May 5, 2015: that was when Maggie Nelson’s ninth book, “The Argonauts,” came out. Published two months after the author turned forty-two, the slim, intense volume, which tells the philosophical, sometimes comic tale of Nelson’s ever-developing consciousness, combines—like a number of other masterpieces of American autobiography—memoir, literary analysis, humor, and reporting with vivid instances of both the familiar and the strange. Central to “The Argonauts” is the story of Nelson’s great love for Harry Dodge, a West Coast sculptor, writer, and video artist who is fluidly gendered. As Nelson embarks on her intellectual and emotional journey, Harry also goes on various excursions in order to become the person he is now, whom Nelson describes, quoting a character from Harry’s 2001 film, “By Hook or By Crook,” as neither male nor female but “a special—a two for one.”
Sara Marcus, in an elegant and concise review of “The Argonauts,” for the Los Angeles Times, notes the way that Nelson circles “away and back again to central questions about deviance and normalcy, family-making and love.” What Nelson is asking, throughout the book, Marcus says, is “How does anyone decide what’s normal and what’s radical? What kinds of experience do we close ourselves off to when we think we already know?” Last month, the book won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, but long before that it was passed around and praised by any number of readers who knew nothing, or next to nothing, about Nelson’s interest in queerness, let alone lives like the ones her memoir grew out of and embodies. What those fans responded to most viscerally, perhaps, was the fact that it’s a book about becoming, both mentally and physically—about what it takes to shape a self, in all its completeness and disarray.
In “The Argonauts,” at the time that Harry is taking testosterone and having a double mastectomy, Maggie is pregnant with their son, Iggy, who is now four. It’s one of the rare moments in modern literature where the pregnant woman does not stand alone, wondering what will become of her or her child; Papa’s going through some fairly significant shit, too. But before the reader can settle into any kind of cozy acceptance of all that, Nelson shifts course again, asking what family can mean when the body is no longer a body but dust and then a memory. Is memory the tie that binds? Is love?
When Harry talks about his life—as he did, with great affability, one evening last August, at a corner table in a dark Los Angeles restaurant—the diminutive, auburn-haired Nelson listens with quiet seriousness. Her pale face turns nearly as red as her hair when Harry says something about their connection, or when she interrupts him to interject an idea or a detail about his own life which he may have forgotten. Afterward, Nelson may blush again or quickly smooth down her hair or say, even more quickly, “Right, right, right,” as a way of marking time, before continuing on with, or going deeper into, whatever she was talking about.
Speaking freely but thoughtfully is important to Nelson, in part because as a kid she was teased for being a “Chatty Cathy,” and in part because she finds ideas irrepressible and exciting to explore. Not surprisingly, Nelson has a very precise relationship to language—and to the vicissitudes of personal history, including the self-mythologizing that goes into making a transformed self. She has published four volumes of accomplished verse, but it’s her prose works, which cover an array of intellectual and social issues, that have brought her a wider readership: the devastating “The Red Parts” (published in 2007 and reissued this month, by Graywolf), for instance, focusses on the aftermath of the 1969 murder of Nelson’s aunt and the trial, thirty-six years later, of a suspect in the case; in “The Art of Cruelty” (2011), Nelson explores the role of the body in an age of extremity; and in “The Argonauts” she questions what it means to be a lover, a parent, someone’s child—“heteronormative” roles—when you don’t feel heteronormative, let alone comfortable with such traditional labels as “gay,” “straight,” “female,” and “male.”
In all of her books, Nelson picks at the underbelly of certainty and finds scabs—the white-male-patriarchy scab, the smug-female-thinker scab, the academic scab—and yet she gives these voices a place in her work, because, as her friend the novelist Rachel Kushner put it, “she knows exactly what kind of language, at this moment, what kind of views, are important, but she also understands that people are vulnerable and they get things wrong, not through malicious intent. Sometimes it’s just a misstep, or they’re too far from the other person’s subjectivity.” Matthew Barney, an artist known for his high-risk, epic exploration of American masculinity, told me that, for him, “The Art of Cruelty” was “the missing piece of a puzzle,” in terms of analyzing a world saturated with pornography and torture. “Maggie’s voice had a certain level of doubt and a self-reflective vibe that made me trust her, even when she was criticizing stuff that I really love.”
