Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  It just seems like they went after people who are pretty well known in our age group, and he’s …

  Mark Childress—Bonnie is Mark’s agent too. And Rick Moody is Michael’s editee. And I mean Vollmann, I think Vollmann and I have been blurbing each other back and forth for years. It’s very odd because we’re so different, and we get lumped together. Well, our first books came out the same year.

  Backwards a little bit; in six months while waiting to hear: were you nervous? Or pretty confident about this? Worry it wasn’t good?

  It’s like I said: I worked real hard on this, and I like, there was a weird kind of calm that was a result of that. I was nervous because I knew it needed cuts, and I was terrified that it was gonna turn out that the cuts he wanted were gonna gut the book. And I was nervous about that. But it’s weird, the year after going to McLean’s, I developed this real habit of, at least for a period of a few months, I could not think about stuff.

  I mean, I can really like, when thinking about it starts—you have an interesting little stain on your pants. He specializes in that. [Dave laughs. Drone has been snout-resting on my thigh.] He specializes in makin’ you look like there’s been a horrible accident. It’s usually right before you go out on a date. You’re sittin’ there reading and you notice this.

  [Drone is now licking my pocket.]

  And it was a tough summer. It was very hard for me, because I would like to be married, and I would like to have children. And it was hard for me when my sister got married, who’s like younger than me. And there was a certain amount of stuff going on in the family. And I was also, I was just tired. I was tired, and I had a lot of nonfiction to do.

  But when did someone come to you and say, “David, you really nailed it”?

  It’s very odd, because Michael would say really nice stuff to me, and he’d say it in the context of having critical suggestions. So I could write it all off as you know, Well he, this is the sugar that’s making the medicine go down.

  And Charis liked it, but Charis likes everything I do. There was some stuff—because Mark is really good friends with Nan Graham, who knows more about the publishing industry than anybody. She’s really good, I think. She was DeLillo’s editor, which as far as I’m concerned does it for me. So I can remember—when they did this postcard thing, and when they wanted to do signed bound galleys and sent me boxes full of paper—my thinking, my not knowing what to make of it. And calling Mark and having Mark find out, I presume from Nan, although I don’t know from whom, that this meant that they were gonna support the book, and that they were into the book or whatever. Which given that the book is a thousand pages made me think that they thought it was a pretty good book.

  Relieved? Remember, this is only about four years from McLean’s.

  I really don’t want to pump it up. It could be embarrassing, it could seem like it was entirely an emotional breakdown, and a lot of it had to do with the work, too. I guess as long you don’t …

  Um, it’s hard to explain. But I sort of like, um, that book didn’t get written for any of the reasons the other books did. I mean, I decided that I wanted to think of myself as a writer, which meant whether this got published or not, I was gonna write it.

  Which four years ago, when I was all thinking, “Oh no, what if the next thing I do isn’t as good as …” I mean, it would’ve been unthinkable. I’d really sort of given up, in a certain way. Given up a lot of … Hush, Jeeves. …

  Became a writer while writing this, then?

  Yeah. I thought, yeah. I mean, this was different in a lot of ways. This was the first thing that I ever said, “All right, I’m gonna try to do the very best I can.” Instead of doing this, “All right, I’ll work at like three-quarter speed, and then I can always figure that if I just hadn’t been a fuckup, the book coulda been really good.” You know that defense system? You write the paper the night before, so if it doesn’t get a great grade, you know that it could’ve been better.

  And this—I worked as hard as I could on this. And in a weird way, you might think that that would make me more nervous about whether people would like it. But there was this weird—you know like when you work out really well, there’s this kind of tiredness that’s real pleasant, and it’s real sort of placid …?

  [Hamlet quote about buzzing …] “There was in my head a buzzing that would not let me rest …”

  I guess … Yeah. So anyway. So no, I wasn’t that nervous.

  Like I said, it never really felt finished. Because it felt finished and then I had to reprint it. And it felt finished and then I spent a few months waiting for Michael’s cut and then working on the cuts. And then it felt finished but then a few months later hearing that there were more cuts. And then right after the cuts—I mean, the copy editor must have been on speed, because a month later it came in. So it just, it hadn’t felt finished. And then the bound galley was such a mess.

  Here’s the deal: Is one reason I want this phase over. It’s gonna feel finished when this is over. Because this has been part of a whole like unending stream, that started when I started the book. Like this feels like part of it. And when you go, and I unplug the phone for two days, that’s when it’s gonna to be over. And then I’ll let you know. Because I think it’s going to take me a day to just sort of stop quivering.

  Any moment of euphoria you can give me?

  I’m not sure. [Long pause]

  I know we probably disagree—I think Sven’s really smart, and I was really nervous. I knew two months ahead of time, but there’s a last paragraph of the review that’s something about … And I just realized that for me Sven’s a big deal, and I was very scared. And I remember that last paragraph feeling, having to go way up into the stacks to get the magazine out. And reading it and then taking the stairs down two at a time, and walking out with this kind of wonderful … yeah, it felt done then. …

  [Birkerts: “Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses. … It is resourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique. Those who stay with it will find the whole world lit up as though by black light.”]

  [Dave checks the tape.] We work real differently, man—I would never be able to boil all this down. Maybe I’m a minimalist, in a perverse way.

  We’re almost out. You have tapes around here?

  [I check my watch.]

  It’s twelve ten.

  That’s what your watch says? It’s two twenty, dickbrain.

  [I read parts of the book to him: LaMont Chu and Lyle.]

  You know how this works: sure, in one way. There’s also fifty other ways.

  “The obsession with future-tense fame makes all else pale.” Does that …

  Who says that?

  The narrator. What does it remind you of?

  I think what it reminds me of is the way that the fall of ’89 felt … feeling like, that I was washed up, and what was painful about that is never gettin’ a chance to you know be felt about the way LaMont feels about those players. And then also realizing how pathetic that was.

  “To get compared to M. Chang, lately expired [He’s killed off all old stars.] … He confesses it to Lyle: he wants the hype … A couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made him lose …”

  I make of that that it’s very hard to talk about coherently—at ages twelve, thirteen, fourteen, when I was young and starting out and had promise, it looked like I could be very very very good. And some of that was literally how I would feel. And I remember clipping action shots of players out of tennis magazines and envying them. And you know, so there’s a whole bunch of not real interesting …

  And it seems to me that it’s somewhat true of everybody from, you know, grim eighteen-year-old premeds who know that they’re gonna be a leading podiatrist at thirty, and have a trophy wife and $200,000, to nine-year-old ice sk
aters who are skipping Beverly Hills 90210 to practice their compulsories. That there’s something real American about it.

  Shut that off for one second …

  [On the PR campaign, his fears—David: “It would get the same response hype gets from you, which is like a derisive curl of the lip …” If the book came to him that way, with postcards.]

  The end of that reasoning—there’s no such thing as bad attention, which I strongly disagree with. That was Tama Janowitz’s battle cry—“no such thing as bad attention.” Attention that seems to shut you down as a writer is arguably bad attention, isn’t it? That’s under your game show attention to it.

  (More reading) “You burn to have your photograph in a magazine …”

  In fact, I sort of think that’s probably one facet of the great theme of sadness that’s going on.

  “After the first photograph … the famous men do not enjoy their photographs so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.”

  Sounds like a fuckin’ good little bit of dialogue to me.

  Extremely intelligent.

  I’ll tell ya, the thing that it reminds me of, is that it took me a long time to figure out what was so sad about the cruise. Have you read the thing about the cruise?

  Of course.

  Is that the great lie of the cruise is that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet this discontented part of you. When in fact, all it does is up the requirement. That’s the sort of thing that it’s about. And yeah, my little corner of that experience, some of this had to do with the writing, you know? I can remember being twenty-four years old and having my, you know, smiling mug in the New York Times Magazine, and it feeling really good for exactly like ten seconds. You know?

  Magazine?

  I’m sorry—The New York Times Book Review. Or, the big one also, some pointillist drawing of me in the Wall Street Journal, and some article like, “Hot Shot’s Weird New Novel” or something like that. And I remember that coming out when I was at Yaddo. (“Yahdo”) [He has the reformed person’s apparent responsibility to feel contempt for the person he’d been then.]

  And feeling real cool, because you know all of them were reading it in the living room and stuff. But it feeling intensely good, and probably not unlike a crack high. You know? Intensely good for thirty seconds, and then you’re hungry for more. And so that, clearly, I mean if you’re not stupid, you figure out that the real problem is the discontented self. That all this stuff that you think will work for a second, but then all it does is set up a hunger for more and better.

  And that the thing that interested me, at least in the book, and I know it’s less interesting for the purposes of your essay [By now calling it an “essay,” which is what he writes. Interesting], is that that general pattern and syndrome seems to me to get repeated, at least in our culture, for our kind of plush middle-class part of the culture, over and over and over again in a million different arenas. And that we don’t seem to get it. We do not seem to get it.

  This is just for color; so the fact that you’ve gotten the readership that you might have wanted in your midtwenties … quote from Self-Consciousness: photograph Updike sees of himself in his mother’s house, as a five-year-old boy, which now looks kind of sinister. “I’m what you wanted me to be,” you know what I mean? “You got me into this: now what do I do? I await his instructions.” I mean, in a sense, you fulfilled the ambitions that twenty-five-year-old had in terms of the kind of impact you wanted to make …

  You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded.

  But there is, you’re right, once you’ve decided those delusions are empty, you’ve got a big problem, because like you said [three days ago, in airport], you can’t kill off parts of yourself. You have to start building machinery that can incorporate that part of yourself, but … that isn’t at its mercy, you know?

  Started writing fiction when how old?

  Twenty-one.

  Never before?

  I think I started a World War Two novel when I was nine. [I laugh.]

  And abandoned?

  Yeah, well, it was about a bunch of people with strangely hyperdeveloped skills and powers, who are going to invade Hitler’s bunker during World War Two. And I remember I started it after seeing something called Kelly’s Heroes, or maybe The Dirty Dozen or something. And it was very much a project inspired by the experience of liking that movie. And once that … I mean, so yeah, I really started when I was twenty-one, and I started because—it was actually Mark kinda got me into it.

  Well, I’d done some stuff—when I was in college, I’d written a couple of papers for other people. Because there were a lot of students who … it was kind of neat.

  They were paying you to write their papers?

  Well, I wouldn’t put it that coarsely. But let’s say there were complicated systems of reward. But—and it didn’t happen a whole, whole lot of the time. But I remember one of the things that was interesting was reading two or three of their papers to learn, you know, what their music sounded like.

  And I remember realizing at the time, “Man, I’m really good at this. I’m a weird kind of forger. I mean, I can sound kind of like anybody.” Or I would write papers for professors that would parody the stuff that the professors had said—I mean, that’d sound just like them, only more so.

  Nabokov called that the ability to do blue magic.

  Yeah. And it was weird, because I remembered that I’d always wanted to be an impressionist, vocally. But I just didn’t, I don’t have an agile enough vocal and facial register to do it. Although I can do it.

  Mark and I resuscitated an old humor magazine that had been dormant for a couple of years—

  What were your impressions?

  I can do, um, I can do Scooby-Doo, I can do Dudley Do-Right, and I can do a really good James Carter.

  Do one for me?

  How would this play in the piece?

  [He does one; it’s not great.]

  How many papers?

  I wasn’t Michael Pemulis: The number of times I did this, you could count on one hand.

  Was it money?

  Come on …

  So we did this humor magazine, and I really liked it, and then Mark …

  [The tape side runs out.

  We’re out of tapes; Dave finds me one belonging to an ex-girlfriend. It’s an old step-aerobics mix tape that says “Step!” We tape over.]

  In this class we read Ada, and we read Gravity’s Rainbow, we read a bunch of Barthelme, anyway stuff like this.

  And see ’cause, there were literati on campus, but they were these sensitive, you know like, politically correct—yeah, the beret guys.

  And I just—boy, I remember, one reason I still don’t like to call myself a writer is that I don’t ever want to be mistaken for that type of person … Uuuh! Yeah, I think on East Coast colleges, with their little campus magazines, and their little infighting about who’s gonna get it, and it’s just Uh! The vanity speaks so stark.

  [One of his strengths: he judges and speaks like a Midwesterner, a kid’s offhand slang, that’s inside all the intelligence, it’s the cement base under its field.]

  Um, but anyway, we got really into that, and then Mark, Mark had always kind of written fiction. And he wrote a thesis, he wrote a creative thesis in the English department. And by this time, he was a year ahead of me, because I took a year off from college to drive a school bus.

  Why?

  God. I wasn’t very happy, I wasn’t very happy there. And I felt kind of inadequate. And there was a lot of stuff I wanted to read that wasn’t part of any reading class. And Mom and Dad were just totally cool, it was pretty clear I wasn’t fucking off. They just let me take a year off, live at home
and drive a school bus. And I read, pretty much everything that I’ve read was read during that year.

  Anyway, OK, I was majoring in philosophy, and it was serious, I mean, I was on a career track.

  [Wouldn’t it be great to fall in through this transcript, back to that house, and tell him to live differently, explain to him how it was all going to go? It’s suddenly odd that this isn’t possible.]

  Anyway, Mark went ahead and wrote a novel for his English thesis, and I didn’t know that this was possible, that you could get sanctioned to actually. And there were big writers there at the time. Brad Leithauser was there. Marilynne Robinson was there. And you could get these people to read it and like help you. And Mark sort of blazed that trail.

  And that spring I took a workshop—the only undergraduate one I’ve ever had—from a man named Alan Lelchuk. Right, American Mischief. Safe to say that he and I didn’t hit it off. But anyway I took that class, and actually, I liked a couple of the other students, there were a couple of other students who were incredibly good, who’re now, like, teaching at Catholic schools in New York and L.A. So I just kind of eased into it.

  And then I thought I would just sort of do this, because the philosophy thesis I was gonna do looked really hard and I was really scared about it, and I thought I would do this jaunty thing. Kind of like a side—I figured it would be like a hundred-page thing. And Broom of the System, the first draft of it was like seven hundred pages long. It was written in like five months, and it was just this very weird, it was sorta like it had, I had …