Maggie Nelson: American classics that influenced the writing of The Argonauts

The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
(Graywolf Press, 2015)

For the relaunch of our series of blog posts by contemporary fiction writers, essayists, poets, and historians, we reached out to Maggie Nelson to learn what classic works of American writing might have influenced her critically acclaimed new memoir The Argonauts.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. If you’re looking for an example of how to move between personal anecdote, trenchant political analysis, and urgent spiritual/ontological rumination, I doubt anyone bests Baldwin. His account of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad was, is, endlessly instructive to me, not only for its use of an encounter as a springboard for reflection, but also for Baldwin’s skill in saying exactly what he wants and needs to say without bending under the pressures of imagined readerships, some of whom might stand all too ready to misuse his critique. (I thought about this issue a lot when trying to figure out how to weight various critiques in The Argonauts.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings. People love to talk about unclassifiable creative nonfiction as a recent invention, but what on God’s green earth are Emerson’s essays? Genre-wise, and sentence by sentence, they are some of the strangest, most inspiring pieces of nonfiction that I know. (Nietzsche thought so too—how’s that for mind-blowing.)

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. First published in 1981, this collection feels fresh, relevant, and necessary every time I pick it up. Whenever people complain to me about the so-called “ivory towerness” of theory, I advise them to revisit the “theory in the flesh” articulated in these pages, which proves how some—perhaps most—people who come to analyze the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality do so out of a need to make livable lives, and sometimes to survive.

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. I read this book when it came out in 1991. I was eighteen, and had just come of age in San Francisco, a city ravaged by AIDS, but I hardly knew what the hell had happened, what was happening. This book helped me to understand everything—about AIDS, about the brutality of normalcy, about how rage might be mobilized to sublime effect in writing, about queerness, about mortality, about friendship, about how hallucinogenic, poetic accounts of roadside encounters might be paired with utterly fierce condemnations of this country’s politics, and so much more.

Against Interpretation
by Susan Sontag
(Dell, 1966)

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. Whenever I go back to my heavily annotated copy of Against Interpretation, I am appalled at how much of my thinking, and even my sentences, seem to me cribbed from Sontag. I guess I read Against Interpretation—an American classic of criticism if there ever was one—at a particularly molten moment in my development, when I was trying to figure out how to combine art and literary criticism, philosophy, and a certain speed or heat in my writing style. Sontag was so clearly already driving that car. I got in, and the rest is history.

Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s and Other Essays. Koestenbaum was my teacher once, and I remember very clearly his telling me: You have to get yourself to say upfront the unspeakable, indefensible thing; after that, you can spend the rest of the piece backpedaling or devoting yourself to nuance. But at least you’ve said it. I am endlessly in thrall to his mastery of this skill: his unsurpassable talent for assertion—hilarious, provocative, or perverse assertion—coupled with an appetite for / apprehension of nuance. I am edified by the range, verve, experiment, and energy of this collection, which makes me think there is a version of “American letters” that I could get behind.

Maggie Nelson's previous books include several volumes of poetry in addition to The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), a work of cultural criticism named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. The Argonauts—a book whose form tests the boundaries of genre at the same time its content pushes against traditional gender definitions—has been called “vibrant, probing, and, most of all, outstanding” by NPR, and “a beautiful, passionate, and shatteringly intelligent meditation on what it means not to accept binaries” by the Chicago Tribune. Nelson lives in Los Angeles and currently teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Emerson, Agassiz, and the Mind of God

Guest blog post by Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of the recently published biography, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.

In one of his lesser-known poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson confessed that while he admired the outfit worn by priests, such masquerade was not for him:

I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowled churchman be.

(Emerson, “The Problem”)

Emerson’s clipped lines reveal the dilemma in which he found himself, an ex-minister who had quit his job because he didn’t want to lose the substance of his faith while he was “seeking the shadow,” as he said, beautifully, in the last sermon he ever gave. Emerson was convinced that the human mind was equipped to understand “the substance” of the universe; priestly vestments or rituals (such as the Lord’s Supper) were nothing but a distraction in his quest for such understanding. And while Emerson’s “unchurchy religiousness” (to use a phrase from one of Max Eastman’s essays) needed no ministry, he gladly accepted help from one of his closest allies, the scientist Louis Agassiz, whose biography I have just published.

