How to Be Alone

by Jonathan Franzen

  But this is all still in the future as I speed north on I-170, veering through the underlit lanes, my stomach empty, my head a little woolly with Scotch. The brass door knocker has upset me. I’ve left it in Pete Miller’s care because I don’t want to have it. (It will resurface months later in my editor’s desk.) I don’t want to hold the knocker, don’t even want to look at it, for the same reason that I’ve been averting my eyes from my old house. Not because it reminds me of how empty of meaning the house is now, but because the house is perhaps not so empty after all. The distant past may live only in my head, and my memories of it may merely be mocked by the sterile present, but there are much more recent and much more painful memories that I haven’t touched at all: memories that I’ve tried to leave behind me in the house.

  For example, there’s the little Pyrex dish of canned peas that I found in the refrigerator the last time my mother was in the hospital. My mother had long ago reconciled herself to staying in the house while her children fled to the coasts. We invited her to move to one of the coasts herself, but the house was her life, it was what she still had, it was not so much the site of her loneliness as the antidote to it. But she was often very alone there, and I was always at pains, in New York, not to remember this aloneness. Generally I managed to forget it pretty well, but when I flew into town on the day of her last surgery I found unavoidable reminders in the house: a soiled towel soaking in a bucket in the basement, a half-finished crossword by her bed. For the last week or so before she was hospitalized, my mother couldn’t keep any food down, and by the time I arrived her refrigerator was empty of almost everything but ancient condiments and delicacies. On the top shelf there was just a quart of skim milk, a tiny can of green peas with a square of foil on top, and, next to this can, a dish containing a single bite of peas. I was ambushed and nearly destroyed by this dish of peas. I was forced to imagine my mother alone in the house and willing herself to eat a bite of something, anything, a bite of peas, and finding herself unable to. With her usual frugality and optimism, she’d put both the can and the dish in the refrigerator, in case her appetite returned.

  The last day I was ever in the house, three months later, I worked with one of my brothers to make last-minute repairs and to box my old belongings. We’d been going at it twelve and fourteen hours a day that week, and I was packing furiously up to the moment I went to fetch a rental truck. I didn’t have time to feel much of anything but the pleasure of getting the boxes labeled, the truck loaded up; and then suddenly it was time for me to leave. I went looking for my brother to say goodbye to him. I happened to pass my old bedroom, I found myself stopping in the hallway to look inside, and it occurred to me that I would never see this room again; a wave of grief rose up in me. I ran down the stairs, breathing heavily through my mouth, not seeing well. I clapped my arms around my brother and ran, just ran, from the house and hopped in the truck and drove too fast down the driveway, ripping a branch off a tree in my hurry to get on the road. I think I made myself be done then. I think the implicit promise I gave myself that afternoon, the promise I would have broken if I’d gone back inside the house today, was that I had left for the last time and I would never have to leave again.

  Promises, promises. I’m speeding toward the airport.

  [2001]

  INAUGURATION DAY, JANUARY 2001

  A couple of Saturdays ago, lacking any better invitation, you might have got up at 5:30 and left your silk scarves and your cashmere coat in the closet, put on your beat-up Red Wings and several layers of old wool, and cabbed up to the Harlem State Office Building, on 125th Street, where twenty young socialists, a shoal of fellow-traveling Fordham students, and two stray Barnard seniors who’d been drinking all night at the Village Idiot were waiting for transportation to Washington.

  The transportation, when it came, rather late, proved to be two antique yellow school buses. David Schmauch, a member of the Harlem branch of the International Socialist Organization, was in charge of the operation. Schmauch, who resembles a clean-shaven Kenneth Branagh, was wearing duck boots, a nylon parka, and a goofy stocking cap. He’d paid fifteen hundred dollars out of his own pocket for the buses, and he’d sold nowhere near fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of tickets. One contingent of sympathizers, he said, had backed out when it learned that the buses had no bathrooms. You might have been tempted to sneer at this objection, at the bourgeois primness of it, but after your very slow bus, slowed further by rain and fog, had made a bathroom stop at every service area along the New Jersey Turnpike—each stop dilating into cigarette break and extended snack opportunity—you might have wished, yourself, for a motor coach with self-contained amenities.

