How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  Other people

  MY FRIEND MICHAEL, who became a widower seven years ago at fifty, emailed me, “I keep hearing the same advice from different people, most recently my sister and my therapist: don’t isolate yourself. I have tendencies in that direction, especially in recent years, and I know it can be bad. When we discussed Zuckerberg’s anti-social impulses, you said writers can’t be isolated for too long because their subject matter is people. I agree. Don’t you think that right now, though, in order to finish my new book, it’s fine for me to be somewhat isolated?”

  I wrote back, “It’s a good sign that you wrote this note, since if you were really tumbling into free fall, such questions wouldn’t even register for you. You’re working on your book, which is coming into harbor after its years-long journey at sea; I’d say, if you feel like you’re on a good rhythm, by all means keep at it. We all understand, or at least I do. When I mentioned Zuckerberg, I wasn’t covertly sending you a message. If anything, I was speaking about and to myself. It appeals to me as well to be as impressively focused as he is (remember, too, though, he’s only twenty-eight). But I’ve built my life in such a way as to make sure that I don’t ever get trapped again in my own private Wallingford. Have tried it—doesn’t work for me. I do think there is value for you now in semi-impermeable iso tank, but perhaps you could/should come up for air a little more frequently?”

  Our ground time here will be brief

  IN History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life, Jill Bialosky asserts her identity as a living person: wife, mother, writer, editor. She says it over and over again. It becomes a chant, then a mantra. She uses the coincidence of her younger sister Kim’s suicide and her own failed pregnancies to convey how quickly hope dwindles when you discover that the world can kill you. Kim, a young, sweet, beautiful girl with no history of mental illness, is hardly the brooding Slipknot teen I was expecting. Jill suggests that suicides are a casualty of natural selection—which is a survivor’s theory, a wall erected against death. “Sisters are mirrors; we see parts of ourselves in each other,” she says, conveying her culpability, her fear, her hauntedness. I thought that people who killed themselves were different from everyone else, and I was wrong. Jill sounds as if she’s still deeply in shock. All her memories of Kim are exceptional, tender, but poisoned a little. Why did this happen? How could I let this happen? Could I have prevented this from happening? The questions are a kind of torture; trying to answer them is the only distraction. She looks through the police, coroner, and toxicology reports just to learn what her sister was wearing—a small, gruesome, but ultimately answerable question. On one page, Jill compares Kim’s death to a Shakespearean tragedy; on the next, she writes about the death of her son’s goldfish—the impossibility of pinning down what she can’t fathom. For her, it’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s life and death. Don’t trust what you think you know about another person. In the wake of Kim’s death, Jill is hyperaware of the sadness of others, of how lightly we all tread.

  When I finished the book, I picked up my phone and called Michael just to say Hey man, what’s up, how ya doin’?

  Real life

  IT’S OFTEN SAID, with some justification, that most novelists have, finally, only one story to tell and that, in book after book, they ring endless changes on a single essential narrative. For more than thirty years, Frederick Barthelme has been exploring the same material (marriage, divorce, middle-aged male ennui), the same territory (Southern suburbia), and similar characters (overeducated protagonists in dead-end jobs and their wry, weary wives and ex-wives and sassy young girlfriends).

  Barthelme’s ninth book, The Brothers, is told from the astringent point of view of Del Tribute, who moves from Houston to Biloxi “because he’d been given a condominium, outright, by his ex-wife’s rich father, a going-away present. It was less than a month since the divorce papers were final.” When he arrives in Biloxi, Del discovers that his brother, Bud, has left to pursue an exceedingly vague “movie thing” in Los Angeles. Waiting for the tenant of his condominium to move out, Del stays with and comes perilously close to falling in love with Bud’s wife, Margaret.

