Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980, momdead)
My father’s sometime-girlfriend Hannah and I went out to see the new Godard movie, Sauve qui peut (la vie), or Every Man for Himself, at the Quad Theater on Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, on an evening when my father was out with another woman. The film had been widely reviewed as a return to form for Godard, who had for most of the seventies renounced the poetry of his sixties style in favor of Marxist agitprop (or anyway that was the received opinion). I’d been watching his sixties films at repertory houses, and loved the ones I (partly) understood: Breathless, My Life to Live, A Woman Is a Woman, Band of Outsiders, Weekend. This would be the first time I’d seen a new Godard film at the moment of its release. Hannah was a young painter, sharp and funny, as near my age as my father’s. I treasured my friendship with her, even at a time when my anger at my father for surviving my mother was at its very worst, and my treatment of him consisted largely of sullen avoidance.
I didn’t understand Sauve qui peut (la vie). I’ve also never seen it again, so I can’t characterize it for you here. I only recall an undertone of political and sexual disappointment that was beyond me. No major shame in that, as Godard can mystify plenty of adults. I did sense the film’s beauty, the beauty of a pure cinematic voice that even in its pensiveness evoked grand, unnameable emotions. These days, I see that as Godard’s gift, sufficient unto itself: an eroticism of the intellectual life, against which not only the viewer’s suppositions but Godard’s own ideologies are finally helpless. At fifteen, though, I wasn’t at a point where I could trust art which baffled and enraptured me. I needed to feel I’d encompassed it. Perhaps if I’d gone to the movie alone I’d have kidded myself, but in Hannah’s company the incompleteness of my response was exposed to me.
We returned to my family’s home, an odd move given the situation. There we smoked pot together at my family’s kitchen table, a provocation (by both of us) to my absent father, but also an invocation (by me) of my dead mother. It dawned on me that I was being used, a little. Hannah was staking out my dad, seeing if he came home alone, or at all. But that was okay, because I was using Hannah to taunt my father, whether he knew it or not. I wanted to feel I was out on a date with Hannah. The flaw in my game was clear soon enough. As I tired, Hannah grew angry, and my insufficiency as a surrogate became annoying to us both. I wasn’t interested enough in this drama because it wasn’t about me, so I went to bed.
Something was quietly wrecked. Hannah generously treated me as an equal, so it wasn’t her fault that the evening had stripped away part of my disguise, both in terms of Godard and my father. From now on I’d have to go farther from home for my companions, that was the lesson. And Sauve qui peut (la vie) became a farewell to Jean-Luc Godard as one of my primary tokens of identification. He’d betrayed me by belonging more to the adults in the full auditorium at the Quad than he had to me as a teenager sitting in mostly empty repertory houses, alone. I quit trying to see all his movies. The sole exception was Alphaville , which, with its dystopian noir science-fiction plot, was precisely in my ballpark of satirical paranoia. Alphaville was unbudgeable, with Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, the Talking Heads album Fear of Music, and Kafka, from my deep pantheon. The rest, though, was French to me. In fact, I wouldn’t again see a film of Godard’s at the moment of its release until I saw Éloge de l’amour at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, with Godard himself in the audience. We gave him a standing ovation. He looked as tired as someone who’d borne the freight of so many expectations for so many years probably ought to look.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1978–1986, mom dead)
In the years following my mother’s death, when I was fourteen, then fifteen, then sixteen, I forged a series of friendships with grown men, all of them teachers or artists or bohemians or seekers of one kind or another. There was the bon vivant Michael, whose bookshop I haunted until he imported me into his remarkable circle of friends. There was Paul, a Quaker/hippie/army-dropout, whose book of poetry I illustrated. There was Ian, my math teacher in high school, with whom I’d stalk the streets of Greenwich Village after school, engaged in deep talk of existentialist resistance to bourgeois life. More briefly, there was Rolando, a gay black painter and ballet dancer, who gave me a glimpse of New York’s homosexual demimonde while leaving me untouched; Mr. Newman, a refined young painter frustrated at being trapped teaching English in a high school for aspiring painters; Mr. Greenberg, my sensitive, bearish sculpture teacher, for whose pleasure I momentarily became a prodigy at marble carving; Steve, a British hippie and world traveler by bicycle, who for a time had been a boyfriend of my mother’s, with whom I would stay up all night inflamed by mystical, Gurdjieffian dialogues.
