David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Sometimes the place I go to be alone to think turns out in the end to be the most dangerous place I can be

YEATS SAID that we can’t articulate the truth, but we can embody it. I think that’s wrong or at least beside the point. What’s of interest to me is precisely how we try to articulate the truth, and what that says about us, and about “truth.”

What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver’s license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That’s what I want to hear.

Texting: proof that we’re solitary animals who like being left alone as we go through life, commenting on it. We’re aliens.

Updike: “I loathe being interviewed; it’s a half-form, like maggots.” Gertrude Stein: “Remarks are not literature.” Um is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate/put scare quotes around what comes next. The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter. I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower.

The perceiver, by his very presence, alters what’s perceived: Plato, Dialogues of Socrates . Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe . Boswell, Life of Johnson . Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer . Schopenhauer: “The world is my idea.” We don’t see the world. We make it up.

Ancient Sanskrit texts emphasize the ephemeral nature of truth. Sanskrit writers use fiction, nonfiction, stories within stories, stories about stories, reiteration, oral history, exegesis, remembered account, rules, history, mythological tales, aphorisms to try to get to the “truth,” often dressing it up in narrative as a way to make it appear comprehensible, palatable. Sanskrit works revolve around the question “Who is the narrator?” Subjectivity is always present in the recitation: the nature of reality is ever elusive. We spend our lives chasing it.

When playing an electric guitar, instead of plugging the cord straight into an amplifier, you first plug it into a little electronic stomp box called a pedal. A second cord takes the altered sound from the pedal to the amplifier. The sound coming from the guitar to the pedal is “clean”—as true to life as a given electric guitar can be (which is a whole other debate). There are hundreds of different guitar pedals you can buy, each one altering the “true” sound of the instrument. One “clean” note from your Telecaster can become a crescendo of sound (if sent through the right effects pedal).

In Amadeus , Salieri says re Mozart’s score, “I am staring through the cage of his meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”

In Ron Fein’s Drumming the Moon , the flute assumes a pitch and sound somewhere between the tonality of human expression and wolf howl, never quite sure of its place in the world, negotiating its own survival.

I recently reread Renata Adler’s novel Pitch Dark and felt like I finally got it. The three sections are thematic sculptures. The first section is about how love is a mystery, a sadness, an absence, a darkness. The second section takes place in Ireland, where the Adler figure gets in a car accident: the misunderstandings between her and everyone she meets are represented as utter epistemological darkness. And the third section is this darkness writ large, into society and civilization as a whole—every human interaction is conducted in pitch dark.

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…