbul, and how. Clearly, that decision led to things that changed your life in all kinds of different ways.

David Leeming: Definitely. I suppose that night changed my life. My life was changed in many ways through my relationship with Baldwin and with other people, such as the painter Beauford Delaney, who was very close to him, and with whom I became very close.

Razia Iqbal: Delaney was the painter who really introduced Jimmy to downtown New York, the Village, and actually changed his way of seeing the world.

David Leeming: He did, yes. Definitely.

Razia Iqbal: At a very young age. I think he met him when he was 15, still a teenager.

David Leeming: He did. He was having trouble in school and also was bothered by lots of things that were happening in his family life. He was leaving the church, and so he was somewhat at loose ends. A friend of his, Emile Capouya was his name, gave Jimmy Beauford's address. He knocked on what he called the unusual door. Used a phrase from an old spiritual--

He knocked on the unusual door and was greeted by Beauford Delaney. That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, which was probably the most important relationship. 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.

[music]

David Leeming: Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.

Razia Iqbal: 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 Beauford Delaney to Istanbul.

David Leeming: 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 Beauford from Paris to Istanbul. This was after I came back to the States, worked 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 Beauford Delaney.

I didn't really know who Beauford Delany was. In a way, this says something about Baldwin's idea of love. Because he loved Beauford and he wanted me to love Beauford, but he wanted me to love Beauford 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 involves vulnerability. He didn't tell me that Beauford was clinically schizophrenic and paranoid.

Razia Iqbal: Heard voices and--

David Leeming: He heard voices who called him a Black faggot, using the N word, not the B word. I didn't know that when I met Beauford.

Razia Iqbal: He did also give you an instruction, didn't he?

David Leeming: He said, don't lose him. I, of course, was confused by that. I found my way to Beauford's studio apartment and knocked on the door. He opened the door and everything was draped in white. He was all dressed in white and a white dashiki. All I could see was sun coming through the window after he opened the door on this round Black face, or brown face. That was my introduction to Beauford Delaney. He said, won't you lie down? Not, won't you come in, or how are you? Won't you lie down? He pointed to these two cots which were head to head on one wall.

I got down on the cot and he got down on the other cot, and we stayed in that position except to get up to use the latrine outside in the hallway, or to eat a can of tuna fish or something. We stayed on those cots for three days while we got to know each other. He told me about his life, which is interesting because eventually, years later, I would write a biography of him. 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, would I lie down? I had to lie down for three days and three nights.

Razia Iqbal: Why did you?

David Leeming: It's a good question. I have no idea. There was a part of me, probably, that said you really should get out of here while you can. Again, Beauford was hypnotic, the way that Jimmy was.

Razia Iqbal: It interests me that you trusted the part of yourself that didn't make you flee.

David Leeming: 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. Love coming in meant being vulnerable and open to all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad. After three days and three nights, he said, we can go to Jimmy now. As if Jimmy were across town in Versailles or something. He didn't realize what this was going to involve. Driving through the Iron Curtain to Istanbul at that time was not easy. 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 the people in the car coming in the other direction at 60 miles an hour were 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. 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 cots were next to each other in a men's dormitory. I looked over, and Beauford's cot was empty.

It suddenly dawned on me. What did he say? Don't lose him. That's what Jimmy had told me, not to lose him. I got out of bed and went out into the village to look for him. There he was talking to villagers who I guess had somehow become personifications of the voices that spoke to him. He was haranguing them. I got him to come back into the dormitory. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had to go to sleep, and that if I went to sleep, he would do the same thing again and I would lose him again.

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 have 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. 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 in his arms, I did--

Razia Iqbal: In his arms [crosstalk]

David Leeming: In his arms. I did stay with him. In some strange way, I heard the voices too. Or in some way I heard the voices too. I realized much later when I did the biography of Baldwin, he was probably, by sending me to Paris to get Beauford Delaney and bringing-- he knew that it would be complicated. 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. I fell in love with Beauford too. 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, it demanded.

Razia Iqbal: Everything that you're saying suggests that you are imbuing James Baldwin with a kind of wisdom.

David Leeming: A kind of wisdom also. Also, he was a natural teacher. When he loved someone, as I think he 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 Beauford Delaney and hearing his voice has changed the way I looked at life and it therefore changed me radically.

[music]

Razia Iqbal: We'll take a short break. More from David Leeming when we come back. This is Notes on a Native Son with me, Razia Iqbal.

David Leeming: 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.

Razia Iqbal: You're listening to Notes on a Native Son with Razia Iqbal. Our guest is the American writer, David Leeming. It's so interesting to me that he regarded you as-- in fact, introduced you to people as his Boswell, immediately casting himself in the role as a writer of the stature of Samuel Johnson. I wonder what you made of that.

David Leeming: I thought of it as being funny. 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. 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 Sidney Poitier, or I went with him to meet Miles Davis. Jokingly, he referred to me, who's this white kid that keeps following me around? He's my Boswell. We both joked about this. It wasn't until years after that that I took that seriously in any sense.

