CALEB: What did you mean, though, when you said you think I’m a funny mix—
DAVID: Calling me a “dork,” say—why would you do that?
CALEB: (laughing) I was toning it down.
DAVID: What happened to your face?
CALEB: The scars? Car accident. July 1985: I was sixteen. I’d been invited to a Chicago Cubs tryout camp at Skagit Valley Community College. All the local prospects were there—mostly college. It was before my senior year of high school. I’d been an all-league pitcher. Everyone did sprints and played catch and then played a simulated game. I pitched two innings, didn’t allow a hit—not much of a sample, but it got a scout, Andy Pienovi, interested. He talked to me and gave me his card.
DAVID: So you could throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball?
CALEB: Mid-eighties. I weighed about 160 pounds but had an odd delivery and could put English on the ball. I worked nights at a restaurant and always smoked pot afterward and sometimes got drunk. Couple weeks later I was driving home from work, probably high and drunk, and I ran into a tree. Scars on my face, broke my arm, some vertebrae, and my brain. I was flown by helicopter to St. Luke’s in Bellingham, in a coma for four days, and in the hospital for two months. This factored in my early writing. Mark and Vince lost their parents. They saw death, but I almost died.
CALEB: What’s so great about Jackson Pollock?
DAVID: His work is unspeakably beautiful, and he changed the history of art. Other than that, not much.
CALEB: I’d argue he changed art negatively. Why do you find his work beautiful?
DAVID: More than anyone before him, he showed you the artist in the process of making art. He showed you—
CALEB: Whoop-de-fucking-do.
DAVID: I share your skepticism. I hate art talk. But I honestly respond to Pollock, Diebenkorn, Rothko. I just do. Most artists do nothing for me—de Kooning, say. Visual art is completely visceral: I love Gerhard Richter’s work—immediately upon looking at it. You either get, I don’t know, Rauschenberg, or you don’t. I love collage, so I do.
CALEB: “You either get it or you don’t” is a brick wall. You either get Christianity or you don’t. You either get French wines or you don’t. Or Franzen. Basically, you’re saying, “If you can’t see value, it’s your fault.” We both agree the Cascade Mountains are beautiful, but Pollock?
DAVID: To me, the Cascade Mountains are nowhere near as beautiful as a painting by Jackson Pollock.
CALEB: Now you’re just being stupid.
CALEB: In one corner we have Eula Biss’s The Balloonists, seventy-two pages of lyric essay. In the opposite corner we have Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. David Shields speaks for the former. Caleb Powell speaks for the latter.
DAVID: I like both books.
CALEB: You said you were surprised No Man’s Land won that award.
DAVID: I like the book. I don’t love it anything like the way I love The Balloonists. You know this line of Picasso’s I always quote? “A great painting comes together, just barely.” That, for me, is the definition of art. The casual reader reads The Balloonists and has no idea what it’s about, whereas No Man’s Land pretty much spells it out; there’s nothing to get. The Balloonists is this incredible generation-defining anthem about how Eula simply can’t get the hot-air balloon of romance off the ground, because she just can’t believe in it anymore, not after everything she’s seen happen to her mother.
CALEB: (laughing) Big fucking deal.
DAVID: Is that right? To you, that’s—
CALEB: We’re endlessly dreaming about being in a balloon? This balloon will save us? That’s an X factor? I’m chewing gum as I’m tasting wine.
CALEB: The artist has to have a foot in the world, be open to journalism, expository writing. I’m a writer first, artist second. You may be the opposite. I want writing to mix artistic with nonartistic, to link to interest in human crises. Hitchens or Samantha Power or Jon Krakauer on Mormon fundamentalists who commit a brutal murder. Orwell’s good, because he combined a great writing style with firsthand knowledge of the world. The microphone didn’t catch that, but when I mentioned Krakauer, David Shields gave a “yuck” face and a thumbs-down gesture.
