Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety

by Daniel Smith

  In its particulars, Zuckerman’s story was not mine. I could scarcely imagine undergoing a bruising battle with my father, as he does, over the competing claims of literary integrity and ethnic solidarity. My father would probably take literature’s side. But it felt like my story. The novel excavated a species of torment—a concurrent hunger and repulsion for the protection and adoration of one’s family—that I had never encountered in a novel before, and to which I felt a curious, reflexive kinship. After I read The Ghost Writer (twice) I turned at once to Roth’s other books, and as I inhaled them in order that fall, from Goodbye, Columbus to Operation Shylock, I came again and again upon the same dogged theme, the same irresolvable tension, and I began to work up a theory as to why Roth’s depiction of family life felt so familiar.

  • • •

  The big clue came from brooding about my surroundings. Whenever I dared to voyage away from my carrel and out of the basement—furtive, blinking sorties to stretch my legs—I would look out the tall windows at the campus and think, I don’t want to be here. I had never wanted to be here. I hated it here. Yet I was here. Why on earth was I here?

  It was my mother, I recalled, who first suggested that I consider Brandeis, at the start of my senior year. The idea struck me as preposterous. College, I explained, was for broadening one’s perspectives, for seeking out the unfamiliar and the untried. It should be, ideally, like the black-and-white-to-Technicolor switchover in The Wizard of Oz. Brandeis’s student body was nearly two-thirds Jewish, just like my high school. If I were being raised in, say, the Ozarks, it might make sense to enroll, see what it’s like to be in the majority for a change. But I was being raised on Long Island. I was swimming in Jews. Every third friend a Rachel or an Aaron, a bar or bat mitzvah every weekend, High Holiday services so crowded people scalped tickets. “Ma,” I said, “we’ve got two black families in this town and one of them goes to our synagogue. What’s the point?”

  But she persisted. She appealed to my practical side. I needed to increase the number of my applications. I needed to apply to more schools likely to offer me scholarship money. I needed another safety school. Then the coup de grâce: What was the big deal? Why all the fuss? If I got in and didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.

  “Humor me,” she said. “Fill out an application.”

  I humored her. By that time, my anxiety had subsided to the point at which I could appreciate humor again. Kierkegaard, I would later learn, argued that there is an inverse relationship between humor and anxiety, since humor comes out of taking a detached stance toward something and anxiety is the state of being utterly, hopelessly attached to everything. One of the things I knew about Brandeis was a sort of joke. Originally, the school was to have been named Einstein University, but when the founders suggested this to the great man, in the 1930s, he demurred. That’s very thoughtful of you, he said, but my life isn’t over. What if I do something bad? What if my work turns out to be, you know . . . destructive? Not long afterward, Einstein urged Roosevelt to build the atomic bomb. “The worst mistake of my life,” he later called it. Ha ha.

  When the university sent its acceptance package, it was accompanied by the offer of a full scholarship. I wouldn’t have to pay a nickel. This was very flattering, but I wasn’t prepared for how the money would transform, in my mother’s hands, from a financial incentive into an emotional one. My high school was one of those suburban piles crammed to the rafters with overachievers—dozens upon dozens of extracurricularly resplendent teenagers with secret amphetamine habits and early-onset gastric ulcers. I rated, but just barely, and I’d never much cared. Now came the suggestion that I should care, that to have had so many above me in the rankings for so long could only have been a strain on my confidence, which was, as evidenced by my recent breakdown, lacking. The scholarship Brandeis was offering was an opportunity to rise in my own and others’ estimations, to bolster my self-esteem. It was an opportunity, as my mother telegraphed all this, to be “a big fish in a small pond.”

  This argument confused me on a number of levels. To begin with, I hadn’t thought my self-esteem needed so heavy an infusion. It’s true that I’d gone through a tough time. But I was on the upswing. Also, I had not previously harbored an ambition to be a “big fish.” An engaged fish, yes. An involved fish. But dominant? It honestly never occurred to me. Finally, this wasn’t just any small pond. This was a Jewish small pond. Which suggested that there were certain ethnic and religious considerations at play in my mother’s mind. This was odd, because I’d never thought my parents cared much about the maintenance or advancement of our Jewish identities beyond what was required as a matter of social and familial course: five or six desultory years of Hebrew school; a lavish bar mitzvah with hired dancers and a Viennese table; an annual seder in which the epic tale of exile, exodus, and Egyptian infanticide was speed-read so that we could get down to the real business of engorging ourselves on brisket. I thought all the Jewish stuff was just so much inherited furniture. But for my mother, it now seemed, it meant enough that she was troubled by the thought of its absence in my life. A few weeks later, touring Georgetown, by whose Gothic spires and Jesuit gravitas I was particularly entranced, my mother took a long look around and said, “All these crosses make me uncomfortable!” Then she asked the tour guide where the Hillel chapter was located.

  A more self-assured young man would not have been swayed by any of this. A more self-assured young man would have gone and done exactly what he wanted where he wanted. But that was just the point, I realized. That was the most plausible answer to the question I wanted answered—not just “What am I doing here?” but the exponentially more consequential “What’s wrong with me?” What defect was responsible for this terrible anxiety?

  What defect? How about being a weakling? How about being a pushover? How about being shamefully, contemptibly, pathetically, unreservedly acquiescent to the wills of others? How about being so weak of will that you may as well not even have one?

  It fit, this explanation. It fit as an explanation for why I’d enrolled at Brandeis despite not wanting to, it fit as an explanation for why I’d slept with Esther despite not wanting to, and it fit as an explanation for why I’d broken down in the aftermath of both: Even someone who acquiesces in ignorance knows in his bones that he has acquiesced. His body registers the self-betraying act of submission. And I never acquiesced in ignorance. Never. Whenever I did what I didn’t want to do I did it with a glimmer of awareness, with an intuition of my own desires but with a slavish readiness to abandon that intuition. At moments of decision I treated my intuition in the opposite way everyone treated theirs, not as a handy volitional dispatch from the characterological depths but as a suspicious, mercurial, dubious voice from the same, mired in the chaos of existence and so best to be discounted in favor of more objective-seeming data—namely, other people’s opinions. I shut my eyes, held out my hands, and asked other people to lead me. What else could I possibly be but anxious?

  • • •

  I didn’t blame my mother for my feeble will, though. Don’t get me wrong. Despite the torrid Oedipal rants of Portnoy’s Complaint, which had me cackling with pleasure, that wasn’t the lesson about anxiety I took away from my reading. I didn’t emerge from those stacks poisoned by grievances against a castrating mother, that mythical villain. On the contrary, I emerged from the library more sympathetic to my mother than ever, more cognizant and welcoming of our similarities, and even with a wry smile for where our little collegiate psychodrama had landed me. It was perfect, in its way. My anxious mother had contrived to deliver her anxious son to the land of the anxious: to the Jews. Because of Roth, I could now appreciate the joke.

  Because of Roth, I had to appreciate the joke. Appreciating the joke was the only viable prescription for the diagnosis his books amounted to, and what they amounted to was this: anxiety was my birthright. This wasn’t panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder or any other DSM designation. This was a Jewish disorder—
a genetic and environmental disease that consisted of being pulled simultaneously in the directions of rebellion and approval-seeking, of wanting to live adventurously and wanting to live conventionally, of selfishness and selflessness. This thing I was walking around with wasn’t psychiatric; it was ethnic, like Tay-Sachs or a taste for smoked fish. And if I was reading Roth correctly, it was untreatable.

  It was a relief. I felt relief having drawn this conclusion. It lent my anxiety a sheen of, if not normality then at least of sanctioned abnormality. It gave the condition a kind of tribal distinction, a historical heft and respectability. I was aware, in no small part because Roth’s novels fixated on the point, that not everyone felt the same way. Poor Zuckerman, like his creator, suffers the disdain of many of his own people for publishing books that portray Jews in an unflattering light. (“Dear Mr. Zuckerman: It is hardly possible to write of Jews with more bile and contempt and hatred. . . .”) The last word Zuckerman’s own father speaks before he dies, staring into his son’s eyes, is: “Bastard.” And at the end of Portnoy, Roth cleverly subjects his protagonist to the scorn of his exact opposite—a courageous, decisive, morally resolute Israeli soldier.

