I couldn’t bear to listen to Talking Heads records, even the ones I’d previously revered, after Naked, and after David Byrne’s early solo records. That subsequent music seemed to my fierce acolyte’s heart a betrayal of the idea of Talking Heads, as though David Byrne were an unworthy steward of the art he’d partly created. All their music became poisonously embarrassing to me the moment I realized it wasn’t as good as I’d claimed it was (and no band is as good as I’d claimed Talking Heads were in the years I adored them). I suffered other similar, if milder, divorces: from the surrealist painters Magritte and De Chirico, from Jean-Luc Godard, from Brian Eno and David Bowie. These disappointments I managed to modulate: the artists are less like ex-lovers than like friends I keep in my address book but call less often than I used to. It was my splits from Talking Heads and Stanley Kubrick and Don DeLillo that left me as indignant, ashamed, and unmoored as breakups with a girlfriend or wife, wondering who’d failed whom.
Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art. When I first began to write fiction, at eighteen, I conceived that I would write the novels Philip K. Dick hadn’t lived to write—that I would continue his work rather than begin my own. Of course, I now think that Philip K. Dick probably lived to write any novel he was capable of writing, as well as a few he wasn’t, but at the time it seemed to me tragic that dozens more didn’t exist for me to read. That was the sort of tragedy I could allow myself to dwell on, as a teenager: that Philip K. Dick had died, not that my mother had died.
Nightly wearing headphones to memorize Robert Fripp’s twenty-one minute guitar solo wasn’t finally so different from watching The Searchers a dozen times, though one activity was meditative and put me to sleep and the other was busy and made me enraged. In either case, and in dozens of others, I wanted to submit and submerge, even to die a little. I developed a preference, among others, for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers. By ignoring my hunger or need to use the bathroom during a three-hour movie by Kubrick or Tarkovsky I’d voted against my body, with its undeniable pangs and griefs, in favor of a self comprised of eyeballs and brain, floating in the void of pure art. If I wasn’t afraid of this kind of dissolution I shouldn’t be afraid of death, so I’d be an evolutionary step ahead. I downloaded art into myself, but I was also downloading myself out of my family, my body, and my life, onto a bookshelf of Complete Works, or into the ether of music or film.
By trying to export myself into a place that didn’t fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn’t give. At the depths I’d plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water.
This was especially true of anything that assumed a posture of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur. Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Talking Heads. The artists who’d seemed to promise the most were the ones who’d created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk—so these were the ones capable of failing my needs most violently. When I discovered their imperfections, my own hope of absenting myself from emotional risk seemed imperiled. It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I’d asked them to feel on my behalf. I blamed them, anyway. My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappointment artist was me.
Slow Train Coming (1979–81, mom dead)
Bob Dylan belonged to my parents, specifically to my mother, who’d even known him very slightly in her days in the folk scene. He was as obvious and omnipresent in our house as the Beatles, but, for a child, nowhere near as alluring as the Beatles. Dylan’s songs spoke to me without my paying attention, until my mother’s death forced me to parse her record collection for her traces. Then he became crucial in a series of ceremonies that extended also to Nina Simone, Cream, and Carly Simon.
In the same year I befriended Michael, who loved Dylan in the manner he loved his favorite writers, with the same ready disdain for anyone who didn’t get it. This was 1979, when Dylan was seen by most liberals to be in dishonor for his born-again Christianity, another sixties illusion smashed. Anyway, for teenagers, Dylan was a part of what punk had supposedly swept away. So listening to Dylan became a token of the perversity of my tastes, something like wearing jodhpurs or earmuffs to school in order to be branded eccentric. I championed him ironically to my peers, who’d shake their heads. In this way I brandished Dylan as a fetish until it was safe for me to love him honestly.
Philip K. Dick was even more of a stealth operator. Amid my fondness for Borges, Eno, The Twilight Zone, Orwell’s 1984, Talking Heads, and Kubrick, Dick seemed to be the writer I was waiting for. I liked science fiction but the science fiction I’d located to that point wasn’t hip or funny or, mostly, dark enough for my tastes. Dick’s profile as King of the Paranoids, which is how I understood it from the jackets of his books, suited me so well that he was almost my official favorite writer before I’d finished a single book. Yet he was no Eno or Kubrick, no David Byrne. Dick’s work had a yearning and homely undertow, a self-doubting quality, that made him infinitely richer and more disturbing than I’d assumed. Franz Kafka, another idol who survived my teenage years, was like Dick in concealing personal art within a Trojan horse of paradox and paranoia. As with Dick, I came for the dystopian worldview, and stayed for the self-disclosure.
