How Literature Saved My Life (4 page)

A myth is an attempt to reconcile an intolerable contradiction.

W
RITING WAS
, and in a way still is, very bound up for me with stuttering. Writing represented/represents the possibility of turning “bad language” into “good language.” I now have much more control over my stutter; it’s nothing like the issue it was in my teens and twenties and into my thirties. Still, Edmund Wilson’s notion of the wound and the bow persists in my mind (Samuel Johnson had scars all over his face, he twitched, every time he walked past a tree he had to touch it, he
was sexually masochistic, and out of his mouth came wondrously strange and funny things). Language is what differentiates us from other species, so when I stutter, I find it genuinely dehumanizing. I still feel a psychic need to write myself into, um, existence. So, too, due to stuttering, I value writing and reading as essential communication between writer and reader. It’s why I want writing to be so intimate: I want to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone—I’ve gotten to this other person.

Email to Natalie, now nineteen, insulin-resistant and hypothyroid, who faced weight issues throughout high school: “I felt utterly isolated in high school and college (not at all a part of any social scene), but over time my speech issues receded and I became the immensely social butterfly I am now.”

Her reply: “Ha ha ha.”

In “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” Dinty Moore overcomes his ambivalence about having a child—his own father was a stutterer and a drunk—but he desperately wants a girl because “boys have a higher likelihood of inheriting their ancestral traits.”

T
HE STAR OF
the reality show
Supernanny
tells her charges, “The answers you give to your parents are meaningless to me. I’m not going to put on the mask of parent or caregiver. I’m going to be completely real to you.” Kids almost always respond quite positively to her. With Natalie I also try to be “real.” Her friends say, “Your dad does not play Dad with you.” I take this as a compliment, not sure Natalie does. After spending a few days with Paul Giamatti, my friend Ellen said Giamatti reminded her of me. I said thanks a lot—it couldn’t be another movie star? How I interact with Natalie reminded Ellen of how Giamatti interacts with his son. She said that both of us seem to empty out the melodrama from the relationship by speaking in a flat, ironic, peer-to-peer sort of voice: “no singsong, no patronizing, maybe a little distant, but probably very loving, I would think, in its own way.”

F
RED
M
OODY
, the former editor of
Seattle Weekly
and the author of four works of nonfiction, is a friend. His as yet unpublished antimemoir (memoir with wings?),
Unspeakable Joy
, describes his adolescent years spent in
two seminaries in California. The book is framed by a national scandal in the 1990s, when the news broke of widespread abuse by priests in the 1960s at the seminary Moody was attending. The book is written in short passages, each one separated by a triangle (=Trinity) and nearly every one just a couple of pages.

The opening of the book—Moody’s mother calling him on the phone after hearing the news, demanding to know if he was one of the abused, and his reassuring her that he wasn’t—sets a particular tone for what follows, frames the entire thing in a peculiar way. Moody reassures his mother that he wasn’t abused, but he doesn’t reassure me. If anything, I’m inclined to think he’s lying. He reflects on how troubled his adult life has been, how he has to hide in plain sight because of the horrible things within him: “Marriage, kids, house, friends, career—when you’re like me, those things are basically barnacles on a rotting pier. I suppose, for the secretive, the power of the secret has some direct correlation with the worth of the life you have: the more loved ones in your life, the more emotional equity, the more you have to lose by being found out.”

All of which further inclines me to believe that he was abused and that I’m going to hear about it, but this information is withheld, and he segues into a retelling of his entire seminarian career, beginning with his earliest, uncontrollable desire to enter the seminary because of
his mortifying fear of girls and all things sexual, and his assessment that, as a result, “there was something deeply wrong” with him. The first several chapters revolve around Moody’s unrelenting emphasis on how troubled he was as a child, how disturbed he is as an adult, and how traumatizing the intervening years were. Further, and perhaps most important, he describes how difficult it is for him to recall these memories, both emotionally and physically: “Memory isn’t a resurrector of past reality so much as it is a storyteller.” His wife asks him (about the manuscript I’m reading) whether he’s writing memoir or fiction, and he responds that he’s “still thinking about it.”

At this point, I believe that (1) I’m going to read the story of how Moody was molested by a priest at seminary, and (2) I’m going to have no way of knowing how much of what follows is “true.” As Moody’s story of adolescent angst unfolds, the feeling of impending molestation hovers—not on the page, but in my mind—over every encounter Moody has with a Father, every time he’s alone in a room with one. Whenever one of his classmates has a nervous breakdown or mysteriously decides to drop out and go home, I assume abuse is the root cause, but Moody doesn’t speculate. Where’s the trauma? The devastation? The “rotting pier” upon which the adult Moody’s family and marriage are to be just “barnacles”?

