“I wish I could bottle you,” he said. “Sometimes you smell like lemons. At other times, you’re the world’s most delicious vanilla cake. I wish you were here in this hotel room right now.”
I wished I were there with him, too. That was all I wanted. But I knew something about David. I knew that being close to him meant that, sooner or later, you’d be forced to discover what you were made of.
But why was I so terrified to discover what I was made of?
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.
A pause.
“You’d just better never hate me,” he said. “Do you understand? Never hate me.”
IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN HOW MUCH BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN hurt to read. A damp cloth on the solar plexus was the least of it.
So many of the stories—“Forever Overhead,” the intimidatingly brilliant “Octet” (one of the greatest stories ever), and “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon”—were just stunning . . . though I would gently suggest to David that “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” a painfully unamusing mock-Homeric, John Barth–esque pastiche set in seventies-era Hollywood, maybe not be included in the collection. (It could possibly be the worst thing he ever wrote. Although he believed that his book about rappers took that particular prize.) I was hugely disturbed by what would become the collection’s most illustrious story, the so-called “Granola Cruncher,” in which a woman’s rape somehow becomes, through an act of empathy with her attacker, no longer a rape. And I hadn’t been expecting the savagery of the title stories. I guess I’d anticipated something interrogating sexism rather than confessing to it. Maybe I’d expected the female “characters” to be granted something approaching full humanity.
“I can’t wait for the feminist critique of this,” I said to him on a call.
“Well, do not send it to me when it comes out,” David replied.
An unnamed female interrogator, whose questions are represented only with a “Q.,” “interviews” the hideous men about their grisly sexual histories, and they rant back at her. The whole enterprise felt awfully Spaderlike to me, I told David, Spader-sense tingling. (David admitted that there might indeed have been some subconscious sex, lies, and videotape thing happening with the conceit, but let’s not make too much of that.) But unlike the creepy, prying Spader of the movie, in Brief Interviews, the female interviewer’s questions are never heard.
I pointed out the obvious to David: the woman is not given a voice. She is muzzled, silenced, erased.
His reply: It was fine because he stole the whole “Q.” thing from DeLillo.
(This had also been David’s response, by the way, to my complaint that the interminable Eschaton sequence in Infinite Jest—Eschaton is a game of global warfare played by students on the courts at a tennis academy—was one of the most self-indulgent wankfests ever put to paper. “Don’t blame me!” he said, and went on to explain that he stole the idea from End Zone. DeLillo. The source and the absolver.)
The unnamed male characters in Brief Interviews are grotesque parodies of the Updike/Roth/Mailer narcissists David had attacked in his GMN essay. Visions of those already entombed—liars, manipulators, con men, abusers—they are all stuck, like so many Wallace characters, in pernicious cul-de-sacs of thought. Thinking is unconstructive; thinking is paralysis. Were they able to experience happiness? Were they able to experience love? Wait a minute—was David? And what about that GMN essay? Was the concern expressed in it merely an artfully constructed mask?
Not to put too fine a point on it: I was worried about him.
“David, you weren’t one of those little boys who set insects on fire, were you?”
“No,” he said. “But I was one of those little boys who put insects down the backs of little girls’ shirts!”
I needed him to explain to me: Why was there so much abuse? Why were all the relationships—or “relationships”—in the book so pathological? Why were the men all such sociopaths? Why were the women all such victims? Why was everyone so trapped?
“Yes, the characters are trapped,” David, a control freak about everything, especially about the interpretation of his work, said. “But you have to understand that they are all totally self-aware.”
About “The Depressed Person”: he rather rhetorically wondered what it meant that he was able to look at the parts of himself he most despised only if he portrayed himself as a woman—just as, he then suggested, he’d done with another psychotically depressed character, Kate Gompert in Infinite Jest. He said that in “The Depressed Person” he’d tried to confront his own narcissism in a more direct way than he’d ever done before. He’d been, he added, an ass to everyone in his life when he was writing it.
Regarding the interview chapters of the book—there was the small, dark chuckle (it always indicated any number of malfeasances)—he said that some of the interviews were “actual conversations I had when I had to break up with people.” That doom-laden “had to” was not an easy one to forget. Neither was the fact that he characterized the interviews, in which men talk at, not to (never to), their anonymous female interrogator, whose voice is never heard, as “conversations.”
I realize this could come across as a facile interpretation of his work, by the way. David would in fact caution us against doing exactly this—poking around a writer’s life in search of “personal stuff encoded in a writer’s art,” as he wrote in a scolding review of a Borges biography, in which he warns against the syndrome of “psychological criticism.” I agree that this sort of literalism is a crude way to interpret an artist’s work. But what am I supposed to do here?
David later claimed that one of the interviews, #2—the female interrogator’s own breakup, in which her boyfriend preemptively dumps her so he may be spared the hassle in some indefinite but inexorable future—had been conceived of as an imagined breakup conversation with me. This was not intended as flattering information, and it was not received as such. And this is the interview that sets everything in motion, by the way: after the interrogator’s bewildering breakup (she and the boyfriend actually seem to like each other, and “liking each other,” amid the profound relationship dysfunction in David’s fiction, is about as good as it gets), she henceforth embarks on the project of trying to understand what makes these various hideous men tick. (Yeah, good luck with that one. And does it ever occur to our nebulous lady that none of the men would ever begin to grant her the same level of analysis she grants them?)
