In which I evoke my character and personality, especially the way I always argue against myself, am ridiculously ambivalent—who knew?
AT A VERY EARLY AGE I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated writers.” Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. They saw themselves the same way. They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression, by writing yet another article they didn’t want to write. They worshipped “real writers,” i.e., writers who wrote books. Henry Roth. Hortense Calisher. Jerzy Kosinski. Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write books, be worshipped.
Hellman’s statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” was my mother’s mantra. For many years, she was the West Coast correspondent for The Nation. Draconian, omnipotent, she read a few of my early short stories, e.g., “A Few Words About a Wall,” which she overpraised by way of dismissing. She died of breast cancer during my junior year of college.
My father, who throughout his adult life was severely manic-depressive and constantly checking himself in to mental hospitals, where he craved and received dozens of electroshock therapy treatments, died a few years ago at ninety-eight. I’ll never forget his running back and forth in the living room and repeating, “I need the juice,” while my third-grade friends and I tried to play indoor miniature golf. Thirty years later, I asked him what he thought of my writing, and he said, “Too bad you didn’t become a pro tennis player. You had some talent.” I sent him a galley of my book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, in which he plays a major role; he sent back a list of errata. When the book tied for fifteenth place on the bestseller list one week, I clipped the listing and sent it to him. He asked me whether that counted—being tied for last. I live in fear of becoming my father.
I was the editor of my junior high school and high school papers. In high school I worked at McDonald’s. Got fired. I worked at a fabric store. Got fired. My freshman year at Brown—where I was an almost unfathomably devoted English major who closed the library nearly every night for four years and who, at the end of one particularly productive work session, actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, “I shall dethrone Shakespeare”—I worked as a custodian. Got fired. (Despite once having been an athlete, I have never been good at simple physical maneuvers—never learned how to snap my fingers properly, blow a bubble, whistle, dive, rope climb, swing higher and higher on a swing.) One of my fellow student-custodians asked me if I was this bad on purpose or whether I was really that uncomprehending of the relation between soap and water. I also worked as a proofreader at the Rhode Island Historical Society. I worked as a TA at Iowa. I house-sat whenever and wherever possible. I got a lot of grants. I made a very small amount of money stretch a long way.
I first started teaching at a private high school, with branches in Santa Monica and Malibu, for the children of the rich and semifamous. The kids would be, say, the daughter of the comedian Flip Wilson, the girlfriend of the son of Elizabeth Montgomery, Rob Lowe’s little brother. They weren’t, needless to say, interested in their school-work. I would sit in the front of the class and pretend to have answers to their questions about history, geometry, science. “Who wrote The Scarlet Letter?” Maybe look at the spine of the book; might be a clue there. (Where was Google? This was 1985.) The entire day would go by like that. During recess and even during class, they would be running to the bathroom to drop acid and I’d be madly working on revisions of my book about a boy who stutters so badly that he worships words.
I’d show the kids the manuscript I was working on. Beyond charming, they’d laugh at my woes—no way this book is being published, dude. For the graduation ceremony, I wrote brief satiric profiles of all the seniors. These profiles received the most sincerely appreciative response of anything I’ve ever written. I have an image of myself on the bench in the tiny schoolyard, reworking the sentences from Dead Languages, hoping beyond hope that there was life in this book, that books could be my life.
THE ASTROLOGER AND I met for two hours, and nearly all of it was, to me, mumbo jumbo, but one thing she said rang incontrovertibly true. She said my Sun is very late Cancer—less than a degree away from Leo. Therefore, supposedly, I partake of Cancer qualities (domestic, nurturing, protective) as well as Leo qualities (ambitious, attention-seeking, overbearing). My leoninity is apparently bolstered by the fact that in Leo both Uranus (rule-breaker) and Mercury (mind) are sitting within 4 degrees of the sun. This extremely close association means that all my Cancer tendencies have a strong Leo flavor, and vice versa.
Whatever. I’m a complete skeptic. (Decades ago, at my Transcendental Meditation initiation ceremony, I was informed that “Sho-ring” was my mantra. The next week, I told my TM teacher I couldn’t use “Sho-ring” because every time I said it aloud, all it signified to me was how to perform a marriage proposal. I asked for another mantra. The teacher said no.) But then the astrologer emailed me, “A perfect example of this tension within your Sun sign is the little exchange we had over my reading your chart. Though you were curious about it in a party-chatter sort of way, your initial reaction to my suggestion that we talk about it for an hour or two was to recoil and let me know—in clear, unambiguous terms—that you didn’t take it seriously enough to warrant that kind of conversation. That was very Leo. Then, in short order, part of you got worried that you’d been too harsh, hurt my feelings, and perhaps damaged a personal relationship. That was very Cancer.”
That’s me. It just is.
IT’S HARD NOW to reanimate how viscerally so many people hated Bush just a few years ago, but looking back on him now, I remember him as a homebody, someone who doesn’t like to travel, travels with his pillow, is addicted to eight hours of sleep a night; so am I. In India, he wasn’t sufficiently curious to go see the Taj Mahal. I must admit I could imagine doing the same thing. For his New Year’s resolution nine months after invading Iraq, he said he wanted to eat fewer sweets; he was widely and justifiably mocked for this, but this was also my New Year’s resolution the same year. He pretends to love his father, but he hates him. He pretends to admire his mother, but he reviles her. Check and check. (When the Dutch translator of Dead Languages asked if “Daddums” could be translated as “molten fool,” I said, “Yep, pretty much.”)
He finds Nancy Pelosi sexy, but he won’t admit it (cf. my imaginative relation to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann). He outsources every task he can. He walked into Condi Rice’s office and said, “Fuck Saddam—he’s going down.” I could imagine saying this. He loves to watch football and eat pretzels. He did everything he could to avoid serving in the Vietnam War; in 1974, when the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector. As do I, he prides himself on being able to assess people immediately based on their body language. When he has the tactical advantage, he presses it to the limit; when he’s outflanked, he’s unattractively defensive. I don’t negotiate against myself: I’m incapable of embodying this Bush aperçu, but I quote it at least once a month.
He’s not very knowledgeable about the world. He has trouble pronouncing the names of foreign leaders. He’s obsessed with losing those last ten pounds. He’s remarkably tongue-tied in public but supposedly relatively smart in private. He had a lower SAT score than most of his Ivy League classmates; so did I. He wildly overvalues the poetry in motion of athletes. He once said he couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be poor; I have trouble reading books by people whose sensibility is wildly divergent from my own. He wasted his youth in a fog of alcohol and drugs; I didn’t do this, but sometimes I pretend I did. He reads a newspaper by glancing at the headlines—more or less what I do. He loves to get summaries of things rather than reading the thing itself. He’s never happier than in the box seat of a ballpark. He takes way too much pride in throwing the ceremonial first pitch over the plate for a strike. He’s slightly under six feet tall but pretends he’s six feet. I’m barely six feet and claim to be six one. He’s scared to death of dying.
He was too easily seduced by Tony Blair’s patter, as was I. His wife is smarter than he is, by a lot. Asked by the White House press corps what he was going to give Laura for her birthday, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, conveying, unmistakably, “I’m going to give it to her.” (My wife’s name is Laurie.) He’s intimidated by his father’s friends. He can express his affection most easily to dogs. He finds the metallics of war erotic. His knees are no damn good anymore, so he can’t jog and has taken up another sport: biking (for me, swimming). He loves nicknames. He’s not a good administrator. He has a speech disorder. He views politics as a sporting event. He resents The New York Times’s (declining but still undeniable) role in national life as pseudo-impartial arbiter. In a crisis, he freezes up, has no idea what to do, thinks first of his own safety; note how I responded to the 2001 Nisqually earthquake.
He just wants to be secure and taken care of and left alone—pretty much my impulses. Asked what he was most proud of during his presidency, he said catching a seven-pound bass. Asked in 2011 what’s on George’s mind now, Laura said, “He’s always worried about our small lake—whether it’s stocked with bass—because he loves to fish. There’s always some concern. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Are the fish not getting enough feed? That’s what he worries about.” He’s lazy (it goes without saying). He hates to admit he’s wrong.
Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. Asked what’s wrong with the world, G. K. Chesterton said, “I am.”
Spider-Man, which I watched maybe a hundred times with my daughter, Natalie, then nine, when it came out in 2002, is about how important it is for ordinary boys to view their own bodies as instruments of power—which, incidentally, or not so incidentally, is what has allowed nation-states to go to war from the beginning of time. The names of the main characters in the movie are aggressively average, parodies of Mayberry R.F.D. ordinariness: Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Norman Osborn (who’s both normal and born of Oz), Peter Parker (who literally has a crush on the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson). The words “average,” “ordinary,” and “normal” recur throughout the film.
It’s high school and peer pressure is the state religion, so Peter has two choices: try to do what he tells his friend, Harry, spiders do—blend in—or he can stand out, which is terrifying. Even when he punches out the bully Flash, another kid calls Peter a freak. But as Norman/Green Goblin Nietzscheanly tells Peter/Spider-Man, “There are eight million people in this city, and those teeming masses exist for the sole purpose of lifting a few exceptional people onto their shoulders.” The Goblin crashes World Unity Day, killing dozens, whereas when he forces Spider-Man to choose between rescuing the woman he loves or a tram full of children, Spider-Man, of course, manages to rescue both MJ and the children. “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” a Yo-Vinnie type informs Gobby. The movie thus figures out a way to deliver an immensely reassuring message to its predominantly male and teenage audience: the metamorphosis of your body from a boy into a man will make you not into a monster who despises the crowd but into the kind of creature whom the crowd idolizes.
When Peter gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re not the same guy lately: fights in school, shirking your chores. This is the age when a man becomes the man he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s flip from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his conversion from boy to man. When MJ asks him what he imagines his future will be, he says, “It feels like something I never felt before,” alluding to becoming Spider-Man but also to his feeling of falling in love with her. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style. Afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. The screenplay phrases male sexual maturation as the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Asked by Mary Jane what he told Spider-Man about her, Peter says he said, “The great thing about MJ is when you look in her eyes and she’s looking back in yours and smiling—well, everything feels not quite normal, because you feel stronger and weaker at the same time, and you feel excited and at the same time terrified.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world.
Which it does and doesn’t. The second time Spider-Man rescues MJ, she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling his mask down past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes emphatically clear that Peter’s newfound Spider-Man prowess is onanistic transcendence: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” He changes the position of his fingers. “Thwip. A single strand of webbing shoots out from his wrist.” The webbing flies across the alley and sticks to the side of the other building. Peter tugs on it. It’s tough. He pulls harder. Can’t break it. He wraps one hand around it, closes his eyes, jumps off the roof. He sails through the air.” All three times Spider-Man rescues MJ, they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex—Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked. As Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex flight without any of the messy, emotional cleanup afterward.
Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Norman Osborn/Green Goblin, of course. But also, when Uncle Ben changes the lightbulb, he says, “Let there be light.” When Peter fails to show up to help him paint the dining room, Ben writes a teasing note to Peter and addresses him as “Michelangelo.” The testosterone-intensive announcer at the New York Wrestling Foundation has a surprisingly understated side: “The Human Spider?” he asks Peter. “That’s it? That’s the best you got? Nah, you gotta jazz it up a little.” Even the “squirrelly-faced” burglar who steals the foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a carjacking, mouths “Thanks” and flashes a sweet smile when Peter unwisely lets him by into the elevator.
Ferocity and humility, then, in constant conversation and confusion:
ALTHOUGH THE GREEK TRAGEDY professor said that reading the play carefully, once, would probably be sufficient preparation for the test, I couldn’t stop reading Prometheus Bound and also, for some reason, the critical commentary on it. I was a freshman and I loved how scholars felt compelled to criticize the play for not obeying certain Aristotelian dicta but were nevertheless helplessly drawn to “the almost interstellar silence of this play’s remote setting,” as one of them put it. I wrote my sister that even if our father pretended to be Prometheus, he was really only Io. I blurted out quotes to my friend MJ, I mean Debra, with whom I was none too secretly infatuated.
“Why are you studying so much?” she asked. “You’re running yourself ragged. You know he said we could take the test after spring break, if we want. There’s no reason to punish yourself.”
“You must not have read the play,” I said, then quoted a line: “ ‘To me, nothing that hurts shall come with a new face.’ The admirable thing about Prometheus is that he accepts his fate without ever even hoping for another outcome.”
“Yeah, maybe so, but at the end of the play he’s still chained to a rock.”
“There’s a certain purity to basing your entire identity upon a single idea, don’t you think? Nothing else matters except how completely I comprehend a drama written twenty-four hundred years ago. If I don’t fully grasp each question, after a week of studying, I’ll probably jump off the Caucasus,” I said, referring to the mountains of the play and grabbing her arm. “I can sense some excitement.”
“Shhh,” she said, putting her finger over her lipsticked lips. “People are studying.”
“You’re as bad as the chorus of Oceanus’s daughters, always telling Prometheus to stop pouting.”
Debra thought I was kidding and laughed, shaking her head. I told myself I was kidding and tried to believe it. I felt like a Greek New Comedy “wise fool,” parading around—to everyone’s astonishment—in chinos and a turtleneck. Studying until five in the morning the day of the exam, falling asleep in my room and waking barely in time, I stumbled into the lecture hall, where I filled four blue books in fifty minutes. My pen didn’t leave paper: whole speeches stormed from my mind. In immense handwriting (child’s handwriting, out of control), I misidentified virtually every passage in the play but explicated them with such fevered devotion that the sympathetic teaching assistant gave me an A—.
I took a train from Providence to Washington, D.C., then a cab into the suburbs, and when I appeared on her front porch in Bethesda, my aunt asked how long I’d been ill. I groan for the present sorrow, I groan for the sorrow to come, I thought, I groan questioning whether there shall come a time when He shall ordain a limit to my sufferings. Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I saw black circles around my eyes. I listened to my aunt tell my mother over the phone how wonderfully I’d matured.
My uncle, a science adviser to the State Department, was in Japan on a business trip. Nearly all the books in his study, where I secluded myself for most of the Easter vacation, were technical, indecipherable, and of little interest to me—a big Aeschylus fan. Rummaging through desk drawers, I came across elaborate lists of domestic and secretarial errands for my aunt to perform and a few recent issues of Penthouse, which at the time I found extremely erotic because of its emphasis upon Amazonian women.
My uncle’s office had a small record player and a stack of classical music. He had many performances of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3, the so-called Heroic Symphony, and I found myself immersed, first, in all the liner notes. “Like Beethoven, Napoleon was a small man with a powerful personality,” and Beethoven admired him, so when the French ambassador to Vienna suggested to Beethoven that he write a symphony about Bonaparte, Beethoven agreed. He was just about to send the finished score to Paris for Napoleon’s official approval when he heard that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor. Beethoven tore off the title page, which had only the word “Bonaparte” on it, and changed the dedication to “Heroic Symphony—composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” Beethoven is then supposed to have said, “Is he, too, no more than a mere mortal?” Beethoven was disappointed, in other words, to discover that Napoleon was human.
What was a funeral march doing in the middle of the symphony? Why was the finale borrowed from Beethoven’s ballet The Creatures of Prometheus? Because—one commentator surmised—Beethoven “planned his symphony as a diptych, after the manner of his favorite book, Plutarch’s Lives, in which every modern biography is paired with an antique one like it. Thus, the first two movements of the Eroica are about Napoleon and the second two about Prometheus.” Oh, Prometheus. I knew, as I listened over and over again to the symphony, that I’d felt elated and suicidal in exactly the same way before.
And the musicologists talking about Beethoven and Napoleon sounded eerily like the classicists discussing Prometheus or like me discussing the classicists discussing Prometheus or like Peter Parker worrying about becoming Spider-Man: “What Beethoven valued in Bonaparte at the time of writing the Eroica was the attempt to wrest fate from the hands of the gods—the striving that, however hopeless, ennobles the man in the act.” I couldn’t sleep at night because I couldn’t get out of my head either the two abrupt gunshots in E-flat major that began the symphony or the trip-hammer orgasm of the coda, so I outlined an essay on the parallel and contrasting uses of water imagery in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Debra had suggested I adopt a “mythopoeic” approach to the paper. Instead, I circled every water image in both trilogies.
I’d always wanted to get to know better a high school friend who was now a freshman at Georgetown. I let the phone ring twice and hung up. I called again the next day, and the line was busy. The third time I called, she answered on the first ring, clearly expecting someone else. Her voice was newly inflected to underscore her International Relations major.
