How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by David Shields

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This page constitutes an extension of this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shields, David, 1956–

  How literature saved my life / by David Shields. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96153-2

  1. Shields, David, 1956—–Books and reading.

  2. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)

  3. Criticism. I. Title.

  PS3569.H4834Z469 2013

  813′.54—dc23

  [B] 2012036686

  Internal photo series by Tom Collicott and David Shields

  Front-of-jacket photograph by Geoff Spear

  Jacket design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1_r1

  For L.

  I am deeply grateful for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  In which I discuss another book as a way to throw into bold relief what this book is about.

  1. NEGOTIATING AGAINST MYSELF

  In which I evoke my character and personality, especially the way I always argue against myself, am ridiculously ambivalent—who knew?

  2. LOVE IS A LONG, CLOSE SCRUTINY

  In which I characterize love as a religion w/fallible gods.

  3. WHY IS THE HUMAN ANIMAL SO SAD?

  Exploration of melancholy, in myself and the general populace.

  4. OUR GROUND TIME HERE WILL BE BRIEF

  Partial answer to question asked in previous chapter: we’re the only animal that knows it will die.

  5. THE WOUND AND THE BOW

  In which I make various self-destructive gestures, flirt none too successfully or seriously with suicide, pull back from the brink via the written word.

  6. ALL GREAT BOOKS WIND UP WITH THE WRITER GETTING HIS TEETH BASHED IN

  The only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared predicament.

  7. LIFE V. ART

  Do I still love literature?

  8. HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE

  How it didn’t.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  PROLOGUE

  In which I discuss another book as a way to throw into bold relief what this book is about.

  ALL CRITICISM is a form of autobiography.

  I’ve never met the poet Ben Lerner, though we trade email now and then, since we’re interested in each other’s work. In my case, “interested” is a bit of an understatement. I’m obsessed with him as my doppelgänger of the next generation. Both of us went to Brown, have lived in Spain, are Jewish. I wasn’t born in Topeka, as he was, but growing up in a northern California suburb felt as far removed from Oz as Kansas. Both of us are writers and “critics.” Both of us have/had accomplished mothers and dreamier fathers. Above all, both of us are in agony over the “incommensurability of language and experience” and our detachment from our own emotions.

  Ben’s most recent book, Leaving the Atocha Station, is nominally a novel but thick with roman à clef references to his childhood in Topeka, his undergraduate and graduate years in Providence, his Fulbright year in Madrid, his essay on the Library of America edition of John Ashbery’s poetry (which includes the poem “Leaving the Atocha Station”), his poet friends Cyrus Console and Geoffrey G. O’Brien, his psychologist parents (his mother is the feminist writer Harriet Lerner). I’m going to go ahead and treat the novel’s narrator, Adam, as if he were Ben. Ben won’t mind!

  His book—as what serious book is not?—is born of genuine despair. Adam/Ben wonders if his poems are “so many suicide notes.” If the actual were ever to replace art, he’d swallow a bottle of white pills. If he can’t believe in poetry, he’ll close up shop. You and me both, pal.

  Leaving the Atocha Station “chronicles the endemic disease of our time: the difficulty of feeling,” a perfect phrase a reviewer once used to describe an imperfect book of mine. Ben never lies about how hard it is to leave the station—to get past oneself to anything at all. He incessantly wonders what it would be like to look at himself from another’s perspective, imagining “I was a passenger who could see me looking up at myself looking down.” He wants to take everything personally until his personality dissolves and he can say yes to everything. Ben has never come anywhere near such an apotheosis. Neither have I. When I was a little kid, I was a very good baseball player, but I mostly preferred to go over to the park across from our house, sit atop the hill, and watch Little Leaguers, kids my age or younger, play for hours. “What’s the matter with you?” my father would ask me. “You should be out there playing. You shouldn’t be watching.” I don’t know what’s the matter with me—why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor—but playing has somehow always struck me as a fantastically unfulfilling activity.

  What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? I’ve lifted these two sentences from the flap copy (surely written by Lerner). The nature of language itself is a major part of Adam’s problem: he’s unable to settle on the right word in English, unable to understand Spanish, revels in mistranslation as a bottomlessly rich metaphor for all miscommunication. An unfortunate fact about stuttering—the subject of my autobiographical novel, Dead Languages, published when I was the same age Ben is now—is that it prevents me from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, I’ve come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property, not mine except by way of disingenuous circumlocution.

