TThe literary power couple is a historically appealing concept. Two writers sharing a life, their private and creative worlds intertwining, each becoming a witness and critic of the other’s work. Think of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Or, less promisingly, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Now, in this illustrious society, a new duo has emerged: novelist Marlon James and biographer Nicholas Boggs, whose books have each been shortlisted for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary prizes – James for the Booker Prize and Boggs for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. Between them, they have produced two terrific books, each a culmination of years of work and each dealing with the lives of black queer men whose stories have often been overlooked.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” James responds when I ask them what they think of the inevitable looming “literary power couple” label. “I have all these romantic ideas that we were like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne or something – I don’t know. What do you think?” He turns to Boggs, who laughs. “This is all very new,” he said. “We’re still getting used to it.”
It’s a warm October morning in Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s fashionable writers’ enclave, and I’m sitting across from the couple in their apartment. They relax on a lounge chair, looking comfortable enough to have been there all morning. Their exchanges have the easy rhythm of a long relationship, full of small corrections and private jokes.
James, the 55-year-old Jamaican-born novelist whose book A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Booker Prize in 2015, is back on the shortlist this year with The Disappearances, a dark and sprawling reckoning with the brutality of gay life and homophobia in Jamaica’s AIDS era. Boggs, his partner of 53 years of almost nine years, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for his first book, Baldwin: A Love Story, a biography of James Baldwin that draws on two decades of research into the writer’s intimate life and creative relationships.
“The Baillie Gifford is an award I know well,” says James. “So when Nick was on the shortlist I knew how important it was.” Boggs remembers James’ reaction when the nonfiction shortlist was announced on October 1. “His eyes became very wide. I don’t think I’ve seen his eyes this wide before.”
James got his first taste of excitement when the Booker shortlist was announced in September. “You were shortlisted first, so the pressure was on! » Boggs jokes. “No matter how many times you do this, it’s always a big surprise,” James adds.
The couple have been together since 2018 and have lived in this apartment for just under a year. Its walls form a sort of sanctuary for their work and interests, filled with artwork by African-American and queer artists, ranging from intimate, often erotic photographs to paintings. At one point, they rummage under the bed to retrieve an original 1938 painting by Beauford Delaney, the Harlem Renaissance artist who became one of Baldwin’s mentors and who features heavily in Boggs’ book. A monumental horse sculpture dominates the room – or, as Boggs laughingly points out, “It’s really just the horse’s ass, isn’t it!” » Purchased by James after his Booker victory in 2015 and named “Booker” by Boggs, he rubs shoulders with an equally imposing gorilla.
Their love story did not begin in a rarefied literary salon, but in the very ordinary setting of a dating application. “I was on the apps and I was like, well, I only go out in my neighborhood,” Boggs says. “It was three blocks away, so it was perfect.”
They were both in their forties at the time. Boggs, who had never dated a writer before – “it was mostly bartenders,” he jokes – was familiar with James’ work, but hadn’t read any of his books. James, for his part, did not know that Boggs was a writer until their first meeting.
“It was a very chaste first date,” James says, with a twinkle in his eye. “We were gentlemen.” The relationship developed “healthy and slowly” over a summer spent apart while Boggs was teaching in London, until they were reunited when James invited Boggs to a Booker anniversary event in the capital. He wanted to set the bar high.
“Our third date was at Buckingham Palace,” James says with a fake shrug. “I’m trying to keep it classy, you know, I have to impress her. We actually kissed in the Queen’s bathroom.”
Their relationship may have brought them into the same orbit, but the worlds they come from – and the experiences that inform their writing – are distinctly different.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., where his father was a civil rights lawyer, Boggs read Baldwin from a young age. While studying the writer in college, he came across a reference in a 1994 biography to an out-of-print children’s book by Baldwin, illustrated by a French artist, Yoran Cazac. Boggs suspected there was a romance behind the collaboration and attempted to track down Cazac, but was told he was probably dead. A few weeks later, the phone rings.
“It was Yoran saying, ‘I’m alive, I’m in Paris, come on, I have a lot of stories to tell you about Jimmy,'” Boggs remembers. “That was 23 years ago, and we began to realize that there were untold stories in Baldwin’s life that needed to be uncovered.”
For James, widespread homophobia shaped his upbringing and his storytelling. Growing up gay and closeted in 1980s Kingston, in class he was “the school gay”; in church he was trying to become heterosexual. He only began to form a more comfortable queer identity after moving to Minneapolis to teach in 2007, away from the control of his family and friends in Jamaica. Unlike Boggs, his queer literary education came late. He first discovered Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room when he was 50. “The first thing I thought was, I could never have read this at 20,” he says. “I was so in the closet.”
In his novels, James has repeatedly delved into Jamaica’s histories of violence and political upheaval, from his 2005 debut novel, The Devil of John Crow (rejected 78 times by publishers), to gang warfare and state corruption in A Brief History of Seven Killings, which made him the first Jamaican to win the Booker Prize. The Disappearances, his sixth novel, was born from a rumor of a homophobic attack in a middle-class neighborhood of Kingston in the late 1980s.
“I first heard about it when I was 21,” he says. “I knew it happened, I just couldn’t prove it. It haunted me: the idea that it could happen – and in an upscale neighborhood – was one of the things that certainly pushed me firmly into the closet.”
He was not able to establish exactly what had happened until he began researching the novel, interviewing nearly 20 people in Jamaica who helped him piece together the incident over several years. “I wanted to fill in the gaps,” he says. “I wanted to give these guys some sort of agency and power back.”
In different ways, both men attempt to reclaim black queer stories that have been marginalized or lost. “We both respond to gaps,” Boggs says.
For James, one of these gaps became the starting point for The Disappearances. He wanted to build his novel around the production of a play, but he couldn’t find one that suited him. The solution came, by chance, from Boggs: while researching his biography, he discovered that Baldwin had directed a 1969 production of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes in Turkey. He suggested that James consider it for his novel.
“At first you said ‘no,'” Boggs recalled. “And I said to myself, ‘Just read these 60 pages.’ And I was right.”
It is no exaggeration to say that the play serves as a structural and emotional scaffolding for the novel and is also central to Boggs’s chapters on Baldwin’s life in Turkey. “I like to say I raided his book with his permission,” James says, smiling. “That’s one of the reasons why our books wouldn’t be possible or wouldn’t have turned out the way they did if we hadn’t been together.”
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On a table in the couple’s living room is a September 25 edition of the New York Times. It contains a review now infamous in the literary world, in which the notoriously harsh critic Dwight Garner devoted an almost novel-length assessment to The Missing, hailing it as “a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and perhaps the century”, placing it alongside the works of Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and William Faulkner.
“I still don’t really believe it,” James says. The morning the article came out, an author friend emailed him to warn him of what he described as a “dazzling review” of Garner. “I didn’t know what stoning meant, I thought it was something bad!” he laughs. “So I’m like, ‘God, no. I’m not going to read that.'” But he still clicked on the link and saw the word “masterpiece.”
“I went to the kiosk to look for it, because I still didn’t believe it,” he says. “I was like, ‘If I leave this bed, I’m going to wake up.’ »
He is wary of the idea that recognition should become an expectation, or success a fait accompli. “There’s a part of me that still thinks I’m this underground writer who got lucky,” he says. “For me, it’s always a real surprise. It always catches me off guard. I don’t know if I want to get to the point where I start expecting good reviews. I don’t know if I want to…
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