At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  That no good writer would ever again appear on the cover of Time, that “counting” now counted in a different way—that everything was a niche, and that what was not “niche” was a parade of oafish grotesques, a parade one could parody or join or both but never now overcome with some other, better parade—was the secret shared knowledge of our generation. Fame came in smaller bits, and money in smaller chunks—and yet it did come. This was so even though a “boom” in writing could hardly be heard over the thermonuclear explosions of Wall Street, or even the continual snap and crackle of the art world. Art world paydays made book world paydays look like no paydays at all. Visual artists hunted for golden tickets, and when they got one, they were set. Good pictures in the art market—a market that has never stopped booming in all the years since—buy estates in the Hamptons. Even large royalties in the literary world (the handful—no, fingerful—of truly “commercial” writers aside) bought small apartments in the upper reaches of West End Avenue, and then in Park Slope—no small or bad thing, but not the same thing.

  Yet, for someone interested, as I was, in continually making little comparative anthropologies of things, it was fascinating to experience firsthand the difference between the booms in the literary world and art world. Each month, it seemed, a new writer—a David Leavitt or a Meg Wolitzer or a Mona Simpson or a Lorrie Moore—emerged from the fiction programs or creative-writing classes with a collection of short stories or a first novel and became celebrated, talked of, the “flavor of the month,” occasionally even the bouquet of the season. Resentful and envious observers—i.e., all older writers—exaggerated both the money and the celebrity won. Still, the difference between the lives and livelihoods of the Delmore Schwartz–Randall Jarrell generation, which Eileen Simpson writes about so movingly in her memoir Poets in Their Youth—with the writers scuffling from one part-time job to another, a sinecure at a liberal-arts college teaching freshman composition being the most golden of tickets they ever got—and our own was plain.

  There was still no “real money” in writing, but there was a kind of play money, Monopoly money, in it, different from the true no-money-at-all of earlier times. In retrospect, of course, this was only the briefest of pauses on publishing’s way to the bottom—like the moment when the Titanic, having sheared in two and seen its bow entirely sunk in the ocean, saw its remaining, rear half rise and rock steady in the water, giving a brief illusion of horizontal stability before it, too, filled with sea water and headed for the bottom. There was only one way, and direction, the boat, or serious writing, was heading. But for the passengers on board, that momentary pause must have seemed, if very briefly, hopeful.

  What was fascinating about the literary world in the eighties, as against the art world, was that the literary world ran on the myth of no masks, whereas the art world ran, at the same time, on a belief in ever more complicated masquerades. In the art world, the young painters and collagists and video makers I was coming to know all believed as a matter of uncritical faith that everything you made had to pass through the prism of another manner. It could be the borrowed manner of commercial art, as in Barbara Kruger’s parodies of advertising, or that of greeting-card platitudes, as in the glowing signs of Jenny Holzer. One might put on a big suit to parody the bigly besuited, as David Byrne did, trusting the audience to know the difference between the mannered and the meta-. But everyone in the art world accepted masks as naturally as mummers do. Everything still worked on Jasper Johns’s simple, telling formula: take something, do something to it, then do something else to it. The artists I knew were always doing things to things done to—and the job of the art critic was therefore to undo them, unravel the tangled skein to show the impulse inside. Sometimes this could be enlightening, as when Bob Hughes took apart the famous Rauschenberg combine, a stuffed goat skewering a real tire, to show its many sources and erotic resonances. At other times it could be merely comical. It became the set piece of that moment for an artist to take some utterly self-evident claim—that homelessness was wrong, say—and then to encode it so obliquely that only an art critic could decrypt it. The “work” came to consist of the obvious statement, the encryption, and then the decoding, all in one neat and often expensive package.

  But the literary world still believed in naïveté. The young short-story writers who clustered around the charismatic Gordon Lish were full of faith that you could make art just by being honest. Even doing something to your truth was, well, dubious. Authenticity, direct speech, unmediated urgency, emotional candor—that was still the goal. Lish taught them to fear the mannered words of mere social presentation—“restaurant,” “haircut,” “commuter train” were all, it was rumored, verboten. (I got to know him well, mostly as a genial relater of old Jewish jokes, good ones, about Mr. and Mrs. Shmuelovitz, such as the one in which, after interrogating Mr. Shmuelovitz to the point of revealing that he has killed his wife, the ladies by the pool at the Fontainebleau have one final question, “So: you’re single?”) Since I loved comedy of manners as much as, if not more than, the articulation of raw emotion, the eliminations seemed sad to me.

  The direct manner produced countless stories written in the present tense (of the “Joan is driving the station wagon to the strip mall” kind—the present suggesting instant presence). It was in its way a style more connected to the method acting of the forties and fifties than to the B-movies that often featured that acting, those same B-movies the painters so loved. Something of pure voice and no manner was the heart of what the time wanted from writing. Raymond Carver’s artless-seeming—though obviously very artful via Lish—stories were a model, and so were Alice Munro’s plain-Jane (but actually Jane Austen made plainer in Ontario)–seeming stories.

