David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

How I want literature to save my life now

TWENTY YEARS AGO, another undergraduate, Caleb Powell, was in my novel-writing course; we’ve stayed in touch. I’ve read and critiqued his stories and essays. A stay-at-home dad and freelance journalist, he interviews me occasionally when a new book comes out. We disagree about nearly everything. Caleb wanted to become an artist and has overcommitted to life; I wanted to become a person and have overcommitted to art. He’s one of the most contrary people I’ve ever met. I like how he questions nearly everything I say. Last fall, we spent a week together in a mountain cabin, recording all of our conversations. We played chess, shot hoops, hiked to lakes and an abandoned mine, ate at the Cascadia Inn, relaxed in a hot tub, watched My Dinner with André, Sideways , and The Trip , and argued about a multitude of topics: Michael Moore, moral placebos, my high-pitched voice, Jewish identity, transsexual blow jobs, artistic jealousy/envy, DFW, the semicolon, Camus, DJ Spooky, our respective families, Cambodia, racism, capital punishment, et al., inevitably circling back to our central theme of life and art. We went at it hammer and tongs.

In our self-consciousness, we couldn’t help but act naturally. Two egos tried to undermine each other. Our personalities overlapped and collapsed. There was no teacher, no student, no interviewer, no interviewee, only a chasm of uncertainty.

We’re now trying to turn that uncertainty into art, taking our initial 300,000-word transcript and constructing an argument out of it, a through-line. I love the collage nature of this project, which is a perfect expression of my aesthetic, and I’d even go so far as to say it’s an apt metaphor for any writer’s artistic process. When you’re dealing with such a massive amount of material, you perforce ask yourself, Isn’t this what all writing is, more or less—taking the raw data of the world and editing it, framing it, thematizing it, running your voice and vision over it? What you’re doing is just as much an act of writing, in a way, as it is an act of editing. Multiply 300,000 by a very large number—a trillion, say—and you have the whole of a person’s experience (thoughts, anecdotes, misremembered song lyrics, etc.), which he or she then “edits” into art.

How literature might just still save my life

INO LONGER BELIEVE in Great Man Speaks .

I no longer believe in Great Man Alone in a Room, Writing a Masterpiece .

I believe in art as pathology lab, landfill, recycling station, death sentence, aborted suicide note, lunge at redemption.

Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That’s why I pick at my scabs.

When I told my friend Michael the title of this book, he said, “Literature never saved anybody’s life.” It has saved mine—just barely, I think.

How I want language to save my life now

What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross .

THE NOVELIST NANCY LEMANN and I went to college together thirty-five years ago. Major crush. The book of hers that I most admire is Sportsman’s Paradise , which explores and embodies women’s condescension to men’s risible devotion to spectator sports—in this case, the New York Mets. The last line of the book, “New York played Chicago,” is, in context, devastating, because Nancy has taught us to understand that the key to life is to find something trivial (sub specie aeternitatis , everything is trivial) and love it to death.

Which brings me to Dave Mahler, who hosts a Seattle sports talk radio show on KJR 950 weekdays from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Although he does brilliant impressions, he’s almost never insightful about the game, and even less frequently is he insightful about life in general. He’s not especially funny, he’s a painfully bad interviewer, he’s enormously overweight (his nickname is “Softy” and he’s ceaselessly mocked by the other hosts for his appetite), he says, “The bottom line is…” every five minutes, and yet I must admit I arrange my mornings to be sure to listen to at least one segment of his show. Why is this?

Because he gets what Nancy gets (two more different people are impossible to imagine). A caller recently told him to “get over it”—Seattle’s loss, due in part to some truly terrible calls by the head referee, Bill Leavy, in the 2006 Super Bowl. Softy’s response: “Don’t get over anything.” This is the extent of his philosophy. It’s the extent of my philosophy. Failure is the only subject .

Each of us is an ungodly mix of suffering individual, artist, entrepreneur. Who knows? Maybe Mahler’s shtick is an act. His persona feels to me pretty “real,” whatever that means. I want the University of Washington football team to win so that I can hear the lift in Softy’s voice, his projection into the future of kingdom come. After the team loses, though, I can hardly wait to get downstairs to my “office,” pretend to work, and listen to him take calls until one or two in the morning. He never gets over it. He never gets over anything. “I’m nervous,” he says, “because of my nature.” Informed that if the Seahawks obtain the elite quarterback Peyton Manning, it might change the entire trajectory of the franchise, he says, his voice breaking slightly, “I’m tearing up in here.” (They didn’t.) The yearning that comes through the radio, the beautiful sadness of it, the visceral hunger to be saved by complete strangers’ mesmeric performances, the conglomeration of voices in a single space…

Not a news flash: we live in a spectatorial society. We are all stargazers of one kind or another. There are far worse models than Softy for how to exist in this culture, participate in it, dig it but remake it in your own image, use it for your own purposes. He was recently talking about the 2012 Super Bowl, then suddenly broke off the monologue and focused again on the Seattle Seahawks, saying, “It always comes back to my team.” He is alert to his own nerve endings. He’s alive right now. He’s not dead yet. He still has feelings (it’s increasingly hard to have actual feelings anymore, I find). He’s capable of a kind of love.

How language doesn’t really save anyone’s life

ONE SUMMER, a friend of Laurie’s worked as a graphic artist in a T-shirt shop in Juneau, Alaska. Cruise ships would dock, unloading old passengers, who would take taxis or buses a dozen or so miles to Mendenhall Glacier, which is a hundred square kilometers—25,000 acres—and whose highest point rises a hundred feet above Mendenhall Lake. Once, a tourist said about the glacier, “It looks so dirty. Don’t they ever wash it?” On their way back to the boat, one or two ancient mariners would invariably come into the shop and ask Laurie’s friend if he would mail their postcards for them. Able to replicate people’s handwriting exactly, he would add postscripts to the postcards: “Got laid in Ketchikan,” “Gave head in Sitka,” etc.

What do I love so much about this story? I could say, as I’m supposed to say, “I don’t know—it just makes me laugh,” but really I do know. It’s an ode on my favorite idea: language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn’t, not quite.

How literature did and didn’t save my life

IWANTED LITERATURE to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this—which is what makes it essential.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: