BEAUFORD Delaney was sitting at the worn Victrola in his Greene Street studio, listening to Bessie Smith. He heard a knock at the door. He was expecting a visit from a high school student, a friend of a young friend. Delaney lifted the needle off the record, stood up, and walked across his bare white studio to open the door. The young man shifted slightly as the door opened, an eager half smile on his face. Delaney thought he was beautiful—narrow and quick, all desire and the hope of love. Beauford Delaney looked long and hard—James Baldwin later wrote that it felt rather like being X-rayed—and invited him in.
In 1940, Baldwin was a senior at De Witt Clinton high school in the Bronx. Until a year or so before he went to meet Delaney, Baldwin had been a prodigy of the church. He had wanted to outdo his father, a lay preacher, but had wisely chosen to preach before a different congregation, which may have been the only reason the senior Baldwin could tolerate his son’s success. Preaching had also been a way of staying out of the hands of men and women on the streets of Harlem who would call out to Jimmy Baldwin, “Whose little boy are you?” Baldwin’s other allegiance was to school: an elementary-school teacher had taken him, at the age of eleven, to see Orson Welles’s all-Black Macbeth, which had helped create in him a passion for the theater comparable in intensity to that felt by Henry James. Baldwin’s junior-high-school French teacher had been Countee Cullen, who recognized his student’s talent and gave Baldwin’s writing serious attention and Baldwin himself the sense that he could grow up to be a writer. At De Witt Clinton, Baldwin and another student, the future photographer Richard Avedon, were editors of The Magpie, the school literary magazine. Baldwin was one of the few Black students at De Witt Clinton, making the trip up from Harlem, but it was a liberal and reasonably integrated school, mostly of Jewish students, and he was at the center of the group of boys who formed around The Magpie. Baldwin used to make his Magpie friends laugh with his impersonations of the saints from his church. His friends suspected somewhat before Baldwin did that the church for him was more a place of hiding than of revelation. The last Sunday Baldwin preached, his friend Emil Capouya, who also became a writer, took him to the movies. It was Capouya who arranged for Baldwin to meet Delaney. By the time he went to Greene Street, Baldwin was trying to edge himself out from under the shadow of his domineering father; he was writing all the time.
Beauford Delaney by Carl Van Vechten, 1953.
Beauford Delaney had a lot of visitors at his apartment; Alfred Stieglitz came, as did Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Miller, who was one of Delaney’s closest friends. Ethel Waters stopped by and so did the actor Canada Lee, and sailors and soldiers and gallery owners. Delaney kept his paintings covered with white sheets. He liked the way Stieglitz’s An American Place looked with its white walls and bare floor, and he had set up his studio the same way. He could usually, although not always, be persuaded to uncover his canvases; in this case, he might have volunteered. People said that the paintings of Delaney’s Greene Street period—the jumble of buildings and fire hydrants, the angular streets, the insistent reds and greens and the yellow—were a bracing surprise in the white studio.
Delaney was one of the first Black people Baldwin could remember encountering who didn’t live in Harlem, and certainly the first artist he’d met who didn’t feel his material was confined to “Black life.” Baldwin always associated this first meeting with the old song “Lord, Open the Unusual Door.” As for Delaney, he was watching Baldwin’s expressive face react to every detail and painting him in his mind. Baldwin eventually sat for more than a half-dozen portraits by Delaney, including a nude called Dark Rapture, one of very few nudes Delaney did and a painting that helped him move toward abstraction. They weren’t lovers, but there were times when Delaney was in love with Baldwin.
•
When he walked through Beauford Delaney’s door, James Baldwin was as much in need of a father as a lover. Not too long before this visit, Baldwin had brought one of his white high school friends home. After the friend left, Baldwin’s father asked if he was “saved.” Baldwin, in a cold rage, said, “No. He’s Jewish,” and his father knocked him across the room. The son “felt the depth of a merciless resolve to kill my father rather than to allow my father to kill me.” James Baldwin may have understood how anxious David Baldwin was that his son had already ventured into unfamiliar territory, and the young man knew, in some ways, that his father was trying to protect him, but the relationship grew more and more strained. David Baldwin was actually the future author’s stepfather and James Baldwin felt this as a distance that was only compounded by his stepfather’s increasingly paranoid behavior.
About three years after Baldwin met Delaney, Baldwin’s father was institutionalized, and, not too much later, in July of 1943, he died; Baldwin’s youngest sister, Paula, was born that same day. Baldwin, who had wanted to be loved by his father at least as much as he had wanted to kill him, took a long time to recover from his relief and guilt and grief. The day of the funeral was Baldwin’s nineteenth birthday. That night, one of the worst race riots in the history of Harlem broke out—the next day the family drove the body to the burial ground through streets of shattered storefronts. Baldwin was drunk.
