Since then, I’ve been in a hurry. Writing is another meditation that’s also a frantic compensation. As if wearing headphones, I’m putting some of myself to sleep, rushing to the end of my days: there’s a death wish in reducing life to watching one’s fingers twitch on the alphabet. I’m as pathetic as that kid watching double features alone, but also as vain. Writing’s an aggression on the world of books, one reader’s bullying attempt to make himself known to others like him. My heroes Greene, Dick, and Highsmith left many dozens of novels; I’m on pace to write at best ten or twelve of the things. Still, I’m building my shelf. Like the comedian Steven Wright, who said “I keep my seashell collection scattered on the beaches of the world,” my teenage room is still expanding, like the universe itself. If writing’s a beard on loss, then, like some character drawn by Dr. Seuss, I live in my own beard.
What’s one supposed to say when the mask comes off? Is there an etiquette I’m breaking with? John Lennon recorded a song, for his first album after the breakup of the Beatles (what a grand beard that was, art and companionship blended together, and the worshiping world at his feet!), called “My Mummy’s Dead.” I suppose this is my version of that song. I sing it now in order to quit singing it. Mine has been a paltry beard anyway, the peach-fuzzy kind a fifteen-year-old grows, so you still see the childish face beneath. Each of my novels, antic as they may sometimes be, is fueled by loss. I find myself speaking about my mother’s death everywhere I go in this world.
A critic once said that every serious poem’s true subject, whether obvious or not, is death. Yet to write more than one poem you’d better find a way to forget you heard that. If life itself is, after all, only a beard for death, couldn’t the reverse be true as well?
JONATHAN LETHEM
The Disappointment Artist
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two short story collections, Men and Cartoons and The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye , and the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Harper’s. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
BOOKS BY JONATHAN LETHEM
Amnesia Moon
As She Climbed Across the Table
The Disappointment Artist
Girl in Landscape
Gun, with Occasional Music
The Fortress of Solitude
Men and Cartoons
Motherless Brooklyn
This Shape We’re In
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Lethem
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Versions of some of these essays have appeared elsewhere: “Defending The Searchers” in Tin House; “The Disappointment Artist” in Harper’s; “13, 1977, 21” in The New Yorker and in A Galaxy Not So Far Away; “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” in Harper’s; “Indentifying with Your Parents” in The London Review of Books and Give My Regards to the Atomsmashers!; “You Don’t Know Dick” in Bookforum; “Lives of the Bohemians” in Modern Painters; and “Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes” in Granta and in the Criterion Collection Cassavetes box set.
My thanks to the individual editors and in particular to Sean Howe, as well to David Shields, Laura Miller, Phillip Lopate, Zoë Rosenfeld, Kat Silverstein, David Hyde, Edward Kastenmeier, Richard Parks, and Bill Thomas.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Lethem, Jonathan.
The disappointment artist and other essays / Jonathan Lethem.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3562.E8544D57 2005
814’.54—dc22
2004055133
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42840-0
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