How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  He was too easily seduced by Tony Blair’s patter, as was I. His wife is smarter than he is, by a lot. Asked by the White House press corps what he was going to give Laura for her birthday, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, conveying, unmistakably, “I’m going to give it to her.” (My wife’s name is Laurie.) He’s intimidated by his father’s friends. He can express his affection most easily to dogs. He finds the metallics of war erotic. His knees are no damn good anymore, so he can’t jog and has taken up another sport: biking (for me, swimming). He loves nicknames. He’s not a good administrator. He has a speech disorder. He views politics as a sporting event. He resents The New York Times’s (declining but still undeniable) role in national life as pseudo-impartial arbiter. In a crisis, he freezes up, has no idea what to do, thinks first of his own safety; note how I responded to the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.

  He just wants to be secure and taken care of and left alone—pretty much my impulses. Asked what he was most proud of during his presidency, he said catching a seven-pound bass. Asked in 2011 what’s on George’s mind now, Laura said, “He’s always worried about our small lake—whether it’s stocked with bass—because he loves to fish. There’s always some concern. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Are the fish not getting enough feed? That’s what he worries about.” He’s lazy (it goes without saying). He hates to admit he’s wrong.

  Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. Asked what’s wrong with the world, G. K. Chesterton said, “I am.”

  Negotiating against ourselves

  Spider-Man, which I watched maybe a hundred times with my daughter, Natalie, then nine, when it came out in 2002, is about how important it is for ordinary boys to view their own bodies as instruments of power—which, incidentally, or not so incidentally, is what has allowed nation-states to go to war from the beginning of time. The names of the main characters in the movie are aggressively average, parodies of Mayberry R.F.D. ordinariness: Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn (who’s both normal and born of Oz), Peter Parker (who literally has a crush on the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson). The words “average,” “ordinary,” and “normal” recur throughout the film.

  It’s high school and peer pressure is the state religion, so Peter has two choices: try to do what he tells his friend, Harry, spiders do—blend in—or he can stand out, which is terrifying. Even when he punches out the bully Flash, another kid calls Peter a freak. But as Norman/Green Goblin Nietzscheanly tells Peter/Spider-Man, “There are eight million people in this city, and those teeming masses exist for the sole purpose of lifting a few exceptional people onto their shoulders.” The Goblin crashes World Unity Day, killing dozens, whereas when he forces Spider-Man to choose between rescuing the woman he loves or a tram full of children, Spider-Man, of course, manages to rescue both MJ and the children. “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” a Yo-Vinnie type informs Gobby. The movie thus figures out a way to deliver an immensely reassuring message to its predominantly male and teenage audience: the metamorphosis of your body from a boy into a man will make you not into a monster who despises the crowd but into the kind of creature whom the crowd idolizes.

  When Peter gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re not the same guy lately: fights in school, shirking your chores. This is the age when a man becomes the man he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s flip from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his conversion from boy to man. When MJ asks him what he imagines his future will be, he says, “It feels like something I never felt before,” alluding to becoming Spider-Man but also to his feeling of falling in love with her. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style. Afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. The screenplay phrases male sexual maturation as the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Asked by Mary Jane what he told Spider-Man about her, Peter says he said, “The great thing about MJ is when you look in her eyes and she’s looking back in yours and smiling—well, everything feels not quite normal, because you feel stronger and weaker at the same time, and you feel excited and at the same time terrified.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world.

  Which it does and doesn’t. The second time Spider-Man rescues MJ, she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling his mask down past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes emphatically clear that Peter’s newfound Spider-Man prowess is onanistic transcendence: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” He changes the position of his fingers. “Thwip. A single strand of webbing shoots out from his wrist.” The webbing flies across the alley and sticks to the side of the other building. Peter tugs on it. It’s tough. He pulls harder. Can’t break it. He wraps one hand around it, closes his eyes, jumps off the roof. He sails through the air.” All three times Spider-Man rescues MJ, they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex—Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked. As Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex flight without any of the messy, emotional cleanup afterward.

  Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, of course. But also, when Uncle Ben changes the lightbulb, he says, “Let there be light.” When Peter fails to show up to help him paint the dining room, Ben writes a teasing note to Peter and addresses him as “Michelangelo.” The testosterone-intensive announcer at the New York Wrestling Foundation has a surprisingly understated side: “The Human Spider?” he asks Peter. “That’s it? That’s the best you got? Nah, you gotta jazz it up a little.” Even the “squirrelly-faced” burglar who steals the foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a carjacking, mouths “Thanks” and flashes a sweet smile when Peter unwisely lets him by into the elevator.

  Ferocity and humility, then, in constant conversation and confusion:

  Negotiating against myself

  ALTHOUGH THE GREEK TRAGEDY professor said that reading the play carefully, once, would probably be sufficient preparation for the test, I couldn’t stop reading Prometheus Bound and also, for some reason, the critical commentary on it. I was a freshman and I loved how scholars felt compelled to criticize the play for not obeying certain Aristotelian dicta but were nevertheless helplessly drawn to “the almost interstellar silence of this play’s remote setting,” as one of them put it. I wrote my sister that even if our father pretended to be Prometheus, he was really only Io. I blurted out quotes to my friend MJ, I mean Debra, with whom I was none too secretly infatuated.

  “Why are you studying so much?” she asked. “You’re running yourself ragged. You know he said we could take the test after spring break, if we want. There’s no reason to punish yourself.”

  “You must not have read the play,” I said, then quoted a line: “ ‘To me, nothing that hurts shall come with a new face.’ The admirable thing about Prometheus is that he accepts his fate without ever even hoping for another outcome.”

