The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  Whatever form it takes, your e-mail address becomes a part of your permanent identity in a way that no mere phone number can. For one thing, you can’t hide it. You can make an obscene phone call from an anonymous number or mail a poison pen letter without giving a return address, but your e-mail message carries its provenance in its heading. This necessary mutuality is both e-mail’s virtue and its curse. That is, you have to consider before engaging in any communication whether you want to hear from someone as well as speak to him, because he will thereafter possess your address. There are no one-way assaults in the world of e-mail: if you launch a missive, you automatically open yourself up to a counterattack.

  And unlike a phone number, which can be as temporary as your present whereabouts, your e-mail address travels with you. I had exactly the same CompuServe number during my London stay as during my normal Berkeley life. People seeking to contact me didn’t have to know I was out of the country or even out of the office. Sometimes I would amuse myself by trying to imagine where my virtual mailbox was located. Did it float somewhere in the fourth dimension, rushing into my computer only when it was actually consulted? Or did it hover somewhere over the Atlantic, relaying messages between my temporarily European self and my North American correspondents? I had been told it was in cyberspace—but what kind of space was that, exactly? Thinking such thoughts is a bit like trying to imagine how one’s voice gets through those little telephone wires into the other person’s receiver, only more so. You regress to your childhood self, for whom all such concepts are made concrete and miniature: the little person inside the telephone receiver, the tiny mailbox inside the computer. And the fact that my computer was a laptop (a ridiculously compact mechanism which, the dealer told me, was more powerful than the huge computer that had flown the first man to the moon) made the miniaturization imagery even more credible.

  I discovered just how portable my e-mail was when a thief crept into my London house and walked off with my computer. One day I had been happily communicating with the entire world, the next I was reduced to virtual silence. My anxiety at the loss of my equipment was exacerbated by my sense of all the messages I was missing. I had become dependent on my daily fix, and the burglar, as if guessing at this aspect of my psychology, had even cut the phone wire that led into the computer—a symbolic act, easily remedied by the purchase of a new wire, but one that drove home for me my feeling of violent interruption. “I feel as if I’m hemorrhaging information,” I told my husband. But information was only the half of it. All the little pieces of me that I had been feeding into cyberspace were loosed into the world, never to return.

  Yet when I got a new computer, hooked myself back up to CompuServe, and checked my old mailbox, there it still was, just as if no interruption had ever occurred. My e-mail had been patiently waiting for me out there in Nowhere Land, the messages accumulating until I was once again able to pick them up. The beauty of the system, it turns out, is precisely that it’s not connected to any physical object. They can steal the transmitting device from you, but the mail service continues unabated in its ideal Platonic form—temporarily inaccessible, maybe, but always ready to be picked up. I had my answer to Bishop Berkeley’s question: if the tree had fallen in cyberspace, the sound could simply have waited decades or generations or millennia until someone came along to hear it, and then it would have existed. In this respect, as in so much else, e-mail’s qualities are strangely mixed. It is both speedy to the point of instantaneousness and arrested in a state of timelessness.

  So have I lost my soul to e-mail? I think not. Of course, proper use of it requires some mastery, and particularly self-mastery. One’s initial subservience to the medium’s surprising delights is inevitably a bit enslaving. (But this must have been true of all new media, even the cave paint at Lascaux.) Still, once it has been brought under control and made to function in the life you have already constructed for yourself, e-mail can be a great gift. If you keep all those strangers and business connections and mass-directory people off your screen, it can be, as Furbank put it, “like enjoying a second life.” You will be rewarded with all the old-fashioned pleasures of the intimate personal letter. You will be offered, in other words, the chance to gain a soul rather than lose one. As an atheist, I’m not sure I believe in the very idea of a soul; but if I had to say where it resides, I would point to the thing in us that allows us to be and have intimate friends. And e-mail, by bringing back personal correspondence, reintroduces us to the form of writing that best enables us to know and acknowledge friendship.

  CHASING DALDRY

  ou may have wondered what I was doing in London for those four months. At times I even wondered myself; and I know my husband and son wondered why they had been forced to give up their comfortable Berkeley lives and relocate, however temporarily, to this antiquated, grimy, senselessly managed metropolis, with its beautiful old parks, horrible new buildings, interminable suburbs, overcrowded center, decaying transit system, strange domestic deficiencies, and stunningly rich cultural offerings. If I had a single answer, it was that we were there because of the theater.

  It all started in 1993, when I went to London for a week on my own (my husband, in exchange, got a solo week in Sicily) and saw a production of An Inspector Calls at the National Theatre. I am used to relying on my own judgments, but rarely have I allowed a single judgment to determine so many of my future actions. I was both dazzled and moved by that production—it reminded me just how good theater can be, at its best—and within a few months I had decided that my next book would be about its director, Stephen Daldry.

