The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  Acclaim for

  WENDY LESSER’s

  The Amateur

  “[Lesser] has the gift of enabling the reader to grasp the deeper workings of art forms, both high and low, in the act of describing how they affect her.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Perhaps [Lesser’s] most remarkable and unconventional feat is to have written an autobiography that is neither an exercise in self-aggrandizement nor in self-embarrassment, but is a work of arresting—almost shocking—modesty and restraint. In addition, it is consistently interesting and surprising.”

  —Janet Malcolm

  “Filled with beautifully chiseled language and lucid observation.… Showcases a lively mind, brimming with fascinating perceptions about the world we live in.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The Amateur delights the reader with an independence of mind that has almost passed from our cultural scene.… With great vitality, Lesser brings her appetite for life into an accounting of her works and days like no other contemporary autobiography.”

  —Maureen Howard

  “The Amateur is not a typical memoir.… [It] is that rare thing: the story of an intellectual odyssey undertaken by a woman.… [Lesser] is a critic to be treasured.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  WENDY LESSER

  The Amateur

  Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of four previous books; her reviews and essays appear in major newspapers and magazines across the country. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1997 she received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and son.

  ALSO BY WENDY LESSER

  A Director Calls

  Pictures at an Execution

  His Other Half:

  Men Looking at Women

  through Art

  The Life below the Ground:

  A Study of the Subterranean

  in Literature and History

  Hiding in Plain Sight:

  Essays in Criticism and Autobiography

  (editor)

  For my sister, Janna Lesser

  CONTENTS

  Overture

  In Washington Square

  Wish Fulfillment

  Vocabulary

  Mr. Jones

  Thinking Back on Harvard

  An American in England

  Consultants

  Strange Meeting

  Report on a Site Visit

  Founding a Magazine

  Drafted

  On Philanthropy

  Out of Academia

  Dance Lessons

  Passionate Witness

  Portrait of a Ballerina

  A Night at the Opera

  Ralph

  The Conversion

  Chasing Daldry

  Thom Gunn

  Elegy for Mario Savio

  My Imaginary New York Life

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Fragments of this book, in somewhat different form, have appeared in a variety of places, including the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, San Francisco Focus, Two Cities, Dance Ink, and three anthologies: The State of the Language (edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks), The Company of Cats (edited by Michael Rosen), and Tolstoy’s Dictaphone (edited by Sven Birkerts). I am grateful to the editors of these publications for their encouragement.

  My deepest thanks are due to those who made this book possible, and especially to Richard Rizzo, Nicholas Rizzo, Katharine Ogden Michaels, Lisa Michaels, Gloria Loomis, Camille Smith, Dan Frank, and, as always, Arthur Lubow.

  OVERTURE

  he autobiographical mode implies the justification of a life, but that is rather hard to do when one is still in the midst of living it. Also, it is not clear exactly what in the life could justify it. The plan you conceived and executed? A laughable chimera, believable only when you are nineteen years old and deciding on a college major. The choices you made? But if they turned out well, you don’t necessarily deserve the credit, and if you try to take it, you will merely sound foolish or smug. Do you, in any case, make the important choices, or are they thrust on you?

  I had this argument recently with a friend who is nearly my age, a theater director who lives in England. Like me, he has been a freelancer all his working life; in other words, his whole career would seem to be a series of choices. Like me, he is married and a parent. He said: You never really make choices—even, or especially, about the big things. I said: Maybe you don’t, but I am very conscious of having made choices in my life. You can’t plan how the choices will turn out; that isn’t under your control. But you can certainly make them. Or at least I can. I feel myself doing so all the time.

  Of course, whether you approach life in this way is largely determined by your character, and we don’t choose our characters. My own character seems to have been remarkably consistent over a lifetime. I think I was born with a sense of an instantaneous connection between the things I perceived in the world and my feelings about those things. I was born with it, and then it was encouraged in me (largely by my mother, who pretty much raised me on her own). I can see the same thing now in my son: he knows right away how he feels about things—there is no gap between perception and response. I wouldn’t have thought this was unusual, except that I have detected the absence of it in many people. It mainly takes the form of their not knowing what they want. I almost always know what I want. My only questions are, first, how I might go about getting it, and second, whether it would be good for me to have it (morally or practically or physiologically or psychologically good—I tend to jumble all these things together).

  This instantaneous response often makes me difficult, and sometimes makes me stupid. I can be blind to the complicated hesitations and byways of a situation; I am a bit like a tank, running roughshod over everything. This gets me places, but sometimes the subtleties get trampled in the process. I have tried to compensate for this tendency in myself, and life (including, mainly, other people and works of art) has done its best to help me compensate by forcing me to slow down and consider the details.