There may even have been others, but it would be a mistake to class any others with these principal three: Michael, Paul, and Ian—call them the beards. Each wore a beard, like my father. And it was their beards that made it unmistakable (to my eye) that my friendships were with adults and so that I must therefore be an adult myself, just as it was their beards and my lack of one that must have made it unmistakable (to other eyes) that a kid was hanging out with a grown-up.
My relationships with each of these three, Michael, Paul, and Ian, might have seemed similar to a witness, had there been one. With each of the three I talked about books and movies of the “outsider” variety, smoked pot, complained about the dullness of school and the limited perspective of my peers, and escaped the role of teenager in a house wracked by my mother’s death. To each of them, I suppose, I delivered the flattery of my reverence, nicely hidden inside the outlines of genuine friendship. For they were my real friends. No one of these three (nor any of the others) ever hinted at anything paternal in their feeling for me. I would have rejected it irritably, and anyway, they weren’t the type. Only in their twenties, Michael, Paul, and Ian were more like older brothers, but we’d never have invoked even that mild analogy. That pretense of equivalence was precious to me, as was the escape from anything to do with family.
For these outward similarities, the flavor of a day in the company of each of these three was violently dissimilar. Michael cultivated a misanthropic air, but drew people to him more compulsively than anyone I’ve yet known. Trained as an actor, he was an instinctive mimic and scene stealer. In the puppet shows that shared the space of his bookstore, Michael played the “human” character to the puppets: the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, the genie in Aladdin, the sorcerer in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice . His extemporaneous asides in these roles were in the nature of the “adult” part of an entertainment for children, meant to keep parents from growing restive. Yet in rooms full of six- and seven-year-olds and no parents, they seemed aimed solely at me. When the sorcerer turned the apprentice invisible, the spell he spoke aloud would attenuate into lines from Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”: “You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal, you’re a complete unknown, so how does it feel to be on your own?” Michael taught me to delight in the erratic nature of human interaction from within a pose of exasperated worldliness. That he adored people as much as books helped keep me from making too firm a choice between the two, even as he became my idol as a reader and collector.
Paul was more problematic, in that he called to a side of me that remains underdeveloped to this day: the mystical. We even first met one another through my family’s involvement in Quakerism. This drab vestige of family connection—our parents had known each other—we strove to leave behind. Our sole use, those days, for our Quaker heritage, was the mysterious Quaker Cemetery in Prospect Park, a private plot grandfathered into the public land, the high gates to which only the Quakers had access. Paul and I got hold of the keys so that we could creep around and take drugs inside the cemetery, where we were fascinated by the chicken heads thrown in by local practitioners of Santeria or voodoo (we weren’t sure which). I also wanted to search for Montgomery Clift’s grave—Clift’s eccentric Quaker mother had had him buried there—but Paul wasn’t as i
nterested as I was. He was bored by pop forms. For instance, he knew Philip K. Dick’s work, but found it uninteresting except for one novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In that book Dick had, it seemed to Paul, almost accidentally rattled the doors of perception. Paul’s taste was for exoticism, secret knowledge, and he treated not only literature but both sex and drugs as paths to higher realms.
I savored Paul’s frank talk of experiences he’d had and I hadn’t, and tuned out what stumped me. His book of poetry and memoir, the pages of which I spent six months illustrating, typesetting, and laying-out with an X-acto knife, was similar to our conversation, a collision of things I could and couldn’t use. I liked that Paul was a “real” writer. His language was resplendent, but veered into the sort of muzziness that back then always had me guiltily skipping pages in John Fowles or Frank Herbert. I was more literal than Paul. When I brought the finished product of Paul’s book into Michael’s shop, to insist we display it on a front table, Michael complied, grudgingly. When he glanced inside its pages he spared just a raised eyebrow and slight smile for comment. Michael knew he could devastate his rival wordlessly, not by criticizing the book but by revealing his X-ray capacity to see in my eyes the diffidence I thought I’d hidden.