It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves—the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love with a singular knight—that makes her readers feel hopeful. Her universe is “queer,” fluid, as is Harry’s (tattooed on the fingers of his left and right hands, respectively, are the words “flow” and “form”), but this sense of flux has little to do with the kind of sentimental hippiedom that emerged, say, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of Maggie and Harry’s home town in the sixties. Nelson is just as critical of the politics of inclusion as of exclusion. What you find in her writing, rather, is a certain ruefulness—an understanding that life is a crapshoot that’s been rigged, but to whose advantage?
Maggie met Harry in April, 2007, the year that “The Red Parts” came out. The occasion was a joint book party in celebration of “The Red Parts” and of a new poetry collection by Eileen Myles, at the Machine Project, a Los Angeles art space.
The two had settled in L.A. at different times. Back in the early nineties, in San Francisco, Harry had co-founded Red Dora’s Bearded Lady, a community-based performance space, and staged a number of solo pieces around the city, before joining Sister Spit, the now legendary spoken-word and performance-art collective—for a time, they were signed to Mr. Lady Records—which also featured Myles, for what he describes as a “weird dyke tour roving around the country.” Priced out of San Francisco by 1999, Harry joined his partner at the time, the video artist Stanya Kahn, in New York. Two years later, they moved to L.A., where they had a son, whom they still co-parent, though their relationship dissolved in early 2007.
Maggie arrived in 2005, when she was offered a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. (She’d taught at Wesleyan, her alma mater, for a year before that.) L.A., as she wrote in “The Red Parts,” seemed “as good a place as any other.” By the time they met, Harry, who was making video pieces and other work that examined marginalism and capitalism, had come to love L.A., but Maggie was lonely and disoriented there.
Of their first meeting, Harry told me, “She was just open-faced. Big strong smile, firm handshake, and then—whoosh—blushing.” A few months later, he e-mailed her to ask if she’d like to take a walk. He reasoned that “walking is good, because if you’re really nervous you can get the jitters out.” Before seeing her again, Harry read several of Nelson’s books, including “The Red Parts” and her verse exploration of the same subject, “Jane: A Murder” (2005). He admired the structure of “The Red Parts,” which Nelson had wanted to have a “documentarian” feel. (While working on it, she read Peter Handke’s classic about his mother’s suicide, “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,” another record of a silent, lost woman.) For Harry, the book’s many narrative strands, interrupted by or leading to other strands, indicated Maggie’s understanding of how in real life tales don’t always add up. They met at the Silver Lake Reservoirs and walked and talked and talked.
In “The Argonauts,” Nelson writes about the first days of the love affair:
At the restaurant in L.A. in August, Maggie excused herself to use the restroom, and I took the opportunity to ask Harry what it felt like to be written about so intimately. (When the book was first published, the pair gave a joint interview in which Harry admitted that, several years into their relationship, he was “still getting used to being with someone who writes ‘personally.’ ” He went on, “I’ve been a very private person. Kind of a public person as an artist in some sense, but very private in most ways. And so I said at some point, sort of earlier in our relationship, that being with her was like an epileptic being married to a strobe-light artist.”) He smiled. He said that he tried to keep the responses to Nelson’s work “a little blurry, because specifics might be too much for me to know, or to bear. Like most people, I was very concerned about how I’m represented, and how people respond to me.”
I said, “Sure. You’re human.”
“Yeah, exactly. And so, I am capable of staying away from a kind of stream of feedback. And, in a way, that’s what I’ve done. So, to answer your question, it hasn’t been that strange. I don’t know what you asked. What did you ask?”
We laughed: I was already being “blurred.”
Maggie, returning to the table, asked what we’d been talking about. I said, “Book chat.”
Harry said, “He asked how has it been with the response to ‘The Argonauts.’ ”
Maggie, blushing a bit and looking down, said, “Oh, that kind of book chat.”
Letting someone into your life involves letting someone into your complications. “And then, just like that, I was folding your son’s laundry,” Nelson writes in “The Argonauts.” “He had just turned three. Such little socks! Such little underwear! I marveled at them.” Throughout Nelson’s books there is an undeniable desire to belong to a family, including the one she was born into.
