Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

“Welcome home, brother,” I said. “Can’t wait to hear about your trip.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said, smiling. “Heard I missed a lot, being gone.”

  He turned about-face and went to his end of the table. Ring held out a beer for him to fill his pyramid. Lucky took it and tipped his head in my direction and Ring shook his slowly.

  I knew Lucky knew. I hadn’t gone to great lengths while he was away to hide what I’d been up to.

  As we got going I felt I’d played maybe one or three too many games. I’d been eighty-sixed from the zone. The cups started to blur and I had to concentrate very hard to keep them from looking like one big buckety cup. And the hand that only moments ago had delivered dialed-in parabolas? It felt heavy and foreign and my first shot landed at least six inches in front of the cups. Lucky nabbed it with a swift magician’s pass of his hand and asked, “So what? you bouncing now, too?”

  Ring and Lucky started the game by doubling up, so they got the balls back. They performed their special high five/handshake before taking their next shots. The mark of a good team, like that of a family, is that it takes them no time at all to pick up where they left off. By the time we reracked, they had only one cup gone from their pyramids, a shot Overdorff made.

  Brothers I’d met maybe once were on the table next to ours. I didn’t remember their names, if I’d ever known them in the first place. Their polo shirts were wet-spotted and torn. One of them spoke with a southern accent but had gel in his hair and I thought like what the fuck is that about? From across the basement I heard “Go, go, go.” Coeds lifted red Solo cups to their washed-out-looking faces as though smelling roses. In order to be heard over the music and the chanting and cheering, people were using outside voices and the basement became a symphony of small talk. Through it all and as though from somewhere far off I heard the distinct plunk of a rimmed shot. The hollow plink-plink of a ball skittering across linoleum. I couldn’t tell, had it come from our game or the other one? I glanced around, scanned the floor. And then my legs were ripped clear from under me and there was the weight of a body across my chest and I was far more horizontal than vertical and I saw the ceiling lights rise in front of me, lambent with their hideous fluorescence, and as gravity seized me and I thudded to the ground and all the breath left my lungs and the frat-sludge soaked through my shirt, I knew that I was, at least for the moment, right where I belonged.

  Learning Curves

  The task of the writer is to learn how to write.

  —Jules Renard

  I didn’t know I would ever want to be a writer when, at seventeen, I started to keep a journal. And if those early entries reveal anything, it is the near crystalline insanity of that dream. They take as their subjects things like how much I’d partied at Beach Week and how certain friends (that they were not really my friends deserves mention—I recall setting out to convince my future self that they, who numbered among the popular kids, had been my friends, such was the level of self-deception I was operating on) had cried as they headed off to college. In one entry I announce that I’m a cynic and a misanthrope and then, mere entries later, I declare, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, that I’m a born people person. Then there are the girls, my nauseating desire for, my persistent lack of success with, their names light as sundresses: Allison, Katie, Lindsey, Ginny, Kristine, Katie, Katie. “Girls are so dumb!” I lament. “I just want someone to hold hands with,” I emote. But sometime during my freshman year of college, the record shows, I started to transcribe poems and quotes from whatever I was reading. (I was reading!) There’s some Dickinson and Eliot and Frost. Vonnegut and Kafka. I practiced what only by the loosest of definitions qualifies as explication. Observe my inchoate insight: “I finished Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis.’ It was an interesting short story that I thought contained many underlying meanings and themes.” It wasn’t long before I was writing descriptions, full of dashes, of my solitary walks through snowy Virginia woods, peppered with phrases in Latin, a language I’d never studied. I composed metered lines about stars and the moon that used the word “sublunary” as though I’d bought it at cost. Reading back through these entries now gives me a sensation something like when you put your hand up against another person’s and massage the twinned middle fingers, a charge of the familiar and the utterly mysterious. This is and cannot be me.

  These notes are my daily prayer.