DAVID: Two thumbs down.
CALEB: He’s a writer first and an artist second.
DAVID: When I talk about Chomsky, I paint in very broad strokes and I sound foolish, since I don’t care sufficiently about the details. I don’t care as much about politics as you do. When you talk about Pollock, you paint in very broad strokes and you sound foolish, since you don’t care sufficiently about the details. You don’t care as much as I do about art.
CALEB: You don’t sound that foolish regarding Chomsky; you’re too aware of your own ignorance. I hoped you might go to the mat for Chomsky; things would have gotten heated. If I sound foolish to some people, so be it, but I have a sophisticated distaste for Pollock. My mother was a painter. I grew up around painting and art history books. I’ve engaged. I care about the details. His work is crap.
CALEB: Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso, Amy Fusselman, Simon Gray, Leonard Michaels, David Markson: I like all these writers you like. In Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate, when she finally gets pregnant, she ties this in with memories of her father and her desire to have a baby. It was a satisfying book.
DAVID: You’re flattening the book down to nothing. It’s not about her getting pregnant. The book is held together by this extraordinary trope: all three tracks—her father as a pharmacist’s mate, her attempt to get pregnant, and her father dying—are about the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. That’s what holds the book together.
CALEB: Okay …
DAVID: It’s crucial to me that these books rotate outward toward a metaphor. In Bluets, Nelson is obsessed with the color blue, can’t get over her ex-boyfriend, and her friend is paralyzed. She’s asking a series of related questions: Why are we so sad? Why is the human animal so melancholy? How do we deal with loss? How do we deal with the ultimate loss?—which is death. It’s actively about the intersection of these things.
CALEB: I find Bluets much more interesting when she’s talking about her paralyzed friend, when she’s showing empathy. The poetic meanderings on blue and the Tuareg and cyan and sadness, not so much. And this painful breakup: he’s two-timing her. That, to me, is obliviousness of obliviousness. What’s her point? She’s having mega-erotic passionate sex. Enjoy it, baby. Don’t bring me your pain. Give me widows of Kabul, give me Krakauer’s psychopaths, give me a Khmer Rouge cadre cutting off Haing Ngor’s finger, give me Texas death row inmates, give me Somaly Mam getting fucked in a brothel by a former soldier who lost an arm and an eye, give me Maggie’s quadriplegic friend, give me painful pain.
DAVID: In your story, what’s the takeaway? What are you saying about sexuality in the West and East and desire and oppression and obliviousness and risk? The point is what? What do you think that story is saying? What are you saying?
CALEB: Right now I’m not saying anything.
DAVID: If you just need time to think …
CALEB: You’re much more certain about literature than I am. You say Fusselman’s book is about the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. Fine, but everything is about that. When you’re alive and can die at any moment, and the people you love can die at any moment, and people who starve or are bombed can die at any moment, or death row prisoners can die at any moment, and every day people do die, that’s the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. I rarely get this tension from the books you write or the books you love.
CALEB: You express your aesthetic well—that’s your strength. You talk about these other books and turn back to yourself, and thus you aspire to do what you admire.
DAVID: No, that’s backward! I write what I write and then I find work that deepens and extends my aesthetic.
CALEB: Can you talk without me? I’ve got to go to the bathroom.
CALEB: (returning) Khamta said we should try Lake Elizabeth.
DAVID: A hike?
CALEB: We can get there by road and then we can walk around the lake.
DAVID: Great. Lunch in town, then the lake. And we can go back to Cascadia tonight.
CALEB: (skimming a newspaper at the Skykomish Public Library) They got Anwar al-Awlaki.
DAVID: It’s funny: Obama is far more militarily effective than Bush.
CALEB: And Libya seems to have turned out okay.
DAVID: I guess.
CALEB: I’ll turn this off.