Occasionally, when you’d read David’s fiction, you’d notice that he had used a bit of you or perhaps a suggestion—sometimes more than that—of a thing you’d said or written. Your reaction was never “Oh, neat, look at that!” It was always a queasy “Ew.”
Yes, I know: again with David’s point about the dangers of rooting around for extra-literary clues to a writer’s work. But this is my life, too.
(And anyway, my biggest editorial gripe about this chapter: in the book version, David changed the hideous man’s shrink’s name from the outstanding “Mr. Chitty” of the manuscript to the far less excellent “Mr. Chitwin.” For my money, there can never be any improvement on the line “As Mr. Chitty would put it I am just not a closer.”)
But maybe, I thought then, we expect too much of our literary artists. No writer has a perfect corpus—I’m in agreement with Martin Amis’s assessment that when we say we love a major writer’s work, we actually really love only about half of it. I intensely disliked parts of Brief Interviews. Still do. I accept that. It’s a dangerous, defiantly experimental collection, and each story takes its own risk. Some of those risks aren’t successful. But David was also the genius who had written the searing “woman who said she’d come” chapter in Infinite Jest (an addict waits for his dealer to show up at his place with enough drugs for one final binge), and if there’s a more virtuosic sequence anywhere in American literature, I’d like to know about it. How fitfully the rest of us pe
rceive our interior worlds.
David would often speak of his growing ambition to write with, as he said, greater clarity and urgency and of his desire to develop more trust for the reader: “More respect,” he’d say. “More respect, and more trust.” He brought up “Cathedral,” the classic Raymond Carver short story, a couple of times. “These aren’t people like us,” he said. “No one writes about people like that. That’s what I want to do.”
David believed in fiction—“our lone outpost of civilization”—and there was no more persuasive advocate for it. “Fiction is a lie,” he said to me and to anyone else who’d listen (his own proto–TED Talk), because most of this stuff can’t be talked about directly. But we believe fiction because, unlike everything else in this world, it tells the truth.
But with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, I couldn’t see how his stated goals for his fiction were in any way compatible with what he was actually writing.
I KNEW THAT I HAD BEEN PERMITTED TO WORK IN AN EXTRAORDINARY world, and I knew how privileged I was to be permitted to do the thing that enlightened me and the thing that I loved. My happiest moments came when I’d give a writer an editorial suggestion, and the writer would go off and return with something glorious. Of course, the accomplishment was always the writer’s, but when an author took something I’d said and soared with it, I’d believe that I actually had some sort of role in the world.
Regarding the work submitted to me, I would try to assume, with varying degrees of success, a generous attitude: Don’t resent it. Try to appreciate it. Even if it is sublimely bad, it is well intentioned. I had to reject far, far more than I was able to publish, and the odds were not in anyone’s favor. The influx was astonishing, and I had to reject pretty much all of it. How many short stories did I have to reject every day? Think of a number and put an exponent on it.
And would there be a psychic toll, I wondered, for my having to come up with some half-baked run of reasons that a piece of writing, which had been created in a spirit of generosity, was getting a great big old “pass” from me? Now, as a career reader, I had to think about what this story/book/proposal failed to do, had to analyze how it went wrong. But the “it’s not right for us”—the “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup approach—was always my preferred sort of rejection.
One of my most prolific renowned submitters was none other than Ray Bradbury, the sci-fi giant. He was in his late seventies then and still admirably writing away, writing, writing, writing, and submitting to Esquire, via his agent, what seemed like a story a week. Was it a weird experience to send continual pass letters (Esquire didn’t publish sci-fi, but his stories were always cool and interesting) to the great fantasy author whose supreme novel, Fahrenheit 451, I’d read in eighth grade? It was.
Indeed, there really were plenty of writers who didn’t let rejections get to them too much—they just kept slugging away. Slugging and slugging. I had lots of regular slush-pile authors who did not stop submitting, who could not stop submitting; I would ultimately come to respect their amazing defiance (and, frankly, their amazing self-regard). So here’s to you, you aspiring authors who would routinely call me to check in on the progress of your submissions. (And let’s not forget those among you who would leave voice-mail messages asking if we could meet in person! Thank you for telling me you were in town.)
But usually I worried that all I was doing was canceling people. All I was doing was taking things away. And if you take things away, you have to give them back elsewhere.
THERE WERE NOW SOME SIGNS OF TROUBLE IN MY RELATIONSHIP WITH David.
A friend showed me a letter David had written to him in which David had taken a potshot at me, suggesting I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand his work.
More trouble. On a call, David said, “I don’t get any work done on the days we talk.”
He actually had the gall to suggest that I was a Porlockian person, a mere interruption, a bumbler blocking the artist from his art. That really hurt.
“And then when we do get off the phone,” he continued, “I think about you. It is very disruptive.”
That hurt even more. I wanted David to write. I wanted him to work. It did not need to be explained to me that if he didn’t or couldn’t write, his world would collapse like an avalanche. David was an artist rare and true, and we needed him to write. We needed him to hold a mirror up to ourselves and tell us who we were. The question was: How much did we really want to see what he showed us?
And more trouble still. Once when I called with a check-in, I was greeted with the choice Wallace brush-off: “I’m fine. I’m a big boy.”
After he’d come back from a dinner with a woman, or women, he’d deemed perilously middle-aged, he said, menacingly, “I’ve been thinking: it’s going to be very hard for you to get older. You’d better watch out.”
(Similarly, he had yelled at me once when he believed I was looking at myself in a mirror [it’s maybe possible that I was], when I ought to have been looking at him.)
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I have a little too much going on for that.”
“Oh,” David replied. “Sorry.”
Another time, David: “I wish you were older.”
“Excuse me?”
“I would prefer it if you were older, that’s all.”
(“Please say you’re not doing that younger woman–older man thing,” he would say at a later date, irritated by a mildly toadying remark I had made.)
I started receiving tastes of the small acts of gratuitous cruelty of which David could be so dreadfully fond:
“I was trying to actually talk to you,” he said, “but you were making these excited little squeaking sounds that could only be confused for human speech.”
As I’ve noted, in my experience with David, after some offensive thing he did or said, I’d often be presented with a series of choices: Do I walk away from him now, or later? Is the time now, or now, or now, to yell at him? Should I hang up on him now, or should I wait? How angry do I allow myself to become at him—now, later, and forever? How much forgiveness does he even deserve?
Eventually—it would take a long time, but I would get there—I would begin to understand that in adult life, in the adult world, one had to learn to control not only the expression of anger but also the emotion itself.
Toward the end of the summer, David said, in regard to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, “You know, I’ve always liked pseudonymous dedications.”
David’s fondness for coy pseudonyms was well known; he used one for his piece “Neither Adult nor Entertainment” in Premiere and would later deploy a female pseudonym (yes, a female one) for his story “Mr. Squishy” in McSweeney’s. David, of course, always had to mask everything.
“I’ve always hated ‘personal’ dedications,” he added, and said that he liked to keep his “personal stuff” away from his work—which was really just such a gas, given how patently autobiographical his fiction so often was, a charge he’d both concede to and deny.
“So the dedication will be pseudonymous,” he said. “But it will really be dedicated to you.”
He told me that I should consider it a little in-joke for classicists and said, in a house-of-mirrors spirit, that he had given “me” the sizzlingly assonant pseudonym “Ms. Nicolette Fiss”—the name that appears on the dedication page in the manuscript draft.
“Sounds like steam escaping,” I said to David, quoting, naturally, Dom DeLuise in Blazing Saddles and trying to sound amused.
(In the published book, the fake dedicatees are “Beth-Ellen Siciliano” and “Alice Dall.”)
I had been wondering when and how David was going to shove the old dedicatee snake back into the can. Now I finally had my answer. Shirley Hazzard wrote of Graham Greene that he regularly invited you to step on a rug, which he would then pull out from under you. David said it would be our little joke—a joke that was so very unfunny.
“Do you hate me?” he asked.
20
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nbsp; One night when Dave Eggers and I were disembarking from a taxi (blast from the past: we were seeing the Jesus and Mary Chain, but they were a nostalgia act even then), he opened his wallet to pay, and a bunch of receipts and papers and whatnot came fluttering down to the floor. One of those pieces of paper was his pay stub. I reached down to pick it up and noted with astonishment that Dave’s salary at Esquire was twice mine.
Men were prioritized. Men were always prioritized. My only option, as I understood it then: I’d have to develop a thick skin. I’d have to take my knocks; that was to be expected, of course. I was also learning what I had always known but had never really known. Power is always an ephemeral event, subject to ebb and flow. Power is never absolute.
The truth was that I always felt as if the benefits that came along with my job were rather generalized. Anyone who had the job would have gotten the same prizes. And it would have been self-deceptive indeed to think that any of the fluff on top had anything to do inherently with me. Plus, I was from the cornfields, from the Rust Belt, and being pandered to was not my natural mode. Whenever anyone showed me any deference or somewhat aggressively attempted to be my friend, I always assumed they were lying.
This is why power must always be mistrusted: the narcissistic self is not “in” the world; the narcissistic self does not consider itself a part of the whole. The amount of power you have (or believe you have) shapes your demands of life and your demands of other people. And you’d better have an unshakable moral core if you always get what you want—otherwise what, exactly, is the incentive to behave decently?
“All men would be tyrants if they could,” wrote Abigail Adams to John.
Quick story: A couple of years ago, my husband and I went to a cocktail party at a town house, hosted by a CEO of something or another. As my husband, Joe, attempted the sociological experiment of chatting up the CEO (“That dude is the human embodiment of an Excel spreadsheet,” Joe later said), I silently considered the room, the paintings on the paneled walls, and found myself thinking about that Balzac (or Mario Puzo, if you’d rather) line: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
In the Land of Men Page 24