I Think You're Totally Wrong

by David Shields

CALEB: (sings) Literature with religion!

  DAVID: His, you know, his fuddy-duddyness.

  CALEB: (sings) His fuddy-duddyness!

  DAVID: I’ve read his two collections of reviews. I’ve read How Fiction Works, which is incredibly banal. I’ve actually read his novel about God, which is even worse.

  CALEB: (lightly strums) I haven’t. Just the occasional piece in the New Yorker.

  DAVID: He fascinates me as a case or type. His father was an Anglican priest, and Wood was raised to also become a man of the cloth. He left the church to become a literary critic, but he never left—that old story. In 2011, he’s still clinging to the “great tradition.” Every contemporary work is judged according to how well it measures up to Madame Bovary.

  Caleb laughs.

  DAVID: He’s thought to be the gold standard for people who do book reports, when what he is is a sea captain for nineteenth-century novels. He is, to me, one lost human, movingly so, but it’s really important to push back against his rearguard action.

  DAVID: In My Dinner with André, Wally feels compelled to have dinner with André because André’s in the throes of a meltdown. I wonder, with Caleb and David, if we can concoct something similar. Maybe Caleb has a manuscript he wants me to read. Or I want him to interview me about How Literature Saved My Life. Or he’s mad that I didn’t blurb his manuscript. Or he needs a recommendation to apply to graduate school.

  CALEB: Too staged.

  DAVID: Just the tiniest thing at the beginning …

  CALEB: I don’t know.

  DAVID: I’m just throwing it out there.

  CALEB: Well, if we’re going to imitate My Dinner with André, we could start with me walking to meet you at your UW office. Voice-over: “Hmm, David Shields asked me if I’d be interested in collaborating on a book. Why? Is this some cruel joke? I thought he hated me.”

  DAVID: Or a possible trigger could be that David seeks Caleb out because David has become a bit of a pamphleteer, a blabberer about art and culture, which bores him greatly, and he doesn’t want to keep doing this. And yet he can’t exactly come up with anything else to do. He fears he may have few if any arrows left in his quiver. He needs something, someone, to shake him up. He wants an opponent, and he recalls Caleb as an aggressive—

  CALEB: You’ve used “combative” and “contentious.”

  DAVID: You’re one of the most confrontational people I know.

  CALEB: You called me “hostile.”

  DAVID: I did.

  CALEB: I take that as a compliment. And a complement. Ba-boom! We’re somewhat friendly, though.

  DAVID: You’ve always been willing to take me on, and yet we have a shared enough aesthetic that we don’t not have anything to talk about. Like André and Wally …

  CALEB: Like André, I can disappear. I told Terry, before we got married, that I’m the sort of guy who can disappear for three months and still be happy in a marriage. When she confirmed a healthy pregnancy, I went back to Asia. That was part of our informal prenuptial, but even then, she didn’t understand how I could do this. Her mother, especially, didn’t: “Your wife’s pregnant and you’re going to Taiwan?” André leaves his wife and family, too.

  DAVID: You have huge wanderlust.

  CALEB: I proposed and went to Taiwan for six months. We met in Hong Kong for a week, but she did all the marriage plans. Her family and mine thought that was weird. I come home from Asia, we get married, and then honeymoon in Belize and Guatemala. At our wedding, her father makes a toast and says Terry and I are so similar—both of us have wanderlust. He says, “Caleb has traveled all around the world. And when my daughter’s employer asked if she’d be willing to relocate to Maryland, Terry went.” Ever since, I tease my wife about the great adventure of Maryland.

  DAVID: She never worked in Asia?

  CALEB: No.

  DAVID: Maybe she’s like André’s wife.

  CALEB: André doesn’t evoke his wife.

  DAVID: Sure he does. I have a very specific sense of her.

  CALEB: We know hardly anything about her. Trivia: she’s sitting in the bar as an extra.