CALEB: My dad and I had problems getting along twenty years ago. I don’t think we liked each other. He’s prehistoric when it comes to race and homosexuality and so forth. This thinking dies out a little more with every generation; with him there’s no point in debating. Now, he comes over, adores my daughters. I can watch them and feel at peace.
DAVID: What does he do with them?
CALEB: Takes them swimming or to the playground. I painted his house this summer, and he spent a lot of time with them. My mom’s relatively useless, almost an extra burden. He has to take care of her, so he’ll watch the kids and my mother will just sit at home with a magazine.
DAVID: As you get older, it matters more. It’d be hard to function without family. I know I couldn’t.
CALEB: If you don’t have a child, it’s different: family has a different meaning. One of the most revealing things about you that I didn’t know (and as far as I know, you haven’t written about it) is that Laurie wanted to have a second child and you said no. A second child would have given Laurie a lot of joy.
DAVID: Me, too, for that matter.
CALEB: As well as Natalie. The idea of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kid at home. And the empty nest, rather than now, would happen when this youngest child goes to college in a couple years.
DAVID: Got it.… Do you wish you had had more kids?
CALEB: We’re happy with three.
DAVID: Three’s a lot.
CALEB: I got snipped.
DAVID: You’re done.
CALEB: For two days afterward, every time my wife asked me to do anything I’d shout, “My balls, sorry, my balls! Now please bring me a bowl of ice cream.”
DAVID: That’d be fun.
CALEB: It was. You’ve talked about Laurie asking for a second child, but what else don’t I know about you? Are there any secrets that you’ve kept out of your writing?
DAVID: I’d talk about them if there were, but there’s nothing I can think of right now, and I definitely want to get a good hike in before it gets dark.
CALEB: Have you ever betrayed someone?
DAVID: I’ve never had an affair outside of my marriage, if that’s what you’re asking. Have you?
CALEB: No.
DAVID: At these various conferences and residencies, you know, out of who knows what mixed motive, these girls come on to you.
CALEB: It’s probably very tempting, especially for the single writer.
DAVID: If I do that, the marriage is effectively over. I’m not French.
CALEB: Get divorced first.
DAVID: But it’s a nice test. I really do want a successful marriage.
CALEB: It’s—I’ve been single. That was fun, but why be with someone you’re willing to cheat on? Serial monogamy and then marriage.
DAVID: I’ve been thinking about these eighteen-year periods of my life. From zero to eighteen I was growing up, and eighteen to thirty-six I was more or less on my own, and thirty-six to fifty-four I was a husband and father. And now Natalie’s eighteen and out of the house, so I’m starting to enter the fourth phase of my life. Natalie’s part of our life, but she’s one step removed, and it’s been interesting.
Laurie and I had this discussion a couple of years ago. We weren’t getting along that great, and I’m pretty sure she was under the influence of one of her friends who was getting divorced. We got into an argument about some minor thing—Oliver Stone’s movie about Bush, actually—and found ourselves asking what we were going to do if and when Natalie left the house for school. We were saying our marriage is okay, but are we really happily married? “Let’s give ourselves eighteen months. I don’t think either of us is going to do anything until Natalie leaves for school, and if we’re unhappily married then, we can act.” It was a fascinating trial period. And I tried very, very hard to engage with Laurie, whether helping out in the kitchen, taking walks, trips, watching movies together, etc. It’s—
CALEB: Sorry to interject, but I can see my marriage in this. It’s an unavoidable dynamic.
DAVID: How so?
CALEB: Being involved in my own stuff, I don’t need an outside source to share it with, especially if there’s only superficial interest, and thus I can’t share a lot with Terry. I wish she’d have her own passion so she could occupy herself. And maybe your marriage might be better if Laurie had more of that.
