How to Be Alone (30 page)

Although Benedict believes that she can liberate the reader from the “demons” of self-censorship, she’s vague on exactly how this occurs. At one point, she implies that liberation is simply a matter of gumption: “Question: Who are your censors and how do you silence them? Answer: Just do it.” But a book that intends to give us “permission to indulge” new possibilities requires an exemplary performer, and, as with Betty Dodson, whose
Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving
mainly retails the professional triumphs of Betty Dodson, the work that most interests Benedict is her own. She includes four substantial excerpts from her fiction, and she praises them with charming artlessness. (“These are emotionally complex scenes . . .”) At the same time, she takes care to remind us that
her
skills didn’t come from any manual. In her own work, she says, she didn’t “consciously try to create conflict or to inject surprises”—although, sure enough, she now realizes “how important those elements are.

The fraud of
The Joy of Writing Sex
is meaner than the fraud of sex manuals, since every man can be a king in bed and every woman a queen but not everyone can be a successful novelist. Nietzsche said, “Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books; the smell of small people clings to them.” The truth, of course, may be that I’m no larger than the next man. But who wants to know a truth like this? Just as every lover at some level believes that he or she makes love as it’s made nowhere else on the planet, so every artist clings for dear life to the illusion that the art he or she produces is vital, necessary, and unique.

Aesthetic elitism, sexual snobbery: these are not the reprehensible attitudes that our culture makes them out to be. They’re the efforts of the individual to secure a small space of privacy within the prevailing din. All people should be elitists—and keep it to themselves.

THE ONE WELCOME SERVICE
that Benedict performs in
Joy
is her surgical removal of sex scenes from their context. The more sincerely explicit a novel’s dirty bits, I think, the more they beg to be removed. When I was a teenager, novels were Trojan horses by means of which titillation could sometimes be smuggled into my sheltered life. Over the years, though, I’ve come to dread the approach of sex scenes in serious fiction. Call it the orgasmic collapse: the more absorbing the story, the more I dread it. Often the sentences begin to lengthen Joyceanly. My own anxiety rises sympathetically with the author’s, and soon enough the fragile bubble of the imaginative world is pricked by the hard exigencies of naming body parts and movements—the sameness of it all. When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger’s biochemistry. A few geniuses—Philip Roth may be one of them—have the skill or bravado to get away with explicit sex, but in most novels, even otherwise excellent ones, the corporeal nomenclature is hopelessly contaminated through its previous use by writers whose aim is simply to turn the reader on.

Jacques Derrida once demonstrated, in his sublimely contortionist essay “White Mythology,” that language is such a self-contained system that even a word as basic as “sun” cannot be proved, by anyone using language, to refer to an objective, extralinguistic Sun. A candle is
like
a small sun, but the sun is
like
a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identifications of naming. So what is “sex”? Everything is like it, and it’s like everything—like food, like drugs, like reading and writing, like deal-making, like war, like sport, like education, like the economy, like socializing. In the end, however, every orgasm is more or less the same. This may be why writing
about
sex is at once effective and boring. Language of the nominal, hot-slippery-cunt-ramrod-straight-dick variety both aims for and achieves its own closure. The orgasm is a kind of consumer purchase, and, one way or another, the language that attends it always remains a kind of ad copy.

Language
as
sex, on the other hand, is fraught with the perils of an open-ended eros. When I’m in bed with a novel, I hope its author will be faithful to me. Right now I’m reading Nick Hornby’s
High Fidelity
, an enjoyable sendup of male anxiety in which the narrator’s girlfriend leaves him for his upstairs neighbor, a man he now remembers was “something of a demon” in bed:

“He goes on long enough,” I said one night, when we were both lying awake, staring at the ceiling. “I should be so lucky,” said Laura. This was a joke. We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I’m not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.

