How Literature Saved My Life (15 page)

Gilbert Sorrentino, “The Moon in Its Flight.” “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.”
It can’t?
I thought art was the only twin life had.

Melanie Thernstrom,
The Dead Girl
. The title refers to Thernstrom’s best friend, Bibi Lee, who is murdered, and also to Thernstrom, who can’t seem to live.

Judith Thurman,
Cleopatra’s Nose
. In nearly every essay, Thurman appears to be looking out a window, but she’s not. She’s painting a self-portrait in a convex mirror. There’s always a moment when the pseudo-objective mask drops, yielding a quite startling self-revelation.

George W. S. Trow,
Within the Context of No Context
. An assemblage of disconnected paragraphs, narrated in a tone of fanatical archness, and perhaps best understood as what Trow calls “cultural autobiography.” In other words, its apparent accomplishment—a brilliantly original analysis of the underlying grammar of mass culture—is a way for Trow to get at what is in one sense his eventual subject: the difference between the world he inhabits (no context) and the world his father, a newspaperman, inhabited (context). In the book’s final paragraph, Trow writes about his father, “Certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact,
worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.”

Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five
. The expository first chapter, for all intents and purposes a prologue, renders moot the rest of the book and everything else he ever wrote. I live and die for the overt meditation.

Do I still love literature?

C
LAUDIUS MURDERS
K
ING
H
AMLET
. The piano falls on the cartoon duck. Your life won’t turn out the way you expect it to. This is where art comes in …

My two proudest literary accomplishments of middle age are that “good” and “bad” reviews no longer affect me much (I used to retire to bed with a quart of ice cream if, say,
The Kansas City Star
had even the slightest quibble) and I now give readings without the benefit of pharmaceuticals (which I used to use to mitigate stuttering).

If Geoff Dyer weren’t so handsome, he would never have become such a traveler. I wonder if travelers, in general, are more good-looking than other people; I think they might be. At the very least, travel writers, e.g., Chatwin, Theroux, Junger, are generally better-looking than other writers. So, too, the essays/diaries/notebooks of
handsome male writers are so different from those of ugly male writers that there should be separate shelves in the bookstore: “Essays: male (h), essays: male (u).” Compare Michaels, Brodkey, Isherwood, Camus, Theroux, Amis (père et fils) to Canetti, Sartre, Genet, Larkin, Cioran, Naipaul. The former veer toward wise-depressive; the latter, toward brilliant-bitter. Fence straddlers like Henry Miller—great body, but jug-eared and cueball-bald—typically report with self-mocking bonhomie.
Out of Sheer Rage
is a serious and urgent book, though it wears its seriousness under a mask of Chaplinesque comedy. When I said this to Dyer, he seemed taken aback, as if its real subject should never be spoken of in public. So, too, he likes to pretend that
The Ongoing Moment
is “about photography” (it’s about trying to learn how to live life inside time).

In German bookstores, there are pretty much only two categories: literature—work aspiring toward artistic merit—and then just pure information, train schedules and the like. Unfortunate example.

Sarah Manguso and I became friends when I wrote her a fan letter about her book
The Two Kinds of Decay
, which is an account of living for ten years with a life-threatening blood disorder and is devoid of anything even remotely resembling self-pity or self-aggrandizement. She recently wrote to me, “I’ll watch a genius do anything. I’ll watch my friend Andy use Photoshop to erase color impurities
on the same image for an hour because he sees things I don’t see. I’ll watch him until I see that he sees them. It’s like opening a gift. Or the original meaning of ‘apocalypse’: the lifting of the veil.”

In
Fahrenheit 451
, people experience almost nothing in their own lives, but they experience a lot by watching television shows that are more like life than life itself. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Baudrillard declared that Western culture had become a simulacrum and that there was no longer an original to base our perceptions on: the replication, the program had become reality. In the visual arts, a replication of a replication became media within media (the original no longer exists). Visual artists continued to appropriate, but now, in order to avoid legal skirmishes, they tend to re-present the representation, moving the material into another form, customizing it, enlarging it or shrinking it, using new color or materials, moving from one medium to another, e.g., a Harley made of salt.

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, the cofounders of the International Necronautical Society and coauthors of the “Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity,” when asked to present their declaration at the Tate Britain, found and trained two actors to pretend to be them. Many people in the audience were angry when they discovered that the actors were not in fact the authors … of a declaration on inauthenticity … presented in a museum.