  About the 2004 Madrid bombings—three of the bombs exploded in the Atocha Station—Ben says, “When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz.” He wonders if he’ll be the only American in history who visits Granada without seeing the Alhambra. While Spain is voting, he’s checking email. Easy enough to judge him. Harder to acknowledge the near universality of such lassitude. In the fall of 1974 I left the Bay Area to go to college in Providence, Rhode Island, which I imagined as, quite literally, Providence—a heavenly city populated by seraphic souls. I imagined Rhode Island as a literal island, the exotic edge of the eastern coast. And I saw Brown as an enclosed, paradisiacal space in which strong boys played rugby on fields of snow, then read Ruskin by gaslight in marble libraries too old to close, and girls with thick dark hair, good bodies, and great minds talked about Goethe (which I thought was pronounced “Go-eth”) at breakfast. The first month of my first semester, black students occupied the administration building and demanded increases in black student enrollment and financial aid. These seemed to me laudable goals, so I went over to become part of the picket line outside the building and marched in a circle, chanting, for a few minutes, but the whole event felt like a really weak imi
tation of all the demonstrations I’d been going to since I was six years old, and I wanted to get away from groups and the West Coast and my former milieu for a while. A few people from my dorm were tossing around a Frisbee on the back side of the green. I left the picket line to go join them.

  If Ben cares about “the arts,” it’s only to measure the distance between his experience of the actual works and the claims made on their behalf: “The closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.” He’s “unworthy.” Profundity is “unavailable from within the damaged life.” And yet he’s willing to say, somewhat begrudgingly, that Ashbery is a great poet: “It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. It is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: ‘You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.’ ”

  This is a lot. Still, is that the best art can do now—be a holding tank/reflecting pool for lostness? Maybe, maybe. Life’s white machine. The words are written under water. Ben has nothing to say and is saying it into a tiny phone. Why was he born between mirrors? Twenty-three years older than he is, I’m in exactly the same mess. The question I want to ask, in the book that follows: Do I have a way out?

  1

  NEGOTIATING AGAINST MYSELF

  In which I evoke my character and personality, especially the way I always argue against myself, am ridiculously ambivalent—who knew?

  Real life

  AT A VERY EARLY AGE I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated writers.” Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. They saw themselves the same way. They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression, by writing yet another article they didn’t want to write. They worshipped “real writers,” i.e., writers who wrote books. Henry Roth. Hortense Calisher. Jerzy Kosinski. Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write books, be worshipped.

  Hellman’s statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” was my mother’s mantra. For many years, she was the West Coast correspondent for The Nation. Draconian, omnipotent, she read a few of my early short stories, e.g., “A Few Words About a Wall,” which she overpraised by way of dismissing. She died of breast cancer during my junior year of college.

  My father, who throughout his adult life was severely manic-depressive and constantly checking himself in to mental hospitals, where he craved and received dozens of electroshock therapy treatments, died a few years ago at ninety-eight. I’ll never forget his running back and forth in the living room and repeating, “I need the juice,” while my third-grade friends and I tried to play indoor miniature golf. Thirty years later, I asked him what he thought of my writing, and he said, “Too bad you didn’t become a pro tennis player. You had some talent.” I sent him a galley of my book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, in which he plays a major role; he sent back a list of errata. When the book tied for fifteenth place on the bestseller list one week, I clipped the listing and sent it to him. He asked me whether that counted—being tied for last. I live in fear of becoming my father.

  I was the editor of my junior high school and high school papers. In high school I worked at McDonald’s. Got fired. I worked at a fabric store. Got fired. My freshman year at Brown—where I was an almost unfathomably devoted English major who closed the library nearly every night for four years and who, at the end of one particularly productive work session, actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, “I shall dethrone Shakespeare”—I worked as a custodian. Got fired. (Despite once having been an athlete, I have never been good at simple physical maneuvers—never learned how to snap my fingers properly, blow a bubble, whistle, dive, rope climb, swing higher and higher on a swing.) One of my fellow student-custodians asked me if I was this bad on purpose or whether I was really that uncomprehending of the relation between soap and water. I also worked as a proofreader at the Rhode Island Historical Society. I worked as a TA at Iowa. I house-sat whenever and wherever possible. I got a lot of grants. I made a very small amount of money stretch a long way.

  I first started teaching at a private high school, with branches in Santa Monica and Malibu, for the children of the rich and semifamous. The kids would be, say, the daughter of the comedian Flip Wilson, the girlfriend of the son of Elizabeth Montgomery, Rob Lowe’s little brother. They weren’t, needless to say, interested in their school-work. I would sit in the front of the class and pretend to have answers to their questions about history, geometry, science. “Who wrote The Scarlet Letter?” Maybe look at the spine of the book; might be a clue there. (Where was Google? This was 1985.) The entire day would go by like that. During recess and even during class, they would be running to the bathroom to drop acid and I’d be madly working on revisions of my book about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words.

