[sic]: A Memoir (20 page)

So I can’t use “literally.” But I guess I can use the whole idea of the
literary
in some self-saving sense—if only in the sense that I saw manifold but ordered reflections of myself, each endowed with a different hue of self-awareness: and, most important, that this self-awareness, just as Pound “might have realized,” is in the form of a flow of words not yet invented—the flow of words that has just been invented here, now. The many reflections were, in fact, many selves: one that lost itself in the tight and soft sublimity of Nothereal’s body; one that saw the line back to the child in my parents’ book on Klee; one that was bidding good-bye to the body and the mind the morning of its almost death; and there were also selves infused with other selves: one that saw Caroline watching herself crack a whip in front of a client and thinking this is absurd; one that saw Sophie deftly performing the tightrope walker’s walk of playing the role of a woman in New York whose mind was actually at ease; one that saw Nothereal, easily the most opaque example here, aware of her condition on one level and, on another, its helpless victim, like a nation of people can be rendered a victim, rendering her a victimizer, like a nation of people can be rendered a victimizer.

So the intelligently underemphatic ending, the certainly not disappointing truth: that moment in my apartment with the glass at my throat was not as hysterically climactic as I might like to believe now or, indeed, perhaps wanted to believe then. But I did breathe some kind of sigh of relief, as if something like a chapter had ended (and indeed I think it had) (notwithstanding a few aftershocks). I put the glass down, and I called my mom. I remember, while dialing her number, thinking about those books called
Fifty Things To Do before You Die,
or whatever
,
and how bullshit they were because there’s only one thing to do before you die, and that’s not die. I’d turned down my mom’s offer to fly in from Milwaukee to accompany me at my appointment for the scan results. I told her I’d changed my mind; would she be willing to fly in? Sure, she said. Great, I said. Thanks a lot. Then I called the suicide hotline and gave a brief description of the events of the evening, and a very nice gentleman calmed me down. I collapsed on my bed and fell into a deep sleep for about four hours. I awoke when my mom knocked at the door. I let her in. She was totally cool about the carnage; I said I’d been upset by comments made by a woman I’d been involved with, and that I was worried about the results of the scan—all entirely normal. I made some coffee, we cleaned up the place, went over to the hospital. Scan looks fine, the doc said. I made an appointment with a shrink, and my mom and I had lunch at Da Silvano and then caught
The French Connection
at the Film Forum. We sat in the first row. I gauged the audience’s reaction, as I tend to do now, watching the film and watching the watching. As good as the film is, the car chase has been rendered less effective due to its familiarity; but Hackman’s performance still startles.