  The real romance of the novel, though, is between Del, a forty-four-year-old stereo salesman, and Jen, a twenty-four-year-old exhibitionist and satirist who infosurfs Compuserv for mordant wire service stories for Blood & Slime Weekly, the one-page “Hi-Speed Terrorzine” that she posts around town (it’s 1993). When Del says he doesn’t want to have sex, Jen says, “Yeah, neither do I. I’ve had my sex for the year. Let’s forget it. You want to watch TV? You want a sandwich? You want to play Crazy Eights?” (Laurie’s and my favorite recent “activity”: immersing ourselves in DVD after DVD of The Sopranos, The Wire, The Singing Detective, Brideshead Revisited, Friday Night Lights, Breaking Bad. Don’t let it ever end, we practically pray to the screen. Don’t let’s ever die.)

  When Bud returns from Los Angeles, he and Del and Margaret and even Jen make much ado throughout the rest of the novel about Del’s earlier flirtation with Margaret. This proves to be something of a MacGuffin, as the novel’s true subject is Del’s attempt to reclaim his presence in the world by seeing it as breathtaking, as beautiful. In the opening paragraph, “it’d quit raining, and the sunlight was glittery as he crossed the bridge over the bay, but his fellow travelers didn’t seem to notice the light.” When Del and Jen are at the Singing River Mall, “Del thought it was beautiful. ‘Nobody really gets this,’ he said. ‘Nobody sees how gorgeous this is or knows why.’ ” At another point, Del says about storms that “they transform everything instantly. It’s like suddenly you’re in a different world, and the junk of your life slides away and you’re left with this rapture, this swoon of well-being and rightness. You get the world in its amazing balance.”

  Speaking to Jen about the weird wire service articles she culls but referring indirectly to the novel’s apparent aesthetic, he says, “There isn’t any story. It’s not the story. It’s just this breathtaking world, that’s the point. It’s like the story’s not important—what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel the stuff. That’s what puts you there.” When he waxes self-righteously philosophical, Jen, his instructor in the visible, teases him back to reality: “Whoa. It’s Deepman. Deepman in the window.”

  The Jen cure, in general, takes. The final two chapters offer an instructive contrast between Del and Bud. Bud defines his own minibreakdown in terms of the fact that he can no longer respond to “the scent of a woman as she passes you in an aisle, the light trace of her skirt grazing your thigh, or her blouse on your forearm as you reach for a magazine.” After Del tries to convince Jen that she shouldn’t go out dressed the way she is because her pants are so short that they’re practically invisible, Jen says, “I’m here to make you happy. I’m going to make you love me, make our lives worth living, make my pants visible—all at once.”

  The swoon of well-being and rightness, the world in its amazing balance, is what Barthelme’s protagonists (what Barthelme, and I, and you) have always explicitly been seeking. By the end of the book, “it was one of those nights when the air is like a glove exactly the shape of your body.” Isn’t it pretty to think so—

  A day like any other

  ENTERING ST. FRANCIS HOSPITAL to receive some not particularly crucial test results, I thought What the hell and crossed myself. A beatific nun passed me and said, with astonishing intensity, “Good morning”—as close as I’ll ever get to religion.

  Writing as religion:

  The wound and the bow

  How had my life come to this? I wondered, shuttling back and forth between two four-story brick buildings, two houses of language, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa Speech and Hearing Clinic.