  By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.” Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious.

  Yet for all the disparagement, no one inside or outside Roth’s fictional world denied that such frightened, self-deprecating, disagreeably overwrought Jews existed. How could they? We were here. We were real. I was real. My mother was real. My brother Scott was real. Woody Allen and Jules Feiffer and Fran Lebowitz were real. Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had taken place, and what Roth’s fiction seemed at least in part designed to argue was that the ceaseless cerebration in which two millennia of Jewish wandering had allegedly resulted was not only valid but vital. Exegesis—interminable, serpentine, mind-knotting, tormented exegesis—was the very soul of the Jewish experience. The goys read the Bible and only the Bible. The Jews read the Torah and what thousands of long-dead, contentious, slippery-minded scholars had to say about what the Torah may or may not mean, what to do when it seems to mean two different things at once, what seeming to mean two different things at once says about meaning in general and about what God may or may not be trying to say about meaning in general, and about how all this should or should not color one’s understanding of divine authority, ethics, secular law, and so on and so forth in an unending welter of confusion. This is Judaism. This disputatiousness was the engine of its development. And like it or not this, Roth seemed to be saying, is part of its psychic legacy. In “Eli, the Fanatic,” one of his earliest stories, a young, assimilated suburban lawyer is enlisted to evict the tenants of a Hasidic yeshiva that has sprouted up in the neighborhood and ends up wearing the uniform of the chief rabbi, wide-brimmed hat, phylacteries, and all. Everyone thinks Eli has had a nervous breakdown, but, Roth writes, “he felt those black clothes as if they were the skin of his skin . . . he would walk forever in that black suit, as adults whispered of his strangeness and children made ‘Shame . . . shame’ with their fingers.”

  That defiance in the face of shame was perhaps the greatest attraction of Roth’s work. Roth’s protagonists are for the most part not good men. They tend to be selfish, overbearing, misogynistic, and vain. In some instances they are downright vicious. But they are almost always exceedingly honest—even, or especially, at the expense of their own serenity. They never recoil from the truth, even when the truth is horrendous. Their will to self-awareness is almost tyrannical.

  This thrilled me. I exalted in the uncompromising nature of Roth’s characters, for they seemed to transform the idea of anxiety from a pathology into nothing less than a virtue—a heroic trait. They suffered, Roth’s men. How they suffered! But their suffering was indivisible from their brilliance. They refused to sacrifice even one mote of their intelligence for the sake of dumb, ordinary comfort. In this Roth is like Kierkegaard, and not yet knowing the risks I attended closely to the message: To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life’s contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin. It was to be a writer, and I wanted in.

  episode three

  11.

  the facts

  Here are some of the jobs an anxiety sufferer should, if he is the slightest bit sensible, avoid at all costs: high-security prison guard, coal miner, emergency room surgeon, offshore oil rig worker, Mafia henchman, CIA field operative, investigative journalist in Moscow, criminal court judge in Bogotá, drug enforcement agent in Tijuana, rickshaw driver in New Delhi, political cartoonist in Pyongyang, and the opposition leader of any Central African nation.

  Here is another: fact-checker at a major American magazine.

  Indeed, just as the law wisely prohibits minors from working in factories and the blind from working as air-traffic controllers, it should prohibit the anxious from working as fact-checkers. This is because fact-checking subsists on an ideal—perfection—that is also the petty demon that haunts the anxious mind. The salient word is “petty.” The jobs listed above all consist of life-or-death decision-making; the vigilance they demand is warranted by the high stakes. In a state of anxiety, a person is as vigilant as any surgeon or spy but without the surgeon’s or spy’s cause to be vigilant. The energy put in is all out of proportion to the actual threat.