Nicholson Baker’s
A Box of Matches
has the thinnest
of fictional apparati: there is no plot or setting; there are no characters; it’s just Baker sitting down with a box of matches—he really did this, of course, just as for
The Anthologist
he videotaped himself giving lectures about poetry—and thinking, thrillingly, about the ephemeral nature of existence. Baker estimates that 93 percent of each of his “novels” is autobiographical, but that if he alters a single detail from “reality,” this necessitates calling the work a novel, which is absurd. The personal essay isn’t “true”; it’s a framing device to foreground contemplation. There are passages from
The Anthologist
that are as eloquent and tender as anything Baker has ever written, but what he wants to do is dilate on the emotional triggers, formal properties, and soul-rearranging rewards of poetry. He doesn’t care a whit about the book’s twinned narratives: the narrator getting back together with his ex-girlfriend and giving a speech at a poetry conference—utterly pro forma. What could have been a great book is thrown off track by Baker’s pretense that he’s writing a novel. The novelistic gestures, especially in the last half, seem to me extremely left-handed (no offense to all those superb left-handed readers out there).

Douglas Gordon’s
24 Hour Psycho
slows down Hitchcock’s
Psycho
to two, rather than twenty-four, frames per second. Don DeLillo watched
24 Hour Psycho
and wanted to write a meditation on that film. Duty called, though, and he trapped his beautiful film criticism inside an uninspired novel called
Omega Point
.

Thoreau: “The next time the novelist rings the bell, I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.”

I like art with a visible string to the world.

Lucian Freud: “I’ve got a strong autobiographical bias. My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings. I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.” My aesthetic exactly, for better and worse.

Mairéad Byrne’s
The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven
is everywhere a seizure and transfiguration of the everyday into insight. She “reclaims” life by showing that a poem can be made of anything, e.g., the awkward “hi” between a white woman and black man passing each other on a dark street. The poems pretend to be light, but they aren’t, careening as they do between fury and joy.

My entire twenties, I lived on practically nothing, slept on my father’s couch for ten months. At thirty-one, I was a proofreader for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (PMS), a San Francisco law firm that represented the wrong side of every case. The lawyers hated their jobs. I loved mine, though, since I spent my entire time there finishing my second novel. All the other subalterns were as bored as I was, and they were happy to print out copies of drafts for me, retype pages for me. It was Team Shields. We also discovered something new called a fax machine. Very exciting. I’d arrive before anyone else, and the lawyers would thank me for being such an eager beaver.

In fiction, the war is between two characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, say, whereas in ambitious personal essay, there’s just as much war, just as much “conflict,” but it’s within the breast, as it were, of the narrator/speaker/author. The essayist tries to get to everything that
Macbeth
does; he just locates it all within his own psyche.
Every man contains within himself the entire human condition
.

When Natalie was seven, she read the Lemony Snicket series, which is about three orphaned kids who undergo various and terrible adventures as they try to find a home. They get handed off to Count Olaf, a distant cousin who is an utter ogre. A middle-class kid can read it from the vantage of her secure home and love the characters’ horrific lives. What’s alluring to children about something cute is that they can love it back to health and thereby feel powerful themselves. In their ordinary lives, children are constantly condescended to; it’s important that they can condescend to something else.

One of my former students, who appeared on
The Weakest Link
, mailed me a videotape of her appearance on the show and then sent me the essay she wrote about it; I showed the video and read the essay to Natalie. I wanted to emphasize to her that you can write about anything that happens to you, that it’s a natural response to experience.

N. is so preternaturally creative that she’s made me
a more productive and better writer, not to mention a more human human.

Lester Bangs: “Once you’ve made your mark on history, those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.” Manguso: “Once your first book appears and is read, it provokes a set of expectations of what you should produce, or are capable of producing, next. Sudden fame tends to demolish the lives of adolescent film stars. Writers, with their much tinier fame, don’t escape the effects of the infinitely reflecting mirror of a readership. A Hegelian synthesis between writers’ first books and their first criticisms occurs not once, not twice, but forever. A mature writer’s facility with his craft can threaten the genuineness of his product—one that turns into a celebration of skill rather than a necessary foray into a mysterious world. This is not to say that all emerging writers are afire and that all mature writers are shallow, only that public validation and expectation increase as a writer’s career continues, and that the threat of writing to an audience becomes only more present a danger as time passes and renown increases. I value most those writers who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.”

Dyer calls this self-karaoke. It happens to virtually everyone. Hemingway, Carver, Brodkey, DeLillo come quickly to mind. Only men? Do women in their maturity
avoid this? Not at all sure that’s true (see Kael, Adler, Hardwick, Malcolm, Didion, Carson, Hempel). This whole idea of self-karaoke, for Dyer, is predicated on the idea that at a certain age—mid-fifties? late fifties? early sixties?—new stimuli tend not to penetrate and so one is mining oneself endlessly in a not especially productive feedback loop. Dyer says that people ask him who his main influences are, and at this point, it’s himself. He’s his main influence. After a certain age, you’re building only on yourself, for ill or good.