  But despite its difficulties—which, in any case, are mostly difficulties for other people—my character has served me well. It has made me unable to do most of the jobs that seemed available to someone of my age and education (lawyer, academic, high-powered executive), and it has given me something else to do instead. It has made me … well, an eighteenth-century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in twentieth-century Berkeley.

  My character gave me this, but my character couldn’t have done it on its own. Social history helped. I was born into the upwardly mobile, third-generation-from-immigration middle class. Economic history helped, too. I came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when America was rich enough to spawn people like me, people who made a living on the fringes of the economy by defining a previously nonexistent niche and then occupying it. I don’t think it would be possible for someone starting out now to do things in quite the way I have done. The resources simply aren’t there.

  And if history is one factor, geography is another. Berkeley, where I have lived since I was twenty-three, is not just the background to my life: it has in many ways shaped that life. Like eighteenth-century London, it is filled with coffeehouses, scruffy artists, notorious lawbreakers, and underemployed literary types. This town makes my kind of life seem not only possible but normal. I belong here.

  Perhaps I even belong in a more rooted way th
an most of the people around me, because I was born in California, and so was my father. This crude biographical fact qualifies me for membership in the rather select club of second-generation native Californians. Actually, we can’t be all that rare; there must be millions of us statewide, especially when you start to count small babies. But among people my age, in my professional and personal circles, I know only two or three who share this background.

  Often, people in California think I am from New York. This may be because I am brash, impatient, judgmental, loud, energetic, efficient, pale-skinned, and red-haired—not qualities traditionally associated with laid-back, beach-frequenting Californians. Or it might be because I am Jewish: in Texas, at any rate, I have noticed that “Eastern” or “New York” is used as a code word for “Jewish,” and I suspect that the same thing may be true, at a slightly more benign and less conscious level, among nonmetropolitan Californians. Or the confusion may be due to the fact that my mother is from New York, and though she has been trying since her early twenties, when she first arrived on the West Coast, to erase the more conspicuous manners and speech patterns of her natal place, some of its inflections nonetheless got passed along to me. I say “stand on line,” for instance, whereas almost every Californian I went to school with said “stand in line.” And no doubt my brash, impatient, energetic side can be traced to her as well. (My father, though equally judgmental, tends to be more inhibited.)

  I have tried for most of my life not to be identified with California. Any kind of regionalism, but particularly the brief-historied, long-winded, unremittingly outdoorsy regionalism of the Far West, has always struck me as stultifying. Still, I have lived here all but six years of my life (four of them spent at college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two more in Cambridge, England) and have become increasingly resigned to the fact that this is where I am always going to live. Yet something in me still wants to resist.

  Among the things I resist is the popularly held view of California. This somewhat outlandish vision is perpetrated not solely or even largely by the so-called East Coast media, but by Californians themselves: the movie and television moguls of Hollywood, the journalists and novelists of Marin County, the self-styled inheritors of Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. Many of these California spokespeople have only recently arrived, and they therefore see what they expect to see: colorful eccentricity, shallow relationships, perfect weather, mindless enjoyment, and the utter absence of any kind of Puritan work ethic. Like all half-true portraits, this one is both annoyingly persistent and persistently annoying. What especially rankles is the implication that, because we live “out west,” we are irretrievably cut off from the rest of the country’s serious artistic and intellectual culture.

  Part of what I bring to my daily life—part of what it means to live in Berkeley, for me—is the continuing sense of a life lived outside California as well as in it. By this I don’t just mean I am aware of what is going on in the metropolitan centers (though I do mean that, as well: an eighteenth-century person of letters needs to pay attention to what is happening in the faraway centers of culture, whether they be Edinburgh and Paris or New York and London). What I mean by “outside” is the life that lies beyond my immediate vicinity and my precise point in time. You could call it the life of art. The things that have happened to me in my four decades here in California, and the things that have happened on stage and canvas and screen and paper, are not two separate realms. They are all part of the mixture that has made me what I am. Or so I imagine. It is always possible that I am deluding myself; we Californians have made a specialty of self-delusion. But we have also specialized in certain forms of clarity and directness (you can see it in the Los Angeles paintings of David Hockney and Richard Diebenkorn, the film criticism of Pauline Kael). The clarity and the self-delusion go hand in hand, support each other, make each other necessary. And I am the child of both traditions.