  The fact-checker’s job is to inspect the factual content of the magazine that employs him. Depending on the magazine, this content may take the form of anything from gossip item to investigative report to book review to short story. What doesn’t vary from publication to publication is what the checker spends his days inspecting for. He spends his days inspecting for error. Error of any and every possible kind—small, large, technical, logical, expository, dialogical, unwitting, nefarious, academic, essential, graphical, punctuational, typographical, attributional—is the only thing the checker thinks or cares about from the moment he sits at his desk in the morning to the moment he gets up at the end of the day. His paycheck depends exclusively on his ability to scrutinize the fruits of other people’s labor for bruises, blemishes, and rot. This task often results in an unfortunate mindset. To the journalist being subjected to a rigorous checking process, the checker is a relentless detective, dissecting and probing every niggling point. Yet it is the checker who actually has the psychology of the persecuted, for he lives in unceasing terror of failure. His professional standing and his self-esteem demand that he be on constant alert against slippage and distraction. Being a fact-checker is like playing the classic videogame Kaboom!, in which you have to move laterally back and forth trying to catch little cartoon bombs as they fall from the top of the screen, speeding up, slowing down, increasing and decreasing in frequency, but never stopping, always falling, brooking no error or else it’s KABOOM! Game over.

  Sara Lippincott, a former fact-checker, has said that when an error sneaks into print in any journal of reputation, it “live[s] on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed . . . silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”

  An exponential explosion of errata. By now the reader will recognize this phrase as pretty much a precise rendering of how my anxiety works its clockwork horrors. Its default setting is the perpetual, paralytic awareness that even the most mundane decision can be the fulcrum on which fate turns
and Armageddon is permitted to dawn. When I die my epitaph will read: HERE LIES DANIEL SMITH. HE LIVED IN FEAR OF AN EXPONENTIAL EXPLOSION OF ERRATA.

  • • •

  The magazine Sara Lippincott worked for was The New Yorker. The New Yorker invented the modern fact-checking system. Then they exported it, forever changing American journalism. One of the magazines to which The New Yorker exported its system of fact-checking was The Atlantic Monthly. This was a hand-to-hand export, like Cortez introducing smallpox to the New World. In 1980, William Whitworth, a high-placed editor at The New Yorker, became editor in chief of The Atlantic. The Atlantic had only the most rudimentary fact-checking system. Whitworth quickly remedied this, calling in a veteran New Yorker checker to turn The Atlantic into a lean, ruthless, mistake-catching machine. Nineteen years later, right out of college, I was hired to be a staff editor at The Atlantic. At The Atlantic, “staff editor” usually meant “fact-checker.”

  For a young man of my literary ambitions and Semitic background, the appeal of The Atlantic, one of the oldest and most venerable of American magazines, was enormous. When I arrived, the magazine’s editorial offices were located on the fifth floor of a converted warehouse in the North End. Riding the steel elevator each morning was like ascending to the summit of some Brahmin Mount Olympus. The first sight to greet you when you approached the magazine’s entrance was a large sepia-toned reproduction of the first page of the magazine’s first issue, dated November 1857, at the center of which was a seventeenth-century woodcut portrait of John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and coiner of the phrase “city upon a hill.” The second sight to greet you, when you walked through the door, was a framed drawing by the cartoonist Edward Sorel of three of The Atlantic’s founders toasting the editor and novelist William Dean Howells at a legendary dinner that took place in 1860 at Boston’s Parker House hotel. Howells was twenty-three at the time, just two years older than I was then, and he had traveled from his hometown in eastern Ohio—a “devout young pilgrim from the West,” as he would later put it—for no better reason than to lay his eyes on the “New England luminaries” of the American Renaissance, then in full swing. He also hoped, of course, that the luminaries would lay their eyes on him. Sorel’s drawing commemorates the wild fulfillment of his hopes. Toasting the young Howells in the picture are three of the most esteemed and powerful cultural figures of the period: Oliver Wendell Holmes, celebrated essayist, wit, teacher, and inventor; James Russell Lowell, poet, critic, satirist, and The Atlantic’s first editor; and James T. Fields, the publisher of everyone from Tennyson and Thackeray to Emerson and Hawthorne and the owner of what was arguably the coolest beard in antebellum America. (Howells: It “flowed from his throat in Homeric curls.”) The dinner was the first of Howells’ life to be served in courses, and the first in which he was exposed to the way the comfortably elite spoke around each other.