Raised in Marin County, California, Maggie was the second child of Bruce and Barbara Nelson, both of whom loved words. Barb, as she was called, had written a dissertation on Virginia Woolf, at San Francisco State University, while pregnant with her first child, Emily. Bruce was a lawyer—and a great talker, Maggie says—who travelled a lot during the early years of their marriage, leaving his wife home alone with two children. When Maggie was seven, Barb fell in love with a man who’d painted the Nelson house. She and Bruce divorced the following year, and after that Maggie and Emily split their time between their father’s place and the home their mother shared with her new husband.
Maggie’s father encouraged her to be whatever she wanted to be. He left out clippings of articles on subjects that interested her—dance, theatre—and in those words Nelson saw possibilities. In the early evening of January 28, 1984, when Maggie was ten, Barbara received a phone call from a friend of Bruce’s; the friend had been supposed to meet Bruce that afternoon but he hadn’t shown up. In “The Red Parts,” she describes, with calm horror, the rest of that evening: Barb and the girls getting in the car and driving over to Bruce’s house; one of the girls asking that the car radio be turned down, because “its manic chirping sounded all wrong”; Barb telling the girls to stay upstairs while she went downstairs to her ex-husband’s bedroom to investigate, then ordering them outside; the paramedics arriving. Bruce had died, of a heart attack, at forty.
“I think when he died and people were trying to find the reason for why he died—it was the era when everyone talked about being Type A,” Maggie told me. “And I began to feel like I was maybe Type A as well.” She laughed. “I didn’t have to worry about any particular trait being terminal. Life would do me in no matter what my traits.” Often children find it easier to blame death or divorce on the parent who stays. Emily thought their father had died of a broken heart, and for years Maggie resented her mother for not having let her go into the bedroom where she found the body—maybe there were clues as to what had killed him which only Maggie could have spotted. The close-knit trio of Barb, Emily, and Maggie unravelled, for a time. Maggie reacted negatively, at first, to Barb’s new husband. In “The Red Parts,” Nelson says of that unnamed man:
Emily acted out, hanging with a rough crowd. Maggie forced herself to be the responsible daughter, the good girl who did well at school and avoided trouble, behaving at times like a kind of emotional spousal equivalent for her mother. It would take Maggie years to figure out that what life breaks sometimes has to stay broken.
In 1990, she moved east, to attend Wesleyan, where she studied English. Post-structuralism was not only in the air, it was becoming central to the curriculum. This meant that the dead white men were being questioned and held to account for what they’d got wrong. The thinking empire was dead. Long live Gayatri Spivak! Maggie studied writing with Annie Dillard, eventually producing a thesis on Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (with some Foucault)—outsiders who made noise by talking about their bodies and their relationship to death. In 1998, Nelson enrolled in the graduate program in English at the City University of New York. She waitressed to support herself and lived in a series of decrepit apartments that she didn’t bother to fix up. When one fell apart, she’d move into another, maybe putting a couple of beers in the fridge, but for the most part her life was not what you’d call domestic.
Despite the unsteadiness and drift, there was the life of the mind—the order and disorder one could chart and articulate through language. “She found a friendship with her instabilities and turned it immediately into questions that are dazzled, rather than narcotized,” the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, with whom Nelson studied at CUNY, told me. “The language of criticism fit her like a glove. She already had the whole personality and she was much more fluent than I am, or anyone I know—with just putting together a paragraph so that it flows and pursues an argument in a non-pedestrian way. A quality of being on fire with questions.” Koestenbaum’s work and guidance released Nelson from certain internalized academic expectations. She said, “I remember when I first met Wayne he told me, ‘Don’t get bogged down by the heavyweights.’ It sounds so simple, but it was very freeing advice. A sense of permission.”
At CUNY, Nelson wrote a dissertation, which was published by the University of Iowa Press, in 2007, as “Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions.” In it, she explores the flip side of macho nineteen-fifties and sixties New York Abstract Expressionist painting and poetry; she looks at the spaces that fiercely independent female artists, like Joan Mitchell, and gay male poets, like James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara, built, friend by friend and complication by complication—a family united in its difference. The book traffics in a fair amount of academic language, but Nelson perverts the staid stuff with an intimate tone that intertwines quotations, close readings of the work, and plain old feeling.