My aunt made breakfast for me every morning. We talked a lot. She asked me to define existentialism. She watched television and washed the dishes. I started agreeing with her. All this happened nearly forty years ago: the documentary film Hearts and Minds had recently been released. I drove into Georgetown to see it, and when I returned I sat in my aunt’s kitchen, excoriating the racist underpinnings of all military aggression, but I was really thinking about only one scene: the moment when two U.S. soldiers, fondling their Vietnamese prostitutes, surveyed the centerfolds taped to the mirrored walls, and for the benefit of the camera, tried to imitate heroic masculinity.
BROWN STILL, I think, suffers from a massive superiority/inferiority complex (we’re anti-Ivy, but we’re Ivy!), proud of the club it belongs to and anxious about its status within that club. Saith Groucho Marx (two of whose films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, were cowritten by S. J. Perelman ’25, who didn’t graduate), “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member.” At once rebel (we’re more interesting than you are) and wannabe (we got 1390 on our SATs rather than 1520), we’re like Jews in upper-middle-class America: we’re in the winner’s circle but uncertain whether we really belong. In general, Brown is (perceived to be) not the best of the best but within shouting distance of the best of the best—which creates institutional vertigo, a huge investment in and saving irony toward prestige, ambivalence toward cultural norms, and among artists, a desire to stage that ambivalence, to blur boundaries, to confuse what’s acceptable with what’s not.
At halftime of a football game my freshman year, the Yale band asked, “What’s Brown?” and came back with various rude rejoinders (Governor Moonbeam, the color of shit, etc.), but the only answer that really stung was the final one: “Backup school.”
In the artistic work of a striking number of Brown grads (Lerner’s, obviously; mine, too, equally obviously), I see a skewed, complex, somewhat tortured stance: antipathy toward the conventions of the culture and yet a strong need to be in conversation with that culture (you can’t deconstruct something that you’re not hugely interested in the construction of in the first place).
These impulses are not unique to former or current residents of Providence, Rhode Island, so to what degree can Brown be seen as a crucial incubator-conduit-catalyst-megaphone for the making of the postmodern American imagination? Is this a credible claim, and if so, how and why? Is there an analogous Harvard or Williams or Oberlin or Stanford or Amherst or Cornell or Yale or Berkeley aesthetic, and if so, how is it different, and if not, why does Brown have such a thing while many other, “similar” institutions don’t?
These schools are, I imagine, more secure in what they are and aren’t (the University of Chicago, for instance, probably isn’t obsessed with the fact that it isn’t Princeton), whereas Brown is helplessly, helpfully trapped in limbo (just as Seattle, where I now live, is, and just as I am). Brown has a flawed, tragicomic, self-conscious relation to power/prestige/privilege. In 2004, Women’s Wear Daily named Brown “the most fashionable Ivy”: bourgeois/bohemian clothes made (expensively) to look like the thrifty alternative to expensive threads. Embarrassing recent poll result: Brown is the “happiest Ivy.” Brown is Ivy, but it’s, crucially, not Harvard, Princeton, Yale. Brown students affirm a discourse of privilege at the same time they want to/need to undermine such a hierarchy.
The result, in the arts: a push-pull attitude toward the dominant narrative. Boston Globe: “From its founding as a fledgling program in 1974 to its morphing into a full Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics has produced a crop of creators that, if they don’t exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it.” Emphasis on sparring.
Which brings me to the Fuck You Factor (crucial to Brown’s overdog/underdog ethos). My friend Elizabeth Searle, who received her MFA from Brown, emailed me, “Walter Abish advised our workshop, ‘The single most important thing in writing is to maintain a playful attitude toward your material.’ I liked the freeing, what-the-hell sound of that. I like the sense—on the page—that I’m playing with fire. I know I’m onto something when I think two things simultaneously: ‘No, I could never do that’ and ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’ ” We were taught at Brown to question ourselves rather than naïvely and vaingloriously celebrate ourselves—to turn ourselves inside out rather than turn (easily) inward or outward, to mock ourselves, to simultaneously take ourselves very seriously and demolish ourselves.
Several years ago I was a member of the nonfiction panel for the National Book Awards. One of the other panelists, disparaging a book I strongly believed should be a finalist, said, “The writer keeps getting in the way of the story.” What could that possibly mean? The writer getting in the way of the story is the story, is the best story, is the only story. We semiotics concentrators (my mother in 1974: “Semiotics—what the hell is that?”) knew that on day one.
My senior year an essay appeared in Fresh Fruit, the extremely short-lived and poorly named weekly arts supplement to The Brown Daily Herald. A Brown student, writing about the culture clash at a Brown-URI basketball game, referred in passing to Brown students as “world-beaters.” I remember thinking, Really? World-beaters? More like world-wanderers and -wonderers.
Harvard: government, sketch comedy (same thing?). Yale: Wall Street, judiciary (same thing?). Princeton: physics, astrophysics (same thing?). Brown: freedom, art (same thing?).
A myth is an attempt to reconcile an intolerable contradiction.
WRITING WAS, and in a way still is, very bound up for me with stuttering. Writing represented/represents the possibility of turning “bad language” into “good language.” I now have much more control over my stutter; it’s nothing like the issue it was in my teens and twenties and into my thirties. Still, Edmund Wilson’s notion of the wound and the bow persists in my mind (Samuel Johnson had scars all over his face, he twitched, every time he walked past a tree he had to touch it, he was sexually masochistic, and out of his mouth came wondrously strange and funny things). Language is what differentiates us from other species, so when I stutter, I find it genuinely dehumanizing. I still feel a psychic need to write myself into, um, existence. So, too, due to stuttering, I value writing and reading as essential communication between writer and reader. It’s why I want writing to be so intimate: I want to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone—I’ve gotten to this other person.
Email to Natalie, now nineteen, insulin-resistant and hypothyroid, who faced weight issues throughout high school: “I felt utterly isolated in high school and college (not at all a part of any social scene), but over time my speech issues receded and I became the immensely social butterfly I am now.”
Her reply: “Ha ha ha.”
In “Son of Mr. Green Jeans,” Dinty Moore overcomes his ambivalence about having a child—his own father was a stutterer and a drunk—but he desperately wants a girl because “boys have a higher likelihood of inheriting their ancestral traits.”
THE STAR OF the reality show Supernanny tells her charges, “The answers you give to your parents are meaningless to me. I’m not going to put on the mask of parent or caregiver. I’m going to be completely real to you.” Kids almost always respond quite positively to her. With Natalie I also try to be “real.” Her friends say, “Your dad does not play Dad with you.” I take this as a compliment, not sure Natalie does. After spending a few days with Paul Giamatti, my friend Ellen said Giamatti reminded her of me. I said thanks a lot—it couldn’t be another movie star? How I interact with Natalie reminded Ellen of how Giamatti interacts with his son. She said that both of us seem to empty out the melodrama from the relationship by speaking in a flat, ironic, peer-to-peer sort of voice: “no singsong, no patronizing, maybe a little distant, but probably very loving, I would think, in its own way.”
FRED MOODY, the former editor of Seattle Weekly and the author of four works of nonfiction, is a friend. His as yet unpublished antimemoir (memoir with wings?), Unspeakable Joy, describes his adolescent years spent in two seminaries in California. The book is framed by a national scandal in the 1990s, when the news broke of widespread abuse by priests in the 1960s at the seminary Moody was attending. The book is written in short passages, each one separated by a triangle (=Trinity) and nearly every one just a couple of pages.
The opening of the book—Moody’s mother calling him on the phone after hearing the news, demanding to know if he was one of the abused, and his reassuring her that he wasn’t—sets a particular tone for what follows, frames the entire thing in a peculiar way. Moody reassures his mother that he wasn’t abused, but he doesn’t reassure me. If anything, I’m inclined to think he’s lying. He reflects on how troubled his adult life has been, how he has to hide in plain sight because of the horrible things within him: “Marriage, kids, house, friends, career—when you’re like me, those things are basically barnacles on a rotting pier. I suppose, for the secretive, the power of the secret has some direct correlation with the worth of the life you have: the more loved ones in your life, the more emotional equity, the more you have to lose by being found out.”
All of which further inclines me to believe that he was abused and that I’m going to hear about it, but this information is withheld, and he segues into a retelling of his entire seminarian career, beginning with his earliest, uncontrollable desire to enter the seminary because of his mortifying fear of girls and all things sexual, and his assessment that, as a result, “there was something deeply wrong” with him. The first several chapters revolve around Moody’s unrelenting emphasis on how troubled he was as a child, how disturbed he is as an adult, and how traumatizing the intervening years were. Further, and perhaps most important, he describes how difficult it is for him to recall these memories, both emotionally and physically: “Memory isn’t a resurrector of past reality so much as it is a storyteller.” His wife asks him (about the manuscript I’m reading) whether he’s writing memoir or fiction, and he responds that he’s “still thinking about it.”
At this point, I believe that (1) I’m going to read the story of how Moody was molested by a priest at seminary, and (2) I’m going to have no way of knowing how much of what follows is “true.” As Moody’s story of adolescent angst unfolds, the feeling of impending molestation hovers—not on the page, but in my mind—over every encounter Moody has with a Father, every time he’s alone in a room with one. Whenever one of his classmates has a nervous breakdown or mysteriously decides to drop out and go home, I assume abuse is the root cause, but Moody doesn’t speculate. Where’s the trauma? The devastation? The “rotting pier” upon which the adult Moody’s family and marriage are to be just “barnacles”?
I’m relieved, sort of, when Moody says that his seminary is shutting down. I realize that he isn’t going to be molested there. The school closes, Moody goes home, and trauma is spared. To my dismay, I learn that Moody is going to transfer to another seminary—St. Anthony’s Franciscan, which proves to be far different from the previous one. Suddenly, the chapters are numbered in Roman numerals. I meet Father Mario, the consummate disciplinarian (he’s still alive; google him). Signs of sexual abuse abound, from kids being mysteriously summoned during class to audible screams coming from Mario’s office. And after several tortured months of enduring true Catholic discipline, Moody is kicked out for giving a homily about the hypocrisy of the institution of confession.
Moody escapes unscathed. Finally, though, near the end of the book, Moody satiates my curiosity—really, my anxiety, my fascination. He reveals his dark secret, but it becomes immediately obvious that the event he describes is a fabrication. And Moody doesn’t disguise it: the very next passage begins, “Novelists get a free ride, presenting fact as fiction and taking undeserved credit for creativity when they’ve simply taken down what reality dictated to them. But let a nonfiction writer try to present fiction as fact for the noble cause of inspiring and uplifting the reader, and he ends up crucified on Oprah.” (Sing it, Fred!) The real source of Moody’s shame, I learn, is that the signs of abuse were all around him but he didn’t do anything about it. “This is what I can’t get over: the shame over my complicity in that series of monstrous crimes.”
The book concludes with Moody’s revisiting St. Anthony’s with a friend, who shoots a photo of Moody comically trying to pry apart the bars of a gate. The concluding sentences: “We entitled it ‘Prisoner of Memory.’ Then we got the hell out of there.”
Prisoner of memory. Moody’s book is what I had in mind when I wrote my harrumphing letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books: “Pace Lorrie Moore’s mention of my book Reality Hunger in her review of three memoirs, Reality Hunger is neither an ‘anti-novel jihad’ (Geoff Dyer’s jocular reference in his generous discussion of my book in The Guardian) nor a brief for the memoir. It is instead an argument for the poetic essay and the book-length essay—in particular, work that takes the potential banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts,’ ‘truth,’ ‘reality’), turns that banality inside out, and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s ‘true’? What’s knowledge? What’s ‘fact’? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.”
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE came to like country music by imagining that the singer of each song was actually singing about him/herself. Many country songs were thus transfigured for Wallace into the battle of a self against itself. When Patsy Cline sings “I’m crazy for loving you,” it’s a statement of self-loathing. Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” is self-indictment. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.” Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come On, Come On.” Garth Brooks’s “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places.”
Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with the album cover of “outsider” musician Daniel Johnston’s Hi, How Are You? on it. It’s as if Johnston—bipolar, schizophrenic—has found a way to hot-wire his feelings directly into his tape recorder. He presents zero façade, only the inscape of his tortured self. The music, raw beyond raw, is the very definition of lo-fi. Emerson: “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.” Johnston never had any arrows to begin with. He has always had only himself and a microphone.
In “River,” “Blue,” and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Joni Mitchell opens a map of pain, regret, and an ego trying to stitch itself back together. She wrote these songs while traveling in Europe after a bad breakup with Graham Nash. The nakedness also manifests itself in her stark instrumentation. Blue is the sound of Mitchell healing, though there are still signs of blood in the wounds.
On an orange Post-it note attached to the upper right corner of my computer screen is Denis Johnson’s admittedly melodramatic advice Write yourself naked, from exile, and in blood.