Swimming to Cambodia

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“The image that will stay with most of us is a picture of Mr. Gray talking and talking, anchored by a plain table, with a sheaf of notes at hand. It's conventional to think of Mr. Gray as relentlessly autobiographical. And yet the real autobiography in his monologues wasn't what he said so much as the way he connected what he was saying. Profound suffering was only an ellipsis away from comic anxiety.”

“Spalding is breaking new ground ... he has accomplished the most difficult task for a writer—to speak for himself with no frills and no pretense.”

Sam Shepard

“Gray fishes up much of the glory and chaos of our time ... Talking about himself—with candor, humor, imagination and the unfailingly bizarre image—he ends up talking about all of us.”

“His art is almost closer to that of a magician. Gray draws a graceful, sometimes invisible line from the primal to the avant-garde.”

“Gray is more than a consummate storyteller. He is a passionate tour guide, probing the tortured labyrinth of the American psyche ... an unholy cross between James Joyce and Hunter S. Thompson.”

“Spalding Gray's monologues inspire a reaction that is rare in theatre: affection. You're aware of the art involved, but most of the time it might be you and him somewhere, two friends from way, way back.”

“A new wave Mark Twain.”

“In the same way an Ann Beattie story, a Woody Allen movie or a Bob Dylan song might capture the essential quirks of a group or a generation, a Spalding Gray monologue exemplifies the current Zeitgeist.”

H
e said that you can't be present in the place you're in until you've left, and want to go back. He also said that his two favorite Dollies were Parton and Lama. Spalding the mystical. Spalding the hilarious. Spalding the self-exposed, the professionally puzzled, the scared, the brave. Spalding the supporting actor. That's what he was in the movies. But as a writer and a stage performer, he changed the idea of what a supporting actor is. He supported us. He played our part—we who wish to think that we're the stars of the show, but who, in our shaky, collapsible hearts know better, and yet who know, too, that we have a significance somewhere.

Spalding the storyteller. We constitute a narrative species, we humans. We like to tell one another that we're a rational species, but given human behavior in places such as Cambodia, that idea has become more of a bitter joke. A narrative species is something else, and closer to the mark. We learn by stories, live by stories, evolve by telling the story of ourselves in the half-vain, half-beautiful hope that one day we may get our story right.

In the process, we tacitly elect a few to be the chief tellers of our tales. Spalding was one of the elected. The specialty of his storytelling was the search for a sorrow that
could be alchemized into a myth. He went for the misery sufficiently deep to create a story that makes us laugh.

So doing, he invented a form, a very rare thing among artists. Some called it the “epic monologue” because first it was spoken and then it was written, like the old epics, and because it consisted of great and important themes drawn from the hero's life. But as an epic hero, Spalding told his stories standing on his head. Instead of exhibiting a single tragic flaw, he was all flaws. (Spalding would have said that he crawled around on all flaws.) And the one true heroic element in his makeup was the willingness to be open, rapidly open, about his confusions, his frailties.

At the same time, he understood that openness was his protection. The monologue kept him safe from others, just as did the table (his set) at which he sat. The monologue protected him from dialogue. And it also allowed him to be open, rapidly open, to images. The thing about good writing is that it never starts with an idea. It is the image, always the image, that comes first, arising in the murky fluid of the writer's mind like the answers in a Magic 8 Ball. Without explanation and bearing no map, it simply appears and it beckons. The writer follows.

On a day off from shooting
The Killing Fields
, Spalding finds himself chatting among correspondents, whom he calls Real People, as distinct from actors, and still he occupies his own sphere: “And then there was me, who was looking at this incredible bee that looked like the cartoon of a bee because it was so big and fluffy, and its stripes were so wide, and I was saying, ‘Wow! Look at these bees.' And everyone said, ‘It's just a bee, Spalding.'”

No one ever was better at the art of digression. Spalding digressed from life. He digressed from the narrative. He
made narratives out of his digressions from life. Holden Caulfield, a kindred threatened nomadic spirit, was in speech class where the students were coached to cry out: “Digression! Digression!” whenever a speaker wandered off the point—Salinger's own point being that only by wandering does one get anywhere. For Spalding, “Where was I?” was not a rhetorical device; it was both a profound and funny question. Throughout
Swimming to Cambodia
he thrives on getting lost in the lost country, and only when we are lost with him, do we get somewhere.

