David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Ferocity and humility, then, in constant conversation and confusion:

Negotiating against myself

ALTHOUGH THE GREEK TRAGEDY professor said that reading the play carefully, once, would probably be sufficient preparation for the test, I couldn’t stop reading Prometheus Bound and also, for some reason, the critical commentary on it. I was a freshman and I loved how scholars felt compelled to criticize the play for not obeying certain Aristotelian dicta but were nevertheless helplessly drawn to “the almost interstellar silence of this play’s remote setting,” as one of them put it. I wrote my sister that even if our father pretended to be Prometheus, he was really only Io. I blurted out quotes to my friend MJ, I mean Debra, with whom I was none too secretly infatuated.

“Why are you studying so much?” she asked. “You’re running yourself ragged. You know he said we could take the test after spring break, if we want. There’s no reason to punish yourself.”

“You must not have read the play,” I said, then quoted a line: “ ‘To me, nothing that hurts shall come with a new face.’ The admirable thing about Prometheus is that he accepts his fate without ever even hoping for another outcome.”

“Yeah, maybe so, but at the end of the play he’s still chained to a rock.”

“There’s a certain purity to basing your entire identity upon a single idea, don’t you think? Nothing else matters except how completely I comprehend a drama written twenty-four hundred years ago. If I don’t fully grasp each question, after a week of studying, I’ll probably jump off the Caucasus,” I said, referring to the mountains of the play and grabbing her arm. “I can sense some excitement.”

“Shhh,” she said, putting her finger over her lipsticked lips. “People are studying.”

“You’re as bad as the chorus of Oceanus’s daughters, always telling Prometheus to stop pouting.”

Debra thought I was kidding and laughed, shaking her head. I told myself I was kidding and tried to believe it. I felt like a Greek New Comedy “wise fool,” parading around—to everyone’s astonishment—in chinos and a turtleneck. Studying until five in the morning the day of the exam, falling asleep in my room and waking barely in time, I stumbled into the lecture hall, where I filled four blue books in fifty minutes. My pen didn’t leave paper: whole speeches stormed from my mind. In immense handwriting (child’s handwriting, out of control), I misidentified virtually every passage in the play but explicated them with such fevered devotion that the sympathetic teaching assistant gave me an A—.

I took a train from Providence to Washington, D.C., then a cab into the suburbs, and when I appeared on her front porch in Bethesda, my aunt asked how long I’d been ill. I groan for the present sorrow, I groan for the sorrow to come , I thought, I groan questioning whether there shall come a time when He shall ordain a limit to my sufferings . Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I saw black circles around my eyes. I listened to my aunt tell my mother over the phone how wonderfully I’d matured.

My uncle, a science adviser to the State Department, was in Japan on a business trip. Nearly all the books in his study, where I secluded myself for most of the Easter vacation, were technical, indecipherable, and of little interest to me—a big Aeschylus fan. Rummaging through desk drawers, I came across elaborate lists of domestic and secretarial errands for my aunt to perform and a few recent issues of Penthouse , which at the time I found extremely erotic because of its emphasis upon Amazonian women.

My uncle’s office had a small record player and a stack of classical music. He had many performances of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3, the so-called Heroic Symphony, and I found myself immersed, first, in all the liner notes. “Like Beethoven, Napoleon was a small man with a powerful personality,” and Beethoven admired him, so when the French ambassador to Vienna suggested to Beethoven that he write a symphony about Bonaparte, Beethoven agreed. He was just about to send the finished score to Paris for Napoleon’s official approval when he heard that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor. Beethoven tore off the title page, which had only the word “Bonaparte” on it, and changed the dedication to “Heroic Symphony—composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” Beethoven is then supposed to have said, “Is he, too, no more than a mere mortal?” Beethoven was disappointed, in other words, to discover that Napoleon was human.

What was a funeral march doing in the middle of the symphony? Why was the finale borrowed from Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus ? Because—one commentator surmised—Beethoven “planned his symphony as a diptych, after the manner of his favorite book, Plutarch’s Lives , in which every modern biography is paired with an antique one like it. Thus, the first two movements of the Eroica are about Napoleon and the second two about Prometheus.” Oh, Prometheus. I knew, as I listened over and over again to the symphony, that I’d felt elated and suicidal in exactly the same way before.

And the musicologists talking about Beethoven and Napoleon sounded eerily like the classicists discussing Prometheus or like me discussing the classicists discussing Prometheus or like Peter Parker worrying about becoming Spider-Man: “What Beethoven valued in Bonaparte at the time of writing the Eroica was the attempt to wrest fate from the hands of the gods—the striving that, however hopeless, ennobles the man in the act.” I couldn’t sleep at night because I couldn’t get out of my head either the two abrupt gunshots in E-flat major that began the symphony or the trip-hammer orgasm of the coda, so I outlined an essay on the parallel and contrasting uses of water imagery in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra . Debra had suggested I adopt a “mythopoeic” approach to the paper. Instead, I circled every water image in both trilogies.

I’d always wanted to get to know better a high school friend who was now a freshman at Georgetown. I let the phone ring twice and hung up. I called again the next day, and the line was busy. The third time I called, she answered on the first ring, clearly expecting someone else. Her voice was newly inflected to underscore her International Relations major.

My aunt made breakfast for me every morning. We talked a lot. She asked me to define existentialism. She watched television and washed the dishes. I started agreeing with her. All this happened nearly forty years ago: the documentary film Hearts and Minds had recently been released. I drove into Georgetown to see it, and when I returned I sat in my aunt’s kitchen, excoriating the racist underpinnings of all military aggression, but I was really thinking about only one scene: the moment when two U.S. soldiers, fondling their Vietnamese prostitutes, surveyed the centerfolds taped to the mirrored walls, and for the benefit of the camera, tried to imitate heroic masculinity.

Negotiating against ourselves

BROWN STILL, I think, suffers from a massive superiority/inferiority complex ( we’re anti-Ivy, but we’re Ivy! ), proud of the club it belongs to and anxious about its status within that club. Saith Groucho Marx (two of whose films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, were cowritten by S. J. Perelman ’25, who didn’t graduate), “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member.” At once rebel (we’re more interesting than you are) and wannabe (we got 1390 on our SATs rather than 1520), we’re like Jews in upper-middle-class America: we’re in the winner’s circle but uncertain whether we really belong. In general, Brown is (perceived to be) not the best of the best but within shouting distance of the best of the best—which creates institutional vertigo, a huge investment in and saving irony toward prestige, ambivalence toward cultural norms, and among artists, a desire to stage that ambivalence, to blur boundaries, to confuse what’s acceptable with what’s not.