When a full-blown sex scene finally looms on the narrative horizon, a hundred pages into a novel that’s almost entirely about sex, my distaste at the prospect of orgasmic collapse is mitigated by a rare circumstance: I’m actually finding both the female love object (an American folk-rock singer) and the setting (a barren flat in a barren London neighborhood) quite sexy. Though I’m not looking forward to the hardened nipples and spurted semen that seem likely to follow, I’m prepared to forgive them, maybe even enjoy them. But when, after one last eight-page delay for awkward negotiations and precoital anxiety, Hornby gets his lovers into bed, the narrator abruptly declares: “I’m not going into all that other stuff, the who-did-what-to-whom stuff.” Facing a choice between fidelity to “what happens” and fidelity to his reader, Hornby doesn’t let the reader down. In one simple, curtain-dropping sentence he proves to me that he himself, at some point in his reading, has experienced the same uncomfortable suspense that I have just experienced, and for a moment, though I’m alone in bed with a book, I don’t feel alone. For a moment, I belong to a group neither as big as a statistically significant sample nor as small as the naked self. It’s a group of two, the faithful writer and the trusting reader. We’re different but the same.

[1997]

On a chilly morning in late September, by the side of a truck-damaged road that leads past brownfields to unwholesome-looking wholesalers, a TV producer and his cameraman are telling me how to drive across the Mississippi River toward St. Louis and what, approximately, I should be feeling as I do so.

“You’re coming back for a visit,” they say. “You’re checking out the skyline and the Arch.”

The cameraman, Chris, is a barrel-chested, red-faced local with a local accent. The producer, Gregg, is a tall, good-looking cosmopolitan with fashion-model locks. Through the window of my rental car, Gregg gives me a walkie-talkie with which to communicate with him and the crew, who will be following me in a minivan.

“You’ll want to drive slow,” Chris says, “in the second lane from the right.”

“How slow?”

“Like thirty-five.”

In the distance I can see commuter traffic, still heavy, on the elevated roadways that feed the Poplar Street Bridge. There’s a hint of illegality in our plotting by the side of a road here, in East St. Louis wastelands suitable for dumping bodies, but we’re doing nothing more dubious morally than making television. Any commuters we might inconvenience won’t know this, of course, but I suspect that if they did know it—if they heard the word “Oprah”—most of them would mind the inconvenience less.

After I’ve tested the walkie-talkie, we drive back to a feeder ramp. I’ve spent the night in St. Louis and have come over the bridge for no other reason than to stage this shot. I’m a Midwesterner who’s been living in the East for twenty-four years. I’m a grumpy Manhattanite who, with what feels like a Midwestern eagerness to cooperate, has agreed to pretend to arrive in the Midwestern city of his childhood and reexamine his roots.

The inbound traffic is heavier than the outbound was. A tailgater flashes his high beams as I brake to allow the camera van to pull even with me on the left. Its side panel door is open, and Chris is hanging out with a camera on his shoulder. In the far right lane, a semi is coming up to pass me.

“We need you to roll down your window,” Gregg says on the walkie-talkie.

I roll down the window, and my hair begins to fly.

“Slow down, slow down,” Chris barks across the blurred pavement.

I ease up on the gas, watching the road empty in front of me. I am slow and the world is fast. The semi has pulled up squarely to my right, obscuring the Gateway Arch and the skyline that I’m supposed to be pretending to check out.

Chris, leaning from the van with his camera, shouts angrily, or desperately, above the automotive roar. “Slow down! Slow down!”

I have a morbid aversion to blocking traffic—inherited, perhaps, from my father, for whom an evening at the theater was a torment if somebody short was sitting behind him—but I obey the shouted order, and the semi on my right roars on ahead of me, unblocking our view of the Arch just as we leave the bridge and sail west.

Over the walkie-talkie, as we reconnoiter for a second take, Gregg explains that Chris was shouting not at me but at his assistant, who is driving the van. Every time I slowed down, they had to slow down further. I feel sheepish about this, but I’m happy that nobody got killed.

For the second take, I stay in the far right lane and poke along at half the legal speed limit, trying to appear—what? writerly? curious? nostalgic?—while the trucker behind me looses blast after blast on his air horn.