  I’d show the kids the manuscript I was working on. Beyond charming, they’d laugh at my woes—no way this book is being published, dude. For the graduation ceremony, I wrote brief satiric profiles of all the seniors. These profiles received the most sincerely appreciative response of anything I’ve ever written. I have an image of myself on the bench in the tiny schoolyard, reworking the sentences from Dead Languages, hoping beyond hope that there was life in this book, that books could be my life.

  Negotiating against myself

  THE ASTROLOGER AND I met for two hours, and nearly all of it was, to me, mumbo jumbo, but one thing she said rang incontrovertibly true. She said my Sun is very late Cancer—less than a degree away from Leo. Therefore, supposedly, I partake of Cancer qualities (domestic, nurturing, protective) as well as Leo qualities (ambitious, attention-seeking, overbearing). My leoninity is apparently bolstered by the fact that in Leo both Uranus (rule-breaker) and Mercury (mind) are sitting within 4 degrees of the sun. This extremely close association means that all my Cancer tendencies have a strong Leo flavor, and vice versa.

  Whatever. I’m a complete skeptic. (Decades ago, at my Transcendental Meditation initiation ceremony, I was informed that “Sho-ring” was my mantra. The next week, I told my TM teacher I couldn’t use “Sho-ring” because every time I said it aloud, all it signified to me was how to perform a marriage proposal. I asked for another mantra. The teacher said no.) But then the astrologer emailed me, “A perfect example of this tension within your Sun sign is the little exchange we had over my reading your chart. Though you were curious about it in a party-chatter sort of way, your initial reaction to my suggestion that we talk about it for an hour or two was to recoil and let me know—in clear, unambiguous terms—that you didn’t take it seriously enough to warrant that kind of conversation. That was very Leo. Then, in short order, part of you got worried that you’d been too harsh, hurt my feelings, and perhaps damaged a personal relationship. That was very Cancer.”

  That’s me. It just is.

  Negotiating against myself

  IT’S HARD NOW to reanimate how viscerally so many people hated Bush just a few years ago, but looking back on him now, I remember him as a homebody, someone who doesn’t like to travel, travels with his pillow, is addicted to eight hours of sleep a night; so am I. In India, he wasn’t sufficiently curious to go see the Taj Mahal. I must admit I could imagine doing the same thing. For his New Year’s resolution nine months after invading Iraq, he said he wanted to eat fewer sweets; he was widely and justifiab
ly mocked for this, but this was also my New Year’s resolution the same year. He pretends to love his father, but he hates him. He pretends to admire his mother, but he reviles her. Check and check. (When the Dutch translator of Dead Languages asked if “Daddums” could be translated as “molten fool,” I said, “Yep, pretty much.”)

  He finds Nancy Pelosi sexy, but he won’t admit it (cf. my imaginative relation to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann). He outsources every task he can. He walked into Condi Rice’s office and said, “Fuck Saddam—he’s going down.” I could imagine saying this. He loves to watch football and eat pretzels. He did everything he could to avoid serving in the Vietnam War; in 1974, when the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector. As do I, he prides himself on being able to assess people immediately based on their body language. When he has the tactical advantage, he presses it to the limit; when he’s outflanked, he’s unattractively defensive. I don’t negotiate against myself: I’m incapable of embodying this Bush aperçu, but I quote it at least once a month.

  He’s not very knowledgeable about the world. He has trouble pronouncing the names of foreign leaders. He’s obsessed with losing those last ten pounds. He’s remarkably tongue-tied in public but supposedly relatively smart in private. He had a lower SAT score than most of his Ivy League classmates; so did I. He wildly overvalues the poetry in motion of athletes. He once said he couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be poor; I have trouble reading books by people whose sensibility is wildly divergent from my own. He wasted his youth in a fog of alcohol and drugs; I didn’t do this, but sometimes I pretend I did. He reads a newspaper by glancing at the headlines—more or less what I do. He loves to get summaries of things rather than reading the thing itself. He’s never happier than in the box seat of a ballpark. He takes way too much pride in throwing the ceremonial first pitch over the plate for a strike. He’s slightly under six feet tall but pretends he’s six feet. I’m barely six feet and claim to be six one. He’s scared to death of dying.