How literature saved my life

131 Pages·2013·1.01 MB·English

by  Shields

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by David Shields
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This page constitutes an extension of this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shields, David, 1956–
How literature saved my life / by David Shields. —1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi book.”
eISBN: 978-0-30796153-2
1. Shields, David, 1956—–Books and reading.
2. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
3. Criticism. I. Title.
PS3569.H4834Z469 2013
813′.54—dc23
[B] 2012036686
Internal photo series by Tom Collicott and David Shields Front-of-jacket photograph by Geoff
Spear
Jacket design by Chip Kidd
v3.1_r1
For L.
I am deeply grateful for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
In which I discuss another book as a way to throw into bold relief what
this book is about.
1. NEGOTIATING AGAINST MYSELF
In which I evoke my character and personality, especially the way I
always argue against myself, am ridiculously ambivalent—who knew?
2. LOVE IS A LONG, CLOSE SCRUTINY
In which I characterize love as a religion w/fallible gods.
3. WHY IS THE HUMAN ANIMAL SO SAD?
Exploration of melancholy, in myself and the general populace.
4. OUR GROUND TIME HERE WILL BE BRIEF
Partial answer to question asked in previous chapter: we’re the only
animal that knows it will die.
5. THE WOUND AND THE BOW
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.
6. ALL GREAT BOOKS WIND UP WITH THE WRITER GETTING HIS TEETH BASHED IN
The only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have
at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared
predicament.
7. LIFE V. ART
Do I still love literature?
8. HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE
How it didn’t.
Permissions Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
In which I discuss another book as a way to throw into bold relief what this
book is about.
is a form of autobiography.
LL CRITICISM
A
I’ve never met the poet Ben Lerner, though we trade email now
and then, since we’re interested in each other’s work. In my case,
“interested” is a bit of an understatement. I’m obsessed with him as my
doppelgänger of the next generation. Both of us went to Brown, have
lived in Spain, are Jewish. I wasn’t born in Topeka, as he was, but
growing up in a northern California suburb felt as far removed from Oz
as Kansas. Both of us are writers and “critics.” Both of us have/had
accomplished mothers and dreamier fathers. Above all, both of us are in
agony over the “incommensurability of language and experience” and
our detachment from our own emotions.
Ben’s most recent book, Leaving the Atocha Station, is nominally a
novel but thick with roman à clef references to his childhood in Topeka,
his undergraduate and graduate years in Providence, his Fulbright year
in Madrid, his essay on the Library of America edition of John Ashbery’s
poetry (which includes the poem “Leaving the Atocha Station”), his poet
friends Cyrus Console and Geoffrey G. O’Brien, his psychologist parents
(his mother is the feminist writer Harriet Lerner). I’m going to go ahead
and treat the novel’s narrator, Adam, as if he were Ben. Ben won’t mind!
His book—as what serious book is not?—is born of genuine despair.
Adam/Ben wonders if his poems are “so many suicide notes.” If the
actual were ever to replace art, he’d swallow a bottle of white pills. If he
can’t believe in poetry, he’ll close up shop. You and me both, pal.
Leaving the Atocha Station “chronicles the endemic disease of our time:
the difficulty of feeling,” a perfect phrase a reviewer once used to
describe an imperfect book of mine. Ben never lies about how hard it is
to leave the station—to get past oneself to anything at all. He incessantly
wonders what it would be like to look at himself from another’s
perspective, imagining “I was a passenger who could see me looking up
at myself looking down.” He wants to take everything personally until
his personality dissolves and he can say yes to everything. Ben has never
come anywhere near such an apotheosis. Neither have I. When I was a
little kid, I was a very good baseball player, but I mostly preferred to go
over to the park across from our house, sit atop the hill, and watch Little
Leaguers, kids my age or younger, play for hours. “What’s the matter
with you?” my father would ask me. “You should be out there playing.
You shouldn’t be watching.” I don’t know what’s the matter with me—
why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life
feels like a rumor—but playing has somehow always struck me as a
fantastically unfulfilling activity.
What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology,
medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen
for the reader’s projections? I’ve lifted these two sentences from the flap
copy (surely written by Lerner). The nature of language itself is a major
part of Adam’s problem: he’s unable to settle on the right word in
English, unable to understand Spanish, revels in mistranslation as a
bottomlessly rich metaphor for all miscommunication. An unfortunate
fact about stuttering—the subject of my autobiographical novel, Dead
Languages, published when I was the same age Ben is now—is that it
prevents me from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing
such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and
deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the
best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, I’ve come
to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s
happy property, not mine except by way of disingenuous circumlocution.
About the 2004 Madrid bombings—three of the bombs exploded in
the Atocha Station—Ben says, “When history came alive, I was sleeping
in the Ritz.” He wonders if he’ll be the only American in history who
visits Granada without seeing the Alhambra. While Spain is voting, he’s
checking email. Easy enough to judge him. Harder to acknowledge the
near universality of such lassitude. In the fall of 1974 I left the Bay Area
to go to college in Providence, Rhode Island, which I imagined as, quite
literally, Providence—a heavenly city populated by seraphic souls. I
imagined Rhode Island as a literal island, the exotic edge of the eastern
coast. And I saw Brown as an enclosed, paradisiacal space in which
strong boys played rugby on fields of snow, then read Ruskin by gaslight
in marble libraries too old to close, and girls with thick dark hair, good
bodies, and great minds talked about Goethe (which I thought was
pronounced “Go-eth”) at breakfast. The first month of my first semester,
black students occupied the administration building and demanded
increases in black student enrollment and financial aid. These seemed to