The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

3. This Way to the Giant Abstract Octopus

  Talking about what I’m doing, about how it feels to write the books published under Lethem’s name, has become a habit. It’s a second career, conducted within the Kabuki formalities of book touring, both privileged and burdensome. I don’t mean to complain. I’m aware that having this bloggish book issued in boards by a major corporate publisher in 2011 is, precisely, a measure of the aristocratic privilege accorded me by the novelist’s role, akin to being borne aloft in a chair like a conquistador over mountain terrain everyone else is made to traverse barefoot and with supplies on their backs. Yet it’s often weird what the polite novelist lately isn’t supposed to say aloud. We’re not meant to refute critics (though fiendish questions are devised to test our adherence to this principle). Nor should we acknowledge Internet discourse about our books—that Morlockian subverse isn’t fit for mention. No, we’ve renounced, after a brief misguided sally, entering our names on search engines. We don’t rank ourselves among our contemporaries, or attack other polite novelists for being overrated or even completely full of shit (such admissions are reserved for self-loathing grumbles between novelists, by e-mail). We don’t know why we do what we do, but we’re not too amazed with ourselves for being the lucky keepers of this universal flame. That we’re modest goes without saying. Influence is semiconscious, not something to delineate too extensively, except when we’ve patterned our latest book on a literary monument of the past, at least a half-century old, by a master with whom we’d never dare compare ourselves, only hope to be “worthy of.” We don’t speak of our own career’s arc, let alone of crises encountered therein, because we’d never think of what we’re doing in crass terms of a career. Rather, blinkered devotionally, we “serve the needs of the book at hand,” and besides are permanent amateurs, born anew each time we start writing (which I suppose means we die each time we publish, but that’s a downer). We’re always so honored to have been invited onto your radio show.

  Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Thank God in all his mercy that you were willing to have me.

  Though like any properly fame-hungry American of my generation I spent years imaginatively yearning to know what it would be like to be interviewed, I dread reading or listening to the interviews that resulted now that I’ve given hundreds, because I know they’re riddled with such obediences. Here, I’ll try not to be obedient. I want to bite the hand that feeds me, even if that hand is sometimes yours, reader.

  “I’m completely in print, so we’re all stuck with me and stuck with my books.” The words are Kurt Vonnegut’s, making bitter rejoinder to critics he believed wished to see him evaporate from the literary landscape. Vonnegut spoke them in an interview he later collected in a book called Palm Sunday (subtitled An Autobiographical Collage; perhaps not too terrible a term for what I’m doing here). I could say the same, though if I did I’d speak more in wonder than in bitterness—and I don’t mean that as a Kabuki gesture of modesty. Really, most of my heroes are partly or entirely out of print, as I always expected and am surely destined to be (as is Vonnegut, too). After all, I’ve written a lot of short, strange books. That even a very small number of grown men and women in 2011 might still be interested in Amnesia Moon—a novel a nineteen-year-old began composing in 1983—well, that’s a situation that can’t sustain itself forever. It isn’t meant to. In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it’s a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

  But I lie. I have one out-of-print book. A few years ago my friend Christopher Sorrentino and I co-authored the pseudonymous Believeniks: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets. As genuine (therefore, tormented) Mets fans, our book was sincere, and a real account of the 2005 season in progress, but since the listed authors weren’t Lethem and Sorrentino, but Harris Conklin and Ivan Felt, two Flaubertian buffoons we’d invented (Conklin billed himself as “America’s foremost neglected poet”; Felt was a disaffected academic), the book was a fiction, too: a nonfiction written by fictional characters. It parodied Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s (accidentally triumphalist) account of the Boston Red Sox curse-breaking championship season of 2004, and paid homage to Don DeLillo’s Amazons, a pseudonymous faux-memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League (you could look it up).

