David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

In which I evoke my character and personality , especially the way I always argue against myself , am ridiculously ambivalent—who knew?

Real life

AT A VERY EARLY AGE I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated writers.” Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. They saw themselves the same way. They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression, by writing yet another article they didn’t want to write. They worshipped “real writers,” i.e., writers who wrote books. Henry Roth. Hortense Calisher. Jerzy Kosinski. Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write books, be worshipped.

Hellman’s statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” was my mother’s mantra. For many years, she was the West Coast correspondent for The Nation . Draconian, omnipotent, she read a few of my early short stories, e.g., “A Few Words About a Wall,” which she overpraised by way of dismissing. She died of breast cancer during my junior year of college.

My father, who throughout his adult life was severely manic-depressive and constantly checking himself in to mental hospitals, where he craved and received dozens of electroshock therapy treatments, died a few years ago at ninety-eight. I’ll never forget his running back and forth in the living room and repeating, “I need the juice,” while my third-grade friends and I tried to play indoor miniature golf. Thirty years later, I asked him what he thought of my writing, and he said, “Too bad you didn’t become a pro tennis player. You had some talent.” I sent him a galley of my book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead , in which he plays a major role; he sent back a list of errata. When the book tied for fifteenth place on the bestseller list one week, I clipped the listing and sent it to him. He asked me whether that counted—being tied for last. I live in fear of becoming my father.

I was the editor of my junior high school and high school papers. In high school I worked at McDonald’s. Got fired. I worked at a fabric store. Got fired. My freshman year at Brown—where I was an almost unfathomably devoted English major who closed the library nearly every night for four years and who, at the end of one particularly productive work session, actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, “I shall dethrone Shakespeare”—I worked as a custodian. Got fired. (Despite once having been an athlete, I have never been good at simple physical maneuvers—never learned how to snap my fingers properly, blow a bubble, whistle, dive, rope climb, swing higher and higher on a swing.) One of my fellow student-custodians asked me if I was this bad on purpose or whether I was really that uncomprehending of the relation between soap and water. I also worked as a proofreader at the Rhode Island Historical Society. I worked as a TA at Iowa. I house-sat whenever and wherever possible. I got a lot of grants. I made a very small amount of money stretch a long way.

I first started teaching at a private high school, with branches in Santa Monica and Malibu, for the children of the rich and semifamous. The kids would be, say, the daughter of the comedian Flip Wilson, the girlfriend of the son of Elizabeth Montgomery, Rob Lowe’s little brother. They weren’t, needless to say, interested in their school-work. I would sit in the front of the class and pretend to have answers to their questions about history, geometry, science. “Who wrote The Scarlet Letter ?” Maybe look at the spine of the book; might be a clue there. (Where was Google? This was 1985.) The entire day would go by like that. During recess and even during class, they would be running to the bathroom to drop acid and I’d be madly working on revisions of my book about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words.

I’d show the kids the manuscript I was working on. Beyond charming, they’d laugh at my woes—no way this book is being published, dude. For the graduation ceremony, I wrote brief satiric profiles of all the seniors. These profiles received the most sincerely appreciative response of anything I’ve ever written. I have an image of myself on the bench in the tiny schoolyard, reworking the sentences from Dead Languages , hoping beyond hope that there was life in this book, that books could be my life.

Negotiating against myself

THE ASTROLOGER AND I met for two hours, and nearly all of it was, to me, mumbo jumbo, but one thing she said rang incontrovertibly true. She said my Sun is very late Cancer—less than a degree away from Leo. Therefore, supposedly, I partake of Cancer qualities (domestic, nurturing, protective) as well as Leo qualities (ambitious, attention-seeking, overbearing). My leoninity is apparently bolstered by the fact that in Leo both Uranus (rule-breaker) and Mercury (mind) are sitting within 4 degrees of the sun. This extremely close association means that all my Cancer tendencies have a strong Leo flavor, and vice versa.

Whatever. I’m a complete skeptic. (Decades ago, at my Transcendental Meditation initiation ceremony, I was informed that “Sho-ring” was my mantra. The next week, I told my TM teacher I couldn’t use “Sho-ring” because every time I said it aloud, all it signified to me was how to perform a marriage proposal. I asked for another mantra. The teacher said no.) But then the astrologer emailed me, “A perfect example of this tension within your Sun sign is the little exchange we had over my reading your chart. Though you were curious about it in a party-chatter sort of way, your initial reaction to my suggestion that we talk about it for an hour or two was to recoil and let me know—in clear, unambiguous terms—that you didn’t take it seriously enough to warrant that kind of conversation. That was very Leo. Then, in short order, part of you got worried that you’d been too harsh, hurt my feelings, and perhaps damaged a personal relationship. That was very Cancer.”

That’s me. It just is.

Negotiating against myself

IT’S HARD NOW to reanimate how viscerally so many people hated Bush just a few years ago, but looking back on him now, I remember him as a homebody, someone who doesn’t like to travel, travels with his pillow, is addicted to eight hours of sleep a night; so am I. In India, he wasn’t sufficiently curious to go see the Taj Mahal. I must admit I could imagine doing the same thing. For his New Year’s resolution nine months after invading Iraq, he said he wanted to eat fewer sweets; he was widely and justifiably mocked for this, but this was also my New Year’s resolution the same year. He pretends to love his father, but he hates him. He pretends to admire his mother, but he reviles her. Check and check. (When the Dutch translator of Dead Languages asked if “Daddums” could be translated as “molten fool,” I said, “Yep, pretty much.”)

He finds Nancy Pelosi sexy, but he won’t admit it (cf. my imaginative relation to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann). He outsources every task he can. He walked into Condi Rice’s office and said, “Fuck Saddam—he’s going down.” I could imagine saying this. He loves to watch football and eat pretzels. He did everything he could to avoid serving in the Vietnam War; in 1974, when the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector. As do I, he prides himself on being able to assess people immediately based on their body language. When he has the tactical advantage, he presses it to the limit; when he’s outflanked, he’s unattractively defensive. I don’t negotiate against myself: I’m incapable of embodying this Bush aperçu, but I quote it at least once a month.