  DAVID: (talking into the DVR with Caleb out of the room) Wally and André cartoonize themselves in order to make the contrast starker: Quixote tilting at windmills; Sancho Panza, quotidian man. And I think Caleb and I should be willing—in our conversations per se and/or in our edits of our conversations—to slightly exaggerate our positions. Not lie or pretend, but I seriously doubt André is as high-church as he comes across, and I know Wallace Shawn is much more sophisticated than the nudnik he presents himself as being. In the same way, Caleb and I ought to be willing to do the same thing in the service of a work of art whose main debate topic is, let’s face it, life vs. art.

  I’ve never lived abroad for more than four months. Caleb has lived abroad for maybe a quarter of his life, and yet, of course, he’s the stay-at-home dad. I like that there are all these contradictions; otherwise, the whole thing would be a one-line joke about writing books compared to changing diapers. I’m not sure how we’ll carve out our personalities. I don’t have enough distance on myself to know precisely what my personality is. If I even have one. Ha ha. In Although Of Course, DFW is art; Lipsky is very crass commerce. In Sideways, Giamatti is Anxious Writer; Haden Church is We Pass This Way But Once. Perhaps that shows the limit of these works. Caleb and I ought to strive to push beyond these name tags.

  CALEB: (returning to the room) There’s also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  DAVID: Christ, I love that play so much.

  CALEB: Waiting for Godot.

  DAVID: Obviously, you can go all the way back to Plato’s dialogues with Socrates. It’s an ancient form: two white guys bullshitting. I also like the idea of us asking ourselves, Why are we even doing this? Why aren’t we home with our wives and children? I even like the idea of us talking about Lipsky/Wallace, Sideways, The Trip. I wonder if it would be too weird for us to consciously discuss them.

  CALEB: We need comedy, like in Sideways when Thomas Haden Church is tasting wine and Paul Giamatti discovers he’s chewing gum.

  DAVID: That was hilarious.

  CALEB: Terry thinks that’s me, Haden Church.

  DAVID: How so?

  CALEB: She thinks I’m unsophisticated.

  DAVID: Oh, is she so sophisticated herself?

  CALEB: She knows all the rules and etiquette of dining, hosting, being a guest, furniture placement. With pillows the stems must point downward; and with flowers, they must point upward.

  DAVID: I have no idea what that even means.

  CALEB: Floral patterns on the pillows. And the difference between Malbec and Cabernet and Merlot. Once, I handed her a thin-stemmed glass instead of wide-mouthed, and she says, “Caleb, thanks, but wrong glass. The curves allow the essence of the wine to circulate.”

  DAVID: Laurie’s a little like that. Her father grew up in a house with a maid and a cook. Doesn’t Terry acknowledge that you’re sophisticated when it comes to thinking about—

  CALEB: I’ve grown increasingly stupid the longer we’ve been together. She thinks I’ve undersold myself, that I could have been a doctor, lawyer, etc. She can’t understand my motivation, or lack thereof—how is it I’ve never made more than $22,000 a year?

  DAVID: How did you make that, from teaching English?

  CALEB: Construction. I never made much teaching English. There were benefits—housing, usually. In Brazil I made $500 a month, and when I worked in the UAE I made the most.

  DAVID: Let’s watch the movie.

  CALEB: Let me get a beer.

  DAVID: (alone again, speaking into the DVR) Another thing I love about Wally and André is their self-mockery. They’re really clued in to their own ridiculousness. They often say, “I’m an idiot,” which is central to my liking anyone. I do think that Caleb and I should do that. Or, really, just Caleb. Why would I ever have to say that? I’ve never done anything idiotic.

  I hope Caleb and I wind up speaking abou
t the same amount of time, though I like the way Wally stays so long in the background, just waiting to pounce. He’s aggressive in his passivity; he’s just biding time. The whole movie turns on Wally finally saying, “Do you want to know what I think about all this?” And then he gives his monologue, which to my way of thinking gently demolishes André. Or at least André’s argument.

  I don’t know if I’ll find the moment, but I want there to be a place where I say, “Well, thanks, Caleb, for all those amazing stories about Tibet and Istanbul and Cuernavaca. I’m really enjoying listening to all these tall tales, but, you know, here’s what I really think. I think you’re totally wrong.”

  CALEB: I’m back.

  Wally: (voice-over narration) … [André had] been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life” …

  DAVID: That, to me, is the most important line of the movie.

  CALEB: Why?

  DAVID: Perhaps not most important. The line I identify with the most.

  CALEB: There’s a difference?

  André: … a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere … that love of, um—well, that masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle. You know what I mean?

  DAVID: The specter of the Holocaust haunts the film. It’s very intentional. André returns to it over and over again. He was born in France in 1934. Both of them are completely assimilated Jews.

  André: … but since I’ve come back home I’ve just been finding the world we’re living in more and more upsetting … and I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau …

  • • •

  André: Have you read Martin Buber’s book On Hasidism?

  Wally: No.

  André: Well, here’s a view of life.

  DAVID: Can you pause while I go to the bathroom? Caleb?

  Caleb is snoring.

  DAVID: Caleb?

  CALEB: Uhh?

  DAVID: Pause.

  CALEB: Okay, sorry.

  DAVID: No problem.

  Wally: I mean, people used to treat me—I mean, uh, you know, if I would go to a party of professional or literary people—I mean, I was just treated, uh, in the nicest sense of the word, uh, like a dog.… Let’s face it. I mean, there’s a whole enormous world out there that I just don’t ever think about. I certainly don’t take responsibility for how I’ve lived in that world. I mean, you know, if I were actually to sort of confront the fact that I’m sort of sharing this stage with-with-with this starving person in Africa somewhere, well, I wouldn’t feel so great about myself. So naturally I just—I just blot all these people right out of my perception. So, of course—of course, I’m ignoring a whole section of the real world.…

  CALEB: Every artist thinks about this. Or should.

  DAVID: I.e., it’s what your work is about, so you think it’s the sine qua non of literary art. I’d say if in your work you consciously try to think about the world like this, you’re doomed to fail.

  Wally: … But frankly, you know, when I write a play, in a way one of the things I guess I think I’m trying to do is trying to bring myself up against some little bits of reality and I’m trying to share that, uh, with an audience. I mean—I mean, of course we all know, uh, the theater is, uh, in terrible shape today. I mean, uh—I mean, at least a few years ago people who really cared about the theater used to say, “The theater is dead.” And now everybody’s redefined the theater in such a trivial way that, I mean—I mean, God. I know people who are involved with the theater who go to see things now that—I mean, a few years ago these same people would have just been embarrassed to have even seen some of these plays.

  DAVID: Same with books.

  André: It may very well be that ten years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something.

  CALEB: André is insane.

  DAVID: What do you think Fight Club was about?

  André: When I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert … He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves.” … We really feel like Jews in Germany in the late ’30s … I think it’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing.

  CALEB: André’s beginning to sound like DJ Spooky.

  DAVID: Here’s where it turns. Just watch.

  Wally: Do you want to know my actual response to all this? Do you want to hear my actual response?

  DAVID: Acch. So beautiful. I love this so much.

  Wally: I mean, I just—I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy, uh, reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography or, uh, you know, uh, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that’s been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the morning and no cockroach or fly has—has died in it overnight. I mean, I’m just so thrilled when I get up and I see that coffee there, just the way I wanted it. I mean, I just can’t imagine how anybody could enjoy something else any more than that. I mean, I mean, obviously, if the cockroach—if there is a dead cockroach in it, well, then I just have a feeling of disappointment, and I’m sad. But I mean, I—I just—I just don’t think I feel the need for anything more than all this.

  CALEB: Wally sure likes to say “I mean” a lot.

  André: … just as the Nazi demons that were released in the ’30s …

  Wally: … Heidegger said that, uh, if you were to experience your own being to the full you’d be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of your experience …

  • • •

  André: What does that mean—a “wife,” a “husband,” a “son”? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?

  • • •

  Wally: (voice-over narration) … When I finally came in, Debbie was home from work and I told her everything about my dinner with André.

  DAVID: That gorgeous Erik Satie piano as the camera pans the stores Wally went to as a child—it’s hard to think of a more perfect ending to anything.

  In Sideways, Haden Church asks Giamatti why he wasn’t hurt in the car accident they pretended to have. Giamatti says, “I was wearing a seatbelt.” And Haden Church says, “Right.” You realize that Giamatti’s more of a survivor, finally, than Haden Church is. Haden Church bluffs better, that’s all.

  CALEB: He’s a hedonist who realizes—or doesn’t—his own faults.

  DAVID: Well, good night. Thanks for dinner. Tomorrow I’d love to go into Skykomish, if that’s cool. I’ll treat for breakfast. Lunch, if we get up late.

  CALEB: Wow, it’s past midnight. It’s almost one.

  DAVID: We started close to ten, and we stopped to make notes.

  CALEB: I was trying to fight sleep.

  DAVID: You slept for an hour, easily.

  CALEB: I missed that much?

  DAVID: You snored through all the major epiphanies.

  CALEB: I thought I missed maybe five minutes.

  DAVID: You were out cold. See you tomorrow.

  DAY 3

  DAVID: I think it’s a very good story, but if I were you, I’d rework a couple of things. First, you need to evoke Eliza better. You write, “Yes, she has sexual attributes, but why shall I tell you about them?” This probably sounds like conventional creative writing advice, but the whole story pivots on the narrator trying to get over Eliza, so I would do something to make the reader feel that ache. Then there’s this long section where you’re endlessly playing out the confusion surrounding her transvestitism, but we already know this from the opening.

  CALEB: But the narrator doesn’t.<
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  DAVID: But we do. How stupid can the narrator be?

  CALEB: He knows afterward.

  DAVID: Of course. It starts to feel like—what was that movie?

  CALEB: The Crying Game.

  DAVID: It feels like we’re watching The Crying Game for the fifth time. What’s so interesting about you to me, and what’s so different to me about you, is that even if it’s a bit of a fiction, you pride yourself on “I’m a man of experience and adventure. I’ve done this and I’ve done that. I’ve traveled here and I’ve traveled there. I know this person. I know that person.”

  Whereas me, I’m so much not that person. I don’t pretend to be street-smart. I’ve read books. I’ve written books. I’m not a complete idiot, I hope, when it comes to that other stuff.

  CALEB: What other stuff?

  DAVID: Everything that isn’t in books. Life, I guess. The story gets to something very deep about you or one version about you. It’s a fascinating decision where the guy says, more or less, “You know, our charge on earth is to experience everything,” so he calls himself out and makes a potentially suicidal choice. He plans to prove his manhood to himself by, er, fucking this guy. I really want more about this guy who circumlocutes himself into such a pretzel of logic that he convinces himself, suicidally or potentially suicidally, to have sex with someone because the gay guy calls out the narrator’s masculinity over being willing to have more experience. That’s the story. And that’s you. From the age of twenty-six to thirty-four you roamed all over the map. You tried to resist the blandishments of ordinary life. You’re understandably and justifiably—

  CALEB: Your observations are valid. You’ve hit flaws. To me, the story is about homophobia and how far a gay-friendly person might go. I wanted to layer in, as you would say, this sexual culture that accepts transvestites: in Polynesia, when a family has too many boys, they raise the youngest as a girl. So I first wrote about two guys, the narrator and his friend. They meet two transvestites, go to this beach, the narrator pulls at the bra, and then, in shock, shouts to his friend, “Stop!” The friend says, “Why? I’m getting my dick sucked! This better be important.” The narrator says, “These girls have dicks!” The friend screams, “Aaaaaah!” And the two friends run into the night back to the hostel.