Razia Iqbal: 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?

David Leeming: I was aware that these were famous people, especially people in the Black world. This is before I met Beauford Delaney. I was a graduate student in English at New York University at this time. 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.

Razia Iqbal: I was just going to say, of course, so influential in Baldwin's writing.

David Leeming: I was very much aware that these were famous people. Still, I wasn't thinking, I'm going to write about this. If I had been thinking that, I would have taken notes which would have been useful as his Boswell. 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.

Razia Iqbal: Was he a compelling companion?

David Leeming: Oh yes, of course. He could be a terrifying companion.

Razia Iqbal: Because?

David Leeming: 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. 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 you'd be having a very nice dinner--

He loved eating. 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 dinner table, where this person said that, literally seemed to explode. His eyes became large, his face became angry, and he became Ezekiel or Jeremiah performing a jeremiad. He started by saying, fuck your sister in the Bahamas, baby. Went on for, I'd say, a good hour and a half, haranguing this person for having said that things were better in the Bahamas, and straightening him out in terms of race relations in our world.

[music]

Razia Iqbal: Both James Baldwin and Beauford 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. Describe that for us a little bit, him becoming ill and then it seeming inevitable that he would pass.

David Leeming: By the time he was sick, by the time he was back in St. Paul, dying, he had given me-- in fact, some several years before that, 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 so on, children.

Razia Iqbal: This was going to be an authorized biography?

David Leeming: Yes, authorized by him. He wrote a letter authorizing the biographies. 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 very long. I went right away and was shocked to see him. I hadn't seen him in, I guess, a year. He was lying on the bed. I got on the bed next to him and said hello. We chatted a little bit. He could barely talk, however.

I said, I brought you some presents. Because when I talked to him on the phone, I asked him what he would like me to bring from New York. He laughed and he said, bring me some Aunt Jemima pancake mix. I said, I brought you the Aunt Jemima pancake mix. I also brought jelly beans and, I don't know, there were a couple of other things. Oh, I know. I brought Brer Rabbit syrup, I think. He laughed and he said, we can't escape our cultures.

Razia Iqbal: I imagine that that whole period was very, very difficult for you.

David Leeming: It was. Although, again, as difficult as 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 Davids. I was reading in order to stay awake. Suddenly out of the darkness came this voice, he wasn't talking much then and said, what are you reading?

I was shocked that he had seen me, what I was doing. I said, I'm reading a book I found on your bookshelf. Which one? He said. I said, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. He said, which chapter? I think it's chapter 16. Anyway, it's when Elizabeth is being proposed to by Mr. Collins.

Razia Iqbal: It's a fabulous scene.

David Leeming: He said, would you read it? I did. I read the chapter aloud. At the end, he chuckled and he said, so devastating, so economical. It was the writer responding to another writer and respecting her.

Razia Iqbal: Such different writers. A sign, of course, also of the breadth and the depth of his own reading.

David Leeming: He was a voracious reader. I had a set of Dickens in our house in Istanbul that my father had given me. 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. I don't know.

[music]

Razia Iqbal: 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.

David Leeming: I think he was a voice. That voice kept us aware of some of the realities that we as a white culture have tended to prefer to ignore. This, again, is a 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. I think he succeeded in doing that.

Razia Iqbal: 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?

David Leeming: I think that it comes out in his work. You feel that. If you're capable or willing to feel it, you can feel it.

Razia Iqbal: 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 taken out of context as they often are, remain relevant to another generation?

David Leeming: It's very interesting that for several years after he died, one heard very little about him. 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 Giovanni's Room and Another Country, for example.

Razia Iqbal: When James Baldwin died in 1987, I refused to come out of the bathroom. I was living with my family in London. My mother was banging on the door and saying, you've been in there a very long time. I shouted at her and I said, why don't you understand? We've lost somebody really important.

David Leeming: We've lost a prophet.

Razia Iqbal: I wondered how you felt when you found out. You were there with him right up until just a couple of days before he died.

David Leeming: I left one day before he died, because we didn't think he would die that day. I had to take some things to New York and then I was going to come back, which I did. When I came back, he had already died. How did I feel? It was like a big hole in my being. Beauford had already died by then, so there was already one empty space, and now there were two empty spaces.

[music]

Razia Iqbal: David Leeming, thank you so much for speaking with us.

David Leeming: Thank you.

[music]

Razia Iqbal: This has been Notes on a Native Son, a podcast about James Baldwin. In the next episode, we'll hear from the award winning Irish writer Colm Tóibín in conversation with me, Razia Iqbal. That's next week. 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 & Mango production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher is Navani Rachumallu. The executive producer for WNYC Studios is Lindsay Foster Thomas. Karen Frillman is our editor. Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer is Axel Kacoutié. Our special thanks to Dean Amaney Jamal of Princeton University.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.