Ian called to something more atavistic. He earned his misanthropic posture by wholehearted fury and genuine isolation, ornamented brilliantly with provocations, conspiracy theories, and rococo sarcasm. His wild-man math classes were a legend in our high school—he’d drop the lesson and glower, or inform us we were fools to think doing well in math class meant anything in the larger scheme—but I was the kid who followed him home. We’d eat shark’s-fin soup at a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on Eighth Avenue, then visit a pool hall or sit on the stoop of a horse-betting hustler pal of his named Bobby.
Talented at whatever he touched, Ian’s enthusiasms fell on him like illnesses. He’d spend a month or two writing sonnets or carving stone or mastering the newest theories in particle physics, disdaining as futile what he accomplished—it looked to me—effortlessly. I couldn’t keep up, but found my place as a sounding board for both fevers of inspiration and rages of rejection. Fools were everywhere, games were rigged, and striving was pathetic. My challenge was to not point out how our friendship, or Ian’s encouragement of my artistic ambitions, or, for that matter, the laughter we shared watching Godard’s Alphaville at the Bleecker Street Cinema, expressed possibilities of connection that our daily orgy of nihilism denied. Batman might make room for a sidekick, but could Raskolnikov? (Two or three years later, when I dropped out of college, I dragged Ian along with me and another friend on a rambling drive to Boulder, Colorado. His wide-eyed awe at the sight of Kansas cornfields was poignant. He hadn’t been out of New York for more than five years.)
Why should a kid who’s lost his mother seem to be in search of a replacement father instead? Well, Michael, Paul, and Ian weren’t offering me sympathy, at least not a brand of it that cast me as the bereft child I partly was, but didn’t wish in any way to be. A grown woman might threaten to do that. A few of my father’s girlfriends had, in fact (not Hannah, but others). My sudden need at fourteen was to have evolved out of the primitive contexts of childhood and family, into some sophisticated version of adulthood that disdained bourgeois values. If Michael, Paul, and Ian had one thing in common it was their apparent disinterest in home or hearth. Their values reinforced my notions of a happy bohemian solitude, in which entanglements with women were a siren song of distraction.
This wasn’t who I really was, or am now. Nor, necessarily, was it true of my beards. If Michael became the most enduring and versatile of these friendships-as-auditions-for-self, it might be partly because, like me, he wanted a woman near him almost all the time, and maybe even liked their company as friends better than he liked men. But at this moment forgetting my mother seemed to entail forgetting my father, forgetting childhood (I became weirdly blind to the existence of my younger siblings, whose sadness would have mirrored mine back to me), and possibly even forgetting women per se. I threw out most of human life in favor of a handful of unconventional men of the kind I felt I needed to be.
My identification with the figure of the artist was total, yet I couldn’t make safe use of the primary totem available to me: my own father. I had to define my distance from Richard Lethem, not only because of the usual reasons but because he was a parent and I refused to be a child. Or perhaps those are the usual reasons, only amplified to a scream. So, in the beards, I found versions of my father that were also problematic enough to make my real father suspicious. Michael, Paul, and Ian seemed dangerous, and not only because they gave me drugs. They must have unnerved him precisely because they resembled him and his friends, yet I was running from our family. If I’d brought the beards home they’d have likely charmed and reassured my father, but if I’d brought them home they’d have lost their charge, so I kept them in fierce quarantine.
But the beards were also a keeping faith with my mother. That all three smoked pot and were enchanting talkers wasn’t an accident. In different ways they resembled Judith, and Judith would have liked them. In the period before my mother’s worst illness, and her death, each of my parents’ lives was populated with members of the opposite sex who fascinated me. My friendships with their various lovers was a projection, a coping mechanism, and a strange richness in my life. So I refused to let it end with Judith’s death. In collecting the beards I was providing a supply of imaginary boyfriends for my (now imaginary) mother.
