How Literature Saved My Life (13 page)

Walking on Forty-fifth Street, Laurie and I witnessed a car accident. Ten seconds later, we had and held diametrically opposed views of what we’d just seen. (She was wrong.)

I find that no matter what I write, Laurie doesn’t respond to my work in the way I want her to, or more accurately, she resents that she’s an arrow in my quiver. I wouldn’t want to be an arrow in her quiver, either
(though in a sense aren’t we all, etc.). I loved it when she asked, the day before my profile of Delilah was published in the
Times Magazine
, “Are we in it?”—i.e., do she and Natalie make cameos? When I said no, she said, “What, we’re not good enough?” I took this in the way in which I hope it was meant: as a brilliant gloss on Damned If You Do/Damned If You Don’t. Might as well go for broke.

It’s hard to write a book, it’s very hard to write a good book, and it’s impossible to write a good book if you’re concerned with how your intimates are going to judge it. I learned a long time ago that the people whom you most want to love your books … won’t (I’m nowhere near Laurie’s favorite writer; ceaseless is her apotheosis of fellow Illinoisan D. F. Wallace). The people who know you the best are always going to view your work through the screen of their own needs. They’re never going to read it on the terms in which you intend it. As do I, of course, whenever I see even the briefest or most oblique description of myself in someone else’s work.

Are we all just characters in one another’s novels? Is the drama of love indistinguishable from the engine of narrative? Is reading for the plot identical to desire? Are we all egoists, and is the best we can do to make sure that our own needs don’t get in the way of other people’s desires? We’re all sleepwalkers in the mind of, oh, I don’t know, Napoleon. The emperor’s body is a box within a box within a box, a prison within a prison within a prison.

My former student Rachel Jackson: “Sometimes the place I go to be alone to think turns out in the end to be the most dangerous place I can be.”

According to Frank Harris’s
My Life and Loves
, Victorian women liked to fuck, though apparently (whaddya know?) only Frank.

Ross McElwee’s
Sherman’s March
forever altered my writing life. By being as self-reflexive as it is, a heat-seeking missile destroying whatever it touches, the film becomes a thoroughgoing exploration of the interconnections between desire, filmmaking, nuclear weaponry, and war, rather than being about only General Sherman.

I grew up in a house in which there was much talk about love, peace, justice, truth, community, but what I saw operating in my own family was a horrific regime. I often feel like an Eastern European who traveled west in the 1980s and had to hear about the glories of Communism. The Eastern European had lived his entire life under the oppressive umbrella of Mother Russia. He wouldn’t care to hear naïve paeans to the Marxist state. I realize this is trumping up badly my own experience growing up in a San Francisco suburb, but that’s how it feels to me. Don’t tell me how right-on activism is going to save the world. The split between idealistic rhetoric and ragged reality was so extreme that I’ve never quite recovered an ability to participate in the commonweal. Although I can hear how naysaying this may sound, I peeked behind the
curtain and saw the Wizard of Oz making silly noises into a megaphone. I’m not going to now believe all that sound and fury is signifying something real.

I’m a product of post-hippie California of the ’70s: a culture of the unreal that had lost its optimism and found its only refuge in drugs. You had to dig around to find any sort of meaning …

The last line of Adler’s other novel,
Speedboat
, is “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.” (Cf. Isaac Babel: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”) She’s fascinated by the arbitrariness of language, the enveloping embrace of culture. Try as she might to liberate herself from social convention, e.g., cliché, she can’t. She’s doing everything she can to make me hyper-aware of her thought processes, to develop intimacy between the speaker and listener—moments in which I feel the strange rub of language, the way it not only evokes life but creates it, prophesies it. The epigraph is from Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies:
“
‘What war?’
said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told.… ’ And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.”
Speedboat
is an oblique bildungsroman, taking Adler’s alter ego, Jen Fein—whose name suggests that she’s not real, that she’s Renata Adler—from the privacy of her pastoral childhood into the
irredeemably corrupt, war-torn (cliché!) world of public affairs. Adler frequently writes and then repeats an idiomatic expression—for instance, “And what’s more, and what’s more …” It’s a very strange gesture, this impulse to articulate and articulate again: highly oral, even oracular. What is the book, exactly—a novel? memoir? cultural criticism? philosophical investigation? journal? journalism? stand-up comedy? I love that feeling of being caught between floors of a difficult-to-define department store. The chapter titles don’t very accurately or fully describe their ostensible contents. The material can’t be held by its titular container. The book is constantly breaking its own bindings, as you’re going deeper into, you know, a single human consciousness. You keep turning pages and reading scenes until finally you understand what, for Adler, constitutes a scene: a toxic and intoxicating mix of velocity, violence, sex, money, power, travel, technology, miscommunication; when you get it, the book’s over.

Maggie Nelson claims that it makes her feel less alone to compose almost everything she writes as a letter. She even goes so far as to say that she doesn’t know how to compose otherwise. When I’m having trouble writing something, I often close the document and compose the passage as email to, say, my friend Michael. I imagine I can feel the tug of the recipient at the other end of the wire, and this creates in me a needed urgency. The letter always arrives at its destination.

In London, I asked my voluble cabdriver if he could
locate the origin of the tendency of every British conversation to rapidly devolve into a series of quibbles, quarrels, and contradictions. “The end of empire,” he said with certainty. “We’re not going to make that same mistake again.”

Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage—
people always quote this truism as if it were the clinching point of an argument about the limits of irony, but name me the bird among us that is not caged and isn’t at least half in love with its cage.