Agassiz was a minister’s son, as Emerson was. Born in Switzerland in 1807, Agassiz grew up under his father’s ever-watchful eye. Science was not among the career choices Pasteur Agassiz, a meticulous, exacting, unforgiving man, had in mind for his son. Like the smug Calvinist parson in “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss-Shay,’” a satirical poem by Agassiz’s friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Rev. Rodolphe Agassiz would obsess about the smallest details, with the crucial difference that his project wasn’t a minister’s carriage but his son’s life. However, just as the carriage of Holmes’s parson eventually collapsed, so did Rodolphe Agassiz’s plans for Louis. The son rebelled against his father and obtained a doctoral degree in natural history from the University of Munich. Even if Louis’s first real teaching position was in Neuchâtel, close to where he had been born and close to his father’s vicarage, the seeds of discontent came to fruition when he left Europe for the United States in 1846. Louis never returned. And while his ideas on race, evolution, and taxonomy—hopelessly misguided, from a modern perspective—have eliminated him from the pantheon of truly great scientists, Professor Agassiz’s legacy nevertheless lingers, and in no small degree through the influence he had on the Transcendentalists.

After his arrival, the Bostonians did notice that Louis Agassiz, now a new professor at Harvard University, was not of the “churchgoing kind,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted in his journal. But he had something else to offer. Just what that was (and how much it would have resonated with someone like Ralph Waldo Emerson) is clear from a small text I found, a few years ago, among Agassiz’s papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library. It is one of the few Agassiz manuscripts not concerned with scientific matters, an explication of Psalm 8, lines 3-4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

Louis Agassiz and the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce
contemplating the location of Cambridge, Mass., on the globe.
Photograph by Antoine Sonrel (Collection of Christoph Irmscher)

We do not know what had induced his hand at biblical exegesis; nor do we know why he had chosen this particular passage. But it is evident that he cared deeply about his subject. His writing is intense, at times lyrical, at times delirious: phrases pile upon phrases, sentences stretch to the length of entire paragraphs. When it comes to the point he wants to make, though, Agassiz doesn’t waste time. For him, the psalmist’s humility before God was a thing of the past, the distant past. Thanks to the revelations of modern science, the skies to us don’t look the way they did to King David. “We cannot if we would, we would not if we could, put out of mind the knowledge which the intervening centuries of study and observation have established.” Astronomy, for example, had made the universe seem more glorious than ever before: “There is now seen an order more extensive and perfect in the positions and motions in the heavenly bodies than the Psalmist could have dreamed of.” If God’s wisdom is infinite, so is that of man who comprehends it all, and when Agassiz says “man,” he really means “scientist”: “The mind of man profoundly considered is as vast and stupendous a creation as an outward firmament of worlds.” The stars in the skies cannot understand the nature of their own existence; the scientist, however, can.

As a case in point, Agassiz mentions the astronomer Urbain Le Verrier (1811–1877), who in 1846 had, through the power of mathematical deduction alone, predicted the existence of Neptune, a planet that can contain up to sixty Earths. Listen to how Agassiz sets up the story as if he had film treatment in mind:

A young astronomer in Paris sits down with his slate and pencil. He ascertains just the amount of various Irregularities in the motions of Uranus, not accounted for before et [and] then he reckons by a process which to the common and uneducated mind is utterly incomprehensible and amazing, reckons by figure and algebraic operations how large must that disturbing body be, how distant its orbit, and just where it ought to be found on any given day and hour.

Le Verrier hadn’t spent a minute peering at the sky, concentrating instead on the sheet of paper before him. Yet, once he did look up from his work, his prediction was found to be entirely accurate, as Agassiz insists: “The wondrous tube is pointed to the spot and so there it is a little twinkling star, yet a world, one of our family, and compared with which for vastness of size and orbit, this earth is but a child’s bauble.” Agassiz is unstoppable by now, the words pouring out of him like a veritable meteor shower, his prose tipsily soaring to the heights his text seeks to capture on the page. I am telling you, he continues, addressing his readers or listeners, straining to give his insights all the emphasis he can muster, “this mind of man, perverted, dwarfed and misused as it is, is a higher creation, a more astonishing display of God’s power and skill, a more signal expression of his attributes than the material worlds with which that mind deals.”

God’s skill? The great Protestant theologian Jean Calvin (1509–1564) had used that very same word, in his commentary on Psalm 8, or rather the Latin equivalent of it: those who are proud of their excellent intellects they possess, as if they had earned them by their own skill (industria) or merit (merito), forget that all they know or think they know has been gratuitously conferred upon them. Humans are miserable worms, squirming upon the earth: vile, contemptuous creatures all, utterly unworthy of receiving anything from God. For Calvin, Psalm 8 was, above all, an illustration of how wholly undeserved God’s grace was. Louis Agassiz couldn’t have agreed less. His unconventional biblical exegesis is an unashamed prayer not to God but to the power of scientific industria, a virtue Louis considered divine and which he, giving lectures all over the country and filling his museum to the brim with specimens, exemplified like no one else.