I’m relieved, sort of, when Moody says that his seminary is shutting down. I realize that he isn’t going to be
molested there. The school closes, Moody goes home, and trauma is spared. To my dismay, I learn that Moody is going to transfer to another seminary—St. Anthony’s Franciscan, which proves to be far different from the previous one. Suddenly, the chapters are numbered in Roman numerals. I meet Father Mario, the consummate disciplinarian (he’s still alive; google him). Signs of sexual abuse abound, from kids being mysteriously summoned during class to audible screams coming from Mario’s office. And after several tortured months of enduring true Catholic discipline, Moody is kicked out for giving a homily about the hypocrisy of the institution of confession.

Moody escapes unscathed. Finally, though, near the end of the book, Moody satiates my curiosity—really, my anxiety, my fascination. He reveals his dark secret, but it becomes immediately obvious that the event he describes is a fabrication. And Moody doesn’t disguise it: the very next passage begins, “Novelists get a free ride, presenting fact as fiction and taking undeserved credit for creativity when they’ve simply taken down what reality dictated to them. But let a nonfiction writer try to present fiction as fact for the noble cause of inspiring and uplifting the reader, and he ends up crucified on
Oprah
.” (Sing it, Fred!) The real source of Moody’s shame, I learn, is that the signs of abuse were all around him but he didn’t do anything about it. “This is what I can’t get over: the shame over my complicity in that series of monstrous crimes.”

The book concludes with Moody’s revisiting St.
Anthony’s with a friend, who shoots a photo of Moody comically trying to pry apart the bars of a gate. The concluding sentences: “We entitled it ‘Prisoner of Memory.’ Then we got the hell out of there.”

Prisoner of memory. Moody’s book is what I had in mind when I wrote my harrumphing letter to the editor of
The New York Review of Books:
“
Pace
Lorrie Moore’s mention of my book
Reality Hunger
in her review of three memoirs,
Reality Hunger
is neither an ‘anti-novel jihad’ (Geoff Dyer’s jocular reference in his generous discussion of my book in
The Guardian
) nor a brief for the memoir. It is instead an argument for the poetic essay and the book-length essay—in particular, work that takes the potential banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts,’ ‘truth,’ ‘reality’), turns that banality inside out, and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s ‘true’? What’s knowledge? What’s ‘fact’? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.”

D
AVID FOSTER WALLACE
came to like country music by imagining that the singer of each song was actually singing about him/herself. Many country songs were thus transfigured for Wallace into the battle of a self against itself. When Patsy Cline sings “I’m crazy for loving you,” it’s a statement of self-loathing. Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” is self-indictment. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.” Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come On, Come On.” Garth Brooks’s “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places.”

Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with the album cover of “outsider” musician Daniel Johnston’s
Hi, How Are You?
on it. It’s as if Johnston—bipolar, schizophrenic—has found a way to hot-wire his feelings directly into his tape recorder. He presents zero façade, only the inscape of his tortured self. The music, raw beyond raw, is the very definition of lo-fi. Emerson: “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.” Johnston never had any arrows to begin with. He has always had only himself and a microphone.

In “River,” “Blue,” and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Joni Mitchell opens a map of pain, regret, and an ego trying to stitch itself back together. She wrote these songs while traveling in Europe after a bad breakup with Graham Nash. The nakedness also manifests itself in her
stark instrumentation.
Blue
is the sound of Mitchell healing, though there are still signs of blood in the wounds.

On an orange Post-it note attached to the upper right corner of my computer screen is Denis Johnson’s admittedly melodramatic advice
Write yourself naked, from exile, and in blood
.

In which I characterize love as a religion w/ fallible gods
.

T
wo
OF THE ACTORS
John Cameron Mitchell auditioned for his film
Shortbus
were boyfriends. Mitchell suggested that they improvise: meeting for the first time, one is a former child star doing research to play a prostitute in a TV movie, and the other is a real prostitute. One person’s goal is to find out how to play this role, and the other person’s goal is to have sex. The improv was going well (one actor was talking about his child stardom, and the other was portraying a drug-addicted street hustler), and Mitchell thought the scene might actually become sexual. They were friends of Mitchell’s, but he nevertheless found it nerve-racking—just the two of them and him in a room. The two friends did indeed start having sex, and Mitchell quickly grew bored, because the goal had been reached. Sex in and of itself wasn’t interesting
to Mitchell, or, rather, “for porn, good sex might be interesting to watch because you can project stuff onto it, but what I was looking for in this film was bad sex, because it’s revealing and funny. So I whispered to one of them, ‘You need to come as soon as possible.’ And to the other I said, ‘If he touches your left nipple, think of your mother.’ And then I said, ‘Continue.’ ”

I
N
O
TTO
P
REMINGER
’
S
Laura
(my wife’s name is still
Laurie
), a body is discovered in the apartment of Manhattan socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). The corpse is at first assumed to be Hunt, since the body was dressed in her clothes and the deceased’s face has been obliterated by a shotgun blast. Homicide detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) has three suspects: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a closeted, high society gossip columnist who virtually “created” Laura; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price, ludicrously miscast as Laura’s hunky fiancé, a rube from Kentucky); and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura’s wealthy, soignée aunt who purchases Shelby to serve, essentially, as her gigolo.