  “Yeah, maybe so, but at the end of the play he’s still chained to a rock.”

  “There’s a certain purity to basing your entire identity upon a single idea, don’t you think? Nothing else matters except how completely I comprehend a drama written twenty-four hundred years ago. If I don’t fully grasp each question, after a week of studying, I’ll probably jump off the Caucasus,” I said, referring to the mountains of the play and grabbing her arm. “I can sense
some excitement.”

  “Shhh,” she said, putting her finger over her lipsticked lips. “People are studying.”

  “You’re as bad as the chorus of Oceanus’s daughters, always telling Prometheus to stop pouting.”

  Debra thought I was kidding and laughed, shaking her head. I told myself I was kidding and tried to believe it. I felt like a Greek New Comedy “wise fool,” parading around—to everyone’s astonishment—in chinos and a turtleneck. Studying until five in the morning the day of the exam, falling asleep in my room and waking barely in time, I stumbled into the lecture hall, where I filled four blue books in fifty minutes. My pen didn’t leave paper: whole speeches stormed from my mind. In immense handwriting (child’s handwriting, out of control), I misidentified virtually every passage in the play but explicated them with such fevered devotion that the sympathetic teaching assistant gave me an A—.

  I took a train from Providence to Washington, D.C., then a cab into the suburbs, and when I appeared on her front porch in Bethesda, my aunt asked how long I’d been ill. I groan for the present sorrow, I groan for the sorrow to come, I thought, I groan questioning whether there shall come a time when He shall ordain a limit to my sufferings. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I saw black circles around my eyes. I listened to my aunt tell my mother over the phone how wonderfully I’d matured.

  My uncle, a science adviser to the State Department, was in Japan on a business trip. Nearly all the books in his study, where I secluded myself for most of the Easter vacation, were technical, indecipherable, and of little interest to me—a big Aeschylus fan. Rummaging through desk drawers, I came across elaborate lists of domestic and secretarial errands for my aunt to perform and a few recent issues of Penthouse, which at the time I found extremely erotic because of its emphasis upon Amazonian women.

  My uncle’s office had a small record player and a stack of classical music. He had many performances of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3, the so-called Heroic Symphony, and I found myself immersed, first, in all the liner notes. “Like Beethoven, Napoleon was a small man with a powerful personality,” and Beethoven admired him, so when the French ambassador to Vienna suggested to Beethoven that he write a symphony about Bonaparte, Beethoven agreed. He was just about to send the finished score to Paris for Napoleon’s official approval when he heard that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor. Beethoven tore off the title page, which had only the word “Bonaparte” on it, and changed the dedication to “Heroic Symphony—composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” Beethoven is then supposed to have said, “Is he, too, no more than a mere mortal?” Beethoven was disappointed, in other words, to discover that Napoleon was human.

  What was a funeral march doing in the middle of the symphony? Why was the finale borrowed from Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus? Because—one commentator surmised—Beethoven “planned his symphony as a diptych, after the manner of his favorite book, Plutarch’s Lives, in which every modern biography is paired with an antique one like it. Thus, the first two movements of the Eroica are about Napoleon and the second two about Prometheus.” Oh, Prometheus. I knew, as I listened over and over again to the symphony, that I’d felt elated and suicidal in exactly the same way before.

  And the musicologists talking about Beethoven and Napoleon sounded eerily like the classicists discussing Prometheus or like me discussing the classicists discussing Prometheus or like Peter Parker worrying about becoming Spider-Man: “What Beethoven valued in Bonaparte at the time of writing the Eroica was the attempt to wrest fate from the hands of the gods—the striving that, however hopeless, ennobles the man in the act.” I couldn’t sleep at night because I couldn’t get out of my head either the two abrupt gunshots in E-flat major that began the symphony or the trip-hammer orgasm of the coda, so I outlined an essay on the parallel and contrasting uses of water imagery in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Debra had suggested I adopt a “mythopoeic” approach to the paper. Instead, I circled every water image in both trilogies.

  I’d always wanted to get to know better a high school friend who was now a freshman at Georgetown. I let the phone ring twice and hung up. I called again the next day, and the line was busy. The third time I called, she answered on the first ring, clearly expecting someone else. Her voice was newly inflected to underscore her International Relations major.

  My aunt made breakfast for me every morning. We talked a lot. She asked me to define existentialism. She watched television and washed the dishes. I started agreeing with her. All this happened nearly forty years ago: the documentary film Hearts and Minds had recently been released. I drove into Georgetown to see it, and when I returned I sat in my aunt’s kitchen, excoriating the racist underpinnings of all military aggression, but I was really thinking about only one scene: the moment when two U.S. soldiers, fondling their Vietnamese prostitutes, surveyed the centerfolds taped to the mirrored walls, and for the benefit of the camera, tried to imitate heroic masculinity.

  Negotiating against ourselves

  BROWN STILL, I think, suffers from a massive superiority/inferiority complex (we’re anti-Ivy, but we’re Ivy!), proud of the club it belongs to and anxious about its status within that club. Saith Groucho Marx (two of whose films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, were cowritten by S. J. Perelman ’25, who didn’t graduate), “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member.” At once rebel (we’re more interesting than you are) and wannabe (we got 1390 on our SATs rather than 1520), we’re like Jews in upper-middle-class America: we’re in the winner’s circle but uncertain whether we really belong. In general, Brown is (perceived to be) not the best of the best but within shouting distance of the best of the best—which creates institutional vertigo, a huge investment in and saving irony toward prestige, ambivalence toward cultural norms, and among artists, a desire to stage that ambivalence, to blur boundaries, to confuse what’s acceptable with what’s not.

  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.