Decades after his father’s death, Louis Agassiz was still waging war against his meticulous father’s plans for his life. And he was giving the Unitarians what they needed—proof taken from the history of science that the human mind really was divine. Louis’s concept of the divine intellect was not at all like the God Rodolphe had told him about, a God who, like Rodolphe himself, micromanages the lives of others. Rather, Louis’s God was a skillful scientist—of the kind Louis had become. Professor Agassiz was not a humble man. Even death, the ubiquitous subtext of Calvin’s exegesis, did not faze him. Given the power of the scientific intellect, the end of human life to him was at most an inconvenience, an interruption, a brief eclipse. But it is not the end of the process of understanding, not the moment captured in one of Emily Dickinson’s gloomier poems when you can no longer “see to see.” The mind that tracks God cannot just be cast aside, like a withered leaf, after sixty or seventy years: “To fear annihilation of the human mind on account of death,” asked Louis Agassiz, “is it not as weak and puerile as the error of these simple children of nature, who thought the sun was extinct, when they saw the moon pass over and hid his face at midday?” Louis Agassiz was now taking on any number of passages in the Bible that he would have heard his father quote, perhaps most prominently Psalm 90.10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Louis Agassiz’s “devotion,” a term his contemporaries often applied to his tireless attempts to infuse science with morality, was not blind reverence. If it opens a way to understanding the secrets of nature, the keys to the door were, he believed, firmly lodged in the hands of the scientist, the King David of the nineteenth century.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would have agreed, except that for him Agassiz’s scientist was, of course, the poet: two names, really, for the same thing.

Bibliographical note: Louis Agassiz’s autograph essay “VIII Ps. 3.4. When I consider Thy heavens . . .” is in the Louis Agassiz Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1410 (142). Houghton Library’s permission to quote from Agassiz’s unpublished papers is gratefully acknowledged.

Related posts by Christoph Irmscher
• “A very pleasant dinner”: Longfellow, Agassiz, and friends
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his beloved wife, Fanny

John Matteson on the “alternately repelling and attracting” electricity between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson

Guest blog post by John Matteson, distinguished professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and author of the recently published The Lives of Margaret Fuller (W. W. Norton)

We still don’t know exactly what they meant to each other.

Before they met, Margaret Fuller went to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson speak multiple times and relished “the atmosphere of his thoughts.” She called him “that only clergyman of all possible clergymen who eludes my acquaintance.” Still, she seemed reluctant to form a friendship, though it’s unclear whether her shyness—unusual for her—arose because he intimidated her or because she feared she would find him wanting. When at last they sat down together at Emerson’s home in Concord, in the summer of 1836, Fuller was still recovering from her father’s death the previous fall. It is almost too easy to conclude that she was looking for another man of substance to fill the gap. This was probably true, but she was also looking for an ally. To help support her orphaned siblings, Fuller needed employment. Few could supply connections like Emerson.

From the outset, electricity crackled between them, alternately repelling and attracting. A man of instinctive distance and reserve, Emerson thought Fuller “carried too many guns” and tacitly predicted, “we shall never get far.” But, fortunately, she stuck to her strong suit: she kept talking. Her conversation, peppered with satiric observations about mutual acquaintances, amused and bewitched him. Her initial visit, arranged to last two weeks, extended to three. Emerson became Fuller’s cheerleader, praising her talent and urging her to write. And, as Fuller had hoped, he more than once helped her find employment; neither her work at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School nor her editing of The Dial would have happened in his absence. However, the blessing was highly equivocal. The Temple School gave her experience and The Dial brought her something like fame. But transcendentalism was never a great moneymaker, and Fuller never received her expected wages for either project. Fuller was attracted to Emersonian thinking because it emphasized the value of mind and soul without seeming to ask much about the possessor’s sex. However, there was a flavor of exploitation in the work she was given, even if Emerson sincerely apologized for the failure of The Dial to repay her efforts.

Both Fuller and Emerson prized unseen reality above the visible, and both believed fervently in the tireless pursuit of self-culture. It must have seemed to observers that a man and a woman could hardly be more likeminded. Yet in their friendship the seemingly minor differences could sometimes trump the grand similarities. For Fuller, genius was a matter of both intellect and emotion; Emerson’s idea of intellect was cool and smooth as marble. Fuller complained that his “light will never understand my fire; [his] clear eye will never discern the law by which I am filling my circle.” She wanted an intimacy of spirit that both Emerson’s status as a married man and his habitual aloofness made it uncomfortable, if not impossible, for him to supply. She arraigned him with “inhospitality of soul.” Emerson wrote that he would like nothing better than “to melt once for all these icy barriers” that stood between them, but the distance proved too great. He told her, “You & I are not inhabitants of one thought of the Divine Mind, but of two thoughts, that we must meet and treat like foreign states, one maritime, one inland, whose trade and laws are essentially unlike.”