In front of St. Louis’s historic Old Courthouse, where the Dred Scott case was tried, Chris and his helper and I wait in suspense while Gregg reviews the new footage on a hand-held Sony monitor. Gregg’s beautiful hair keeps falling in his face and has to be shaken back. East of the Courthouse, the Arch soars above a planted grove of ash trees. I once wrote a novel that was centered on this monitory stainless icon of my childhood, I once invested the Arch and the counties that surround it with mystery and soul, but this morning I have no subjectivity. I feel nothing except a dullish anxiousness to please. I’m a dumb but necessary object, a passive supplier of image, and I get the feeling that I’m failing even at this.

My third book,
The Corrections
—a family novel about three East Coast urban sophisticates who alternately long for and reject the heartland suburbs where their aged parents live—will soon be announced as Oprah Winfrey’s latest selection for her televised Book Club. A week ago, one of Winfrey’s producers, a straight shooter named Alice, called me in New York to introduce me to some responsibilities of being an Oprah author. “This is a difficult book for us,” Alice said. “I don’t think we’re going to know how to approach it until we start hearing from our readers.” But in order to produce a short visual biography of me and an impressionistic summary of
The Corrections
the producers would need “B-roll” filler footage to intercut with “A-roll” footage of me speaking. Since my book-tour schedule showed a free day in St. Louis the following Monday (I was planning to visit some old friends of my parents), might it be possible to shoot some B-roll in my former neighborhood?

“Certainly,” I said. “And what about filming me here in New York?”

“We may want to do that, too,” Alice said.

I volunteered that between my apartment and my studio in Harlem, which I share with a sculptor friend of mine, there was quite a lot of visual interest in New York!

“We’ll see what they want to do,” Alice said. “But if you can give us a full day in St. Louis?”

“That would be fine,” I said, “although St. Louis doesn’t really have anything to do with my life now.”

“We may want to take another day later and do some shooting in New York,” Alice said, “if there’s time after your tour.” One of the reasons I’m a writer is that I have uneasy relations with authority. The only time I’ve ever worn a uniform was during my sophomore year in high school, when I played the baritone for the Marching Statesmen of Webster Groves High School. I was fifteen and growing fast; between September and November I got too big for my uniform. After the last home game of the Statesmen’s football season, I walked off the field and passed through crowds of girl seniors and juniors in tight jeans and long scarves. Dying of uncoolness, I tugged down my tuxedo pants to try to cover my ridiculous spats. I undid the brass buttons of my orange-and-black tunic and let it hang open rebelliously. I looked, if anything, even less cool this way, and I was spotted almost immediately by the band director, Mr. Carson. He strode over and spun me around and shouted in my face. “Franzen, you’re a Marching Statesman! You either wear this uniform with pride or you don’t wear it at all. Do you understand me?”

When I accepted Winfrey’s endorsement of my book, I took to heart Mr. Carson’s admonition. I understood that television is propelled by images, the simpler and more vivid the better. If the producers wanted me to be Midwestern, I would try to be Midwestern.

On Friday afternoon, Gregg called to ask if I knew the owners of my family’s old house and whether they would let a camera crew film me inside it. I said I didn’t know the owners. Gregg offered to look them up and get their permission. I said I didn’t want to go in my old house. Well, Gregg said, if I could at least walk around outside it, he would be happy to get permission from the owners. I said I wanted nothing to do with my old house. I could tell, though, that my resistance displeased him, and so I offered some alternatives that I hoped he might find tempting: he could shoot in my old church, he could shoot in the high school, he could even shoot on my old street, provided he didn’t show my family’s house. Gregg, with a sigh, took down the names of the church and the high school.

After I hung up, I became aware that I’d been scratching my arms and legs and torso. I seemed, in fact, to be developing a full-blown bodywide rash.

By now, on Monday morning, as I stand in the shadow of an Arch that means nothing to me, the rash has coalesced into a flaming, shingles-like band of pain and itching around the lower right side of my torso. This is an entirely unprecedented category of affliction for me. The itching has abated during the excitement of filming on the bridge, but while we wait for Gregg to sign off on the footage I want to claw myself savagely.