Fear of Music (1970–present, mom well/sick/dead)
I read all the Narnia books. I read The Lord of the Rings. I read every book by Ray Bradbury. I read every book by Raymond Chandler. I reread every book by Raymond Chandler. I read every book by Kurt Vonnegut, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I read every book by Richard Brautigan and Norman Mailer. I kept a complete set of the stories of Guy de Maupassant on the edge of my loft bed, and tried to read one a night until I finished it (I failed). I saw every movie by Stanley Kubrick, except for Killer’s Kiss. (Later, when I ran the film society at my college, I arranged a screening of Killer’s Kiss there.) I tried, hopelessly, to see every movie by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, sitting alone at afternoon showings of Tout va bien and Jules and Jim and The Bride Wore Black in the repertory houses of Manhattan. I watched Star Wars twenty-one times in a single summer, largely alone. I sat alone at the Thalia, on West Ninety-Fifth Street, and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey three times in one day. Philip K. Dick became my favorite writer, and, spellbound by forty-odd titles listed in the front of a Bantam edition of Ubik, I swore to find and read them all, and succeeded. I read Ubik itself four or five times. When I was twenty-five I had a miniaturized version of the dust-jacket design of the first edition of Ubik tattooed on my left arm. Italo Calvino became my favorite author and I read every book by Italo Calvino. Don DeLillo, same thing. Patricia Highsmith, same thing. Thomas Berger, same thing. I know I’ve told you some or all of this before.
I played the third album by Talking Heads, called Fear of Music , to the point of destroying the vinyl, then replaced it with a new copy. I memorized the lyrics, memorized the lyrics to other Talking Heads albums, saw Talking Heads play any chance I got, and when I arrived at college put up a sign in the wing of my dormitory with an arrow pointing down the hall where some Grateful Dead fans lived, reading DEAD HEADS, and an arrow pointing in the direction of the room I shared with my simpatico roommate, reading TALKING HEADS. At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.
I turned John Ford’s The Searchers into a ritual and a cause. I bought approximately two hundred Bob Dylan bootlegs. I tried to see every Howard Hawks movie, every Orson Welles movie, every film listed in the Film Noir Encyclopedia. For years I calibrated my record collection against the grades in Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies, j
otting dissenting views in pencil in the margins: Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, given a B plus by Robert Christgau, got an A from me. Here, My Dear, a tormented account of Marvin Gaye’s divorce, was a record I was introduced to by someone who thought it was only pathetic and funny—I began defending it from scorn before I’d finished listening to the first side, a response similar to my proprietary defiance on behalf of John Ford’s The Searchers, which I humiliated myself defending the first time I ever saw it. I regularly fell asleep to a cassette of Here, My Dear on Walkman headphones for a few years in college. In my late twenties I lulled myself to sleep to Chet Baker records for a while, and at the peak of my Chet Baker obsession I owned more than fifty Chet Baker CDs, though I was never satisfied because I knew someone who had more than a hundred Chet Baker CDs.
I rarely listen to Chet Baker anymore. I haven’t read Vonnegut or Bradbury or Brautigan since I was a child, partly because I’m afraid of what I’ll find, partly because they have become inscribed on the interior surface of the eyes through which I read others. I rarely read Don DeLillo, since the binge years when I feverishly read and reread every one of his novels, and when I do now I find myself stirred but confused. The moment DeLillo became in any way fallible to me I experienced a rupture I’m still traumatized by, one which colors my ability to situate him reasonably in my internal landscape of “contemporary letters”—he’s either as great as I thought he was when I thought he made all other writing look silly or he’s a total disaster. I still think Barry Lyndon and 2001: A Space Odyssey are great films, and The Killing a terrific noir, but my notion of Kubrick-as-favorite-director became bewildering after I allowed myself to feel my disappointment in A Clockwork Orange , Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket. Impossible to place in relation to my “grown-up” pantheon of favorites like Kurosawa, Ford, or Cassavetes, Kubrick floats unfixed in my sky, mooning my awestruck teenaged projections back at me.
The Disappointment Artist Page 15