Beauford Delaney helped Baldwin to find a way to cover the expenses of the funeral, which, in a way, formalized Delaney’s position in Baldwin’s life. Baldwin often referred to Delaney as “my spiritual father.” For the next five years, Baldwin and Delaney saw each other all the time. Baldwin moved down to the Village, and he and Delaney ran into each other at the Waldorf Café or at Connie’s Calypso. They sat up all night next to Delaney’s Victrola, the cover of which Delaney had painted in his personal primary colors, singing along with Bessie Smith, whose voice would later rescue Baldwin in Switzerland. He used to say that listening to her records in that tiny village in the Alps gave him back his own voice and allowed him, finally, to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. In the Village, Baldwin and Delaney went to costume parties; Baldwin sometimes wore his preacher’s robes. Delaney’s father was a preacher, too—he knew the church and what it meant to come out of it.
There was something of the mystic about Delaney. His friends regarded him as a kind of minor deity, and his stories and observations often had the quality of parables. Baldwin told the story again and again of standing on Broadway and being told by Delaney to look down. Delaney asked him what he saw, and Baldwin said a puddle. Delaney said, “Look again,” and then Baldwin saw the reflections of the buildings, distorted and radiant in the oil on the puddle. He taught me to see, Baldwin said, and that “what one cannot or will not see, says something about you.”
•
After a few years, James Baldwin realized that if he stayed in New York he might not “survive the fury of the color problem,” and he managed to leave for Paris. He had received a Rosenwald Fellowship, for which Delaney had recommended him. The Rosenwalds owned a number of Delaneys, which gave Delaney hope that he, too, would be given a stipend, but they turned his application down. Baldwin went to Paris without him.
From Paris, Baldwin eventually published Go Tell It on the Mountain, with Marianne Moore’s compliments on its dust jacket. The book was well received, though Langston Hughes, writing to Arna Bontemps, said it was “a low-down story in a velvet bag.” Hughes thought that if Zora Neale Hurston had written it, “it would probably be a quite wonderful book.” Though Hughes and Baldwin also had a real respect for each other, some years later Baldwin wrote a devastating review of Hughes’s collected poems that cut Hughes to the quick. Also from Paris, Baldwin published his first volume of nonfiction, Notes of a Native Son, which made him famous. He took the title from Richard Wright’s Native Son, published fifteen years before. Wright was in Paris, too, advocating for Black Americans to abandon the United States as a lost cause and to live in Europe and eventually Africa. Baldwin went after Wright in one of the essays in Notes of a Native Son called “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which he said that Wright’s character Bigger Thomas was “Uncle Tom’s descendant” and that the novel failed in its “rejection of life.” Though they never stopped speaking, the air was a little frigid when Baldwin ran into Wright and his circle at the Café de Tournon. Admirers of Hughes and Wright explained Baldwin’s animosity as a need to destroy his Black fathers; this need never surfaced in Baldwin’s relationship with Delaney, to whom he wrote constantly.
The other half of the title of Notes of a Native Son came from Henry James’s Notes of a Son & Brother. Baldwin read Henry James for the first time in Paris, immersing himself in the novels of American men making their way abroad, especially The American and The Ambassadors. The way James’s sentences hesitated and looped back on themselves had a great influence on Baldwin, and he kept in mind the injunction of Lambert Strether that James had borrowed from Howells: “Live all you can.” In 1959, Baldwin turned to James in the opening of his essay “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American.”
“It is a complex fate to be an American,” Henry James observed, and the principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe is just how complex this fate is. America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar position in the world—yesterday and today—are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun.
About a year before Baldwin died, discussing in an interview a long, never finished essay on The Ambassadors, Baldwin said that what drew him most in James was the way the earlier writer had considered “the failure of Americans to see through to the reality of others.” Perhaps when he said that he was thinking of the men who had taught him to see—like Henry James, James Baldwin was always his father’s son.
•
Beauford Delaney’s studio was freezing cold. He earned almost nothing from his art; he taught a little, and he had various odd jobs. If he ever sold a painting or got a small grant, within a few days he had given all the money away to other people who seemed hungrier than he was. His schizophrenia was getting worse. After Baldwin left New York, Delaney drank more to keep the voices at bay. In 1953, a wealthy friend of a friend offered to buy Delaney a ticket to Paris. The trip across the Atlantic was one of the few times in his life that he could remember eating three meals a day.