  My previous book had been about execution and murder (about execution as murder, really), so I was looking for a topic I could passionately love instead of passionately hate. I also had a vague idea that I wanted to write something about the performing arts, so that the written, permanent artifact I produced would complement the ephemeral art form it described rather than simply duplicating it, as my books about literature and painting had done. What I actually wanted to do, as I realized even then, was to write a book about Mark Morris. But that had already been done, quite beautifully, by Joan Acocella, so I was obliged to search out another brilliant young artist for myself. At the time I had no doubts about settling on a subject after only a brief exposure to his work. After all, I had fallen in love with Mark Morris’s work on the basis of a single evening’s encounter with L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato, and over the years that initial judgment had proven to be absolutely correct. Ergo, the same thing could happen with Daldry.

  Logic is not always the best guide in these cases. Still, all the signs were good at the beginning. I sent Stephen Daldry a letter at the Royal Court—the venerable London theater of which, at the age of thirty-three, he was about to take command—asking if I could follow him around for a bit, with an eye toward writing an article or even a book. For the first and last time in our acquaintance, he responded immediately, with a note saying fine, when shall we start? I ascertained that he was about to go to New York to open Inspector on Broadway, and instantly scheduled a trip to coincide with that production’s final rehearsals and earliest previews. (I was guided in this scheduling decision by my friend Arthur, who, having already profiled a couple of theater people for The New Yorker, could intelligently advise me on which rehearsals were crucial to see.)

  One of my Berkeley friends refers to this trip as “the time Wendy went to New York andjoined the circus.” It’s true that I came back bitten by the theatrical bug in a way that is hardly appropriate for someone my age. My week at the Royale Theater filled me with a new kind of energy and enthusiasm, with the sense that live drama was much more exciting than boring old printed literature. The frantic last-minute changes, the technologically complicated sets, the intense rehearsal periods, the worn old theater in its daytime incarnation, the feeling of an overall group ethic among the cast and crew, mingled with subsidiary alliances and spats: I loved it all. Anyone who got involved in theater as an adole
scent will know what I am talking about. My son feels this way now about his drama classes and school plays. But my son is thirteen and I, at the time I am writing about, was already forty-two.

  Stephen Daldry couldn’t have been nicer on our first meeting. He took time off after a harried Saturday-night preview to have dinner with me at the restaurant across the street from the theater. He described the genesis of the Inspector Calls production. He told me his dreams. We discussed left-wing politics. He was charming, and I was charmed. We arranged that I would come over to London to see whatever he did next at the Royal Court.

  That later trip—in November of 1994—gave me my first inkling of the problems I was to face. At the Royal Court, Daldry was no longer the free agent he had been in New York. He was hemmed in by all the responsibilities and personalities of an overworked, underfinanced institution, and he exacerbated the situation by making all decisions at the last possible moment. Rehearsals and even performances would be rescheduled at his command, and the mere act of making a short appointment to see him became a major undertaking.

  “I don’t know who’s going to go crazy first, you or Stephen,” said one of his kindly female assistants, commenting on the difficulties of my project, which had by now grown into a multi-year book.

  “He is,” I said grimly, “because I can always get out of here and go back to California.”

  Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. Besides, with my usual eye for the philanthropic main chance, I had succeeded in getting a travel grant from a fellowship-giving body. So I hauled my family off to London for the summer and early fall of 1995. The three of us saw a lot of theater (I’d say we went to an average of three productions a week for the whole of that four months), and on some days I even saw a little of Stephen Daldry.

  The best times were when he was rehearsing a play. At those moments, Daldry the adminstrator—the charming, prevaricating manipulator, the public relations expert, the phenomenal fundraiser—would drop away, and Daldry the director would once again appear. Rehearsals are essentially repetitions with changes, and it would be easy to find them boring; on some days they are boring. But as I watched a production emerge bit by bit, with chance elements producing entirely new approaches and large chunks of dialogue suddenly cut or rewritten, I could feel the thrill of creation actually taking place. Art came to life before my very eyes.

  It will be objected that I, as a total outsider to the theater, must have been a pretty poor observer. To this I have two answers. One is that theater is finally meant for the outsiders, for the audience members who attend only once and who make their judgments instantaneously. In those terms, anyone who has been an audience member can potentially become a critic—and by this time I had been an audience member at a lot of plays, starting when I was a small child. The other argument is that the outsider brings something to the situation that the expert does not, so that she may be capable of seeing in fresher ways, and conveying what she sees in clearer terms, than the professional can. My model in this regard is and always has been George Orwell. In The Road to Wigan Pier (perhaps my favorite of his books), he tells us exactly what it feels like for a non-miner to go down into a mine, and it is the amateurish fear and wonder and disgust that make his account compelling.

