David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Gilbert Sorrentino, “The Moon in Its Flight.” “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.” It can’t? I thought art was the only twin life had.

Melanie Thernstrom, The Dead Girl . The title refers to Thernstrom’s best friend, Bibi Lee, who is murdered, and also to Thernstrom, who can’t seem to live.

Judith Thurman, Cleopatra’s Nose . In nearly every essay, Thurman appears to be looking out a window, but she’s not. She’s painting a self-portrait in a convex mirror. There’s always a moment when the pseudo-objective mask drops, yielding a quite startling self-revelation.

George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context . An assemblage of disconnected paragraphs, narrated in a tone of fanatical archness, and perhaps best understood as what Trow calls “cultural autobiography.” In other words, its apparent accomplishment—a brilliantly original analysis of the underlying grammar of mass culture—is a way for Trow to get at what is in one sense his eventual subject: the difference between the world he inhabits (no context) and the world his father, a newspaperman, inhabited (context). In the book’s final paragraph, Trow writes about his father, “Certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five . The expository first chapter, for all intents and purposes a prologue, renders moot the rest of the book and everything else he ever wrote. I live and die for the overt meditation.

Life/art

CLAUDIUS MURDERS KING HAMLET. The piano falls on the cartoon duck. Your life won’t turn out the way you expect it to. This is where art comes in…

My two proudest literary accomplishments of middle age are that “good” and “bad” reviews no longer affect me much (I used to retire to bed with a quart of ice cream if, say, The Kansas City Star had even the slightest quibble) and I now give readings without the benefit of pharmaceuticals (which I used to use to mitigate stuttering).

If Geoff Dyer weren’t so handsome, he would never have become such a traveler. I wonder if travelers, in general, are more good-looking than other people; I think they might be. At the very least, travel writers, e.g., Chatwin, Theroux, Junger, are generally better-looking than other writers. So, too, the essays/diaries/notebooks of handsome male writers are so different from those of ugly male writers that there should be separate shelves in the bookstore: “Essays: male (h), essays: male (u).” Compare Michaels, Brodkey, Isherwood, Camus, Theroux, Amis (père et fils) to Canetti, Sartre, Genet, Larkin, Cioran, Naipaul. The former veer toward wise-depressive; the latter, toward brilliant-bitter. Fence straddlers like Henry Miller—great body, but jug-eared and cueball-bald—typically report with self-mocking bonhomie. Out of Sheer Rage is a serious and urgent book, though it wears its seriousness under a mask of Chaplinesque comedy. When I said this to Dyer, he seemed taken aback, as if its real subject should never be spoken of in public. So, too, he likes to pretend that The Ongoing Moment is “about photography” (it’s about trying to learn how to live life inside time).

In German bookstores, there are pretty much only two categories: literature—work aspiring toward artistic merit—and then just pure information, train schedules and the like. Unfortunate example.

Sarah Manguso and I became friends when I wrote her a fan letter about her book The Two Kinds of Decay , which is an account of living for ten years with a life-threatening blood disorder and is devoid of anything even remotely resembling self-pity or self-aggrandizement. She recently wrote to me, “I’ll watch a genius do anything. I’ll watch my friend Andy use Photoshop to erase color impurities on the same image for an hour because he sees things I don’t see. I’ll watch him until I see that he sees them. It’s like opening a gift. Or the original meaning of ‘apocalypse’: the lifting of the veil.”

In Fahrenheit 451 , people experience almost nothing in their own lives, but they experience a lot by watching television shows that are more like life than life itself. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Baudrillard declared that Western culture had become a simulacrum and that there was no longer an original to base our perceptions on: the replication, the program had become reality. In the visual arts, a replication of a replication became media within media (the original no longer exists). Visual artists continued to appropriate, but now, in order to avoid legal skirmishes, they tend to re-present the representation, moving the material into another form, customizing it, enlarging it or shrinking it, using new color or materials, moving from one medium to another, e.g., a Harley made of salt.

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, the cofounders of the International Necronautical Society and coauthors of the “Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity,” when asked to present their declaration at the Tate Britain, found and trained two actors to pretend to be them. Many people in the audience were angry when they discovered that the actors were not in fact the authors… of a declaration on inauthenticity… presented in a museum.

Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches has the thinnest of fictional apparati: there is no plot or setting; there are no characters; it’s just Baker sitting down with a box of matches—he really did this, of course, just as for The Anthologist he videotaped himself giving lectures about poetry—and thinking, thrillingly, about the ephemeral nature of existence. Baker estimates that 93 percent of each of his “novels” is autobiographical, but that if he alters a single detail from “reality,” this necessitates calling the work a novel, which is absurd. The personal essay isn’t “true”; it’s a framing device to foreground contemplation. There are passages from The Anthologist that are as eloquent and tender as anything Baker has ever written, but what he wants to do is dilate on the emotional triggers, formal properties, and soul-rearranging rewards of poetry. He doesn’t care a whit about the book’s twinned narratives: the narrator getting back together with his ex-girlfriend and giving a speech at a poetry conference—utterly pro forma. What could have been a great book is thrown off track by Baker’s pretense that he’s writing a novel. The novelistic gestures, especially in the last half, seem to me extremely left-handed (no offense to all those superb left-handed readers out there).

Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho slows down Hitchcock’s Psycho to two, rather than twenty-four, frames per second. Don DeLillo watched 24 Hour Psycho and wanted to write a meditation on that film. Duty called, though, and he trapped his beautiful film criticism inside an uninspired novel called Omega Point .

Thoreau: “The next time the novelist rings the bell, I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.”