  I remember arriving in Iowa City, standing in the middle of downtown and asking someone, “Where’s downtown Iowa City?” I remember meeting Connie Brothers (the Workshop’s student adviser), experiencing the feeling that she was s
omehow my long-lost older sister, and never coming remotely close to losing that feeling. I remember hearing my highly alliterative short story “The Gorgeous Green of the Hedges” gently demolished in class and, upon returning to my apartment, eating bowl after bowl of mint chip ice cream until the room spun. I remember admiring how some of my classmates (Elizabeth Evans, Mike Hutchison, Walter Howerton, Michael Cunningham, John Hill, Jan Short, Peter Nelson, Sarah Metcalf, Bob Shacochis) had figured out how to get their own personality onto the page. At the time, I wrote like Thomas Hardy and I thought, regarding my classmates and their ability to convert their speaking voice into a narrative voice, I can do that … or if not, I better learn. I remember one of my professors seeing me at a Northrop Frye lecture and saying, as a sort of accusation, “I thought I’d see you here.” (My work was heavy on the symbolism.) I remember thinking nothing of knocking on a friend’s door at midnight to get his reaction to a new story I’d written. He didn’t like it, so he praised, at ludicrous length, my delicate application of Liquid Paper. I remember becoming an instantaneously and excessively devoted fan of the Iowa men’s basketball team (resurrection of childhood ecstasy); my first novel came out of that. I remember being a patient in the speech clinic and being overwhelmed by the paradox that as a writer I was learning to manipulate words but that as a stutterer I was at the mercy of them; my second novel came out of that. I remember people saying that nothing ever happened to anyone in Iowa City and me wondering what in the world they were talking about. I remember, above all, during the five years I lived in Iowa City, believing that what mattered more than anything else in your life was writing as well as you possibly could.

  The University of Iowa field house was built in 1927 with metal and brick and a very low ceiling to create beautifully bad acoustics. The chairs were packed close together on top of the court, and the balcony seats were all benches: when one person cheered, this cheer flowed into the bloodstream of the person next to you and you got a cumulative effect. Every sound echoed and reechoed. Every ovation was shared with your neighbor. On the north and south sides, steel support beams had restricted vision for more than fifty years.

  The speech clinic, by contrast, had brightly colored carpeting, long echoing corridors, stone staircases, and room after room of one-way observation mirrors, mini-cams in the corner, cassette recorders on wooden desks, word-worried people in plastic chairs, clinicians with monogrammed coffee cups. The therapy rooms were visited primarily by three-year-old possessors of cleft palates and six-year-old lispers, so most of the chairs were tiny wooden structures and there were coloring books stacked on the undersized tables, plastic toys to play with on the carpet. At an absurdly small desk in absurdly small chairs, like double Gullivers among Lilliputian furniture, sat my therapist and I.

  The audiovisual center of the clinic was one square room bound by glass walls and populated by closed-circuit television screens. The image popped into place: my therapist, sweet but plain with her bleached face, short hair, white blouse, dark jeans; me, my hair tousled, my shirtsleeves so poorly rolled up as to resemble Elizabethan armlets, my head bent so low it was almost touching the tiny table. The new blackboard, untouched, glistened in the corner.

  For all its gestures toward modernity, the field house could have been a Sioux City barn and as such urged community. The speech clinic was Bauhaus, with its efficient demand for a livable life. The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority. I yearned to become both and, in my inability to identify with another human being’s body or my own mouth, created lacunae only written words could cross. I became a writer.

  How literature saved my life for a while

  ASKED HOW he came to write so seamlessly about the intersection of personal and political lives, Milan Kundera said it’s not hard when you go to the grocery store and the cannon of a Soviet tank is wedged into the back window. When I read Kundera’s statement (and wondered what if anything was the American equivalent of the Soviet tank), I was thirty years old, unemployed, broke, lying on my father’s couch in an apartment in San Francisco and watching a performer on TV pretend to have trouble juggling knives while riding a unicycle. He was in exquisite control of both the unicycle and the knives; I loved how he pretended not to be. I even started crying, and I realized that part of what moved me to tears was that I was watching this on TV—this was one more level of distance and control—and that if I had been watching him live, I almost certainly wouldn’t have been moved anywhere nearly as much, i.e., the degree of removal was central to my emotional engagement with the scene. Which to me was the answer to Kundera’s Soviet tank: the American equivalent is the ubiquity of the camera, the immense power of the camera lens on our lives, on my life, on the way I think about life.

  I resolved to write a novel (my fourth) about this, and my model was Kundera’s own The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which romantic love was the prism through which the dominant mythology of the culture—in his case, the kitsch of Communism—gets examined. I wanted to do something similar with a married couple and American media/celebrity culture. I took notes on thousands of color-coded 3 × 5 cards. I read innumerable books by cultural critics, from Theodor Adorno to Mark Crispin Miller. I wrote many meditations and reportorial riffs, which I thought I would incorporate into my novel as Kundera incorporated his digressions (in truth, the only parts of his book that fully engaged me). I watched a staggering number of movies and TV shows, trying to chart my reactions even as I was having them. Same with Laurie’s, despite her well-justified protestations. And try though I might for many, many years—almost my entire thirties—I couldn’t work up the requisite interest in the warfare between the husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. I didn’t believe in it, since Laurie’s and my takes weren’t vastly dissimilar, and any staged debate seemed very staged, very debatable. I couldn’t bring myself to give the two “characters” jobs, such as high school English teacher and film critic for a provincial newspaper. I knew what our jobs were, and they weren’t fascinating fodder for fiction. I wasn’t interested in imaginary beings’ friction vis-à-vis mass culture; I was interested in my own ambivalence toward mass culture.

  My own failure of imagination? Sure, but as Virginia Woolf said in a passage that I reread dozens of times in the fall of 1991, “The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. This proves that a book is alive: because it has not crushed anything I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.” The novel for me was nothing but crushing alteration. Desperate, I thought of asking a former student if I could use some passages she’d written—as ballast for a ship I couldn’t get out to sea. When I thought I would never be able to write anything again, Natalie was born and the physical universe suddenly seemed unforgivably real. I newly knew that the digressions were the book. The seeming digressions were all connected. The book was everything in front of me. The world is everything that is the case.

  This book became Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, which was my Natalie-down-the-rabbit-hole moment. I’ve never touched terra infirma again. Everything I’ve written since has been collage (from the French coller, “to glue”).

  By the late ’90s, my early forties, I’d stopped writing or reading much if any fiction. I was weary unto death of teaching fiction writing. I would teach standardly great stories, and I would admire them from afar, and sometimes students would love the stories, but I had no real passion anymore for, say, Joyce’s “The Dead.” (The ending of that story is usually interpreted as Gabriel Conroy’s unambiguous, transcendental identification with love and mortality, but to me it seemed more plausible to read the last page or so as an overwritten passage that conveyed emotional deadness taking refuge in sentimentality. “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” Gabriel is thinking about the passion o
f his wife’s ex-suitor, but the word “generous” appeared—to me, at the time; now, too?—to suggest Gabriel’s confusion of self-pity with selfless love. I figured that if Joyce had meant the last sentence of the story to be truly beautiful, he wouldn’t have used “falling faintly” and “faintly falling” within four words of each other. This repetition created discord at the very climax of the rising hymn; even as Gabriel believed he was liberating himself from egotism, his language for compassion was self-conscious and solipsistic. Neither in memory nor in fantasy was he capable of imagining union, completion, or even shared intimacy. That was my interpretation.)

  I could see what made stories like Joyce’s “great” or good or at least well made, but I had and have zero interest in doing something similar. I was watching a lot of self-reflexive documentary films (e.g., Ross McElwee), reading a lot of anthropological autobiographies (e.g., Renata Adler), listening to a lot of stand-up (e.g., Rick Reynolds), and watching a lot of performance art (e.g., Sandra Bernhard). This was the kind of work that excited me, and there was a radical disjunction between the books I was pseudo-espousing in class and the books that I loved reading outside class and was trying to write on my own. The teaching—the falsity of the teaching—forced me to confront and find and define and refine and extend my own aesthetic. It was thrilling. I once was lost and now am found. (Now I’m lost again, but that’s another story, which I’ll talk about a little later.)

  I felt as if I were taking money under false pretenses, so in order to justify my existence to myself, my colleagues, and my students, I developed a graduate course in the self-reflexive gesture in essay and documentary film. The course reader was an enormous, unwieldy, blue packet of hundreds upon hundreds of statements about nonfiction, literary collage, lyric essay. That packet was my life raft: it was teaching me what it was I was trying to write.