David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

I like art with a visible string to the world.

Lucian Freud: “I’ve got a strong autobiographical bias. My work is entirely about myself and my surroundings. I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.” My aesthetic exactly, for better and worse.

Mairéad Byrne’s The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven is everywhere a seizure and transfiguration of the everyday into insight. She “reclaims” life by showing that a poem can be made of anything, e.g., the awkward “hi” between a white woman and black man passing each other on a dark street. The poems pretend to be light, but they aren’t, careening as they do between fury and joy.

My entire twenties, I lived on practically nothing, slept on my father’s couch for ten months. At thirty-one, I was a proofreader for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (PMS), a San Francisco law firm that represented the wrong side of every case. The lawyers hated their jobs. I loved mine, though, since I spent my entire time there finishing my second novel. All the other subalterns were as bored as I was, and they were happy to print out copies of drafts for me, retype pages for me. It was Team Shields. We also discovered something new called a fax machine. Very exciting. I’d arrive before anyone else, and the lawyers would thank me for being such an eager beaver.

In fiction, the war is between two characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, say, whereas in ambitious personal essay, there’s just as much war, just as much “conflict,” but it’s within the breast, as it were, of the narrator/speaker/author. The essayist tries to get to everything that Macbeth does; he just locates it all within his own psyche. Every man contains within himself the entire human condition .

When Natalie was seven, she read the Lemony Snicket series, which is about three orphaned kids who undergo various and terrible adventures as they try to find a home. They get handed off to Count Olaf, a distant cousin who is an utter ogre. A middle-class kid can read it from the vantage of her secure home and love the characters’ horrific lives. What’s alluring to children about something cute is that they can love it back to health and thereby feel powerful themselves. In their ordinary lives, children are constantly condescended to; it’s important that they can condescend to something else.

One of my former students, who appeared on The Weakest Link , mailed me a videotape of her appearance on the show and then sent me the essay she wrote about it; I showed the video and read the essay to Natalie. I wanted to emphasize to her that you can write about anything that happens to you, that it’s a natural response to experience.

N. is so preternaturally creative that she’s made me a more productive and better writer, not to mention a more human human.

Lester Bangs: “Once you’ve made your mark on history, those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.” Manguso: “Once your first book appears and is read, it provokes a set of expectations of what you should produce, or are capable of producing, next. Sudden fame tends to demolish the lives of adolescent film stars. Writers, with their much tinier fame, don’t escape the effects of the infinitely reflecting mirror of a readership. A Hegelian synthesis between writers’ first books and their first criticisms occurs not once, not twice, but forever. A mature writer’s facility with his craft can threaten the genuineness of his product—one that turns into a celebration of skill rather than a necessary foray into a mysterious world. This is not to say that all emerging writers are afire and that all mature writers are shallow, only that public validation and expectation increase as a writer’s career continues, and that the threat of writing to an audience becomes only more present a danger as time passes and renown increases. I value most those writers who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.”

Dyer calls this self-karaoke. It happens to virtually everyone. Hemingway, Carver, Brodkey, DeLillo come quickly to mind. Only men? Do women in their maturity avoid this? Not at all sure that’s true (see Kael, Adler, Hardwick, Malcolm, Didion, Carson, Hempel). This whole idea of self-karaoke, for Dyer, is predicated on the idea that at a certain age—mid-fifties? late fifties? early sixties?—new stimuli tend not to penetrate and so one is mining oneself endlessly in a not especially productive feedback loop. Dyer says that people ask him who his main influences are, and at this point, it’s himself. He’s his main influence. After a certain age, you’re building only on yourself, for ill or good.

I turn fifty-seven later this year. Is it true for me now? Would seem so. I fear so.

Real life

THERE WAS A BLOG, then a Twitter feed, then a mega-selling book, and then a TV show, which I didn’t see before it was canceled. It sounds too easy—someone just collecting the one-off wisdom of his father—but Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says is, to me, hugely about Vietnam (Samuel Halpern was a medic during the war), and on the basis of a single crucial scene, it’s not inconsiderably about him still processing that violence, that anger. The book is also very much about being Jewish in America, about the father teaching the son how to be Jewish and male in America, which is a contradictory, complicated thing.

Each entry is 140 characters or fewer—the length of a tweet—and all of the subsections and minichapters are extremely short. The book is a tape recording of Sam’s best lines, overdubbed with relatively brief monologues by Justin. It’s not great or even good, probably, really, finally, but above all it’s not boring. Which is everything to me. I don’t want to read out of duty. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. I’m trying to stay awake and not bored and not rote. I’m trying to save my life.

In Shit My Dad Says the father, Samuel, is trying to convey to his son that life is only blood and bones. The son is trying to express to his father his bottomless love and complex admiration. Nothing more. Nothing less. There are vast reservoirs of feeling beneath Justin’s voice and beneath his father’s aphorisms.

The only mistake (a major one) occurs in the final chapter: the mask comes off and everything goes badly sentimental. It’s a terrible move—almost certainly the result of editorial ham-fistedness. In many ways it ruins the book.

Halpern’s instinct was to make a blog first. The book seems to be a secondary recasting of the blog. It was the blog that people kept telling me about. I like that you can be an unemployed screenwriter in San Diego (originally, Halpern was just collecting notes for a screenplay about his dad) and six months later a bestselling writer.

Can social networking/blogging generate good books? On very rare occasions, such as this, yes.

Books, if they want to survive, need to figure out how to coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes. That cut-to-the-quick quality: this is how to write and read now , or at least this is the only way I can write and read now .

The undergraduates I teach are much more open to a new reading experience when it’s a blog. I know there have to be a hundred complex reasons as to why that is, but none of them change the fact that un- or even anti-literary types haven’t stopped reading. They just don’t get as excited about the book form. The blog form: immediacy, relative lack of scrim between writer and reader, promised delivery of unmediated reality, pseudo-artlessness, comedy, naked feeling.