•

ARE WE TALKING
about suicide? No. I never wanted to kill the self; I wanted to kill the disease. Suicide, I think, is something else. Pound got away, for instance, but Hemingway didn’t. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Given everything. And now everything lately. David Foster Wallace, September 12, 2008. Our greatest writer. As if I wasn’t thinking of him during that whole thing. My God. As if he hadn’t helped. Not just the writing but the human being. And I know but then Rachel Wetzsteon. As if I wasn’t thinking of her thinking about Auden. I mean that’s the whole thing and I never even got a chance to ask her. Not my fault but still. Christmas 2009. And this whole thing’s about Auden, in that sense—it’s not about Pound. It’s about Auden and Rachel. And Alexander McQueen—February 2010. What the hell? And for that matter if we’re speaking of the fashion world—unfairly criticized from the outside by the feminists who may well paradoxically long for the reappropriation of the aesthetic, of which the object of their scorn is the sole and lonely survivor, Pound and his pre-Raphaelites long since gone—the model Daul Kim? Her unforgettable face—the Korean and the Tartan and the Hun? It’s one thing to give it up and move to Jersey or Los Angeles or (okay, if you’re extremely lucky) to Milwaukee. But suicide? And another model, Ruslana Korshunova, at the age of twenty flinging herself off a high-rise three blocks from where I’m sitting, right now, writing? (Too big a word, “writing.” Frapping.) Remember it wasn’t so long ago that a woman of Ruslana’s beauty gave birth, in a bloody foaming, to Western literature, of which we are presently a part. Helepolis, destroyer of cities! Heliandros, destroyer of men! Remember that not so long ago that a woman of Ruslana’s beauty sat back and watched the world destroy itself over her. (Or maybe she didn’t sit back but, as Pound’s ex-girlfriend H.D. felt, she felt terrible, and took herself out of the picture and moved to Egypt to wait the whole thing out. If so, she’s still there.) For Pound, the essential tragedy was that “poor old Homer” was blinded by Helen’s beauty, and thereby “transmitted it for all ages even though he never saw it with his own eyes but only ‘echoes it’ in the terrified chatter of old men.” In other words, the tragedy wasn’t a question of Eve’s teeth sinking into the flesh of the apple: the tragedy was that Adam, blinded by her beauty, never saw it with his own eyes, and terrified, has chattered madly about her ever since.
²³
But press “ahead” a few times on the remote and somehow Ruslana, far from blinding our first and only author with her beauty, far from destroying the world, herself is destroyed, at the age of twenty, by the world; she somehow manages to let herself drop off the sheer side of a high-rise, unseen. That’s not water down there, that’s concrete. And Mr. McQueen, and Ms. Wetzsteon, and Mr. Wallace. I did
not
enjoy not having been born, and perhaps it wasn’t entirely some screenwriter’s
deus ex machina
, some sort of divine intervention, and my goodness I do love being alive, sitting here with this first edition of the
Cantos
my father gave me—and maybe, you may well argue, the house is too thick and the paintings a shade too oiled (and the old voice lifts itself, weaving an endless sentence), and you may well be right—but my goodness, fuck you, I happen to be so happy to be here with all these gifts and words and all these selves. And here this text was intended as a riposte to the literature of disease, so many of those books I read at the beginning of the whole thing and none of them any help, pure dreck, pale pastel book after book on the shelves in the chains that probably sell scented candles not just to increase revenue but to mask the smell of paper: pale pastel book after book, each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there’s more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe. If there are some who require disease to teach them such things then fine, but I am not, was not, one of those, thank you very much. I loved life and found beauty and sources of pleasure in things on the outside and on the inside, and illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace, it was a harrowing, a
descensus
: and then went down. The principle emotions were terror and above all rage. But never a death wish. And then I suppose I have to grudgingly admit that there may be something about coming out on the other side—like the morning I woke up and impulsively grabbed a bottle of Evian and drank, and it was the first time in months that I could swallow. Or not too long after that, when I could swallow food. It didn’t matter that I threw it up immediately, just the fact that I could swallow food. And then, not too long after that, walking outside, alone, in the air, two blocks through the bright mist to my café, where I walked indoors, ordered a coffee, and, trembling, took it outside and sat down at the cheap little table with my notebook, like a normal person, and an old man, walking slowly by, warmly remarked, “Now that’s the life.” (He was right.) Those two blocks that morning were a voyage to Cythera, an epic journey to an island, myrtle green, and back. And the rediscovery of taste: salt came back first (my favorite), then the rest. So yes there is a rebirth and I’m not saying the whole thing was worth it but of course, to be alive again, to at least not be probably dying in this present moment for two years, to have reacquired the resources of the senses and just the pleasures provided by perception, all of this regained: of course there is some sort of renewal. Orson Welles famously said that RKO gave him “the greatest train set a boy could ever play with,” and this has been misinterpreted. He wasn’t talking about the resources of a Hollywood studio: he was talking about the resources of life. Maybe he didn’t know it, but still.