  Martha had been utterly right about that—about her extreme and prescient admiration for Alice Munro, I mean, offered on our first date in Montreal. Martha had become a bemused, polite spectator of the art world that we lived within—worried, I always sensed, that the entire thing, with its absurd jargon and opaque objects, was an elaborate Sky Masterson con being played on her husband, a face card squirting cider every day directly into his ecstatic ear. But she loved the company of women writers and novelists. It was my own involvement with the young writers that had allowed her, on a rainy, memorable Friday, to re-meet Meg Wolitzer. Meg was then a bright light of that literary circle, and now, two young women in their twenties, they reunited, became enraptured with each other all over again—fifteen forever, a rapture that has not, as yet, lifted. I would come home from the office—the very words had a thrilling ring, “I am coming home from the office!”—and find Martha plopped on the Eames sofa that she had retrieved in ruins from someone’s studio and had restored, her pretty legs tucked beneath her, helpless with laughter at some parody Meg was doing at the other end of the line.

  It was instructive to witness the depth of women’s friendships, how they can exist outside time or worry and remain purely uncompetitive, how they exist outside common pursuits or common “interests,” exist purely and for their own sake.

  But she was finding a life, without knowing it entirely, as a support for other people—me chiefly, but others, too—and had I been more alert I would have been more concerned about her self-abnegation, her losing herself in other people’s cares and quarrels and pages.

  I played a tiny role in this small writers’ boom, writing the flap copy for the younger writers, liking the shoptalk and the small duties of editorial work, different from those of fashion copy or even art criticism. There was a magic in the commodification of literature, making it a much happier event than the commodification of art, in large part because you were just hoping it would become an object for sale. Whereas in the art world the worry was that the object would be degraded by reproduction, the idea of limitless reproduction was, in publishing, the whole improbable fantasy. The terrible fate of art imagined in Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—the art object robbed of
its aura and turned into countless simulacra of itself—was exactly what you wanted to have happen to a book.

  There was a lot more wishful thinking, dreaming, and hoping injected into the process in the midtown office than there was in the SoHo village. Once one had made it to a gallery wall in SoHo, the picture would certainly sell to somebody. It would become an object for sale and covetousness if anyone saw it at all. In the book world, the flap copy and the catalogue copy, the copies sent out to reviewers and for blurbs, all of it managed to put an overlay of optimism on what was a process statistically almost certain to disappoint all around. No one quite covets a book the way she covets a picture. If a book got launched as a commodity, it was a wonder. If a picture didn’t in those days, it was a mystery; you changed dealers. If the book failed, you just hoped someone would let you publish another.

  I loved editing, though I was never really any good at it—too absorbed in my own sentences to really superintend other people’s with the care they deserved. The really great editors are monastics at heart. They love the self-abnegation that comes with editing, and though they may write from time to time, they prefer the sanctified celibacy of not writing. And, of course, they derive power from their abstention: by not writing while knowing all about writing, they achieve exactly the same power that the great monks do. They are worldly but not of this world. Monks bake bread and make cheese, and they savor the smells, but, finally, they are there to serve food, not eat it.

  I had, and have, none of those self-abnegating gifts. But editing is also a form of caregiving, particularly when one’s “patients” are older, as many of mine were; for me it was a kind of accelerated way of growing up. I became the editor to such hugely distinguished older writers as Wilfrid Sheed, the great critic and fine satiric novelist, and later Whitney Balliett, the matchless poet-chronicler of American music, and became aware that, despite the differences in our age and stature—and for all that I could scarcely offer a useful word about their finished sentences, being still so narrowly in pursuit of my own—I was helpful simply by wearing an editorial mask, as absurdly as one might wear a Groucho mustache and glasses. If you are the object of transference from a seventy-year-old master, you assume the manners of an older man. Since assuming manners is pretty much the only way there is to learn them, it works out well. I was a grown-up by virtue of being an editor, because, important corollary, all writers are children.

  As with most roles, playing it becomes being it. Having to be strong for them made me stronger than I was. The bond of editor and writer is comic but intense in a way that no bond of artist and critic, much less artist and dealer, can be. What all psychoanalysts seek—that “transference” whereby the patient ascribes to the therapist limitless stores of wisdom, parental care, and far-seeing attention—editors earn with indecent ease from anxious writers.

  It was a reminder of what the art world had already taught me, if only I had paid attention and enlarged its lessons: everything that looks like a formal transaction in the arts is really a psychological one. People make pictures, not “periods.” Editors only secondarily shape sentences or even structure books; they more often serve as surrogate fathers, reassuring their oddly adopted and often elderly foundlings that they can climb the jungle gym all the way to the top. Even the most famous interventions, like Gordon’s on Raymond Carver’s stories, where whole pages got excised or remade, and endings reimagined, are possible not because the rewrite looks better to the writer—“No good writer ever really likes being edited at all” was the emphatic aphorism of one of the best—but because the transference has taken place so completely that the writer feels naked without the paternal approval that the interference suggests. If he won’t change my work, he must not care, the writer thinks. The editing may benefit the work—taking clotted and overworked material and simplifying it so that, as Shakespeare didn’t say, slow, not-so-bright things come to clarity—but the transaction is moved more by the writer’s primal scene than his ambitions for the finished “product.”