  I aspired to Orwellian description, but I never quite achieved it, perhaps because I lack the cool transparency that characterizes Orwell’s prose. I am just not cut out to be a fly on the wall. I would sit quietly through six rehearsals, and then at the seventh I would burst out, “But what if you had him facing that way instead?” or “Oh, no! I can’t believe you’re going to cut that line!” Sometimes Daldry would give me a look that shut me up; other times he would take my advice. Once, I remember, he took four lines of notes I had given him and began copying them into his own handwriting—“So the actors will think they’re my suggestions,” he whispered conspiratorially. (Generally the scene turned out no better when he took my advice than when he ignored it, and he would usually have to put it back the way it was before.) For the most part Daldry more than tolerated me; he occasionally used me as a theatrical prop, allowed me to feed cough drops to the hoarse actors, and otherwise incorporated me into the close-knit family of the rehearsal room. I doubt that many other artists could have worked with someone like me around. I certainly wouldn’t have allowed such an intrusive observer on my terrain, and I remain exceedingly grateful to Stephen for his unusual openness.

  Whether the book turned out as I would have wished is another matter. The biggest problem was that Stephen Daldry never again did a production as good as An Inspector Calls—not, at least, during the four years I was watching him. If I had gargantuan faith in my powers, I might attribute this to the journalistic equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: the theory would be that I was altering the story just by chronicling it. Much more likely, however, it was due to the peculiar conjunction of Stephen Daldry’s own career, the Royal Court’s history, and the artistic climate in London at the time, all of which meant that Daldry spent far more time on the building as a whole than on any plays of his own. He pretty much dried up as a director during the time I was following him around.

  “I’ve got to renew my resources,” he said to me in the last conversation we had, after I had already finished the book and he was explaining why he had decided to leave the Royal Court. “Right now I’m emptied out. I’ve got to feed myself, give myself something to work from again.”

  I hope his recuperation works; I hope that, before too long, he manages to do a new production that is even more remarkable than his brilliant Inspector. But this is not because I am generous or kindly disposed toward Stephen Daldry. My motives are entirely selfish. I want him to succeed because I don’t like feeling that my artistic judgments are randomly accurate rather than permanently true.

  THOM GUNN

  dedicated my book about Daldry to the poet Thom Gunn for several reasons (in addition to the usual ones, that is, of affection and felt connection). Though he has never been in the theater himself, Thoom has had long, strong ties with the theatrical world: his best friend from university days, Tony White, was an actor (until he died, tragically young, in a freak football accident), and his lover of over forty years, Mike Kitay, was a theater director for a while in the 1950s and 1960s. Also, Thom Gunn and Stephen Daldry seemed to me to have certain superficial qualities in common: they were both English, both gay (in a self-consciously masculine, determinedly un-“sissy” way), both charming and attractive to people of all ages and sexes, both rather childlike in their enthusiasms. But beyond this, I wanted to hold Thom Gunn up as a kind of example to Stephen Daldry. By leading off the Daldry book with the poet’s name, I wanted to suggest to the gifted, energetic, but easily distracted young director that if it is possible to fritter away one’s talents, it is also possible to concentrate them in the way Thom Gunn has done, using each passing decade to make the work deeper and richer and more reflective.

  Thom Gunn might serve as an example to just about anyone, for he is that rare thing in the literary-artistic world, a truly virtuous person—“a nice man,” as he is fond of saying about other people we know. But this does not mean he is inoffensive, or squeamishly polite, or any of the other wishy-washy qualities conjured up by the adjective “nice.” If his work has a strong edge to it, this is in part because he has always been intrigued by bad behavior.

  One of the more spectacular examples of this in recent years is his poem sequence about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer’s cannibalistic murders form the basis of a series of four poems Thom Gunn published, under the title “Troubadour,” in the Fall 1993 issue of The Threepenny Review. The poems recount some of Dahmer’s antics in rather gruesome detail, and as we were typesetting them, we had a little betting pool in our three-person office about the number of subscribers who would cancel after the poems appeared. In the end there were no outright cancellations, but the poems did produce their share of outcry, both then and later.


  “I rather like upsetting people,” Gunn admitted, when talking to me about the Dahmer poems several months after their publication. “I’ve always had a childish desire to shock. But I didn’t really think those poems would upset people as much as they did. They weren’t conceived of as being about somebody crazy, but about someone who experiences the things we do, only in more extreme form. I think of them as love poems. I mean, if you want to possess somebody, what better way than to kill them?”

  Was there a connection, I asked, between his winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 1993 and his publishing the Dahmer poems shortly after that? Perhaps, I suggested, he wanted to show that he was still allied with the “undesirables” (as he entitled a little book of his poems about street people, derelicts, and other marginal types). Perhaps he felt guilty about winning America’s biggest literary prize.

  “No,” he said flatly. “I don’t feel at all guilty about the MacArthur. I do feel guilty about having a house whenever I pass by street people. But doesn’t everyone feel that way?”