DAVID: I know I have major, major deficits as a spouse. I’m so wrapped up in my own head. Sometimes I suppose I wished she had an equally focused interest, but on the other hand she’s great to me, in many ways. She has incredible “emotional intelligence,” she helps me figure stuff out, she makes our house really nice. She’s what used to be called—I hate this term—a “writer’s wife.” Maybe she was wearying of that. There’s a way in which I was an old fifty-three and she was a young fifty-three. She’s limber. She does yoga, Pilates—
CALEB: She certainly looks younger than she is.
DAVID: She’s starting to let her hair grow in gray, and she’s wearing glasses more; to me, she looks like an austere French intellectual (which I find incredibly sexy—her slight remove). She’s in really great shape, but with my back woes I can’t go on elaborate hiking trips, etc. We could have gone in a few directions. We could have, you know, just gone our separate ways. “We had a pretty good marriage, we raised Natalie, but we’re too different.” I’m not sure how much of this I articulated to her. Some of it was in my own mind. Then, there’s another marriage where we keep on going as is and it’s okay, but we agree to look the other way. The third option, the most interesting, is the one we’re trying to do now: Okay, now let’s try to be married for real. We were married for less than three years before Natalie was born.
CALEB: I still can’t believe that you were together four years and never discussed kids. Another overworked chess metaphor, but before you move the “marriage chess piece,” resolve the kid question.
DAVID: And I’d say again, “Life isn’t a chess game, my friend.”
CALEB: My parents celebrated their fifty-fourth anniversary earlier this year. Every year my mom says, “Dave and I have enjoyed—however many—years of blisssss … ters.”
DAVID: Oof. I hate puns like that.
CALEB: And every time, my dad gets red in the face. My mom says, “Bliss …” She pauses and lets my dad react. He says, “Trice. Don’t say it!” Then she drops the “… ssssters.” I’ll do this with my wife now and then, just to freak her out.
DAVID: Sometimes it does baffle me that Laurie and I married each other. She’s very, very smart, but she’s not intellectual—probably somewhat like Terry.
CALEB: I always say that she’s smarter, and I’m stronger.
DAVID: Yep—me, too. With my bad back I can lift grand pianos.
CALEB: She earns the money. I move heavy objects. She loves family time. All weekend it’s “Let’s do this, let’s do that.” And we spend the whole weekend doing this and that: going
to the zoo, parks, movies. She just loves “being a family.”
DAVID: You wish she’d take the kids more often.
CALEB: No. Yes. No. Well, yes. She works all week, she deserves to call the shots on the weekend, but I wouldn’t mind having more time to myself.
DAVID: She doesn’t put a huge priority on your writing.
CALEB: My writing doesn’t bring anything into the family. I’m not as good a father and a husband if I’m doing something that doesn’t bring in income, so I carve out writing moments early in the morning or late at night, and now two of the kids are in elementary school, so I have more time.
DAVID: I’m still not someone who makes huge amounts of money, but I get these lecture gigs now: I go somewhere for a day or two or three and get paid two, three, five thousand dollars.
CALEB: People pay money to listen to you gab?
DAVID: I go to a college, critique manuscripts, give a lecture, a reading, do a Q&A, visit classes.
CALEB: Hey, this is cool: on the map they have paved roads, groomed dirt roads, and trails.
DAVID: Why do we need a map—to make sure we don’t fall?… Anyway, the point is it took forever, and I finally make enough money writing and teaching and talking about writing that—
CALEB: You can move to a better house.
DAVID: What’s the matter with my house?
CALEB: I was joking!
DAVID: So was I!
CALEB: You can travel more, indulge.
DAVID: A little. I have three more years of Natalie’s tuition and that’s $57K a year. I also want to make enough money that Laurie can maybe open a café. She’s a great cook.
CALEB: That’d be so—
DAVID: She’d love it.
CALEB: Many restaurants aren’t literally losing money. The owners just can’t survive on what they make. Sometimes they make less than the dishwasher. They have a $2,000 mortgage, a couple kids, car payments, business loans, and they can’t get by on what amounts to a $20,000 salary.
I Think You're Totally Wrong Page 13