How Literature Saved My Life (10 page)

In
Out of Sheer Rage
, Geoff Dyer tries and fails to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, but the book conveys Lawrence better than any conventional biography does, and more important, it asks the question
How and why do we get up in the morning?
In many ways, it’s a thinking person’s self-help book: how to live your life with passion when you know every passion is delusional. Dyer is paralyzed by the difficulty of choice, because he can always see the opposite position—a different place to live, woman to love, book to write. His conclusion: “The best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence.” By getting up in the morning, we get up in the morning. By not writing our biographies of D. H. Lawrence, we write our biographies of D. H. Lawrence. The crucial line in Dyer’s most recent book,
Zona:
“We never know when we’re going to die and because of that we are, at any one moment, immortal.” All of his best books are fixed on this idea—searching for such moments,
trying to produce such suspensions in the work itself. Extended footnotes divide
Zona
in two. Digressions give us at least the illusion of breaking away from time, killing it before it kills us. The book kept reminding me of an evening Dyer and I spent together a few years ago. It was terribly important to him to find exactly the right restaurant. I didn’t understand this. I remember thinking,
Who cares?
We found the right restaurant, where (after mocking me for ordering Prosecco—“another drink for the homosexual gentleman?”) he devoured what he called the best hamburger he’d ever eaten. Empty praise? Full stomach? It was crucial to him to at least try to enter the Zone. Dyer is determined not to waste his time on earth, and he knows the only way not to waste it is to waste it.

Coetzee’s
Elizabeth Costello
eviscerates, chapter by chapter, a commitment (antiapartheid activism, animal rights, friendship, art, love, sex) that Coetzee, in previous books, had once affirmed. The “novel” consists almost entirely of a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, but in the book a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello gives the lectures. Coetzee/Costello is trying to find something that he/she can actually believe, and by the end of the book the only thing Coetzee can affirm, the only thing Costello affirms, is the belling of the sound of frogs in mud: the animal life of sheer survival. I love how joyous and despairing that is. It’s on the side of life, but along a very narrow ledge. My favorite books are candid
beyond candid, and they proceed from the assumption that we’ll all be dead in a hundred years: here, now, in this book, I’m going to cut to the essence.

David Markson’s
This Is Not a Novel
is a book built almost entirely out of other writers’ lines—some attributed, most not, many mashed-up (weirdly, he insisted upon verbatim quotation of his “own” work in
Reality Hunger
). One of the pleasures of reading the book is recognizing so many of the passages. A bibliophile’s wet dream, but it’s no mere collection of quotes. It’s a sustained meditation on a single question: Against death, what consolation, if any, is art? Against the dark night of death, what solace is it that I still read Sophocles? For Sophocles, Markson implies, not a lot, but for me, maybe a little. Markson constantly toggles back and forth between celebrating the timelessness of art and mocking such grandiosity. The book forces me to ask myself: What do I push back with?
Maybe art, and if so, barely
.

S
HORTLY AFTER
the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the editor of
Image
, a magazine interested in the intersection of art and faith, asked dozens of writers to respond. Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life,” fewer than
1,500 words, is, to me, by far the best essay yet written about 9/11; she addresses the event extremely obliquely and doesn’t come even close to mentioning it. Instead, she uses 9/11 as the catalyst for an extremely far-ranging contemplation of the inherent relativism of all cultural “truths,” and given the actuality of death, the irreducible ephemerality of all human experience (each of us is, apparently, “as provisional as a bug”). And yet if nothing is meaningful, everything is significant.

Aggressively ambivalent, Dillard contains the contradictions: between ecstasy and despair, herself and the world, life and death. In
The Writing Life
, Dillard advises, “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”—which is precisely what she does here: she’s utterly unblinking, unapologetically sober (but still funny) about the fundamental questions of existence.