  —Jules Renard

  Jules Renard, a French novelist, poet, and playwright, started keeping a journal in 1887, when he was twenty-three. This was roughly two years after Victor Hugo died. Literary historians tend to cite Hugo’s death as the end of an era, at least for the French, and what followed was a renaissance that combined, say, the economic boom of our jazz age and the experimental creativity of the sixties. The French call it la belle époque. It’s when Alfred Jarry was waddling the streets of Paris as his creation, Ubu Roi, a pair of six-shooters slung from his hips. When Henri Rousseau was painting his primitive paintings and Picasso was turning perspective on its head. But despite all the flutter and buzz of artistic revolution, Renard remained unfazed. He never hitched himself to any clique or wave or ism. On this point his journal shows him getting a little chippy and defensive: “You can be a poet and still wear your hair short. You can be a poet and pay your rent. Even though you are a poet, you can sleep with your wife.” Point is, Renard set his sights on himself, on exploring and rendering the weave of his experience. It makes sense that in his lifetime he was best known for an autobiographical novel about his troubled childhood, Poil de carotte. And he might have first intended his journal to act as a shadow to his art, a companion to his novels and plays—the success of which won him admittance into the prestigious Académie Goncourt—but through a Peter Pan–like thaumaturgy, the shadow broke off and became the work of art itself.

  I spread out my memory like a map and strive to see again what I have seen: and am continually astonished.

  —Jules Renard

  I discovered The Journal at about the same age Renard began keeping it. I was twenty-two and had just graduated college. That summer I stayed on in Williamsburg and worked at a seafood restaurant, where I served buttery-ass clam chowder to tourists getting their anachrono-historical highs off all the Coloniality. I was also falling in love with an old friend, Grace. We’d met the summer after my sophomore year as part of an experiment in Christian community—we and nine other young adults had lived in a large Victorian house on Martha’s Vineyard. I’d started to think that maybe she was the woman for whose protection (and the protection of whose “virtue”) I’d been taught to pray for growing up—my future wife. In addition to thinking about her, I spent my free time obsessively reading and writing. I’d started to write fiction my senior year and was encouraged when my college awarded me a couple of prizes for my first stories, which were rip-offs of the contemporary writers I was reading at the time. That they were rip-offs meant that for some time to come there hung about me the noxious feeling of fraudulence. I’d built according to others’ designs and imitating their work in this way had given me the first inkling of how much effort would be demanded of me to do my own. And so I became consumed with work. When I wasn’t working, I was alternately anxious and depressed. Was I working hard enough? Did thinking about work count as work? Was I losing my hair? Renard returns to feelings like this throughout The Journal: “Work is treasure; I know it by counter-proof.” During bouts of procrastination, I listened to a radio show that had as its guests the very writers I was ripping off. I listened for murmurs of profundity, shit I could steal. And in one interview the host said Donald Barthelme had at one point carried The Journal everywhere he went. Hooked as I was on Barthelme’s stories then, I went off looking for secrets. See, I believed then that one could catch genius, as though it were an exotic virus.

  My style, full of tours de force that no one notices.

  —Jules Renard

  Early on in his life, Renard writes, “I am convinced it is through
observation that poetry must renew itself.” And later: “Truth is not always art; art is not always truth; but truth and art have points of contact, which I am seeking.” He is everywhere concerned with Truth in a way that feels charming and nostalgic now. But we still talk about small-t truth, how an image or a thought can ring true. And The Journal brims with brilliant descriptions and aphorisms that do just that. “Happy people have no right to be optimists: it is an insult to sorrow.” “Spiders draw plans of capital cities.” “I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself.” He manages to restore a flavor of mystery to things or feelings that, for many of us, time and familiarity have dulled and muted. He has this to say about his style: “I always stop on the brink of what will not be true.” And at their best and most economical, Renard’s sentences give the illusion they’ve stood for all time, as though it was his phrasing that was used to forge whatever he’s describing. I like to imagine him, after writing one, reaching for a cigarette.