Oddly enough, Philip K. Dick was also publicly converting to what seemed to me some creepy version of Christianity at that very moment, at the start of the eighties. His spiritual desires, like Dylan’s, on one hand repulsed me. Yet in both cases the work that resulted from their religious questioning embedded such elegant uncertainty as to the likelihood of a life’s full sustenance in art and ego that my own solipsism was slightly eroded. Before long, too, I’d identified the many points of contact between Philip K. Dick’s characters and situations from his own life. The extent and transparency of autobiographical influence made his work as awkwardly confessional as that of Philip Roth, who was exactly the type of writer I thought I’d decided not to admire or become. Dick had urged me past my biases, after it was too late to reject him.
I’d stumbled into each of these loves against my teenage tendencies in hero selection. Rather than arranging yet again to be disappointed by a figure of authority, these guys were like fraternal companions, stumbling through their own ups and downs. Dylan and Dick created bodies of work so contradictory and erratic that they never seemed to have promised me perfection, so they could never disappoint me the way a parent can let down a child who has idolized them. Here were artists who hung themselves emotionally out to dry, who risked rage and self-pity in their work, and were sometimes overwhelmed by those feelings and blew it. As figures of identification they were riskier for me but also, in the long run, more nourishing.
Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick (and, eventually, others who resembled them in this way) also led me back to my father. For he was of course the artist from whose imperfections, and revealed vulnerabilities, I’d originally flinched. For years I’d chosen against my father by idolizing artists who hid their face behind glossy, impassive surfaces. Yet those figures had proved brittle—inadequate against the untidy barrage of my feelings. They’d refused to meet me where I needed them most, at some emotional substratum down to which I’d excavated and found nobody home. Dylan and Dick, by their own unwillingness to hide their clumsiness a
nd variability, or to protect me from an awareness of the fallible processes behind even their masterpieces, seduced me into sympathy for the artist whose process was, as I grew up, so naked to me. And, needless to say, I had to begin to forgive my father for being human before I could begin to work.
Mr. Natural (1978–86, mom dead)
In Broadway Danny Rose, Woody Allen plays a theatrical agent with a star performer, a singer, who, though married, is carrying on an affair. In order to protect his singer, Allen escorts the mistress around town, allowing them to be mistaken for a couple in order to provide his singer with deniability. When this leads to disaster, and threats of death (the girlfriend is a Mafioso’s ex-moll), Allen begs off: “I’m only the beard,” he says. “You don’t shoot the beard!”
Allen had reintroduced this vivid term, a recent antique. Soon it began cropping up in gossipy magazines, often to describe the heterosexual escort of a secretly gay movie star: the beard. A cloak on passions that those who required a beard might be unwilling to discuss or even consider, the beard was itself a figure of power and mystery. For we are revealed not only as our disguises slip or are abandoned but in the nature of the disguises we choose. Pretenses are always either insufficient, overcompensatory, or both. Masks melt into our faces and become impossible to remove precisely at the instant we’d realized they were transparent all along.
Growing up in an artist’s family, I seized on comic books and science fiction as a solution to the need to disappoint my father’s expectation that I become an artist like himself. These tastes encompassed my real passions: for art that embraced the vernacular vibrancy of pop music and film, and for fusions of imaginative material with the mundane. But they also served as a beard on my own ambition, a cloak on my reverence for the esteemed artifacts of my parents’ universe. The cartoonist I settled on lastly, R. Crumb, was of course as late-modernist and literary as they come, a Philip Roth or Robert Coover of comics. His Rabelaisian universe might be off-puttingly grotesque—a bonus, where I was concerned—but his voice, revealed over time, was relentlessly honest, if neurotic. And he obviously adored mundane landscapes and scuffling background characters, which he recorded in scrupulous detail at the margins of his insane inventions. In fact, the juxtaposition of the two provided the depth which separated Crumb from his competitors.
Well before the revealing choice of Crumb, though, I’d been distilling literary pleasure in various Marvel comic books, reading them as inchoate “graphic novels” before the invention of that term. My attention drifted from superheroes at the moment I suspected the majority of their creators were cynical, less interested in their characters’ morbid implications than I was. Meanwhile, my favorite writer, Philip K. Dick, draped a junk-culture veil over personal obsessions, then transformed the stuff of his disguise into a higher art than he could recognize. When I learned more about Dick’s life I saw I’d instinctively recapitulated his self-exiling, for Dick had wanted nothing more than to be a literary writer. Dick had hardly needed to beard his dangerous liaison with art, though. Literary critics (with their bias) and his publishers (with their garish jacket art) did it for him.