In case we need reminding, Dillard reminds us at the beginning of the essay, “Somewhere in there you die. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.” This sets the terms for all that follows: everything we do—seek to know Rome’s best restaurants and their staffs, take the next tribe’s pigs in thrilling raids, grill yams, hunt white-plumed birds,
burn captives, set fire to a drunk, publish the paper that proves the point, elude capture, educate our children to a feather edge, count coup, perfect our calligraphy, spear the seal—is, in a sense, nothing more or less than a prelude to, distraction from, death. She relentlessly questions her own position as she rigorously investigates the world: “The black rock is holy, or the scroll. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.” She establishes the problem, deepens the problem, suggests “solutions,” explores the permutations of these solutions, argues against and finally undermines these solutions, returning us to the problem (pretty much the M.O. of this book as well).

We know only the culture in which we live and we abide by its “truths.” The “illusion, like the visual field, is complete. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky.” Can we not get beyond our own ethnocentrism? Of course, sort of, but say “you scale your own weft and see time’s breadth and the length of space. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.” There is a good-sized rock in the garden, there is no way to remove the rock even if you peer at it from above and at many different angles, and all rocks are equally significant/insignificant: “However
hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. What new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle?”

There is no wisdom, only many wisdoms—beautiful and delusional.

In which I make various self-destructive gestures
,
flirt none too successfully or seriously with suicide
,
pull back from the brink via the written word
.

I
N THE FIRST
of the eight interlocked stories or chapters of
Butterfly Stories: A Novel
, William Vollmann tells “what happened to the child,” establishing the psychic interconnection—for the butterfly boy—between solitude, beauty, loss, pain, and punishment. The lyric catalogue of childhood humiliations in the first story yields, in the seven stories that follow, to litanies of the butterfly boy (who as an adult is called first “the journalist,” then later “the husband”) reenacting—with a lesbian traveling companion, the son of a former SS officer, a sybaritic and amoral photographer, and especially with a Phnom Penh prostitute named Oy—the sadomasochistic scenarios of his childhood.

Vollmann begins
Butterfly Stories
with an evocation of war torture by the Khmer Rouge. On the next page,
he writes, “There was a jungle, and there was murder by torture, but the butterfly boy did not know about it. He knew the school bully, though, who beat him up every day.” Vollmann makes absolutely explicit the link between the butterfly boy’s childhood and his adult experiences in Thailand and Cambodia. The butterfly boy thinks about the school bully, “The substance that his soul was composed of was pain,” but this is at least as true of the butterfly boy, who “was not popular in the second grade because he knew how to spell ‘bacteria’ in the spelling bee, and so the other boys beat him up.” One evening, a monarch butterfly lands on the top step of his house, squatting on the welcome mat and moving its gorgeous wings slowly. Then it rises in the air. He never sees the butterfly again; he remembers it the rest of his life.

Butterfly Stories
is told in more than two hundred very short sections, many of which deal with the economies of desire: “A middle-aged midget in a double-breasted suit came down the alley, walked under one girl’s dress, reached up to pull it over him like a roof, and began to suck. The girl stood looking at nothing. When the midget was finished, he slid her panties back up and spat onto the sidewalk. Then he reached into his wallet.”

In the middle of the novel, Vollmann appends to the conclusion of several sections the words “The End,” as if to suggest the ceaselessness of the butterfly boy’s capacity for self-inflicted punishment. After acting out “endless” scenarios of humiliation and loss, “the husband,”
who may have AIDS, returns in the final chapter to San Francisco, self-consciously trying—and failing—to play his spousal role: “Sometimes he’d see his wife in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she’d seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she shouted at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel.
He could not feel!
” Reading this extraordinarily intimate book about the butterfly boy’s incapacity for ordinary intimacy, I couldn’t identify more closely with him if I crawled inside his skin.

E
. M. C
IORAN:
“The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.”

I
LEAVE THE DOOR
slightly ajar, turning the switch on and off for twenty seconds until a shadow of gray fills the room. Wet skin on cold glass. I close the door, but
the hall light creases the bottom of the door. Shutting my eyes and turning off the light, I try to imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.

S
CHOPENHAUER:
“Suicide thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from the world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent.”

N
ABOKOV:
“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”

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