  Something else I saw then: writers’ lives were not tutelary in the way that artists’ lives so often were. Richard Serra could be an ornery hero, Jeff Koons a strange local saint. Writers lacked that kind of vividness. Lonelier and sadder for the most part, they endured long stretches of absolute isolation, not the isolation of the painter’s studio, which is almost always intensely social at either end, with fellow students at the beginning and then, later on, assistants. (Not to mention the ever-comforting presence of materials, beautiful in themselves, that must be bought and stretched and lined and sharpened.)

  Writers’ work really is solitary, and there is no “donné” to it. A painter starts with four marks, the four sides of her canvas, and makes a fifth. The writer starts with nothing—staring out into the abyss of language, where any sentence might be made, any word order attempted, however ugly—and must find the one right string of words there, with the additional torture that words are never in themselves beautiful, as the marks may be, even if sometimes strings of sounds may become so. As a consequence, writers live alone even when they live in company, turning sentences over and around in their heads, as artists can’t turn images. Artists work their images, of course, and rush back to the studio to do more. But the image still exists outside the head of the artist.

  The visual arts, for all their occult obliquity, are real. Half the effect of an art object is in its pure thingness. It’s big, dark, polished, and dense; it’s small and shiny and weird. The object exists here, and now, even when it attempts to represent some scene or place. Writing, no matter how vivid or accurate, is reflective. It has no material life outside the materials it embraces. Brushstrokes are both the things they indicate and the thing they are. Words are just what they mean; reduced to mere sound, they become nonsense. We talk about the beautiful sounds of certain words or phrases—“summer afternoon” or “Christmas music”—but in truth robbed of their reference they are just more mumbling in the mouth.

  In this simple sense the writer’s sentences have no existence at all, their place on the page being a mere illusory resting place before they rush from the head of the writer into that of a reader—if any readers are out there. The writer’s work really doesn’t exist outside of the head of the reader, and readers are rarely present in the writer’s immediate world. We shout out sentences to spouses, and the spouses invariably pretend to listen, but, robbed of their context, the sentences as we shout them make little sense. Sentences are like the cat in those quantum diagrams, existing only when they are at last perceived. Before then, they just jump around inside the writer’s head. In there, they can’t be abandoned or even put down for a minute, like a colicky baby. (Perhaps this is why writers like writing about child rearing: they already know what it is like to have a charge that never really rests and occasionally smiles.) The painter’s “lonely” is merely pensive; the writer’s lonely is truly alone.

  I had begun to find my sentence shapes. While the possibilities of songwriting seemed to have snapped shut—we still hadn’t heard back from Art Garfunkel; still haven’t, actually, Art—my ambitions had focused more narrowly on writing, and write every day is what I now did, or tried to, even as I boosted other writers’ fortunes. I was torn between two manners: the argumentative, thesis-driven one of the art critic, full of dubious saws and hypermodern instances, and the simpler, almost faux-naïf one that I admired in the work of my heroes, Thurber and White. By day I would thunder about simulacra and the semiotics of the sign; by night I would sing, or try to, the modest beauties of the MoMA garden in the snow at dusk.

  I wasn’t ready yet to bring the two together. My own natural ambit, I discovered eventually, was somewhere where the two manners met, in a kind of aphoristic prose, filled with neat epigrams, placed on the page like shiny ribbons on a present—funny in parts and touching in others, with a few passionate political views trailing along behind. That was the way I ought to have written all along. But I didn’t. The voice we searc
h for is the voice we have, but cannot hear for all those other voices in our heads.

  I agreed with the Lish doctrine as to voice being everything; disagreed inasmuch as it seemed to me that every voice is choral and polyphonic, in its true articulation. If you’re speaking from the heart without significant redaction from the head, you’re not talking whole. And the head includes restaurants and haircuts as much as sex and blood. Bits of experience ripped out like gobbets of flesh intrigue me, but bits of experience where the flesh comes off to reveal the clothing beneath intrigue me more. The lure of the plain fact, the one-beat phrase, the same note struck first and then struck twice and then struck for the third time—it is a good way to write. But just as the sounds of notes in music are made from the overtones, the parts the ears fill in, the sound of a writer’s voice is made from the overlying ironies and unexpected turns and curlicues for their own sake that make for beautiful sentences. Sentence shapes contain those tones, and are what a writer needs for disguise just as much—and in much the same way—as the stripper in Gypsy is taught she needs a gimmick and a stage name. The writer’s sentences allow for the appearance of naïveté, as the stripper’s gimmick—the Bo Peep outfit, the neon girdle—allows for the illusion of nudity. Both are designed to give the appearance of complete candor to what is in fact an act of elaborate guile.

  Yet, beyond the playacting of “editing,” I knew that there were secrets about writing that transcended the comedy of transference and the little duties of “copy writing.” I was at that time a man in search of secrets. I believed in secrets—a secret to coaching hockey, to stealing bases, to making spaghetti sauce, to writing. That the only secret to any of them is the same dumb process of breaking it down into small steps and building it back up hadn’t been given to me to know.