So I don’t think my story is about suicide. I don’t know how close I was that night. I don’t think it was very close. I really don’t think I
wouldn’t
have realized—
realized
, not remembered, because I obviously knew the fact but for some reason I hadn’t ever really felt it until then—the thing about the multiplicity of selves and thus the thing about the suffering self is merely one of these selves. So my story is not these other stories—Mr. McQueen, and Ms. Wetzsteon, and Mr. Wallace, and Ms. Kim, and Ms. Korshunova—these five people, muses and musers, who basically occupied themselves with showing us beauty (I don’t mean to be reductive; for Mr. Wallace, art existed to “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed”; and echoing this, Mr. McQueen, whose design vocabulary extended to “showers of live moths; amputees; walking on water; a woman reclining in a vast glass box, almost swallowed up by her rolls of fat and naked apart from her elaborate breathing apparatus; the model Shalom Harlow being spray-painted by a machine in Jackson Pollock style,” once remarked, simply, “I try to protect people”
²⁴
), these five people who disappeared within the span of 517 days. That’s about one every hundred days. Aren’t these precisely the people who should not disappear? Should this concern us? When I learned of Mr. Wallace’s death my first thought was very like that voiced by the literary critic Michael Silverblatt on his radio program
Bookworm
a few days later: “Has something further happened in the world that makes it harder for a sensitive and intelligent person to want to stay alive? . . . The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself. Depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”
²⁵
What happens when you can’t find the train set? In other words, we probably should not stop ourselves from wondering whether, as we continue to move ahead, we should move with a little caution, and make sure that we keep enough room for two mirrors: for one is evidently not enough.

Ruslana Korshunova.

VIII

GUTENBERG'S FOLLY

I am not sentimental.

—
Vanessa Duriès
, Le Lien

This is much later, now, of course. I’m in New Hampshire, beautiful lake country. It was an impulse decision to come up here from the Cape. I can think clearly up here; the city can be intellectually claustrophobic, what with the low-ceilinged apartments, the earsplitting noise and lack of sky. It’s early morning: I’m sitting on a lake, paging through a book I still haven’t read, my father’s copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

So what happened?

I actually like lakes more than oceans, anyway, having grown up on a lake myself; the blue is more pungent, and they’re smooth, smooth enough to allow a small pool of petrol to spread unperturbed, amply, into a black and gold plate, shimmering like an insect’s wing, radiating, really approaching insubstantiality, like the Euclidean plane that bisects space. I remember taking a motorboat out on a lake in upstate Wisconsin with my father when I was young. The smell of petrol on a predawn lake, while environmentally harmful, is nevertheless one of the most beautiful odors in the world.

The scan was clear, and my mom and I went to see
The French Connection
at the Film Forum; we sat in the front row. Here’s what happened: our hero, an NYPD cop named “Popeye” Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, has clumsily stumbled onto one of the largest smuggling schemes in history. He’s set up a trap for the villain, the French smuggling mastermind Alain Charnier (beautifully played by one of Buñuel’s favorite actors, Fernando Rey). Charnier and the other buyers and sellers meet in a warehouse, and the deal is sealed, smoothly. They don’t realize they’re surrounded by Popeye and a contingent of narcotics officers until it’s too late. A tightly drawn cat-and-mouse game ensues in the warehouse, played out in silence, not unlike the end of
The Third Man
. I wonder if William Friedkin, the director, had this in mind. (My father’s two favorite movies were
The French Connection
and
The Third Man
. He liked thrillers. He didn’t quite come around to the notion of film as “high art,” or whatever, until quite late; and then, only sporadically.) Popeye sees Charnier and fires—but it’s not Charnier. It’s the FBI agent who’d also been working on the case, and whom Popeye despised. Popeye’s partner, “Cloudy” Russo (the superb Roy Scheider), is aghast: but Popeye is unperturbed. He walks off, as if in a trance: he disappears from (our) view; he’s in a different moral universe now. There’s the sound of a single gunshot. The film ends. We don’t know who fired the shot, nor who received it. It’s one of those intelligently underemphatic endings, not some hysterical climax. It’s realistic. Of course then again it should be—it’s based on a true story. And title cards, in silence, before the end credits begin, let us know what happened after that.

The villain, Charnier, was never caught. He somehow escaped to France.

