How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  Tiger needed to demolish the perfect marble statue he’d made of himself: the image of perfect rectitude. We were shocked—shocked—that his furious will to dominate his opponents on the golf course also manifested in an insatiable desire to humiliate countless sexual partners. We all contrive different, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and revealing ways to remain blind to our own blindnesses. In the British television series Cracker, Eddie Fitzgerald is a brilliant forensic psychologist who can solve the riddle of every dark heart except his own (he gambles nonstop, drinks nonstop, smokes nonstop, is fat, and is estranged from his wife). Richard Nixon had to undo himself, because—as hard as he worked to get there—he didn’t believe he belonged there. Bill Clinton’s fatal charm was/is his charming fatality: his magnetism is his doom; they’re the same trait. Someone recently said to me about Clinton, “He could have been, should have been, one of the great presidents of the twentieth century, so it’s such a shame that—” No. No. No. There’s no “if only” in human nature. When W. was a young man, he said to Poppy, “Okay, then, let’s go. Mano a mano. Right now.” The war of terror was the not so indirect result. In short, what animates us inevitably ails us.

  And vice versa: because I stutter, I became a writer (in order to return to the scene of the crime and convert the bloody fingerprints into abstract expressionism). As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe, but I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language. If I’m not writing it down, experience doesn’t really register. Language has gone from prison to refuge back to prison.

  Picasso: “A great painting comes together, just barely” (I love that comma). And this fine edge of excellence gets more and more difficult to maintain. I yield to no one in my admiration of Renata Adler’s novel Speedboat, which is, I think, one of the most original and formally exciting books published by an American writer in the last forty years (and which now has been reissued on exactly the same day that this book of mine has been published). And I hesitate to heap any more dispraise upon her much-maligned memoir, Gone, which I must admit I still find utterly addictive. Surely, though, the difference between Speedboat and Gone derives from the fact that in the earlier book the panic tone is beautifully modulated and under complete control and often even mocked, whereas in the later book it’s been given, somewhat alarmingly, absolutely free rein. Success breeds self-indulgence. What was effectively bittersweet turns toxic.

  When my difficult heroes (and all real heroes are difficult) self-destruct, I retreat and reassure myself that it’s safer here close to shore, where I live. I distance myself from the disaster, but I gawk in glee (no less assiduously than anyone else did I study Tiger’s sexts to and from Josyln James). I want the good in my heroes, the gift in them, not the nastiness, or so I pretend. Publicly, I tsk-tsk, chastising their transgressions. Secretly, I thrill to their violations, their (psychic or physical) violence, because through them I vicariously renew my acquaintance with my shadow side. By detaching, though, before free fall, I preserve my distance from death, staving off difficult knowledge about the exact ratio in myself of angel to animal.

  In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, “Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—” What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you are.

  4

  OUR GROUND TIME HERE WILL BE BRIEF

  Partial answer to question asked in previous chapter: we’re the only animal that knows it will die.

  A day like any other, only shorter

  KAREN SHABETAI, dead at forty-four.

  When you were around her, you sometimes felt like a bit of a jerk, because you knew you weren’t as good a person as she was. You weren’t as generous, as kind, as civilized, as communal, as energetic, as fun (Karen riding the elevator seated atop her bike with her helmet still on). She gave the best parties in Seattle, at least the Seattle that I know. She made belonging to part of something larger than yourself—a discipline, a city, a religion—seem like a possibility. She had the most and best tips for what school to send your children to, what summer camps, where to travel (Rome, Rome, and Rome, apparently), what to see, what to read.

  Once, masquerading as a scholar, I applied for an NEH fellowship, and I swear Karen spent more time on the application than I did (still no luck!). Having her students in my creative writing classes was a distinctly mixed blessing: they were inevitably among the most well-prepared students in the course, but they expected me to be as dedicated a teacher as Karen was. She believed in the continuity of culture in a way that I pretend to but don’t, and one of my most luminous memories is of her daughter, Sophie, playing the violin at a party at their house (Karen’s concentration matching Sophie’s).

  It’s important to remind myself that Karen was sweet but not too sweet. The loving and challenging contentiousness between Karen and Ross was and is to me a model of a successful marriage. One night, Laurie and I and Karen and Ross saw Il Postino, and afterward we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The waiter at the restaurant was so Italian, so obviously an extra who had somehow (Purple Rose of Cairo–like) escaped from Il Postino, that Karen and I virtually—no, not virtually; literally—had to stick napkins in our mouths every time he came by to inquire about us. Laurie and Ross were considerably more composed, but Karen and I were beyond rescue.

  Our ground time here will be brief

  RAY KURZWEIL BELIEVES that in twenty years, medical and technical advances will produce a robot small enough to wander throughout your body, doing whatever it’s been programmed to do, e.g., going inside any cell and reversing all the causes of aging by rebuilding the cell to a younger version of itself. If you do that to every cell in your body and keep doing this on a regular basis, you could (theoretically) live forever.

  By 2030, Kurzweil believes, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We will have “eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the other hormone-producing organs, kidney, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and bowel. What we’ll have left at that point will be the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

  Kurzweil’s father died of heart disease at fifty-eight. His grandfather died in his early forties. At thirty-five, Kurzweil himself was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, which he “cured” with an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills and intravenous treatments. He now takes 150 supplements and drinks eight to ten glasses of alkaline water and ten cups of green tea every day. He drinks several glasses of red wine a week (gotta love that resveratrol).

  On weekends, he undergoes IV transfusions of chemical cocktails, which he believes will reprogram his biochemistry. He undergoes preemptive medical tests for many diseases and disorders, keeps detailed records of the content of his meals, and routinely measures the chemical composition of his own bodily fluids.

  Kurzweil, now sixty-four, has joined Alcor Life Extension, a cryonics company. In the unlikely event of his death, his body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him.

  Asked if being a singularitarian (someone who believes that technological progress will become so rapid that the near future will be qualitatively different and impossible to predict) makes him happy, he said, “If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would have consisted of getting a fire to light more
easily, but we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge—casting a wider net of consciousness—is the purpose of life.”

  He wants not so much to live as never to die.

  He seems to me the saddest person on the planet.

  I empathize with him completely.

  A day like any other, only shorter

  ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF: “All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.”

  BEN SHEPHARD: “In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up ‘Crackers or Coffins.’ Thereafter, their time in the air was rationed.”

  DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG: “ ‘Frozen on the stick’: paralyzed with fear.”

  PAUL FUSSELL: “The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.”

  MICHEL LEIRIS: “If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.”

  SHEPHARD: “From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of ‘flying personnel who will not face operational risks.’ This sanction was known as ‘LMF’ or ‘Lack of Moral Fibre.’ Arthur Smith ‘went LMF’ after his twentieth ‘op.’ The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr, and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English Channel, he had lost control of his fear. His ‘courage snapped and terror took over.’ ‘I couldn’t do anything at all,’ he later recalled. ‘I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak.’ ”

  JÖRG FRIEDRICH: “The Allies’ bombing transportation offensive of the 1944 pre-invasion weeks took the lives of twelve thousand French and Belgian citizens, nearly twice as many as Bomber Command killed within the German Reich in 1942. On the night of April 9, 239 Halifaxes, Lancasters, Stirlings, and Mosquitoes destroyed 2,124 freight cars in Lille, as well as the Cité des Cheminots, a railroad workers’ settlement with friendly, lightweight residential homes. Four hundred fifty-six people died, mostly railroaders. The survivors, who thought they were facing their final hours from the force of the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, ‘Bastards, bastards.’ ”

  DOUGLAS BOND (PSYCHIATRIC ADVISER TO THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE IN BRITAIN DURING WWII): “Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretense that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.”

  HEMINGWAY: “Hürtgen Forest was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.”

  FUSSELL: “Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence, at least so it appeared.”

  Not a Quaker per se but sympathetic to Quaker pacifism, Nicholson Baker wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make. In Human Smoke, he takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them in such a way that an argument clearly emerges. War, even WWII, is never justified. All deaths are human smoke.

  When the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector.

  A day like any other, only shorter

  WHENEVER U.S. SOLDIERS in Vietnam saw the horror show revealed with particular vividness, they’d often say, flatly and with no emphasis whatsoever, “There it is.” Michael Herr’s Dispatches: “ ‘There it is,’ the grunts said, sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back.” Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers: “Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is.”

  The movie version of No Country for Old Men, ostensibly a thriller, gets at something profound—namely, in the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?

  Love and theft

  IN STANDARD ERASURE POETRY, the words of the source text get whited out or obscured with a dark color, but the pages in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes have literally gone under the knife, rectangular sections physically excised using a die-cut technique that resembles X-Acto artistry. The result: chinked, rectangular cutouts around which remaining text floats, reminding me of the shape of floor plans (albeit for buildings made of nothing). The cutouts produce windows and doorways to portions of up to ten successive pages of text at a time. Words and phrases get revealed, repeated, then covered up. Language waves at me through these X-Actoed text windows, disrupting the surface texture of the page. The composition not only interrupts normal eye movements but in effect forces me to read the book back to front at the same time I’m reading it front to back.

  Lifting the pages up one by one, I discover a lyrical seminarrative delivered by a single narrator, characters (a mother and father), a single plot point (the father’s death), and a shift in setting (the movement from an Eden-like garden to an urban frontier). Futzing with Bruno Schulz’s book The Street of Crocodiles, Foer gets intimate with the Polish writer; Foer is writing a book with, through, and for Schulz by unwriting the original. There’s much debate about the relevance of books to our byte-obsessed culture, but I’ve yet to come across any assemblage of text, hyperlinks, images, and sidebar ads that presents a more chaotic and multidimensional reading experience than this book.

  “I felt light,” says the narrator midway through Tree of Codes. At this point I think, too, of the book itself, which, composed of half-empty pages, feels to the touch too light. When I pick up the doctored book-object, it weighs less than the eye says it should. So, too, when I separate the delicate pages one by one and examine not just the words written on each page but also the space through and past these pieces of paper, I have the uncanny experience of looking through empty picture frames.

  Turning pages, my hand (accustomed to a physical understanding of the page) literally measures subtracted weight. This tactile emptiness lies at the heart of the book’s attempt to plumb antispaces—landscapes unrecoverable at the levels of text, paper, geography, and memory—which are excruciating to Foer, whose oeuvre is simultaneously an attempt to recover, through art, the dead bodies of the Holocaust (his mother’s parents were survivors) and a demonstration that such an attempt is not only impossible but also wrong (“to write a poem after Auschwitz,” etc.). The book is both hospital and crypt: the thousands of tiny rectangular spaces are both beds and graves.

  No one from my immediate or extended family died in the Holocaust, and yet in a way that’s difficult to explain, it was the defining event of my childhood …

  Our ground time here will be brief

  BUILT TO SPILL’S “Randy Described Eternity” is a launching pad for the empty space between your body holding your guts (built to spill onto the pavement) and the vast cavern of forever-land eternity. Doug Martsch manipulates the thin, hollow body inside his electric guitar toward both extinction and monument, marking our inability to hold the dual concepts completely in mind. This isn’t thrill-seeking exploration or death taunt. It’s a slow plod toward guitar inexpressible. No benedictions or apologies, just a few shafts (I can always hope) of illumination. Electric guitar solos simultaneously battle against postmodernity and worship it—feedback jamming the alternating currents into sound sculptures of pain and ecstasy. White-boy field holler
s: slow it down, add pedal steel guitar, and you have a country song. Keep the guitar/drums setup, add a light show, and you have the rock existential thing. Martsch doesn’t really close in on death, but hey, his guitar’s alive.

  A day like any other, only shorter

  PHILLIP, WHOSE MFA thesis I’d just directed, died in a freak accident. He was walking his dog, lightning struck a tree, and a heavy branch hit his head. At the funeral, many of his classmates and teachers told standard stories: funny, sad, vivid, delicately off-color. I praised him fulsomely, thereby casting a warm glow back upon my own head. Another professor, trying to say something original, criticized his fledgling work. I upbraided her for her obtuseness, but I felt bad about badgering her and made it worse by harrumphing, “Words are famously difficult to get right. That’s why being a writer is so interesting.” Worse still by adding, “Who among us doesn’t get the words constantly wrong?” She said she would write Phillip’s widow an explanatory and exculpatory note, but it came out wrong, too, I promise. Because language never fails to fail us, never doesn’t defeat us, is bottomlessly … —But here I am, trying to paper over the gaps with dried-up glue.

  Our ground time here will be brief

  WITHOUT RELIGION, no one knows what to say about death—our own or others’—nor does anyone know after someone’s death how to talk about (think about) the rest of our lives, so we invent diversions.

  In Bruges is a film about two English hit men who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, where they have to while away the days, knowing they’re next. Given death’s imminence, is any particular activity of any greater significance than any other activity? Good question.