More generally, my obsessiveness about books, songs, and films was a beard on growing up, which I didn’t want to catch myself doing. I wanted it behind me while it was ahead of me. This exertion of will (if I’d seen more Godard films than any adult I knew, or read more books by Norman Mailer, then maybe I’d have proved something) was also an act of sensory deprivation, of self-abnegation. The two—will and deprivation—were weirdly compatible. I tried to obliterate my teenage years in movie theaters because my teenage years embarrassed and saddened me. Between double features of French films, between putting one book down and picking up the next, I’d glance at my wristwatch to see if I was in my twenties yet.
And the beards—Michael, Paul, and Ian—were of course a beard for my hazardous love of my parents, in the period when survival had seemed to require numbing myself to my father as a response to the death of my mother. Each was a friend, but also a cover behind which I could engage in fragile experiments in provisional adulthood. The irony may be that for the three of them, single men just in their twenties, mentoring a mother-bereft kid may have been one of the most adult acts of their newly adult lives. Yet to do it at all they had to do it by my terms, which meant pretending we were equals.
So I may have been a beard for the beards as well. By seeming to irresponsibly hang out with a teenager (some would say, seeming to corrupt a teenager), they could dabble in responsibility. I suspect this notion would have startled the beards, precisely because I’d preselected each of them so carefully: not the surrogate-father type. By exchanging good companionship we were able, on both sides, to ignore the central fact in our friendships. Under that cover we were able to simultaneously explore versions of ourselves that would have seemed conflictual had we brought them to light.
In My Room (1974–present, mom, etc.)
Every room I’ve lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing—in my own collection and others— in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I’ve also bricked myself in with music—vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison—room as brain—is one I’ve often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I’d externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.
The simpler, and perhaps deeper, truth lies in the comparison more obvious to others: that the empires of data storage make up a castle or armor or hermit-crab’s shell for my tender self. My exoskeleton of books has peaked in baroque outcroppings and disorderly excess at times of lonely crisis. After my mother died I acquired a friend’s vast paperback collection, and the overflow shelving in my room consisted of books balanced on planks unfixed to any wall or support, so that no one apart from me dared lift a book for fear of calamity. Between marriages I’ve reached such fevers of acquisition that I twice resorted to sleeping on mattresses laid not atop a box spring but a pallet of cartons, the only way to disguise the excess without resorting to storage. Moving books off-site would have felt like putting my arms and legs in hock.
These confessions have begun to bore me, and I only want to make a few more. The adult life I’ve made—getting paid, reader, to tell you these things—bears a suspicious resemblance to the rooms themselves. My prose is a magpie’s, even when not larded with cultural name-dropping, as have been my last two novels, as is this piece of no-longer-particularly-veiled memoir. Perhaps anyone’s writing is ultimately bricolage, a welter of borrowings. But of the writers I know, I’ve been the most eager to point out my influences, to spoil the illusion of originality by elucidating my fiction’s resemblance to my book collection. I want it both ways, of course. At fifteen I wished to be like Michael, who drew admirers into a bookstore he seemed to be exhibiting almost grudgingly, as a private museum of his interests. My rooms might have been armor, a disguise or beard, but I wanted millions of admirers to peek inside and see me there, and when they did I wished for them to revere and pity me at once. The contradiction in this wish tormented me, so I ignored it. Then I became a writer and it began to sustain me. I may still be trying to make it come true now, by working here to arouse your pity and reverence for the child I was.
The Collected Works of Judith Lethem (1978–present, blah blah blah)
My mother, because of her verbal flair, and her passion for books, was taken or mistaken by her friends as a writer-to-be. She sometimes spoke of writing, but I doubt she ever tried. Pregnant at twenty-one, and a mother of three by the time she, at thirty-tw
o, began to die, she never had much chance. It is impossible to know whether she would have made anything of the chance if she had.
Her gift to me on my fourteenth birthday, the last while she was alive, was a manual typewriter. The summer after her death, when I was fifteen, I wrote a 125-page “novel” with the manual typewriter, mostly on torn-out, blue-lined notebook paper. In that same year I typed poems, of a fragmentary and impulsive sort. Truthfully, they more resembled song lyrics, since I wasn’t a reader of poems then. I recall one which spoke of my mother and the possibility of her writing. “You can’t write when you’re sick in bed,” was its much-repeated chorus; I don’t remember more. This poem was on one hand sympathetic. I knew, at least consciously, that my mother’s illness was involuntary. So I offered forgiveness: she couldn’t be blamed for not having written. Yet it was also an admonitory poem—really, admonitory to myself.
The Disappointment Artist Page 16