David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation . Humiliation runs like a rash over the body of Koestenbaum’s work. Here he confronts the feeling directly, and the result is an unusually discomfiting meditation on—I don’t know how else to say it—the human condition.

Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia . The freest form: the essay.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings . Both poetry and the essay come from the same impulse—to think about something and at the same time see it closely and carefully and enact it. An odd feature of poetry is that it’s all “true”: there’s no nonfiction poetry and fiction poetry. Whether it’s Larkin or Neruda, it all goes into the poetry section of the bookstore.

Jonathan Lethem, The Disappointment Artist . The disappointment artist and I solidified our friendship when he told me he was a Mets fan. As my college writing teacher, the novelist John Hawkes, liked to say, “There’s only one subject: failure.” I remember his saying that a story I’d written was “about love without communication and in the context of violence.” I remember thinking, Really? I thought it was just about taking a hike with my dad. Hawkes’s saying that made me a certain kind of writer, because his abstraction interested me immeasurably more than the details of my story.

Ross McElwee, Bright Leaves . Antonya Nelson says that the best fiction “gets lucky.” Similarly, I’d say that the best nonfiction jumps the tracks, using its “subject” as a Trojan horse to get at richer material than the writer originally intended. McElwee’s film Bright Leaves pretends to be about his conflicted relation to his family’s tobacco farm, whereas it’s really about the way in which we all will do anything—make a movie, smoke cigarettes, collect film stills, build a birdhouse, hold a lifelong torch for someone, find religion—to try to get beyond ourselves.

David Markson, Vanishing Point . The best book I know about 9/11, because it’s barely about it: other calamities have befallen other peoples in other times.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick . Melville said to Hawthorne, “I’ve written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb.” His wickedness: in the middle of the nineteenth century, contemplating a godless universe.

Leonard Michaels, Shuffle . Several years ago, when Michaels died, the encomia focused entirely on his stories, but for me his “legacy” rests, or should rest, on his essays and journals, especially Shuffle , in particular the long middle section, “Journal,” which per its title presents itself as mere notes whereas in fact it is a beautifully patterned and organized investigation into sexual desire, anger, despair.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays . The essayist is not interested in himself per se but in himself as symbolic persona, theme carrier, host for general human tendencies.

Vladimir Nabokov, Gogol . Nabokov says somewhere that the essence of comedy—perhaps of all art—is that it makes large things seem small, and it makes small things seem large. My favorite book of Nabokov’s, because for once you can feel how lost he is.

V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World . Seemingly separate blinds—long essays about seemingly disparate subjects—form a single curtain: how to resist colonialism without being defeated by your own resistance.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets . A brief meditation on the color blue, a cri de coeur about Nelson’s inability to get over the end of a love affair, and a grievous contemplation of a close friend’s paralysis. The book keeps getting larger and larger until it winds up being about nothing less than the melancholy of the human animal. Why are we so sad? How do we deal with loss? How do we deal with the ultimate loss? It’s impressively adult—wrestling with existence at the most fundamental level—in a way that I find very few novels are. One Hundred Years of Solitude , say: halfway into that book, I realized I wasn’t learning anything new page by page, so I stopped reading. I want the writer to be trying hard to figure something out; García Márquez, you could argue, is doing this by implication, but to me he’s not.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo . Adorno: “A successful work is not one that resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one that expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”

George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant.” In three thousand words, Orwell tells me more about the sources, psychology, and consequences of racism and empire than entire shelves of political science. All of the power of this deservedly canonical essay arises from his willingness to locate an astonishing mix of rage and guilt within himself. I don’t judge him. I am him.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées . Aphorisms.

Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought . Aphorisms sent through radiation.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet . Aphorisms attached to a suicide pact.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past . The book that I think of as mattering the most to me ever, but I read it more than thirty years ago and I find that I have trouble rereading it now. Seems sad—do I still love it, did I ever love it? I know I did. Has my aesthetic changed that much? If so, why? Does one resist that alteration? I think not. The book still completely changed me, still defines me in some strange way. Proust for me is the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation in paperback, all the covers stained with suntan oil, since I read all seven volumes in a single summer, supposedly traveling around the south of France but really pretty much just reading Proust. I came to realize that he will do anything, go anywhere to extend his research, to elaborate his argument about art and life. His commitment is never to the narrative; it’s to the narrative as such as a vector on the grid of his argument. That thrilled me and continues to thrill me—his understanding of his book as a series of interlaced architectural/thematic spaces.

Jonathan Raban, For Love & Money . For twenty-plus years I’ve been showing drafts of my books to Jonathan, who within days of receiving the manuscript will call and not only insist that it can be so much better but show me how. For Love & Money , which he calls “only half a good book,” is a brutal, ruthless coming-of-age-of-the-author disguised as a miscellany of essays and reviews. Jonathan comes out of what is to me a distinctly British tradition of showing respect for the conversation by questioning your assertion rather than blandly agreeing with it. He’s exhaustive and disputatious, never settling for received wisdom or quasi-insight. More than anyone in my life, he encouraged me to think off-axis about “nonfiction.”

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn . Wendy Lesser: “The crucial art of the essay lies in its perpetrator’s masterly control over his own self-exposure. We may at times be embarrassed by him, but we should never be embarrassed for him. He must be the ringmaster of his self-display. He may choose to bare more than he can bear (that is where the terror comes in), but he must do the choosing and we must feel he is doing it.”

Lauren Slater, “One Nation, Under the Weather.” Many writers pretend that they don’t read reviews of their books and that in particular life is too short to subject themselves to reading bad reviews. Kingsley Amis said that a bad review may spoil breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil lunch. Jean Cocteau suggested, “Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like, then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” Sane advice; Slater doesn’t follow it. Receiving a bad review from Janet Maslin of her genre-troubling book Lying , Slater does that thing you’re not supposed to do: she dwells on it, in public. Accused of being narcissistic, exhibitionistic, self-absorbed, neurasthenic, whiny, derivative, she agrees, revels in her woundedness, and dares me to disagree with her, writing, “The fact is, or my fact is, disease is everywhere. How anyone could ever write about themselves or their fictional characters as not diseased is a bit beyond me. We live in a world and are creatures of a culture that is spinning out more and more medicines that correspond to more and more diseases at an alarming pace. Even beyond that, though, I believe we exist in our God-given natures as diseased beings. We do not fall into illness. We fall from illness into temporary states of health. We are briefly blessed, but always, always those small cells are dividing and will become cancer, if they haven’t already; our eyes are crossed, we cannot see. Nearsighted, far-sighted, noses spurting bright blood, brains awack with crazy dreams, lassitude, and little fears nibbling like mice at the fringes of our flesh, we are never well.”