David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

The last line of Adler’s other novel, Speedboat , is “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.” (Cf. Isaac Babel: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”) She’s fascinated by the arbitrariness of language, the enveloping embrace of culture. Try as she might to liberate herself from social convention, e.g., cliché, she can’t. She’s doing everything she can to make me hyper-aware of her thought processes, to develop intimacy between the speaker and listener—moments in which I feel the strange rub of language, the way it not only evokes life but creates it, prophesies it. The epigraph is from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies: “ ‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told.… ’ And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.” Speedboat is an oblique bildungsroman, taking Adler’s alter ego, Jen Fein—whose name suggests that she’s not real, that she’s Renata Adler—from the privacy of her pastoral childhood into the irredeemably corrupt, war-torn (cliché!) world of public affairs. Adler frequently writes and then repeats an idiomatic expression—for instance, “And what’s more, and what’s more…” It’s a very strange gesture, this impulse to articulate and articulate again: highly oral, even oracular. What is the book, exactly—a novel? memoir? cultural criticism? philosophical investigation? journal? journalism? stand-up comedy? I love that feeling of being caught between floors of a difficult-to-define department store. The chapter titles don’t very accurately or fully describe their ostensible contents. The material can’t be held by its titular container. The book is constantly breaking its own bindings, as you’re going deeper into, you know, a single human consciousness. You keep turning pages and reading scenes until finally you understand what, for Adler, constitutes a scene: a toxic and intoxicating mix of velocity, violence, sex, money, power, travel, technology, miscommunication; when you get it, the book’s over.

Maggie Nelson claims that it makes her feel less alone to compose almost everything she writes as a letter. She even goes so far as to say that she doesn’t know how to compose otherwise. When I’m having trouble writing something, I often close the document and compose the passage as email to, say, my friend Michael. I imagine I can feel the tug of the recipient at the other end of the wire, and this creates in me a needed urgency. The letter always arrives at its destination.

In London, I asked my voluble cabdriver if he could locate the origin of the tendency of every British conversation to rapidly devolve into a series of quibbles, quarrels, and contradictions. “The end of empire,” he said with certainty. “We’re not going to make that same mistake again.”

Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage— people always quote this truism as if it were the clinching point of an argument about the limits of irony, but name me the bird among us that is not caged and isn’t at least half in love with its cage.

All great books wind up with the writer getting his teeth bashed in

FIFTY-FIVE WORKS I swear by:

Renata Adler, Speedboat . D. H. Lawrence: it’s better to know a dozen books extraordinarily well than innumerable books passably. In a documentary on Derrida, when he shows the filmmaker his enormous private library, she asks him if he’s read all the books. He says, “No, just a few—but very closely.” I’ve read Speedboat easily two dozen times. I can’t read it anymore. It’s one book I’ve read so many times that I feel, absurdly, as if I’ve written it; at the very least, I feel that I know a little bit what it must have felt like to write it. In any case, I learned how to write by reading that book until the spine broke. I typed the entire book twice.

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . My writing life was changed forever by Agee’s willingness to use, and ability to incorporate into his book, his rant-replies to a Partisan Review questionnaire.

St. Augustine, Confessions . Autobiography: the testimony of a being in dialogue with itself.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot . Overlapping essays on the inexhaustible dialectic between life and art.

John Berryman, The Dream Songs . Tony Hoagland: “Virtuosity with language is not by itself enough for poetry. A poem has to sustain a strong connection to the suffered world, and any intelligence that dares call itself poetic needs to be penetrated and informed by the life of the emotions. The ego must be breached by the fire and flood damage of experience. At the same time, plaintive wailing will not suffice. Successful poems have grace and vivacity—sometimes even power—of language, mobility of mind, and not a straight-faced, deadpan earnestness, but a brave freedom of feeling.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions . An investigation of otherness pretending to be mere miscellany.

Grégoire Bouillier, The Mystery Guest . A character in Stardust Memories says that all artists do is “document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” Said more positively: a writer finds a metaphor that ramifies and attempts to persuade the reader that the metaphor holds the world’s woe.

Joe Brainard, I Remember . Outwardly, a series of random memories; in fact, beautifully organized around themes of resistance and conformity.

Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America . Here, too, a book is thought to be a random gathering, but it has real power and momentum, derived from the pressure Brautigan puts on the relation between pleasure and commerce.

Anne Carson, “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Women and Men.” Ranges everywhere from songs on the radio to ancient Chinese history in order to get very deeply at the war between men and women.

Terry Castle, “My Heroin Christmas.” Many, perhaps most, reviewers use criticism as a way to brandish what they pretend is their own more evolved morality, psyche, humanity, but this flies in the face of what is to me an essential assumption of the compact between writer and reader—namely, that we’re all bozos on this bus. No one here gets out alive. Let he who is without sin, etc. Castle conveys the mad genius of Art Pepper’s autobiography, but she doesn’t stand back from the book as if she, too, isn’t wildly confused. She implicates herself and her drives and passions. Love is good, but hate is good, too. What she hates is at least as telling as what she loves. She makes the arrow point in both directions: outward toward the work and inward toward herself. I learn at least as much about Terry Castle as I do about Art Pepper.

John Cheever, Journals . An actor read a Cheever story—never quite caught the title—on NPR’s Selected Shorts: a writer husband, estranged from his wife and living in Turin, writes a fantasy of how they’ll reconnect. Driving home, I found it so beautiful to listen to that when I arrived, I ran to the radio to hear the end of the story. It is as nothing, though, compared to the luminous precision of the journals, which he kept from 1940 until his death in 1982. The journals are very consciously and scrupulously sculpted: they’re clearly written to be read and published, and they supersede his fiction. It’s unfair, of course, to compare a fifteen-page story to a four-hundred-page book, but I couldn’t help feeling that in the story, Cheever lets himself get away with everything, and in the journals, nothing—he is relentless. In the story, he is grandiose and unfurls the logic of Christian forgiveness. Even as I was charmed by hearing the story aloud, I was constantly thinking, You lying sack of shit. I’ve read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you, Buster. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings .