\u201cI\u2019m not sure what to do with it,\u201d James says, when I ask how they feel about the inevitable impending \u201cliterary power couple\u201d label. \u201cI have all these romantic notions that we were like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne or something \u2013 I don\u2019t know. What do you think?\u201d He turns to Boggs, who laughs. \u201cIt\u2019s all very new,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re still getting used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a warm October morning in Williamsburg, the fashionable writerly enclave in Brooklyn, and I am sitting across from the pair at their apartment. They are relaxing on a chaise longue, 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.<\/p>\n
James, the 55-year-old Jamaican-born novelist whose 2015 book A Brief History of Seven Killings<\/a> won the Booker prize, is back on the shortlist this year with The Disappearers<\/a>, a sprawling, dark reckoning with the brutality of Aids-era gay life and homophobia in Jamaica. Boggs, his 53-year-old partner of nearly nine years, has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for his first book, Baldwin: A Love Story<\/a>, a biography of James Baldwin that draws on two decades of research into the writer\u2019s intimate life and creative relationships.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Baillie Gifford\u2019s a prize I know well,\u201d James says. \u201cSo when Nick was on the shortlist, I knew what a big deal it was.\u201d Boggs remembers James\u2019s reaction when the nonfiction shortlist was announced on 1\u00a0October. \u201cHis eyes got very wide. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen his eyes get quite that wide before.\u201d<\/p>\n James had the first taste of the excitement, when the Booker shortlist was announced in September. \u201cYou got shortlisted first, so the pressure was on!\u201d Boggs jokes. \u201cNo matter how many times you do this, it\u2019s always a great surprise,\u201d James adds.<\/p>\n Boggs and James at home in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Maria Spann\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The pair have been together since 2018 and have lived in this apartment for a little under a year. Its walls form something of a shrine to their work and interests, crowded with art by African American and queer artists, from intimate, often erotic photography to paintings. At one point they rummage beneath the bed to retrieve an original 1938 portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney, the Harlem renaissance artist who became one of Baldwin\u2019s mentors, and features heavily in Boggs\u2019s book. A monumental horse sculpture dominates the room \u2013 or, as Boggs points out with a laugh, \u201cit\u2019s really just the horse\u2019s ass, isn\u2019t it!\u201d Bought by James after his 2015 Booker win and christened \u201cBooker\u201d by Boggs, it stands alongside a similarly imposing gorilla.<\/p>\n Their romance began not in a rarefied literary salon, but through the very ordinary business of a dating app. \u201cI was on the apps and was like, well, I\u2019m only dating in my neighbourhood,\u201d Boggs says. \u201cHe was three blocks away, so it was perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markMarlon has an incredible work ethic \u2013 we\u2019re not screaming from the\u00a0other room or\u00a0complaining at\u00a0dinner<\/p>\n By then, they were both in their 40s. Boggs, who had never been out with a writer before \u2013 \u201cit was mostly bartenders\u201d, he jokes \u2013 knew of James\u2019s work, but hadn\u2019t read any of his books. James, for his part, didn\u2019t know Boggs was a writer prior to their first meeting.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a very chaste first date,\u201d James says, with a twinkle in his eye. \u201cWe were gentlemen.\u201d The relationship developed \u201chealthily slowly\u201d over a summer spent apart while Boggs was teaching in London, until they reunited when James invited Boggs to a Booker anniversary event in the capital. He was keen to set the bar high.<\/p>\n \u201cOur third date was at Buckingham Palace,\u201d James says, with a faux shrug. \u201cI try to keep it classy, you know, gotta impress him. We actually made out in the queen\u2019s\u00a0bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n Their relationship may have brought them into the same orbit, but the worlds they each came from \u2013 and the experiences that inform their writing \u2013 are markedly\u00a0different.<\/p>\n Growing up in Washington DC, where his father was a civil rights attorney, Boggs read Baldwin from a young age. While studying the writer at college, he came across a reference in a 1966 biography to an out-of-print children\u2019s book by Baldwin, illustrated by a French artist, Yoran Cazac. Boggs had suspicions that there\u00a0was\u00a0a love affair behind the collaboration, tried to track down Cazac, but was told he was most likely\u00a0dead. A\u00a0few weeks later, the phone rang.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was Yoran saying, \u2018I\u2019m alive, I\u2019m in Paris, come on over, I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy,\u2019\u201d Boggs recalls. \u201cThat was 23 years ago, and it began a realisation that there were these untold stories in Baldwin\u2019s life that needed to be unearthed.\u201d<\/p>\n For James, rampant homophobia shaped his upbringing and his storytelling. Growing up gay and closeted in 1980s Kingston, in the classroom he was \u201cthe school homo\u201d; at church, he tried to become straight. He only began to build a more comfortable queer identity after moving to Minneapolis to teach in 2007, away from the scrutiny of family and friends in Jamaica. Unlike Boggs, his queer literary education came late. He picked up Baldwin\u2019s Giovanni\u2019s Room for the first time when he was 50. \u201cThe first thing I thought was I could never have read this at 20,\u201d he says. \u201cI was so in the closet.\u201d<\/p>\n Across his fiction, James has repeatedly excavated Jamaica\u2019s histories of violence and political upheaval, from his debut 2005 novel John Crow\u2019s Devil (famously rejected 78 times by publishers), to the gang warfare and state corruption of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which made him the first Jamaican to win the Booker prize<\/a>. The Disappearers, his sixth novel, grew out of a rumoured homophobic attack in a middle-class area of Kingston in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n \u201cI first heard about it when I was 21,\u201d he says. \u201cI knew it happened, I just couldn\u2019t prove it. It haunted me: the idea that that could happen \u2013 and in a posh neighbourhood \u2013 was one of the things that certainly pushed me firmly into the closet.\u201d<\/p>\n He was unable to establish exactly what had happened until he began researching the novel, interviewing almost 20 people in Jamaica who helped him piece together the incident over several years. \u201cI\u00a0wanted to fill in the blanks,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to give those guys back some sort of agency and power.\u201d<\/p>\n In different ways, both men are trying to recover Black queer histories that have been marginalised or lost. \u201cWe both respond to gaps,\u201d Boggs says.<\/p>\n For James, one such gap became the starting point for The Disappearers. He wanted to build his novel around the production of a play, but couldn\u2019t find one that would fit. The solution came, serendipitously, from Boggs: while researching his biography, he discovered Baldwin directed a 1969 production of John Herbert\u2019s Fortune and Men\u2019s Eyes in Turkey. He suggested James consider it for his novel.<\/p>\n \u201cAt first you were like, \u2018no\u2019,\u201d Boggs recalls. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018just read these 60 pages\u2019. And I was right.\u201d<\/p>\n It is no exaggeration to say that the play serves as the novel\u2019s structural and emotional scaffolding, and is central to Boggs\u2019s chapters on Baldwin\u2019s life in Turkey, too. \u201cI like to say I plundered his book with his permission,\u201d James says, smiling. \u201cIt\u2019s one way in which our books wouldn\u2019t be possible or wouldn\u2019t have ended up the way they did were we not together.\u201d<\/p>\n
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