  The world was as taken with Believeniks as it was by the achievements of the 2005 New York Mets, minus a paid attendance of two-and-some-odd million. No paperback, no translations into any language, and we couldn’t get the team to let us throw out the first pitch at a game. You’d be justified in thinking that writing a fannish account of a real baseball season in the voices of two (disagreeable) fictional characters was an act on par with painting an abstract composition in oils, titling it Giant Octopus, then hanging it on the wall of a public aquarium and standing to one side to chortle as schoolchildren are ushered in for viewings. Well, reserve your brickbats: We did no chortling, as no schoolchildren arrived.

  My point? The book in your hands wouldn’t be published if I offered it under my Believenik name, Harris Conklin. “Jonathan Lethem,” at least for this tiny blip in literary eternity, gets the cookie. I may seem, in places herein, exasperated with how the power of the novelist in twenty-first-century culture is circumscribed, but I grant that it does consist of power. Vonnegut wasn’t feeling powerful when he made his bitter remark about being in print, but his ability to enshrine the remark in hardcovers and keep it in circulation shows he was wrong. (The pretense-of-no-power is a symptom I want to examine, not exhibit.) Then again, if you want to drive a person mad in a fame culture, offer him only a little fame, the very least amount you can scrape up. This happens every day, but it happens in slow motion to novelists. We’re like the guy who gets voted off first on Survivor, except instead of departing the island we walk its beaches forever, muttering.

  All writing, no matter how avowedly naturalistic or pellucid, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the “opening of a window onto life.” Abstract paintings of a giant octopus are all we have to put on view in my city’s aquarium. We writers aren’t sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream.

  None of this disqualifies my sense of passionate urgency at the task of making the giant octopus in my mind’s eye visible to yours. It doesn’t make the attempt any less fundamentally human, delicate, or crucial. It makes it more so. That’s because another name for the giant octopus I have in mind is negotiating selfhood in a world of other selves—the permanent trouble of being alive. Our language has no choice but to be self-conscious if it is to be conscious in the first place.

  4. Models for My Behavior Who Are Not to Be Blamed for What Transpires (and One Who Is)

  In the cause of transparency, I’ll mention that while writing the newest pieces here I’ve been reading essays by Seymour Krim, Renata Adler, Ander Monson, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Mark McGurl, Sianne Ngai, David Foster Wallace, Randall Jarrell, and Leonard Michaels. At any given instant these present infatuations made an influence in which my own loyalties and certainties dissolved, only to re-form somewhat altered when I recovered my senses. That, against an unavoidable backdrop of my own usual suspects list, Vivian Gornick, David Shields, Phillip Lopate, George W. S. Trow, Geoff Dyer, Samuel Delany, Geoffrey O’Brien, Annie Dillard, and Greil Marcus, those who first made me want to try writing essays and set the standard to reach for when I tried, even as their
more abiding commitment to the form keeps me humble by comparison (but hey, I could kick each of their asses up and down the novel-writing block, except Delany). I’m also indebted to Manny Farber, whose original formulation of the opposition between “White Elephant Art” (big, ungainly, awards-season stuff) and “Termite Art” (prestige-immune routes of curiosity through the cultural woodwork) has proven so versatile and stimulating, to me and others, that it’s in danger of floating free of Farber’s first rigorous uses. Sorry.

  Now, all exalted name-dropping aside, let me confess that one particular book hovers uneasily over my effort: Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. I’ll save defense of Mailer as a writer, or self-exculpation for my own fascination with him, for later, saying here just that I discovered that book at age fifteen, and have read it—or read around in it, since it’s unbearable to read cover to cover—dozens of times since then. If I browse in my mental library for examples of behavior by novelists-doing-other-than-writing-novels (and the difficulties attaching thereupon), I find Mailer’s Advertisements everywhere I turn. It’s the template for throwing fiction, poetry, letters, etc. into the same collection, along with so much preening apparatus. Advertisements stands for the simultaneous invention, summit, and dead end of its category, and Mailer for the perfect example of the kind of writer we’re defiantly happy not to suffer in our midst anymore. He’s the paradigm for a novelist’s willful abuse of his credibility with readers, and a White Elephant par excellence. Yet he’s also a father with whom I’m enmeshed, a Big Other I feel watching me work. Disclosure: My editor had to ask me not to subtitle this book Advertisements for Norman Mailer. What I never even told him was that at one point I wanted it for the title.