When he got off the train in Paris at the Gare Saint-Lazare, he was very disoriented; travel and moving were upsetting for him, and some of his worst breakdowns came when he was alone in a new place. Delaney had forgotten to wire Baldwin with his arrival date, but some people he had met on the boat took him to a hotel and the next day, walking by the Café Flore, Baldwin caught sight of him, and screamed, and ran across the street, and threw himself into Delaney’s arms.
Paris liberated Delaney as an artist, and it became his city. He went back to the United States only once, in 1969, to visit his family at Christmas. In Paris, he went to the museums; he met Picasso. Gertrude Stein was no longer alive, but he went to visit Alice B. Toklas—he and Toklas had in common the conviction that if you told a little story well enough and often enough, it became a larger truth.
Like many American painters in the 1950s, Delaney moved into complete abstraction. He had an almost religious relationship to the color yellow. Baldwin wrote that in front of a Delaney painting, “we stand in the light . . . which is both loving and merciless.” They were great proponents of love, Delaney and Baldwin. Delaney wrote in his journal: “Love when unimpeded realizes the miraculous.” Both men held to that possibility and worked to make it true in their art, despite the fact that both were unlucky in love—or anyway loved men who couldn’t love them back or couldn’t love them enough or couldn’t stay with them.
Baldwin initially found it wonderful to be treated in France as an American writer rather than as a Black boy, but eventually he noticed how the French behaved toward the Algerians in Paris. The struggle for civil rights was intensifying in the United States, and Baldwin thought “there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world.” He borrowed money from his friend Marlon Brando, and he went home. Still, he came back to Europe for what he called “sustenance” and to see Delaney.
Delaney was very proud of Baldwin. Sometimes, when he was a little wistful, Delaney felt that at least he had helped Baldwin to succeed in things that he had found impossible. The painter had trouble feeling comfortable with his own sexuality, and he loved the openness of Baldwin’s novel about two men together, Giovanni’s Room. And Delaney had struggled to find a way to make the beauty of introspective work serve the political needs of Harlem; he felt Baldwin achieved this in Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street, which he was moved to have dedicated to him.
As Baldwin became more successful, he took Delaney to the south of France, and he brought him to Istanbul. Delaney was increasingly unstable, and his paranoid attacks were getting closer together. Baldwin tried to make sure that Delaney wasn’t alone too often. One of their favorite summers, they just lived together in a little house in Clamart, outside Paris. They worked, and they talked, and in the evenings they sat by the large window facing the back garden and watched the light fade out of the dark blue sky.
•
Delaney was very gentle—even in the midst of his worst episodes he would injure only himself—and most of the time he radiated a kind of calm beneficence. His friends took care of him, again and again. Delaney wrote notes to remind himself to get his trousers fixed, to have a love affair, to “remember the sculpture and structure of color.” As had been true for Van Gogh, a painter Delaney very much admired, the possibilities of paint and Delaney’s own mental states grew indistinguishable in the end. Delaney’s friends found a good doctor for him—he had also been Antonin Artaud’s doctor, and had written a book critical of the handling of Van Gogh’s depression. In one of the very few moments when Delaney ever expressed any feeling of deprivation, he said that it would have been nice to have had enough money to go to a psychiatrist. By that point, it was a little late.
It was a bitter irony of James Baldwin’s life that he lost both his fathers to insanity. He wouldn’t have called it a coincidence; he thought the reasons paranoia came easier to Black Americans were straightforward—people got worn down by hunger and despair and fear of winter and policemen. For Baldwin, the last visits to Delaney in the hospital were disquietingly reminiscent of his own father’s end. Someone took a heartbreaking picture of the two of them standing together on the lawn of the institution. Delaney, fragile and withdrawn, his eyes a little wild, white hair and beard standing out around his face, was tiny next to Baldwin, who held Delaney’s hand but didn’t quite look at him, as if he couldn’t bear to see. Delaney was buried in Paris. Baldwin was in France at that time, but he didn’t go to the funeral. He later said that this was his worst moment, that he had succumbed to the rage of a child who is angry with his father for leaving him.
•
In those last years, when Beauford Delaney was having a hard time in Paris, when he was drinking and missing his friends and hearing voices and having trouble painting, he told people that he thought of a story that Alice B. Toklas had told him one time when he had gone to visit her. His friends sometimes reminded him of it, as the story seemed to help, but perhaps they found it a little painful to see the hope in Delaney’s face. Toklas had said that she had been sitting alone in the back garden of the house at the rue de Fleurus when a robber had brazenly climbed over the wall. She had stood up very straight and told him that she was going to go into the house and that she expected that when she returned he would be gone. And he was.