Fuller could not excuse his failure to understand her. She asked bitterly, “[W]hen my soul, in its childish agony of prayer, stretched out its arms to you as a father, did you not see what was meant by this crying for the moon . . . ?” “You are intellect;” she later wrote to him, “I am life.” As an affiliation of the mind, their relationship went as far as it could go; as an affinity of two hearts, it never really began. By the time Fuller left New England for New York in 1844, she was transcendentalist no more. During her entire time in Manhattan, she wrote to Emerson only twice.

Nevertheless, Fuller’s death aboard the Elizabeth in July 1850 left Emerson shocked and stunned. In his journals during the months that followed the wreck, he returned to her memory again and again. He collaborated with two of her other closest friends, William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, to write a memoir of her that remains one of the most significant American biographies of the nineteenth century. Perhaps his most fitting tribute to her was his tersest. He said of her passing, “I have lost my audience.”

Also of interest:

• Previous related Reader's Almanac posts: The strange death of Margaret Fuller; Margaret Fuller’s Thanksgiving Day Revelation 
• An exclusive LOA interview with Emerson scholar Lawrence Rosenwald about Emerson’s Journals (“There are some really, really embarrassing moments in Emerson’s writings about Fuller.”) 
• "Humanity, Said Edgar Allan Poe, Is Divided Into Men, Women, And Margaret Fuller," Joseph Jay Deiss holds Emerson responsible for Fuller's contemporary neglect

Related LOA works: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1820–1842; Selected Journals 1841–1877

Celebrate the first day of spring with a favorite poem

“A little madness in the Spring,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Is wholesome even for the King.” Decades later, in “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost echoed the sentiment, “Spring is the mischief in me.” What better mischief to kick off the change in seasons than to share a favorite poem about spring?

“May-Day,” a thirty-five page paean to spring, opens Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second collection of poems. His close observations of nature lead to intimations of an underlying, transcendent, transformative power, as this excerpt demonstrates:

For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect; . . .
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,
Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near. . .
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting, without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

Writing around the same time, Emily Dickinson’s experience of spring is more ethereal and foreboding, as these first four lines of her twenty-line meditation show:

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period—
When March is scarcely here

In the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman delights in something as simple as discovering “The First Dandelion”:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
     calm as the dawn,
The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

For Robert Frost, a sense of the fleeting nature of discoveries like Whitman’s prompts “A Prayer in Spring,” which begins:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

The Poetry Foundation features links to a number of other splendid poems about spring. Won’t you share your favorite?

Related LOA works: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations; Walt Whitman: Poems and Prose; American Religious Poems (includes “A Prayer in Spring”)

Henry David Thoreau: August 9, 1854: “ ‘Walden’ published.”

Henry David Thoreau published only two books during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (James Munroe and Company, 1849) and Walden, or, A Life in the Woods (Ticknor and Fields, 1854). Thoreau began A Week when he went to live at Walden Pond in 1845. Intended to be a memorial to his older brother John, who had died of lockjaw three years earlier, the book was based on a boat trip they had made together in 1839. On the website dedicated to the writings of Thoreau at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Elizabeth Witherell and Elizabeth Dubrulle describe how the creation of A Week ended up overlapping with Walden:

At Walden, Thoreau worked diligently on A Week, but he also explored Walden Woods and recorded his observations on nature in his Journal. He entertained visitors and made regular trips to town; friends and neighbors began to inquire about his life at the pond. What did he do all day? How did he make a living? Did he get lonely? What if he got sick? He began collecting material to write lectures for his curious townsmen, and he delivered two at the Concord Lyceum, on February 10 and 17, 1847. By the time he left the pond on September 6, 1847, he had combined his lectures on life at Walden with more notes from his journal to produce the first draft of a book which he hoped to publish shortly after A Week.

Unfortunately, A Week sold only two hundred copies during the first years after publication. In a Journal entry of October 28, 1853 (PDF) Thoreau describes receiving from the publisher “in a wagon” 706 copies of its printing of 1,000.

They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. . . I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself. . . . Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to-night to record what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever.

Thoreau would revise Walden seven times before it was published on August 9, 1854. His Journal entry for the historic day (PDF) is brief:

Aug. 9. Wednesday. —To Boston.
“Walden” published. Elder-berries. Waxwork yellowing.

His friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson captures a less Stoic post-publication Thoreau in a letter to a friend: “He is walking up & down Concord, firm-looking, but in a tremble of great expectations.” Walden fared much better than A Week. By the end of the year 1,744 copies of the 2,000-copy first printing were sold and reviews were mostly favorable, even as far away as England. Reviewing Walden for The Westminster Review, George Eliot wrote “. . . we have a bit of pure American life (not the ‘go-ahead’ species, but its opposite pole), animated by that energetic, yet calm spirit of innovation, that practical as well as theoretic independence of formulae, which is peculiar to some of the finer American minds. . . . There is plenty of sturdy sense mingled with his unworldliness.”

Related LOA works: Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod; Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems