How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  John Cheever, Journals. An actor read a Cheever story—never quite caught the title—on NPR’s Selected Shorts: a writer husband, estranged from his wife and living in Turin, writes a fantasy of how they’ll reconnect. Driving home, I found it so beautiful to listen to that when I arrived, I ran to the radio to hear the end of the story. It is as nothing, though, compared to the luminous precision of the journals, which he kept from 1940 until his death in 1982. The journals are very consciously and scrupulously sculpted: they’re clearly written to be read and published, and they supersede his fiction. It’s unfair, of course, to compare a fifteen-page story to a four-hundred-page book, but I couldn’t help feeling that in the story, Cheever lets himself get away with everything, and in the journals, nothing—he is relentless. In the story, he is grandiose and unfurls the logic of Christian forgiveness. Even as I was charmed by hearing the story aloud, I was constantly thinking, You lying sack of shit. I’ve read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you, Buster. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings.

  E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay. Cioran: “Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. Impossible to grant any credence to what he says, to regard his phrases as anything but excuses, acrobatics. The experience of the terrible—which alone confers a certain destiny upon our words—is what he lacks, as he lacks, too, the imagination of disaster, without which no one can communicate with those separate beings, the sick. Having nothing to transmit, neutral to the point of abdication, he collapses into well-being, an insignificant state of perfection, an impermeability to death as well as of inattention to oneself and to the world. As long as he remains there, he is like the objects around him; once torn from it, he opens himself to everything, knows everything: the omniscience of terror.” When Richard Stern and his wife, the poet Alane Rollings, were walking home from dinner one night in Paris with Cioran, Rollings had a painful blister on her foot. She was bleeding badly. Cioran refused to slow down for her or even acknowledge her discomfort. Maybe he thought she was learning something.

  Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere. The first part of Maps to Anywhere was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1988, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters “neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions.” The narrator—Howard calls him “the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)”—is simultaneously “the author” and a fictional creation. From minisection to minisection and chapter to chapter, Bernard’s self-conscious and seriocomic attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother’s death, his father’s failing health, his parents’ divorce, and southern California kitsch are delicately woven together to form an extremely powerful meditation on the relationship between grief and imagination. When a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self? The book’s final sentence is an articulation of the melancholy that the narrator has, to a degree, deflected until then: “And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor.”

  Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain. A contemplation of dying, rendered in dozens of preobituaries for himself.

  Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Deep inside, you know you’re him.”

  Annie Dillard, For the Time Being. Literary mosaic is an alluring and difficult form: you gather a bowl full of jagged fragments, and you want each one to take you somewhere slightly new or hurt in a slightly different way.

  Marguerite Duras, The Lover. When someone is searching, being cautious, solving a problem, the brain releases dopamine—the neurotransmitter that controls reward and pleasure. As soon as she finds what she’s looking for, the release of dopamine shuts off.

  Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes. Trying to create in others an image of himself in which he can believe, Exley imagines various versions of potential success, none of which he respects and all of which he tries to court.

  Brian Fawcett, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. On the bottom of each page, Fawcett runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war. The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s central motif: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge. By far the most popular novels of our era are interactive, plot-driven video games: 11 million people subscribe to World of Warcraft alone, and there are dozens of other massively multiplayer games that are nearly as popular. All the people who play a particular game are in the same virtual space and interact with one another; it’s not exactly fiction or fantasy, and it’s not exactly reality, either. It’s a middle ground—quasireality, fictional nonfiction. When I’m standing poolside in my flip-flops, I’m comfortable, and when I’m swimming in the pool, I’m relatively comfortable. When I’m transitioning into the pool, I’m uncomfortable, but I definitely know I’m alive.

  Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist’s Mate. The book fluctuates wildly and unpredictably from Fusselman’s attempt to get pregnant through artificial means, her conversations with her dying father, and his WWII diary entries. I don’t know what the next paragraph will be, where Fusselman is going, until—in the final few paragraphs—she lands on the gossamer-thin difference between life and death, which is where she’s been focused all along, if I could only have seen it.

  Mary Gaitskill’s essay “Lost Cat.” Far and away the best thing she’s written, asking as it does in its every sentence, “Is love real?”

  Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces. Galeano marries himself to the larger warp and woof by allowing different voices and different degrees of magnitude of information to play against one another. A mix of memoir, anecdote, polemic, parable, fantasy, and Galeano’s surreal drawings, the book might at first glance be dismissed as mere miscellany, but upon more careful inspection, it reveals itself to be virtually a geometric proof on the themes of love, terror, and imagination, perhaps best exemplified by this minichapter: “Tracey Hill was a child in a Connecticut town who amused herself as befitted a child of her age, like any other tender little angel of God in the state of Connecticut or anywhere else on this planet. One day, together with her little school companions, Tracey started throwing lighted matches into an anthill. They all enjoyed this healthy childish diversion. Tracey, however, saw something which the others didn’t see or pretended not to, but which paralyzed her and remained forever engraved in her memory: faced with the dangerous fire, the ants split up into pairs and two by two, side by side, pressed close together, they waited for death.”

  Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love. The very embodiment of the critical intelligence in the imaginative position: literary analysis as farewell to feeling.

  Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries. A man, whose friends are dying and who by the final book of the tetralogy is dying himself, stands before us utterly naked and takes account: Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in prose. The gravitation is very extreme to always make himself look bad, and in so doing, of course, he renders himself lovable. Each minisection of Gray’s four-volume work is typically only a few pages long, the subsections connect in beautifully oblique ways, and each book is held together by an understated but brilliantly deployed metaphor. An entire life, an entire way of thinking, comes into being. Having read the diaries, I feel less lonely.

  Barry Hannah, Boomerang. The stakes, shifting from “character” to “author,” get raised. Hannah exposes his own flaws, extends them, and frames them as tragedy.

  Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights. Modularity mirroring and measuring sleeplessness.

  Amy Hempel, “In the Animal Shelter.” Beautiful women, abandoned by men who don’t want to get married and have children, go to an animal shelter to cuddle with “one-eyed cats,” to imagine mothering these homeless pets—
to reverse the rejection they experienced by the men—but also to reexperience that rejection. “Is mama’s baby lonesome?” the women ask the abandoned animals.

  Robin Hemley, “Riding the Whip.” An autobiographical story in which a boy’s older sister commits suicide. Attending a fair with a girl on whom he has a crush, he pretends not to care about his sister. He comes to feel, viscerally, his guilt, his close identification with her, and their shared masochism.

  Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation. Humiliation runs like a rash over the body of Koestenbaum’s work. Here he confronts the feeling directly, and the result is an unusually discomfiting meditation on—I don’t know how else to say it—the human condition.

  Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia. The freest form: the essay.

  Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings. Both poetry and the essay come from the same impulse—to think about something and at the same time see it closely and carefully and enact it. An odd feature of poetry is that it’s all “true”: there’s no nonfiction poetry and fiction poetry. Whether it’s Larkin or Neruda, it all goes into the poetry section of the bookstore.

  Jonathan Lethem, The Disappointment Artist. The disappointment artist and I solidified our friendship when he told me he was a Mets fan. As my college writing teacher, the novelist John Hawkes, liked to say, “There’s only one subject: failure.” I remember his saying that a story I’d written was “about love without communication and in the context of violence.” I remember thinking, Really? I thought it was just about taking a hike with my dad. Hawkes’s saying that made me a certain kind of writer, because his abstraction interested me immeasurably more than the details of my story.

  Ross McElwee, Bright Leaves. Antonya Nelson says that the best fiction “gets lucky.” Similarly, I’d say that the best nonfiction jumps the tracks, using its “subject” as a Trojan horse to get at richer material than the writer originally intended. McElwee’s film Bright Leaves pretends to be about his conflicted relation to his family’s tobacco farm, whereas it’s really about the way in which we all will do anything—make a movie, smoke cigarettes, collect film stills, build a birdhouse, hold a lifelong torch for someone, find religion—to try to get beyond ourselves.

  David Markson, Vanishing Point. The best book I know about 9/11, because it’s barely about it: other calamities have befallen other peoples in other times.

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Melville said to Hawthorne, “I’ve written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb.” His wickedness: in the middle of the nineteenth century, contemplating a godless universe.

  Leonard Michaels, Shuffle. Several years ago, when Michaels died, the encomia focused entirely on his stories, but for me his “legacy” rests, or should rest, on his essays and journals, especially Shuffle, in particular the long middle section, “Journal,” which per its title presents itself as mere notes whereas in fact it is a beautifully patterned and organized investigation into sexual desire, anger, despair.

  Michel de Montaigne, Essays. The essayist is not interested in himself per se but in himself as symbolic persona, theme carrier, host for general human tendencies.

  Vladimir Nabokov, Gogol. Nabokov says somewhere that the essence of comedy—perhaps of all art—is that it makes large things seem small, and it makes small things seem large. My favorite book of Nabokov’s, because for once you can feel how lost he is.

  V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World. Seemingly separate blinds—long essays about seemingly disparate subjects—form a single curtain: how to resist colonialism without being defeated by your own resistance.

  Maggie Nelson, Bluets. A brief meditation on the color blue, a cri de coeur about Nelson’s inability to get over the end of a love affair, and a grievous contemplation of a close friend’s paralysis. The book keeps getting larger and larger until it winds up being about nothing less than the melancholy of the human animal. Why are we so sad? How do we deal with loss? How do we deal with the ultimate loss? It’s impressively adult—wrestling with existence at the most fundamental level—in a way that I find very few novels are. One Hundred Years of Solitude, say: halfway into that book, I realized I wasn’t learning anything new page by page, so I stopped reading. I want the writer to be trying hard to figure something out; García Márquez, you could argue, is doing this by implication, but to me he’s not.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Adorno: “A successful work is not one that resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one that expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”

  George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant.” In three thousand words, Orwell tells me more about the sources, psychology, and consequences of racism and empire than entire shelves of political science. All of the power of this deservedly canonical essay arises from his willingness to locate an astonishing mix of rage and guilt within himself. I don’t judge him. I am him.

  Blaise Pascal, Pensées. Aphorisms.

  Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought. Aphorisms sent through radiation.

  Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Aphorisms attached to a suicide pact.

  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. The book that I think of as mattering the most to me ever, but I read it more than thirty years ago and I find that I have trouble rereading it now. Seems sad—do I still love it, did I ever love it? I know I did. Has my aesthetic changed that much? If so, why? Does one resist that alteration? I think not. The book still completely changed me, still defines me in some strange way. Proust for me is the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation in paperback, all the covers stained with suntan oil, since I read all seven volumes in a single summer, supposedly traveling around the south of France but really pretty much just reading Proust. I came to realize that he will do anything, go anywhere to extend his research, to elaborate his argument about art and life. His commitment is never to the narrative; it’s to the narrative as such as a vector on the grid of his argument. That thrilled me and continues to thrill me—his understanding of his book as a series of interlaced architectural/thematic spaces.

  Jonathan Raban, For Love & Money. For twenty-plus years I’ve been showing drafts of my books to Jonathan, who within days of receiving the manuscript will call and not only insist that it can be so much better but show me how. For Love & Money, which he calls “only half a good book,” is a brutal, ruthless coming-of-age-of-the-author disguised as a miscellany of essays and reviews. Jonathan comes out of what is to me a distinctly British tradition of showing respect for the conversation by questioning your assertion rather than blandly agreeing with it. He’s exhaustive and disputatious, never settling for received wisdom or quasi-insight. More than anyone in my life, he encouraged me to think off-axis about “nonfiction.”

  W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Wendy Lesser: “The crucial art of the essay lies in its perpetrator’s masterly control over his own self-exposure. We may at times be embarrassed by him, but we should never be embarrassed for him. He must be the ringmaster of his self-display. He may choose to bare more than he can bear (that is where the terror comes in), but he must do the choosing and we must feel he is doing it.”

  Lauren Slater, “One Nation, Under the Weather.” Many writers pretend that they don’t read reviews of their books and that in particular life is too short to subject themselves to reading bad reviews. Kingsley Amis said that a bad review may spoil breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil lunch. Jean Cocteau suggested, “Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like, then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” Sane advice; Slater doesn’t follow it. Receiving a bad review from Janet Maslin of her genre-troubling book Lying, Slater does that thing you’re not supposed to do: she dwells on it, in public. Accused of being narcissistic, exhibitionistic, self-absorbed, neurasthenic, whiny, derivative, she agrees, revels in her woundedness, and dares me
to disagree with her, writing, “The fact is, or my fact is, disease is everywhere. How anyone could ever write about themselves or their fictional characters as not diseased is a bit beyond me. We live in a world and are creatures of a culture that is spinning out more and more medicines that correspond to more and more diseases at an alarming pace. Even beyond that, though, I believe we exist in our God-given natures as diseased beings. We do not fall into illness. We fall from illness into temporary states of health. We are briefly blessed, but always, always those small cells are dividing and will become cancer, if they haven’t already; our eyes are crossed, we cannot see. Nearsighted, far-sighted, noses spurting bright blood, brains awack with crazy dreams, lassitude, and little fears nibbling like mice at the fringes of our flesh, we are never well.”

  Gilbert Sorrentino, “The Moon in Its Flight.” “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.” It can’t? I thought art was the only twin life had.

  Melanie Thernstrom, The Dead Girl. The title refers to Thernstrom’s best friend, Bibi Lee, who is murdered, and also to Thernstrom, who can’t seem to live.

  Judith Thurman, Cleopatra’s Nose. In nearly every essay, Thurman appears to be looking out a window, but she’s not. She’s painting a self-portrait in a convex mirror. There’s always a moment when the pseudo-objective mask drops, yielding a quite startling self-revelation.

  George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context. An assemblage of disconnected paragraphs, narrated in a tone of fanatical archness, and perhaps best understood as what Trow calls “cultural autobiography.” In other words, its apparent accomplishment—a brilliantly original analysis of the underlying grammar of mass culture—is a way for Trow to get at what is in one sense his eventual subject: the difference between the world he inhabits (no context) and the world his father, a newspaperman, inhabited (context). In the book’s final paragraph, Trow writes about his father, “Certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.”