  5. Some Termite Ways to Read This White Elephant Book

  Mailer offered two tables of contents, charting alternate paths through his impossible book. He also offered a list of what he considered the best pieces in the book (though nearly anyone would disagree about a couple). I won’t do either, exactly. Yet even figuring anyone’s sure to browse and skip, let me suggest a couple of organizing patterns not alluded to in my table of contents. A few preliminary termite holes I’ve bored in my edifice, to get you started on your own.

  First, in my own defense: I left things out. There are pieces I liked that didn’t fit, just as some pieces that seemed in themselves pretty weak went in because they did fit. This is that sort of book. I excluded enough belletristic work (introductions and reviews, that is) to fill another volume. On the whole, I’ve gathered here maybe a quarter of my “uncollected” writings, if you include fiction.

  “The Ecstasy of Influence” is the eye of this particular storm. Like the essay, this book’s full of other voices: epigraphs, quotes in the bodies of reviews, the utterances of musicians in the two profiles, and what I’ve called “plagiarisms”—i.e., lifts both acknowledged and unacknowledged, both conscious and (surely) unconscious. You could, if you wanted, take this as a kind of commonplace book, or as a list of books to read after reading mine or instead of reading mine. If this somehow were to become the last example of what a book was, left to the bemused assessment of tentacled archaeologists, it might be a lucky selection simply for being ultra-informative, for having gnawed at and disgorged so much of its own context, just as, if Ian Dury’s “Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part 3)” were our culture’s last surviving song, it would be a lucky selection because it name-checks “Elvis and Scotty,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Dali,” “Harpo, Groucho, Chico,” “John Coltrane,” “the Bolshoi Ballet,” and so on. That’s how I regard this fate of ours, drowning in a cultural sea: reasons to be cheerful.

  This preface, the title essay, and several of the newer ones (“Against ‘Pop’ Culture,” “White Elephant and Termite Postures,” “Advertisements for Norman Mailer,” “Postmodernism as Liberty Valance,” “My Disappointment Critic/On Bad Faith,” “Rushmore Versus Abundance,” and some of the interstitial remarks) make a sporadic argument about the contemporary intellectual situation for fiction’s writers and readers, but with implications, I hope, for other kinds of public thinking and talking. They’re more tendentious than the rest. If you’re in no mood to see me skirmish with injustices less ultimately urgent than hunger, disease, and discrimination you might just want to skip them. (Now he tells us.) There’s plenty else.

  Conversely, many sections conclude with a brief piece, usually written headlong and heedlessly, in a mode I’d call “ecstastic.” There are others of these, too, not at the ends of sections—you’ll find them if you look. These were often commissioned pieces, for a journal or website I felt unable to refuse, with the small size of the readership guaranteed. (Harry Cohn: “Miss Stein, what is your secret?” Gertrude Stein: “Small audiences.”) Some were written in annoyance, as I hurried back to my “real” work, to something destined for a book or for a periodical with New York in its name, something with a bigger readership guaranteed. (Perhaps something tendentious.) Anyway, while ecstasy isn’t the guaranteed result on such occasions, it can happen. These are accidental darlings. They read in retrospect as if I’d gulped a lungful of helium, then burbled out the paragraphs before the delirious vocal effect wore off. Putting these samples on a par with the “bigger work,” giving them a second life that is practically their first, is for me reason enough for this book.

  I

  MY PLAN TO BEGIN WITH

  Twist away the gates of steel

  Unlock the secret voice—

  —DEVO, “Gates of Steel”

  Every book conceals a book.