  On the other hand, the more time you’d sat on a warm, dry bus reading your copy of the Socialist Worker, the less time you’d have had to stand in the mud at Stanton Square, behind the Supreme Court, where the only shelters were the dope-scented porta-potties and the plastic-shrouded gazebo from which warmup speakers for the Reverend A1 Sharpton were fishing for cheers in a sea of four or five thousand wet non-Republicans. Worse weather was imaginable: it could have been raining harder. If you’d lucked onto the slower bus and arrived very late, only your smaller fingers might have been frozen by the time Sharpton took charge of the mike and stirred you, against your will, with the brevity and force of his denunciations. There in the rain, among the wilting placards (“Hail to the Thief!” and “The People Have Spoken—All Five of Them”) and the rain-beaded lenses of Bertolt Brecht eyewear, you might even have warmed to Sharpton’s cheaper shots—his challenge to Dubya “to do more than get messy with Jesse,” for example, or his calculated stuttering of “Clarence T—Tom—Thomas.”

  The crowd was all smiles as it formed a column and marched slowly up Maryland Avenue to surround the Supreme Court. If you’d been there, you might have been stirred by the ceaseless chanting of

  Racist, sexist, anti-gay,

  GEORGE BUSH, go away!

  and

  Hey, Dubya, what do you say—

  How many votes did you steal today?

  even if you didn’t actually believe that George Bush was a bigot or that he’d stolen any votes that day. Maybe, long ago, you felt similarly divided at high-school pep rallies. Maybe, although the cheerleaders in this crowd wore dreadlocks and leather pants and those burdensome-looking collections of buttons (those rosarylike skeins of explicit ideology), rather than letter sweaters and pleated skirts, you’d have once again found yourself simultaneously thrilled and repelled. But when the sidewalk surrounding the Supreme Court was fully occupied by drenched protesters, and the chant had shifted to a conga beat of

  THIS is what democracy looks-like,

  THAT is what hypocrisy looks-like

  with hundreds of wet arms pointing at the Court on every shout of “THAT” your irritation with the self-congratulation of the THIS might have been swept away by a sudden, overpowering resentment of the THAT: the marble courthouse that loomed, silent, unlighted, unresponsive, behind a line of cops in riot helmets. You might have been glad you came down here.

  But then, as the line moved on and you rounded the south-east corner of the Court, you might have had the deeply weird experience of seeing yourself seeing yourself. There, in the Florida House on the other side of Second Street, behind tall windows hung with patriotic bunting, were men and women waiting for the party to commence, wearing the kind of suits and shoes that you’d left at home, eating the kind of food that you’d eaten in restaurants almost every night the week before, drinking the eighty-proof kind of drink for which you were suddenly thirsting, and peering out with a mix of curiosity and fear and satisfaction at the sodden line of marchers of which you were at least somewhat, if only for a moment, and yet not entirely reluctantly, a living part.

  The trip back took seven hours. The young socialists—an installer for Verizon, a bartender who was formerly a soccer star at Brown, a first-year schoolteacher—compared cell phones, read Marx in abridgment (“It saves reading
three volumes of Capital for two years”), unanimously praised Friends, and split, along strict gay/straight lines, over the merits of Xena, Warrior Princess. Few pleasures compare with that of riding on a bus after dark, hours behind schedule, with people you violently agree with. But finally, inevitably, you get dumped back in the city. Rain is freezing on the ground, snow covering the slush. You may still be one version of yourself, the version from the bus, the younger and redder version, as long as you’re waiting for the subway and riding home. But then you peel off the thermal layers, still damp, of the long day’s costume, and you see a wholly different kind of costume hanging in your closet; and in the shower you’re naked and alone.

  [2001]

  Appendix:

  Perchance to Dream

  In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels

  The Original (Unedited) Harper’s Essay

  My despair about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists colony in upstate New York, to write the last two chapters of my second book. I had been leading a life of self-enforced solitude in New York City—long days of writing in a small white room, evening walks on streets where Hindi, Russian, Korean, and Colombian Spanish were spoken in equal measure. Even deep in my Queens neighborhood, however, ugly news had reached me through the twin portals of my TV set and my New York Times subscription. The country was preparing for war ecstatically, whipped on by William Safire (for whom Saddam Hussein was “this generation’s Hitler”) and George Bush (“Vital issues of principle are at stake”), whose approval rating stood at 89 percent. In the righteousness of the nation’s hatred of a man who until recently had been our close petropolitical ally, as in the near-total absence of public skepticism about the war, the United States seemed to me as terminally out of touch with reality as Austria had been in 1916, when it managed to celebrate the romantic “heroism” of mechanized slaughter in the trenches. I saw a country dreaming of infinite oil for its hour-long commutes, of glory in the massacre of faceless Iraqis, of eternal exemption from the rules of history. But in my own way I, too, was dreaming of escape, and when I realized that Yaddo was no haven—the Times came there daily, and the talk at every meal was of Patriot missiles and yellow ribbons—I began to think that the most reasonable thing for a citizen to do might be to enter a monastery and pray for humanity.

