I Think You're Totally Wrong (32 page)

CALEB:
Here's your letter, dated January 4, 1993, complete with a six-digit number so I can't call you back.

DAVID:
What an idiot!

CALEB:
In many ways, my asking you for help opened up our relationship.

DAVID:
Probably so.

CALEB:
If I hadn't asked for a blurb, and then hadn't called you a dork, who knows?

DAVID:
Yeah—who knows?

CALEB:
I'd rather be insulted and dismissed by a genius than flattered by an idiot. I'm by no means saying you're a genius, but you're very critical of my work.

DAVID:
Not particularly.

CALEB:
You've never been blown away by anything I've written. It's not as if my goal in life is to blow David Shields away, but any writer wants to impress the reader. I've sent you various things, unpublished, published, and you've never been knocked out. Even my collage of eighteen genocidal deaths, you said, “Ehh.”

CALEB:
A lot of today's artists lack experience. They're not in a prison, but they're sheltered. They're David Markson holed up in his New York City apartment, Tao Lin and Blake Butler at their computers, David Shields in academia. Do you know Chekhov's “The Bet”?

David shakes his head
.

CALEB:
Two men argue over what's harder to endure, life in prison or the death penalty. The banker believes life in prison to be a slow, cruel death, while the young lawyer thinks prison isn't so bad, and thus death would be worse. The banker challenges the lawyer, and they bet whether the lawyer can survive solitary confinement for fifteen years. There are conditions: the lawyer can have a piano, books, wine, and so forth. The lawyer lives fifteen years in solitary confinement, but by this time the banker is no longer wealthy and can't pay. The lawyer, though, has tasted the fragrance of life through literature. He writes a note saying he doesn't want the money, and disappears to roam the earth. The banker locks the note away.

DAVID:
Either you told it badly or once again Chekhov does precious little for me. I don't get it.

CALEB:
The point seems to be that life experienced through the prism of art trumps the experience of life.

DAVID:
Sign me up for that.

CALEB:
Who said you could journey around the world in the comfort of your library?

DAVID:
Let me intercede. I do think it's a continuum. Somehow we wind up portraying you as a man of vast experience and me as someone locked away in a nunnery, but—and this is really sad to have to say—but I've lived a full life. I've married, raised a child, traveled, taught, stuttered.

CALEB:
(laughing)
I agree. I think it's possible to live life at ground level and never leave a five-mile radius.

DAVID:
You do? Good, because that's pretty much what Kierkegaard—

CALEB:
Not really. No.

DAVID:
Don't you think, contrariwise, that you've erred, that you've indulged in life too much, that you've devoted yourself insufficiently to art? You've been too eager to accumulate experience for experience's sake.

CALEB:
I've procrastinated. I've failed. I've overestimated my abilities and underestimated the difficulties.

DAVID:
You probably thought, Hey, I'm going to have fun and then I'll be able to turn it on. It probably wasn't crucial to you, whereas it was everything to me to become a writer. I had to become a writer.

CALEB:
In high school I wanted to be a jock. In college I became a dedicated writer, temporarily. Afterward, I wanted to be a musician. Then it was travel and language. I figured all this would help my writing.

DAVID:
It has. You have a range of reference I couldn't pretend to match.

CALEB:
I regressed. My form got all messed up. After studying Korean and Chinese, you learn to think without articles, so I tried writing without articles: “He went inside room, saw woman cry, sat, picked up bottle, drank beer.” I wrote my rape novel like this; I thought I was being revolutionary to say everything in literally as few words as possible. Minimalist, different. I gave early chapters to a few friends, and they couldn't stand it. Still, experience hasn't been a waste, and I never stopped reading. If anything, I read more overseas. I'm drafting and setting stories in Taiwan, Brazil, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, the UAE.

DAVID:
Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog and the fox. You're the fox: you know many things. I'm the hedgehog: I know one thing.

CALEB:
When I lived in Al Ain, a small city in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, two Pakistani cabdrivers were publicly executed.

DAVID:
Did you see it?

CALEB:
I didn't know about it until after. Some of my high school students had. They told me about it.

DAVID:
Why'd they execute the cabdrivers—took the long way to the airport?

CALEB:
They murdered fares and dumped the corpses in the desert. Over 20,000 people attended. The two were tied to these posts and publicly humiliated for their last twenty-four hours. They were cordoned off. People would walk up to them, two feet away, and spit or curse or whatever. It was September and over a hundred degrees; they gave them just enough water to keep them alive, maximize suffering for twenty-four hours. Then they were shot.

DAVID:
Ford Madox Ford says if you have any imagination at all, the death of a mouse by cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths. Flannery O'Connor said any good writer has plenty of material for the rest of her life if she survived childhood.

CALEB:
You think too much about literature.

CALEB:
In your writing you seem very conscious of Jewish identity. I never considered myself Jewish. My parents only reminded me that it was in my blood.

DAVID:
I'd had no idea you were a quarter Jewish, but I can see you now as a Talmudic scholar.

CALEB:
My dad's cousin lives in Los Angeles: Jerry Benezra, a union lawyer.

DAVID:
He's probably best friends with my half brother, who lives in LA.

CALEB:
I grew up, basically, Christian. My parents aren't very religious, but they thought church was the right thing to do, so we went. They stopped when I was about twelve.

DAVID:
Does your dad view himself as Jewish?

CALEB:
No. And he went to Jewish school until he was nine.

DAVID:
Is he anti-Semitic?

CALEB:
Not at all. I'd even say he's hard-line pro-Israeli.

DAVID:
What about your mom?

CALEB:
Same. Pro-Israeli. Her dad was anti-Semitic, though. His name was James Edmond Wilson. Initials: J.E.W. He didn't like that, said racist things at home. She ended up marrying a man who was half-Jewish.

David laughs
.

CALEB:
He was a superior court judge: The Honorary James Wilson. He molested some of his daughters, my aunts. They went to my grandmother and wanted her to go to the police. Grandma Betty didn't.

DAVID:
How does anyone do that?

CALEB:
It's unimaginable. My grandmother protected my grandfather. My mother didn't go to the funeral of either of her parents.

DAVID:
Was she molested?

CALEB:
If she was, she would never say. It's murky; she claims he did something to them but not to her, though he didn't molest them all. We, meaning my sisters and I, have debated how screwed up my mother's family was. My mother was the oldest of six children—five girls. This we know: of the five girls, the third and fourth oldest were molested and made a fuss, warned the youngest, and protected her. Locked doors.

DAVID:
That is a weird fucking impulse. You have three daughters, I have one, and I could no more molest Natalie than—

CALEB:
I don't know any of my aunts, except one: she's the San Francisco poet, Aunt Grace, and she was one of the two who were molested; hers is a real-life version of distorted memory. Grace's stories change depending on the listener. She has talked to Terry, my sisters, me, and told the horror story: Grandpa was a pedophile. But even Grace doesn't want to tarnish the family name. It's not my pain to own.

DAVID:
My advice to J.E.W. would have been, “Just go to a prostitute and dress her up in pigtails if you need to.”