  —RICHARD G. STERN

  My Plan to Begin With, Part One

  I came from dropping out; the only thing I knew at the start was to quit before they could fire me. My mother left college in favor of the counterculture. In the legend of Judith Lethem it was a brilliant move with no regrets, though I recall her discussing a matchbook offer from Empire State College, which awarded degrees for life experience—hers would have been for protest, encounter groups, social work, drugs. My father, a Fulbright scholar, studied painting at Columbia and in Paris, but threw over a tenure-track gig for work as a cabinetmaker, and commercial Manhattan galleries for cooperative Brooklyn ones. You ran away to make a world. Vanished into a garret and emerged with pages Prometheanly aflame. Thumbed to San Francisco. The Beat generation script sank into my deep layers even as I tired—fast—of Kerouac’s novels. Your parents are the first memo to come across your desk, on a page so large you can’t see past its edges. At least half of the known universe had done without higher education. In the legend of Judith Lethem (which likely lived only in my head) that half was “the smart one,” our home bookshelves her word palace (later I’d notice how many of the volumes actually had Richard Lethem, Columbia University jotted on their flyleaves).

  I still receive congratulations for having “evaded the MFA mill,” unlike my generational cohort. At those moments I really ought to offer a blanket defense of those in the poignant and terrifying situation of trying to become a writer, by whatever means available; the dedication of MFA students often moves me to tears when I speak before them. Instead, I’m usually silent, embarrassed to explain that I was too drunk on a script at least fifty years out-of-date to even notice what had become the new template for becoming a writer. The system was invisible to me until it was too late. After all, didn’t every novelist work as a clerk in a bookstore until they’d published their first book?

  The Used Bookshop Stories

  OPENING THE SHOP

  At fifteen I graduated from sweeping up the painted wooden floorboards and neatening the stock on the erratic, slapped-together wooden shelves and running to Steve’s Restaurant for coffee (“light,” in paper cups with the Parthenon on the side) and for corn muffins scorched on the grill, to opening the shop by myself. Saturday and Sunday mornings on Atlantic Avenue, in the little bookstore next to Kalfian Carpets and across the street from the tire shop, nothing doing here—our eccentric little bookshop was twenty
or thirty years too early for gentrification, if it ever stood a chance.

  Michael didn’t really like to get up in the morning, and as the months went by he liked less and less to preside over the empty store. I was his solution, the local kid who’d be thrilled just to get credit with adults for “working” when what I was really doing was reading, puttering in the stacks, playing God of Books in this almost wholly private realm. I’d take home my “pay” in books alone, was always gathering a stack of goods in the back corridor that I’d shift into my knapsack when I’d earned them. And inside a glass-fronted case were our rare books, including a couple I coveted and saved months to earn: Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel’s Hamlet with a red-ribbon binding and uncut pages, and an autographed copy of Bernard Wolfe’s mysterious Limbo. (I still own the Wolfe, but can’t recall where and when I let go of the Miller-Fraenkel.)

  I’d roll up the gate at eleven (having bought myself not coffee but tea and the grilled corn muffin from Steve’s), pull the cart of steal-able cheapo books to the sidewalk in front of the window, and plant myself at the old wooden desk to the right of the door—a sentry position, against the risk of thievery—waiting for the first customer of the day, sometimes an hour before anyone wandered in. The place had no heat, and in cold months I’d be in scarf and hat, rubbing gloved fingers together, waiting for the sun to hit the window and warm the storefront. We kept change in a cigar box in the top drawer, and the only time I ever left the desk for even a minute the box was scooped clean by some clever bandit, my fault, but Michael knew thievery was the neighborhood’s nature and just shook his head. It counted not against me but against him sticking around Brooklyn, and soon enough the little shop moved up to a basement storefront on East Eighty-fourth Street in Manhattan—half the size of the Atlantic Avenue storefront and a hundred times more viable.