  Any good writer will achieve moments of small-t truth like Renard does in The Journal—it’s for such moments of recognition, the uncanny feeling that it is the writer who has read us, that most of us read in the first place. But there was an aura of inevitability to his details, one that demonstrated to me the powerful alchemy writers fiddle with. Coming to understand this power language wields was for me a lot like falling in love with an old friend. A foundational shift in perception occurs. And this shift was scales-from-the-eyes revelatory for a person who at the time was writing shit like “Then my shirt is off and her pants are off and my pants are off and I’m feeling good.”

  Suppose I were called upon to possess all the women I am in love with!

  —Jules Renard

  The summer I discovered The Journal, one of the girls from the Martha’s Vineyard house got married in DC. Besides the couple who’d been our leaders, Grace and I were the only people from the house to attend. We’d spent the two years since that summer keeping up through letters. Real letters. Hers would arrive in handmade envelopes, intricate collages of images she’d cut out of magazines—glorious vistas abutted the airbrushed features of Abercrombie models. And while there was an intimacy to them, there’d never been any overtures of attraction, not a lick of tension, sexual or otherwise.

  “8/2/04: We spent the day before the wedding doing all the touristy things she wanted to do. The Vietnam Memorial. The Smithsonian. We flirted in that second-grade way, making fun of each other. She really is beautiful, and, remarkably, maybe totally oblivious of this. We shared a bottle of wine in the hotel room, whose lone bed had a thick red comforter and stuck out from the wall like a tongue. In bed, we talked for a while about our summer on the Vineyard, certain nights and discussions we wished we could relive, and then about her Fulbright—she leaves for Germany in a couple months. Then she said something so deeply penetrating about me that only she could have said it, something that had the weight of our history behind it, which I of course can’t remember now, and my head a little light from the wine, I leaned over to her side of the bed and kissed her. She kissed me back. Our knees touched under the sheets like a rock and flint. And then, well, et cetera. Say what they will about creams or lotions, incense or whips, there’s no aphrodisiac like nostalgia.”

  Death appears to me as a wide lake that I am approaching and of which I am beginning to see the outlines.

  —Jules Renard

  The Journal “develops” in two ways. The first is obvious: chronologically. We can talk about Renard’s early years, about the year his son was born or his father died, the years his plays were produced, or the years when he was most social. Our inner art-dork, star-fucker mentality is coddled during these social years. Like some fantastic cocktail party, we’re always surprised who pops up: the Edmonds, Rostand and de Goncourt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde (“He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He gives you a cigarette, but he selects it himself. He does not walk around a table, he moves a table out of the way.”), Mallarmé, Valéry, and Rodin. And then, of course, there’s the magnificent Sarah Bernhardt: “Near a monumental fireplace, she reclines on the pelt of a polar bear. Because in her house you do not sit, you recline.” Some of the pleasure in following this chronology has to do with the curiosity and charm of encountering a living history, as though The Journal were a necromantic terrarium. The fascination here, for me, may also have to do with an embarrassing, solipsistic tic I have: I am still dumbly baffled by the fact that people, hundreds upon hundreds of people, have lived their lives before me, lives more or less like the life I’m living right now. Renard had a wife and kid; I have a wife, have friends with kids. He started a literary magazine; I work for one. He cared about plays; I care about plays and movies. He wrote sentences, was frustrated whenever he couldn’t or didn’t; me too! He died; _______________.

  The second, subtler development is much harder to talk about, at least in any satisfying way—articulation being the curse of our deepest intuitions. (“Disgust with the literary métier, with life bent to fit the written rule, with truth amended for the reader.”) This has to do with the way Renard grows, as a writer and a person. But “grow” is perhaps too simpy and superannuated a word for what I’m trying to get at. Ditto “deepen.” I mean to say something as broad and boring-seeming as that time gets into him, that experiences make and remake him. Life happens, both to and through him. And maybe this is the principal pleasure of reading a writer’s journal—watching how he or she contends with the relentlessness of those two human fundamentals, time and experience. How a perspective emerges in a manner not unlike sedimentary rocks, slowly and certainly, bound by an inscrutable glue. Renard’s insights and descriptions themselves come to convey this acquisition of time and experience. Time, for example: “Several times during our lives we have our seasons, but their course is not well known.” And experience: “The death of my father makes me feel as though I had written a beautiful book.”

  At bottom, though, this has to do with the limit of time and experience, i.e., with death, with Renard’s lifelong internalization of the imminence of his own. Here are two paragraphs from 1906, one of his blooming seasons:

  If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more. I did not see properly, and I did not see everything in that little universe in which I was feeling my way.

  But if I were to try to work again regularly, every day, like a student of rhetoric who wants to be the first in class; not in order to make money, not to be famous, but in order to leave something, a little book, a page, a few sentences? Because I am not at peace.

  These occur right after one another, presumably written in the same sitting. The self-assured acceptance he begins with becomes, very quickly, something more like resignation, acceptance with a caveat. Enter anxiety. What will he leave? And could he ever be satisfied with what he’s done? Not plagued by what he has not? Moments like this present some of the most “truthful” writing in The Journal, because they seem to embody our own state of being-toward-death, to borrow a phrase. He says, “What most surprises me is this heart which keeps on beating.” It’s as though the simplest, most basic aspect of his life is a haunting reminder of what he’s approaching. But this seriousness is always undercut by Renard’s wit, his ability to sculpt a perfect aphorism. “Imagine life without death. Every day, you would try to kill yourself out of despair.”

  At a sign of Sarah Bernhardt I would follow her to the ends of the earth, with my wife.

  —Jules Renard

  I spent the flight to see Grace in Germany exhausting my imagination with the permutations our bodies would combine to form. That I didn’t feel guilty about our relationship’s physical turn seemed a promising augur, to suggest that maybe we had approval from on high. We made dinner that night—during prep, she taught me a neat new way of mincing garlic. After we’d eaten and cleaned up and were hanging out on the couch in her apartment’s small living room, I kissed her. She stopped me. Said she wasn�
��t sure she was attracted to me like that anymore. What had happened? Was it the garlic? I nearly threw up my spaghetti.

  “12/2/04: We’re in Heidelberg. Spent the early afternoon walking around the city. Then hiked up to Heidelberg Castle, which overshadows the city like a family legacy. It was struck by lightning and sustained numerous cannon assaults during I don’t know how many dead wars. Wings and turrets are in shambles, broken and crumbled like a dry, half-eaten wedding cake. We looked out over the city.

  “ ‘Are you upset? I don’t want you to be mad at me. About last night and all.’ She hugged me just long enough to arouse and murder my hope.

  “I quoted Jules to her: ‘I have built such beautiful castles that I would be satisfied with their ruins.’

  “ ‘What?’

  “I felt her looking at my profile. I kept looking out over the city and the Neckar River, which has a system of locks that reminded me of bracelets. Heidelberg lies between two steep, green mountains that cascade down toward the river. In the cradle between these mountains, the city seems to have sprouted up like prodigious, orange-capped fungi. I knew Grace wanted a real response.

  “ ‘Doesn’t the city remind you of a brain from up here?’ ”

  This evening, memories are using my brain as a tambourine.

  —Jules Renard

  It’s now been more than a decade since I went to Germany. The trip and Grace have been relegated to a deeper, less accessible level of memory. Last time we corresponded—our mail now came prefaced by an e—I learned that she’d moved to Seattle, gotten married, and was pregnant. Given all the ways that time and experience have gerrymandered our lives in the meantime, it’s somewhat astonishing to recall that Germany is still somewhere between Paris and Asia. And for a heartbreak that was once so painful and real, I’m surprised it takes reading through my journal entries to summon any emotion in me. Again, the me there is and is not me. To my delight and relief, though, this same heart keeps beating behind my ribs.