  IN WASHINGTON SQUARE

  ome places are points in a landscape and others are places in the mind. Tucson, for instance, is the former, Hell the latter (though even Tucson, when I cite it this way in the pages of a book, momentarily shifts out of the landscape and into your mind). Many places are both—actual geographical locations with an overlay, or underbelly, of fictional, imagined, spiritual existence. This double life is especially characteristic of large cities. World capitals like New York, London, Paris, and Rome belong not only to their citizens and their tourists but also to the novelists, poets, painters, architects, journalists, playwrights, and filmmakers who have inhabited and borrowed them. A Henry James character, remarking on his “latent preparedness” for a visit to London, recalls: “I had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home—at Saragossa, Illinois—in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell.”

  Cities hold on to the events that have taken place in them and the novels that have been written about them. Each urban crevice stores up this radioactive material and gradually leaks it out to successive generations. Especially if you live in an old city, you will be conscious not only of the many other lives led alongside your own but also of the past and future lives crowding in. Far from diluting the effect of your own experience, this crowded history will strengthen each present event: the cracked sidewalks and porous building materials will store up your life and give it forth to you in a way that the smooth walls of a New Town or a planned city never could. For people who live in older cities, the distinction between a place in the landscape and a place in the mind is impossible to make.

  You are lucky—or, let us say, your life will more easily make sense to you—if the place in which you live and the language you speak have some inherent connection to each other. I do not just mean that it is hard to be an exile, though in a broader sense perhaps that is exactly what I do mean. America, for instance, is a country full of exiles. Its language was developed in a small, close-knit society, with words that applied to the everyday features of a circumscribed island life; and this language, transplanted from Britain, was then supposed to be adequate to describe a vast continent filled with strange geographies and peopled by numerous different strands of humanity. The language couldn’t really do this: it had to stretch, and sometimes break, to cover its new ground. The result is that American literature tends to be quite abstract in comparison to the concreteness of English literature. Think of our nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and Britain’s social novelists, our seriousminded experimenters and their witty explorers of the “conventional” and the “real.” Think of Moby-Dick and Middlemarch.

  For an American living west of the Mississippi, this alienation from the sources of the language is still more extreme. Our town names, like Los Angeles architecture, seem mere parodies of themselves: Albany, California, is not even Albany, New York, much less the original Duke’s Albany or his even more ancient country, Albion. The names we Californians give our things and places are echoes, and these imaginative echoes all seem to come from two removes elsewhere. “Gloucester” is merely a cheese I can buy at the local foodstore; it has no concrete connection to a town in England or even Massachusetts.

  This kind of displacement often leads to an elevation of the imaginative connections over the real. When I buy my Gloucester cheese in Berkeley, I think of neither the place in England where it originated nor the town in New England that borrows the name, but the Earl who fathered Edgar and Edmund in King Lear. My cheese skips its geographical heritage and goes straight to the literary sources that have become, ex post facto, its ancestors. One is likely, under such circumstances, to forget about the chronological transmission of culture and believe instead in a kind of all-encompassing literary unconscious. The problem is similar to that described by Emerson in relation to architecture. “The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models,” he says, “is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome by the feeling that these structures are imitations also—faint copi
es of an invisible archetype.”

  A further sense of removal from the sources of meaning afflicts those who, like me, were brought up in the suburbs. Our literary memories, in English, are mostly those of urban places: primarily London, secondarily New York and Boston. In America one also has a backup set of memories provided by the pioneer or rural literature of James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and others. But for the child of the suburbs, there is no imaginative echo surrounding real places, no literary ancestry infusing the objects of everyday life. Especially for the California suburbanite, there is a distinct separation between the real and the fictional—between the swimming pools, shopping centers, cyclone fences, and one-story ranch-style houses that constitute existence, and the “bleak houses,” “New Grub Streets,” and “Bostonians” that constitute literature.

  As a denizen of the California suburbs, I grew up feeling the absence of something, knowing that a deeper layer of significance ought to lie behind the flatness of my surroundings. My first response to this longing was to immerse myself in science fiction, which made up the bulk of my reading from age ten to age sixteen. This, if it did not give me literary echoes, at least gave me the sense that hidden meanings enriched everyday objects. The reason much science fiction seems banal is that it is so obviously a search for significance. It projects our daily life or our current technologies onto an unknown future or an alien planet, and thereby asks for ultimate causes, ultimate meanings. Science fiction is the opiate of the atheists. It gives those who believe in rationality the assurance that something larger than randomness or human ineptness is at the root of our existence. Coincidence rationalized into pattern is the essence of science fiction; we who can find no rational connections in our disjunctive daily lives are thereby persuaded that understanding is simply a matter of seeking out the missing pieces.