Forty-One False Starts (42 page)

When Allen finally reaches his sister at her institution, he feels “an indefinable emotion, essential, yet as colorless as water” and “a sense of wholeness, a kind of relaxation response.” Mary no longer has “the almost porcelain prettiness and look of utter normality” she had as a child. She is a middle-aged woman who has been medicated for a long time and has an atmosphere of abnormality. But “being with her locates the source of a strange feeling I carry around with me everywhere. I wouldn't be myself without her.” Moreover, “she exudes an essence of personality uncannily reminiscent of my father's and brother's.” Allen's own essence, as it wafts out of his book, has a similar uncanny evocativeness. The editor, the playwright, and the essayist are bound by a thread of—what? Is the word “innocence”? Allen uses it to describe his father's capacity for listening to writers, in opposition to the word “jaded.” The writing of both Wallace and Allen Shawn has, as the conversation of William Shawn had, a rare quality of cleanness—as if it came from a spring rather than from the stale pool of received ideas that most talk and writing comes from. Such purity would be chastening were it not accompanied by a playfulness that takes away the sting and puts in a kind of good word for us all.

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Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life
by Allen Shawn

WILLIAM SHAWN

1992

Every encounter with William Shawn was a somewhat mystifyingly intense experience. You left his presence as you leave a play or a film that has taken you out of your own life and plunged you into a world that is more vivid, coherent, and
interesting
than the real world. Shawn was a great teacher, and the lesson he taught—the lesson every great teacher teaches—was the lesson of himself. He was the model and emblem of the uncorrupted intellect. T. S. Eliot's famous description of Henry James—“He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it”—could be a description of William Shawn. He never said anything that wasn't profoundly intelligent and utterly intelligible. We, his students, without ever presuming to imitate him, tried to be like him in our work. We sought to eliminate from our writing the pretentiousness, intellectual shallowness, moral murkiness, and aesthetic limpness that come naturally to the pen. He was our beacon in a treacherous terrain. The thought of him ultimately reading what we had written both slowed us down and gave us courage to continue. The slowing down was the important thing. Shawn knew—and we knew he knew—that writing is a process that can't be hurried, and that each piece has its natural, sometimes preposterously long term. He taught us to be patient, and to trust our material. He had the gaiety and the playfulness that all deeply serious people have. He was an enchanting person and an Enchanter. He was our Mr. Chips and our Prospero. We have missed him and we will always miss him.

JOSEPH MITCHELL

1996

There is a remarkable passage in
Huckleberry Finn
about a circus act in which twenty bareback riders, “resting their hands on their thighs, easy and comfortable,” as Huck reports, enter the ring, then rise to standing positions on the horses' backs and, as the horses go faster and faster around the ring, execute a series of effortless dance steps. I thought of this scene (an account of true, as opposed to sham, aesthetic experience) while trying to think of some way to describe the effect Joe Mitchell's writing produced on his students—as my generation of nonfiction writers at
The New Yorker
have always thought of ourselves. Joe's feat—which looked so effortless that some reviews of his books actually condescended to him—was so far beyond what anyone could do that it inspired no envy; it simply inspired. As listening to Mozart is widely known to be a cure for flagging creativity, so reading Mitchell has been famous among writers as a remedy for stuckness. After reading a few of Joe's easy and comfortable sentences (about matters of life and death), one would blush for the flaccidity and pretentiousness of one's own efforts; Joe's work forced one to take more risks and put on fewer airs.

Joe himself progressively risked more and more. As his pieces got more complex and profound, they took longer to write. In 1964, after writing his masterpiece,
Joe Gould's Secret
, he undertook a work so labyrinthine and deep that at his death it was still not finished. Much has been made of the fact that Joe didn't publish anything for thirty years. To his friends this was not remarkable; it was simply another sign of Joe's seriousness about writing. During his period of patient struggle with unimaginably daunting artistic problems, Joe retained the gaiety, charm, and lovableness of his days on the lower slopes of literature. If there was an unkind word ever spoken about Joe, the person who uttered it must have been mad or thinking of someone else.

THOUGHTS ON
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY FROM
 AN ABANDONED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

2010

I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have dictated their stories to me and I have retold them. They have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now.

Memory is not a journalist's tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory's autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not be afraid to invent. Above all, he must invent himself. Like Rousseau, who wrote (at the beginning of his novelistic
Confessions
) that “I am not made like anyone I have ever been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence,” he must sustain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness.

Since one of the occupational hazards of journalism is the atrophying (from disuse) of the journalist's powers of invention, the journalist who sets out to write an autobiography has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre. When one's work has been all but done—as mine has been for more than a quarter of a century—by one brilliant self-inventive collaborator after another, it isn't easy to suddenly find oneself alone in the room. It is particularly hard for someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn't want to find herself alone in the room.

Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which journalists habitually, almost mechanically, fall when they write. The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendant. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist's habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.