Carmilla never did chemo, nor radiation, much to the distress of her oncologists; her tumor disappeared; she moved to Minneapolis for a while, then came back to the city, where she is now, still partying, still healthy, still radiant.

Charnier’s shady lawyer, Weinstock, was arrested, tried, and released without spending even a day in prison.

Caroline successfully completed rehab and moved back home to start a new life—a life in which stripping and dancing and whipping and all sorts of other activities are performed at her behest, not at the wills of others.

Charnier’s mobster partner, Sal Boca, was arrested, tried, and released with the lightest of penalties.

Sophie’s alive and well and living in New Jersey.

The NYPD transferred both Popeye and Cloudy out of narcotics.

Nothereal fled in despair to Greece. Funny how in times of crisis we Europeans still try to get back to Greece. She sent me a very sad letter. She was hoping against hope that one day I would forgive her, but she knew I could never forgive her. She was from Serbia: I had squeezed her hand on a hill of domes, overlooking a winter cityscape, in a dream: my hospital room, like my apartment with its carpeting of shards of wood and glass, was a kind of laboratory, with much apparatus: like Klee in his analysis of various perversities, she brought the medical and the experimental to the fore. On February 24, 2009, the
New York Times
ingratiatingly reported “the Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the ‘old Ivory Tower view of liberal education’ and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.” There is science: for example, the complex medical science of pain management, which is employed by a doctor to help a patient; but what if the doctor is also unknowingly a patient, without a doctor? Then the vehicle might veer off the highway, and orange cones will have to be brought out; then harm can occur, not necessarily intended or unintended but maybe as the result of an experiment or accident. Experiments and accidents showed us that mustard gas could both kill tumors and flay the skin off soldiers’ backs like when, in Ancient Greece, Apollo peeled Marsyas’s skin off his body and nailed it to a tree; experiments and accidents showed us that uranium, that most silvery of elements, could be used to both ionize atoms of the DNA of a harmful cell, leaving healthy cells behind and vaporize entire human bodies, leaving behind shadows of carbon on concrete.

Chicago-born William Friedkin’s movie
The French Connection
won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Picture, and he went on to direct
The Exorcist
, which is a story about God and vomiting.

In a way, I went on to write a story about God and vomiting.

•

I MISS MY
father; he died, as I mentioned, in 2001, and that sad event was swiftly followed by terrifying suicide attacks—one morning a pair of hijacked commercial airplanes split two skyscrapers that stood six blocks away from my apartment nearly in half, and later that day they collapsed into dust. (I remember those buildings so well, from my first trip to New York; I remember them with tactile memory: I’d placed my hands against one of them and looked straight up against the absolutely sheer, fourteen-hundred-foot-tall façade that really approached a Euclidean plane in air.) And this catastrophe was succeeded by the emotional collapse of my mom, a frightening diagnosis, medical treatment that failed, a considerably dimmer outlook on survival, a second (and highly debilitating) treatment that carried its own mortality rate, medical bills approaching a million dollars, the death of a friend, a nervous breakdown, the death of another friend.

Master of Osservanza,
Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing from Africa,
c. 1430.

I group these unfortunate events together into an eight- or nine-year chapter. Saint Augustine (whom Pound, shamefully, called the “drunken African”
²⁶
) writes of “nearly nine years” that “passed in which I wallowed in the slime of that deep pit and the darkness of falsehood.” I’m reading my father’s copy that he bought in 1941, and at this phrase, in the margin, he’d written, “mine is 8 so far.” I don’t know when he wrote that.

I’m sitting at the side of this lake, paging through this book. On page 345, we have Saint Augustine looking forward to “that pre-eminent rest, when our soul shall have passed through the waters which have no substance.” Next to this my father scrawled

! ?