Before grad school, Nelson had furthered her education in other ways. In the mid-nineties, Eileen Myles would put up flyers in the East Village and hold poetry workshops for a nominal fee. Maggie took some classes, and the two women became close—so close that Nelson is now Myles’s literary executor. Despite that bond, Myles has always marvelled at Nelson’s “formal” quality, which may have something to do with the difference between what she’s willing to reveal in life and what she reveals on the page. Many of Nelson’s early poems involve the body—wanting to escape its limitations or to connect more deeply to the pleasure it can give others. In her 2003 collection, “The Latest Winter,” she describes “the poetry of the future”: “it’s got to come from at least three brains: the brain in the head, the gut-brain, and the brain in the ovaries. it will wax red and rise bone-white.” In “1999,” from the same collection, the body can start to seem like an angry joke, but, then again, most jokers are angry:
In “1999,” as in much of Nelson’s verse, there is a “you” she’s trying to communicate with, a lover or a friend she wants to get closer to by breaking down her feelings in language. One reason she enjoyed writing poetry in those years, she told me, was the way it allowed her to avoid gender references. “I barely ever had third-person pronouns in poetry,” she said. “It was always such a pleasure that it could all just be a ‘you.’ Pronouns are, you know, so bossy and noisy.”
The “you” in “1999” may be the same man Nelson writes about in “Bluets” (2009), a short prose work about the color blue and feeling blue, in which absence in general and the “you” ’s absence in particular drive the story:
Nelson told me that “Bluets” was, to some extent, “a formal experiment,” a marrying of “the emotional content to this kind of faux-Wittgensteinian form.” Balancing pathos with philosophy, she created a new kind of classicism, queer in content but elegant, almost cool in shape.
“Bluets” wasn’t Nelson’s first experiment with form. “Jane: A Murder” (2005), her breakthrough work, tells the story, in poetry, of her mother’s younger sister, Jane Louise Mixer. In 1969, Jane, a smart, political twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a college bulletin board, looking for a ride to Muskegon. She was going home for spring break. The next time her family saw her, she was dead—strangled and shot by an unknown assailant. (A man was convicted of the crime in 2005.) A book of verse, “Jane: A Murder” is not strictly poetical: Nelson drops in crime reports, newspaper stories, and other “news” about Mixer’s hideous death, alongside monologues, poems, letters, and diary entries that try to return Jane to herself, unmangled. Writing about Jane and Barb, Nelson could easily have been writing about herself and her own sister:
Sisters, twinning and not, male power and violence, Nelson’s identification with Jane’s intellectualism and political interests are all rendered in the book with a watchful intensity that takes the reader into Jane’s lost and reimagined body and Maggie’s living and inventing mind. “It added a certain heat to the text” to use Jane’s own voice, culled from her diaries, Nelson told me. And, in a way, the book was the end of a particular kind of recognizable verse for her; no stanza could contain it. Myles told me that “Jane: A Murder” was “like the band that suddenly becomes the Beatles. . . . A chemical thing happens and magic occurs in art-making, and for Maggie it was when she found Jane. All her tricks, all her talents, all her powers came forward.”
It was with “Jane: A Murder” that Nelson went from being a versifier to being a writer who plays with prose and remakes the genre. It was to that person that Harry found himself drawn in 2007, during their afternoon at the Silver Lake Reservoirs. Maggie, he said, helped him get over the skepticism that he was feeling about language as “this thing that misses all the time.” She showed him, he explained, how “it actually can be quite precise and very specific.” Maggie’s work helped change Harry, and it’s hard not to notice how her tendency to defy categorization as a writer parallels his resistance to being classified as a person. “I’m not interested in categories,” he told me. “People put too much pressure on the world and smash it into boxes, and they’re trying to make sense of things that are just a flow. And they’re doing it a disservice.”
A year or so after they started dating, Maggie and Harry got married. Maggie writes about it in “The Argonauts”:
Last month, Harry did the work of a spouse when he got on a plane in L.A. and flew to New York for a day to hold Maggie’s hand while she sat in the great hall at the New School for Social Research for the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards. Resplendent in a blue shirt and black jacket and stroking his beard, Harry listened with interest as the winners were announced. When Maggie’s name was read out, he kissed her. Maggie stood near the stage as the critic Walton Muyumba read the citation, concluding, “She lends critical theory something that it frequently lacks, namely, examples drawn from real life, real art-making, and real bodies.” As he read, Maggie loosened her hair and then smoothed it down. Taking the stage, she thanked various people in her professional life. Looking up, she added:
An earlier version of this article misquoted a word in a passage from Nelson’s “Bluets.”