  Such was my state when I discovered, in the modest Yaddo library, Paula Fox’s classic short novel Desperate Characters. “She was going to get away with everything!” is the hope that seizes Sophie Bentwood, a woman who possibly has rabies, in Desperate Characters, Sophie is a literate, childless Brooklynite, unhappily married to a conservative lawyer named Otto. She used to translate French novels; now she’s too depressed to do more than intermittently read them. Against Otto’s advice, she has given milk to a homeless cat, and the cat has repaid the kindness by biting her hand. Sophie immediately feels “vitally wounded”—she’s been bitten for “no reason,” just as Josef K. is arrested for “no reason” in Kafka’s The Trial—but when the swelling in her hand subsides, she becomes giddy with the hope of being spared rabies shots.

  The “everything” Sophie wants to get away with, however, is more than her liberal self-indulgence with the cat. She wants to get away with reading Goncourt novels and eating omelettes aux fines herbes on a street where derelicts lie sprawled in their own vomit and in a country that’s fighting a dirty war in Vietnam. She wants to be spared the pain of confronting a future beyond her life with Otto. She wants to keep dreaming. But the novel’s logic won’t let her. She’s compelled, instead, to this equation of the personal and the social;

  “God, if I am rabid I am equal to what is outside,” she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she’d discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence.

  Desperate Characters, which was first published in 1970, ends with an act of prophetic violence. Breaking under the strain of his collapsing marriage, Otto Bentwood grabs a bottle of ink from Sophie’s escritoire and smashes it against their bedroom wall. The ink in which his law books and Sophie’s translations have been printed now forms an unreadable blot—a symbolic precursor of the blood that, a generation later, more literal-minded books and movies will freely splash. But the black lines on the wall aren’t simply a mark of doom. They point as well toward an extraordinary relief, the end to a fevered isolation. By daring to equate a crumbling marriage with a crumbling social order, Fox goes to the heart of an ambiguity that even now I experience almost daily: does the distress I feel derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or is it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from this ambiguity and had seen light on its far side—that a book like Desperate Characters had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in a novel pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace. I don’t think there’s a more pure gratitude than the one I felt toward a stranger who twenty years earlier had cared enough about herself and about her art to produce such a perfectly realized book.

  Yet even while I was feeling saved as a reader by Desperate Characters I was succumbing, as a novelist, to despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social. The reader who happens on Desperate Characters in a library today will be as struck by the foreignness of the Bentwoods’ world as by its familiarity. A quarter century has only broadened and confirmed the sense of cultural crisis that Fox was registering. But what now feels like the locus of that crisis—the banal ascendancy of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse—is nowhere to be seen in the novel. Communication, for the Bentwoods, meant books, a telephone, and letters. Portents didn’t stream uninterruptedly through a cable converter or a modem; they were glimpsed only dimly, on the margins of existence. An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still imaginable as a symbol in 1970.

  In a winter when every house in the nation was haunted by the ghostly telepresences of Peter Arnett in Baghdad and Tom Brokaw in Saudi Arabia—a winter when the inhabitants of those houses seemed less like individuals than a collective algorithm for the conversion of media jingoism into an 89 percent approval rating—I was tempted to think that if a contemporary Otto Bentwood were breaking down, he would kick in the screen of his bedroom TV. But this would have missed the point. Otto Bentwood, if he existed in the Nineties, would not break down, because the world would no longer even bear on him. As an unashamed elitist, an avatar of the printed word, and a genuinely solitary man, he belongs to a species so endangered as to be all but irrelevant in an age of electronic democracy. For centuries, ink in the form of printed novels has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives. What Sophie and Otto were glimpsing, in the vatic black mess on their bedroom wall, was the disintegration of the very notion of a literary character. Small wonder they were desperate. It was still the Sixties, and they had no idea what had hit them.

  There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously.

  —from Desperate Characters

  When I got out of college in 1981, I hadn’t heard the news about the death of the social novel. I didn’t know that Philip Roth, twenty years earlier, had already performed the autopsy, describing “American reality” as a thing that “stupefies . . . sickens . . . infuriates, and finally . . . is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents. . . .” I was in love with literature and with a woman to whom I’d been attracted in part because she was a brilliant reader. I found a weekend job that enabled both of us to write full time, and almost every night we read for hours, swallowing whole the oeuvres of Dickens and Proust, Stead and Austen, Coover and DeLillo.

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