Elsewhere, Saint Augustine is talking about his son. “There is a book of ours,” he writes, “which is entitled
The Master
. It is a dialogue between him and me.” My father had scrawled an alarmingly tall exclamation point next to this passage, and written in way of explanation, “This is shocking!
My
book is a dialogue between my son & me! Augustine did it too!” I wonder what book this is. It’s somewhere, within the tens of thousands of typewritten pages and handwritten manuscripts that, after his death, were, oddly enough, still there. So my brother and I gathered them together, in Wisconsin, near a lake; divided them in two, and split them up between New York and Los Angeles, at two oceans.

This is a great book, the
Confessions
. I never did read enough, can’t even go into that, I wasted my time learning about music, although it might not have been as indulgent a waste as I’d feared. But listen to this: Chapter XII of Book Twelfth of the
Confessions
is entitled:

Of the intellectual heaven and formless earth, out of which on another day the firmament was formed.
²⁷

Next to this, my father writes, “magical.” I wonder what he thought was magical here.

I suspect it was the phrase “on another day.” In fact, I’d bet on it.

True story: Saint Augustine and his mother, Monica, had intended to sail from Rome to Africa, but she died before they could make the trip. Days before she died, they were standing at a window that looked down upon a courtyard. The courtyard enclosed a garden. They both experienced a sudden glimpse of eternity, which suddenly vanished.

Saint Augustine was born in Algeria. I googled “Saint Augustine” and two websites caught my attention. In one, a Muslim writes, “St. Augustine was before Islam and here utters words that speak well to us as Muslims.”
²⁸
In the other, an American writes, “More disgusting behavior from Islamic thugs.”
²⁹
But enough about poor Saint Augustine—we’re running out of time, and pages, and I want to talk about my father a bit before we finish up. He was a gifted writer but he never published. Kafka admitted somewhere that anything he wrote was “perfect,” by which he meant, he explained, that there was “style” already imbued in whatever came out of his pen. My father once said a similar thing about his own writing. I can’t recall exactly how he put it, but it was startling to hear, because he was a modest man. “You certainly don’t have to pursue the arts,” he said once, “but you certainly can.” Maybe that’s why I wrote music instead of words—writing music isn’t really writing, it’s designing. And another startling admission he made was when he said that, while Kafka was his favorite writer, he couldn’t stand the fiction, it was only the journals that mattered to him. Which really, now that I mention it, helps us round out the curve here—the motif of journals and memoirs.

When I was in high school and fell in love with a girl for the first time, and fell out of love with science and fell in love with literature and all that artsy stuff I had hated before, my father had something between a nervous breakdown and a midlife crisis. That might have been a coincidence, but as I discovered literature, he rediscovered literature through his son, and that’s why I’d like to have a child someday. (I say that now! And
all my friends warn me—rethink. It’s a lot of work. But still. Plus they’re so cute. That’s what you think. But they are. And in the end we agree.) I took a trip to New York with this high school girl—in those days, and from Milwaukee, New York was a big deal, a big city, you were on an airplane and you were flying into this huge city, and the plane dipped and you could see the Empire State Building like a little model, casting a shadow from the orange setting sun: and back then New York actually was a big city, because you could go to the Gotham Book Mart on Forty-Sixth Street: you could walk in, it was really there. I mean you could literally get on an airplane in Milwaukee and fly through the air and wait and then see Manhattan below you, and you could try to see, as you were landing, and as the plane tipped, if you could identify Forty-Sixth Street; and you could grab your girlfriend’s hand and you could be in love and be flying into Manhattan.
*
Readers my age and slightly older than me will know what I’m talking about, and readers younger (sadly, legion) might not, but let me put it this way: the Gotham Book Mart was where wise men fished, if there wasn’t a freshwater lake around, predawn, smooth. And it was there that I bought my father a copy of the facsimile of Eliot’s original draft, with Pound’s annotations, of
The Waste Land
—I love facsimiles, as you by now know—and even though it had been published in 1971, he didn’t have it. So we flew back to Milwaukee and I gave it to him, thinking he already had it—I couldn’t believe he didn’t have it, but he didn’t have it. So this gave rise to a bunch of interesting conversations that I’m pretty much still having with him.