F
IFTY-FIVE WORKS
I swear by:

Renata Adler,
Speedboat
. D. H. Lawrence: it’s better to know a dozen books extraordinarily well than innumerable books passably. In a documentary on Derrida, when he shows the filmmaker his enormous private library, she asks him if he’s read all the books. He says, “No, just a few—but very closely.” I’ve read
Speedboat
easily two dozen times. I can’t read it anymore. It’s one book I’ve read so many times that I feel, absurdly, as if I’ve written it; at the very least, I feel that I know a little bit what it must have felt like to write it. In any case, I learned
how to write by reading that book until the spine broke. I typed the entire book twice.

James Agee,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. My writing life was changed forever by Agee’s willingness to use, and ability to incorporate into his book, his rant-replies to a
Partisan Review
questionnaire.

St. Augustine,
Confessions
. Autobiography: the testimony of a being in dialogue with itself.

Julian Barnes,
Flaubert’s Parrot
. Overlapping essays on the inexhaustible dialectic between life and art.

John Berryman,
The Dream Songs
. Tony Hoagland: “Virtuosity with language is not by itself enough for poetry. A poem has to sustain a strong connection to the suffered world, and any intelligence that dares call itself poetic needs to be penetrated and informed by the life of the emotions. The ego must be breached by the fire and flood damage of experience. At the same time, plaintive wailing will not suffice. Successful poems have grace and vivacity—sometimes even power—of language, mobility of mind, and not a straight-faced, deadpan earnestness, but a brave freedom of feeling.”

Jorge Luis Borges,
Other Inquisitions
. An investigation of otherness pretending to be mere miscellany.

Grégoire Bouillier,
The Mystery Guest
. A character in
Stardust Memories
says that all artists do is “document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” Said more positively: a writer finds a metaphor that ramifies and
attempts to persuade the reader that the metaphor holds the world’s woe.

Joe Brainard,
I Remember
. Outwardly, a series of random memories; in fact, beautifully organized around themes of resistance and conformity.

Richard Brautigan,
Trout Fishing in America
. Here, too, a book is thought to be a random gathering, but it has real power and momentum, derived from the pressure Brautigan puts on the relation between pleasure and commerce.

Anne Carson, “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Women and Men.” Ranges everywhere from songs on the radio to ancient Chinese history in order to get very deeply at the war between men and women.

Terry Castle, “My Heroin Christmas.” Many, perhaps most, reviewers use criticism as a way to brandish what they pretend is their own more evolved morality, psyche, humanity, but this flies in the face of what is to me an essential assumption of the compact between writer and reader—namely, that we’re all bozos on this bus. No one here gets out alive. Let he who is without sin, etc. Castle conveys the mad genius of Art Pepper’s autobiography, but she doesn’t stand back from the book as if she, too, isn’t wildly confused. She implicates herself and her drives and passions. Love is good, but hate is good, too. What she hates is at least as telling as what she loves. She makes the arrow point in both directions: outward toward the
work and inward toward herself. I learn at least as much about Terry Castle as I do about Art Pepper.

John Cheever,
Journals
. An actor read a Cheever story—never quite caught the title—on NPR’s
Selected Shorts:
a writer husband, estranged from his wife and living in Turin, writes a fantasy of how they’ll reconnect. Driving home, I found it so beautiful to listen to that when I arrived, I ran to the radio to hear the end of the story. It is as nothing, though, compared to the luminous precision of the journals, which he kept from 1940 until his death in 1982. The journals are very consciously and scrupulously sculpted: they’re clearly written to be read and published, and they supersede his fiction. It’s unfair, of course, to compare a fifteen-page story to a four-hundred-page book, but I couldn’t help feeling that in the story, Cheever lets himself get away with everything, and in the journals, nothing—he is relentless. In the story, he is grandiose and unfurls the logic of Christian forgiveness. Even as I was charmed by hearing the story aloud, I was constantly thinking,
You lying sack of shit. I’ve read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you, Buster. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings
.

E. M. Cioran,
A Short History of Decay
. Cioran: “Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. Impossible to grant any credence to what he says, to regard his phrases as anything but excuses, acrobatics. The experience of the terrible—which alone confers a certain destiny upon our words—is what he lacks, as
he lacks, too, the imagination of disaster, without which no one can communicate with those
separate
beings, the sick. Having nothing to transmit, neutral to the point of abdication, he collapses into well-being, an insignificant state of perfection, an impermeability to death as well as of inattention to oneself and to the world. As long as he remains there, he is like the objects around him; once torn from it, he opens himself to everything, knows everything: the omniscience of terror.” When Richard Stern and his wife, the poet Alane Rollings, were walking home from dinner one night in Paris with Cioran, Rollings had a painful blister on her foot. She was bleeding badly. Cioran refused to slow down for her or even acknowledge her discomfort. Maybe he thought she was learning something.

Bernard Cooper,
Maps to Anywhere
. The first part of
Maps to Anywhere
was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1988, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters “neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions.” The narrator—Howard calls him “the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)”—is simultaneously “the author” and a fictional creation. From minisection to minisection and chapter to chapter, Bernard’s self-conscious and seriocomic attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother’s
death, his father’s failing health, his parents’ divorce, and southern California kitsch are delicately woven together to form an extremely powerful meditation on the relationship between grief and imagination. When a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self? The book’s final sentence is an articulation of the melancholy that the narrator has, to a degree, deflected until then: “And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor.”

Alphonse Daudet,
In the Land of Pain
. A contemplation of dying, rendered in dozens of preobituaries for himself.