David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

My sister and I were just kids in 1965—ten and nine, respectively—when my parents hired a guy named Gil to paint the inside of the house. After he left, my mother discovered the word FUCK etched into the new white paint in the dining room. I’d never seen her so infuriated. Had my parents underpaid or somehow mistreated him, and was this his underhanded revenge? He adamantly denied it, offering to return to rectify the problem. Had my sister or I done it? We insisted we hadn’t, and I’m confident we were telling the truth (in any case, I was; I can’t speak for my usually well-behaved sister). Although over time the inscription lost its hold on my mother’s imagination, FUCK remained—if faintly—and continued to cast a subtle, mysterious spell over the dining room for the remainder of my childhood.

Is desire, then, a sort of shadow around everything?

Negotiating against ourselves

MY INITIAL REACTION when I saw on the web the report that Tiger Woods was seriously injured was What’s the matter with me that I hope he’s been paralyzed or killed? Jealousy. The much ballyhooed Schadenfreude. The green-eyed fairway. Tiger is rich, famous (now infamous), semihandsome (losing his hair), semiblack, the best golfer ever (still?), married to a supermodel (no longer, of course). I wanted him to taste life’s darkness. Genes and talent and hard work don’t guarantee anything. Everything comes to naught. It’s not enough for me to succeed—all my friends must fail . Or I want to rise so high that when I shit everyone gets dirty .

At 2:30 A.M. on Friday, November 27, 2009, Tiger drove his 2009 Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant, then into a tree. A minor accident: lacerations about the face. His wife either rescued him by knocking out the back window with a golf club or caused the accident by hitting him with same (more likely the latter, given the news that emerged shortly afterward). I was disappointed that Tiger was okay (for the nonce). But, really, I think we all were. The only reason this minor traffic accident was given so much attention at first was so that we could all pretend to cheer him on but really root for his demise (he is/was too perfect; he’s now said to be, à la Mickey Mantle, a “billion-dollar talent on dime-store legs”). Am I uniquely horrible?

Laurie and I were watching a football game on TV. When the star tailback was badly injured and taken off the field in an ambulance, Laurie said, “I can never watch football for more than five minutes without falling asleep, but as soon as someone is injured, I can’t turn away. Why is that?”

Later on, what was absent from all the coverage of Tiger’s self-destruction was even the slightest recognition that for all of us the force for good can convert so easily into the force for ill, that our deepest strength is indivisible from our most embarrassing weakness, that what makes us great will inevitably get us in terrible trouble. Everyone’s ambition is underwritten by a tragic flaw. We’re deeply divided animals who are drawn to the creation of our own demise. Freud: “What lives wants to die again. The life-drive is in them, but the death-drive as well.” (Note that he says “them.”) Kundera: “Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo—fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

And the more righteous our self-presentation, the more deeply we yearn to transgress, to fall, to fail—because being bad is more interesting/exciting/erotic than being good. Even little children, especially little children, know this. When Natalie was three, she was friends with two girls, sisters age three and four. The older girl, Julia, ran away from her mother, for which she was reprimanded. The younger girl, Emily, asked why and was told that running away was bad. “I wanna do it,” Emily said.

Tiger needed to demolish the perfect marble statue he’d made of himself: the image of perfect rectitude. We were shocked— shocked —that his furious will to dominate his opponents on the golf course also manifested in an insatiable desire to humiliate countless sexual partners. We all contrive different, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and revealing ways to remain blind to our own blindnesses. In the British television series Cracker , Eddie Fitzgerald is a brilliant forensic psychologist who can solve the riddle of every dark heart except his own (he gambles nonstop, drinks nonstop, smokes nonstop, is fat, and is estranged from his wife). Richard Nixon had to undo himself, because—as hard as he worked to get there—he didn’t believe he belonged there. Bill Clinton’s fatal charm was/is his charming fatality: his magnetism is his doom; they’re the same trait. Someone recently said to me about Clinton, “He could have been, should have been, one of the great presidents of the twentieth century, so it’s such a shame that—” No. No. No. There’s no “if only” in human nature. When W. was a young man, he said to Poppy, “Okay, then, let’s go. Mano a mano. Right now.” The war of terror was the not so indirect result. In short, what animates us inevitably ails us.

And vice versa: because I stutter, I became a writer (in order to return to the scene of the crime and convert the bloody fingerprints into abstract expressionism). As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe, but I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language. If I’m not writing it down, experience doesn’t really register. Language has gone from prison to refuge back to prison.

Picasso: “A great painting comes together, just barely” (I love that comma). And this fine edge of excellence gets more and more difficult to maintain. I yield to no one in my admiration of Renata Adler’s novel Speedboat , which is, I think, one of the most original and formally exciting books published by an American writer in the last forty years (and which now has been reissued on exactly the same day that this book of mine has been published). And I hesitate to heap any more dispraise upon her much-maligned memoir, Gone , which I must admit I still find utterly addictive. Surely, though, the difference between Speedboat and Gone derives from the fact that in the earlier book the panic tone is beautifully modulated and under complete control and often even mocked, whereas in the later book it’s been given, somewhat alarmingly, absolutely free rein. Success breeds self-indulgence. What was effectively bittersweet turns toxic.

When my difficult heroes (and all real heroes are difficult) self-destruct, I retreat and reassure myself that it’s safer here close to shore, where I live. I distance myself from the disaster, but I gawk in glee (no less assiduously than anyone else did I study Tiger’s sexts to and from Josyln James). I want the good in my heroes, the gift in them, not the nastiness, or so I pretend. Publicly, I tsk-tsk, chastising their transgressions. Secretly, I thrill to their violations, their (psychic or physical) violence, because through them I vicariously renew my acquaintance with my shadow side. By detaching, though, before free fall, I preserve my distance from death, staving off difficult knowledge about the exact ratio in myself of angel to animal.

In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, “Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—” What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you are.