David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

At halftime of a football game my freshman year, the Yale band asked, “What’s Brown?” and came back with various rude rejoinders (Governor Moonbeam, the color of shit, etc.), but the only answer that really stung was the final one: “Backup school.”

In the artistic work of a striking number of Brown grads (Lerner’s, obviously; mine, too, equally obviously), I see a skewed, complex, somewhat tortured stance: antipathy toward the conventions of the culture and yet a strong need to be in conversation with that culture (you can’t deconstruct something that you’re not hugely interested in the construction of in the first place).

These impulses are not unique to former or current residents of Providence, Rhode Island, so to what degree can Brown be seen as a crucial incubator-conduit-catalyst-megaphone for the making of the postmodern American imagination? Is this a credible claim, and if so, how and why? Is there an analogous Harvard or Williams or Oberlin or Stanford or Amherst or Cornell or Yale or Berkeley aesthetic, and if so, how is it different, and if not, why does Brown have such a thing while many other, “similar” institutions don’t?

These schools are, I imagine, more secure in what they are and aren’t (the University of Chicago, for instance, probably isn’t obsessed with the fact that it isn’t Princeton), whereas Brown is helplessly, helpfully trapped in limbo (just as Seattle, where I now live, is, and just as I am). Brown has a flawed, tragicomic, self-conscious relation to power/prestige/privilege. In 2004, Women’s Wear Daily named Brown “the most fashionable Ivy”: bourgeois/bohemian clothes made (expensively) to look like the thrifty alternative to expensive threads. Embarrassing recent poll result: Brown is the “happiest Ivy.” Brown is Ivy, but it’s, crucially, not Harvard, Princeton, Yale. Brown students affirm a discourse of privilege at the same time they want to/need to undermine such a hierarchy.

The result, in the arts: a push-pull attitude toward the dominant narrative. Boston Globe: “From its founding as a fledgling program in 1974 to its morphing into a full Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics has produced a crop of creators that, if they don’t exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it.” Emphasis on sparring .

Which brings me to the Fuck You Factor (crucial to Brown’s overdog/underdog ethos). My friend Elizabeth Searle, who received her MFA from Brown, emailed me, “Walter Abish advised our workshop, ‘The single most important thing in writing is to maintain a playful attitude toward your material.’ I liked the freeing, what-the-hell sound of that. I like the sense—on the page—that I’m playing with fire. I know I’m onto something when I think two things simultaneously: ‘No, I could never do that’ and ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’ ” We were taught at Brown to question ourselves rather than naïvely and vaingloriously celebrate ourselves—to turn ourselves inside out rather than turn (easily) inward or outward, to mock ourselves, to simultaneously take ourselves very seriously and demolish ourselves.

Several years ago I was a member of the nonfiction panel for the National Book Awards. One of the other panelists, disparaging a book I strongly believed should be a finalist, said, “The writer keeps getting in the way of the story.” What could that possibly mean? The writer getting in the way of the story is the story, is the best story, is the only story. We semiotics concentrators (my mother in 1974: “Semiotics—what the hell is that?”) knew that on day one.

My senior year an essay appeared in Fresh Fruit , the extremely short-lived and poorly named weekly arts supplement to The Brown Daily Herald . A Brown student, writing about the culture clash at a Brown-URI basketball game, referred in passing to Brown students as “world-beaters.” I remember thinking, Really? World-beaters? More like world-wanderers and -wonderers .

Harvard: government, sketch comedy (same thing?). Yale: Wall Street, judiciary (same thing?). Princeton: physics, astrophysics (same thing?). Brown: freedom, art (same thing?).

A myth is an attempt to reconcile an intolerable contradiction.

Life/art

WRITING WAS, and in a way still is, very bound up for me with stuttering. Writing represented/represents the possibility of turning “bad language” into “good language.” I now have much more control over my stutter; it’s nothing like the issue it was in my teens and twenties and into my thirties. Still, Edmund Wilson’s notion of the wound and the bow persists in my mind (Samuel Johnson had scars all over his face, he twitched, every time he walked past a tree he had to touch it, he was sexually masochistic, and out of his mouth came wondrously strange and funny things). Language is what differentiates us from other species, so when I stutter, I find it genuinely dehumanizing. I still feel a psychic need to write myself into, um, existence. So, too, due to stuttering, I value writing and reading as essential communication between writer and reader. It’s why I want writing to be so intimate: I want to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone—I’ve gotten to this other person.

Email to Natalie, now nineteen, insulin-resistant and hypothyroid, who faced weight issues throughout high school: “I felt utterly isolated in high school and college (not at all a part of any social scene), but over time my speech issues receded and I became the immensely social butterfly I am now.”

Her reply: “Ha ha ha.”

In “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” Dinty Moore overcomes his ambivalence about having a child—his own father was a stutterer and a drunk—but he desperately wants a girl because “boys have a higher likelihood of inheriting their ancestral traits.”

Real life

THE STAR OF the reality show Supernanny tells her charges, “The answers you give to your parents are meaningless to me. I’m not going to put on the mask of parent or caregiver. I’m going to be completely real to you.” Kids almost always respond quite positively to her. With Natalie I also try to be “real.” Her friends say, “Your dad does not play Dad with you.” I take this as a compliment, not sure Natalie does. After spending a few days with Paul Giamatti, my friend Ellen said Giamatti reminded her of me. I said thanks a lot—it couldn’t be another movie star? How I interact with Natalie reminded Ellen of how Giamatti interacts with his son. She said that both of us seem to empty out the melodrama from the relationship by speaking in a flat, ironic, peer-to-peer sort of voice: “no singsong, no patronizing, maybe a little distant, but probably very loving, I would think, in its own way.”

Life/art

FRED MOODY, the former editor of Seattle Weekly and the author of four works of nonfiction, is a friend. His as yet unpublished antimemoir (memoir with wings?), Unspeakable Joy , describes his adolescent years spent in two seminaries in California. The book is framed by a national scandal in the 1990s, when the news broke of widespread abuse by priests in the 1960s at the seminary Moody was attending. The book is written in short passages, each one separated by a triangle (=Trinity) and nearly every one just a couple of pages.

The opening of the book—Moody’s mother calling him on the phone after hearing the news, demanding to know if he was one of the abused, and his reassuring her that he wasn’t—sets a particular tone for what follows, frames the entire thing in a peculiar way. Moody reassures his mother that he wasn’t abused, but he doesn’t reassure me. If anything, I’m inclined to think he’s lying. He reflects on how troubled his adult life has been, how he has to hide in plain sight because of the horrible things within him: “Marriage, kids, house, friends, career—when you’re like me, those things are basically barnacles on a rotting pier. I suppose, for the secretive, the power of the secret has some direct correlation with the worth of the life you have: the more loved ones in your life, the more emotional equity, the more you have to lose by being found out.”