Missed opportunities, missed appointments, missed dates; they are the substance of his art, all confessed in that unbuttered-toast voice of his, which was the perfect instrument of the funny serious man. He said, “I'm interested in creative confession. I would have made a great Catholic.” Not to be parochial about it, but I think that he would have made a better Jew, free to be guilty as hell, yet without the safety net of ritual. Specifically, I think he would have made a great Oscar Levant, artistically in control of his chaos, for as long as he could be, and turning the noise in his head into music.

One time Spalding rattled himself by realizing that he actually had enjoyed a day. Then he followed that realization with this: “After all, think of all that could have gone wrong.” Once he says that, of course, he is off to Spalding Land, and we know that we are in for a monstrous inventory of all that could have gone wrong that day: corrosive diseases; attacks from outer space, financial ruin, the usual, until we are certain—as he intended us to be—that it was a disastrous day after all. And instead of feeling content, we are hurled into an imagined depression. No one ever could be so sublimely miserable.

That sort of drifty flight (or nose dive) was a key to Spalding. He could dream into what he knew. He could imagine what already had happened. The casual power of
Swimming to Cambodia
—the memory of murder and catastrophe, the loveliness of the country mixed in with the desperate desire to swim
away
from Cambodia, and the basic sweetness of the soul who guides us—all depend on his ability to dream into the past. By his looking back, it seems as if he could rescue the past, rescue us from the past, and himself as well, up to a point. Spalding survived like a champ. He kept his head above water, up to a point, which is why the cover of the earlier edition of this book, with his face half-submerged, breaks our hearts.

His last adventure (perhaps next to last) occurred on a ferry boat that travels between two islands. He had something unknown on his mind. There was that other ferry boat in Greek mythology that traveled between the realms of the living and the dead. There was that quotation he liked from Eliot's
Four Quartets
about one forever exploring, then arriving where one started and seeing it for the first time. Whatever he was thinking on that sad day, it is certain that he made the world wiser, funnier, and more alert to its most useful sorrow. By attempting to swim to Cambodia, he discovered the misery sufficiently deep to create a story that makes us laugh: Spalding the story.

I
n
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
the author relates, “I remember my father said to me something about memory. He said, ‘I thought I could recall my childhood when we first came to Buenos Aires, but now I know that I can't . . . . Every time I recall something I'm not recalling it really, I'm recalling the last time I recalled it, I'm recalling my last memory of it.' ”

Swimming to Cambodia
evolved over two years and almost two hundred performances. It was constructed by recalling the first image in my memory of each previous performance, so it evolved almost like a children's “Round Robin” game in which a phrase is whispered around and around a circle until the new phrase is stated aloud and compared with the original. The finished product is a result of a series of organic, creative mistakes—perception itself becoming the editor of the final report.

It is this subconscious way of working, rather than any conscious contrivance or manipulation, that captures my imagination. I am interested in what happens to the so-called facts after they have passed through performance and registered on my memory. Each performance becomes like another person whispering a
slightly altered phrase. My job is then to let my intuitive side make choices—and there is never a lack of material, because all human culture is art. It is all a conscious contrivance for the purpose of survival. All I have to do is look at what's around me.

So I like to think of myself as a kind of “poetic reporter,” more like an impressionist painter than a photographer. Most reporters get the facts out as quickly as possible—fresh news is the best news. I do just the opposite. I give the facts a chance to settle down until at last they blend, bubble and mix in the swamp of dream, memory and reflection.

It was almost six months after the filming of
The Killing Fields
that I began my first reports, and more than two years passed before I made my last adjustments. Over that time,
Swimming to Cambodia
evolved into a very personal work in which I made the experience my own. Life made a theme of itself and finally transformed itself into a work of fiction.

I titled this work
Swimming to Cambodia
when I realized that to try to imagine what went on in that country during the gruesome period from 1966 to the present would be a task equal to swimming there from New York. Still, in spite of how horrible it seems to allow entire nations to be wiped out, I opted for tolerance, and beneath tolerance, my bottom line, humor. If ever I thought that God could understand American, I would pray and the prayer would go, “Dear God, please, please let us keep our sense of humor.” I still understand and love America, precisely for its sense of humor.