The Disappointment Artist (18 page)
I’d stumbled into each of these loves against my teenage tendencies in hero selection. Rather than arranging yet again to be disappointed by a figure of authority, these guys were like fraternal companions, stumbling through their own ups and downs. Dylan and Dick created bodies of work so contradictory and erratic that they never seemed to have promised me perfection, so they could never disappoint me the way a parent can let down a child who has idolized them. Here were artists who hung themselves emotionally out to dry, who risked rage and self-pity in their work, and were sometimes overwhelmed by those feelings and blew it. As figures of identification they were riskier for me but also, in the long run, more nourishing.
Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick (and, eventually, others who resembled them in this way) also led me back to my father. For he was of course the artist from whose imperfections, and revealed vulnerabilities, I’d originally flinched. For years I’d chosen against my father by idolizing artists who hid their face behind glossy, impassive surfaces. Yet those figures had proved brittle—inadequate against the untidy barrage of my feelings. They’d refused to meet me where I needed them most, at some emotional substratum down to which I’d excavated and found nobody home. Dylan and Dick, by their own unwillingness to hide their clumsiness and variability, or to protect me from an awareness of the fallible processes behind even their masterpieces, seduced me into sympathy for the artist whose process was, as I grew up, so naked to me. And, needless to say, I had to begin to forgive my father for being human before I could begin to work.
Mr. Natural (1978–86, mom dead)
In
Broadway Danny Rose
, Woody Allen plays a theatrical agent with a star performer, a singer, who, though married, is carrying on an affair. In order to protect his singer, Allen escorts the mistress around town, allowing them to be mistaken for a couple in order to provide his singer with deniability. When this leads to disaster, and threats of death (the girlfriend is a Mafioso’s ex-moll), Allen begs off: “I’m only the beard,” he says. “You don’t shoot the beard!”
Allen had reintroduced this vivid term, a recent antique. Soon it began cropping up in gossipy magazines, often to describe the heterosexual escort of a secretly gay movie star:
the beard
. A cloak on passions that those who required a beard might be unwilling to discuss or even consider, the beard was itself a figure of power and mystery. For we are revealed not only as our disguises slip or are abandoned but in the nature of the disguises we choose. Pretenses are always either insufficient, overcompensatory, or both. Masks melt into our faces and become impossible to remove precisely at the instant we’d realized they were transparent all along.
Growing up in an artist’s family, I seized on comic books and science fiction as a solution to the need to disappoint my father’s expectation that I become an artist like himself. These tastes encompassed my real passions: for art that embraced the vernacular vibrancy of pop music and film, and for fusions of imaginative material with the mundane. But they also served as a beard on my own ambition, a cloak on my reverence for the esteemed artifacts of my parents’ universe. The cartoonist I settled on lastly, R. Crumb, was of course as late-modernist and literary as they come, a Philip Roth or Robert Coover of comics. His Rabelaisian universe might be off-puttingly grotesque—a bonus, where I was concerned—but his voice, revealed over time, was relentlessly honest, if neurotic. And he obviously adored mundane landscapes and scuffling background characters, which he recorded in scrupulous detail at the margins of his insane inventions. In fact, the juxtaposition of the two provided the depth which separated Crumb from his competitors.
Well before the revealing choice of Crumb, though, I’d been distilling literary pleasure in various Marvel comic books, reading them as inchoate “graphic novels” before the invention of that term. My attention drifted from superheroes at the moment I suspected the majority of their creators were cynical, less interested in their characters’ morbid implications than I was. Meanwhile, my favorite writer, Philip K. Dick, draped a junk-culture veil over personal obsessions, then transformed the stuff of his disguise into a higher art than he could recognize. When I learned more about Dick’s life I saw I’d instinctively recapitulated his self-exiling, for Dick had wanted nothing more than to be a literary writer. Dick had hardly needed to beard his dangerous liaison with art, though. Literary critics (with their bias) and his publishers (with their garish jacket art) did it for him.
More generally, my obsessiveness about books, songs, and films was a beard on growing up, which I didn’t want to catch myself doing. I wanted it behind me while it was ahead of me. This exertion of will (if I’d seen more Godard films than any adult I knew, or read more books by Norman Mailer, then maybe I’d have proved something) was also an act of sensory deprivation, of self-abnegation. The two—will and deprivation—were weirdly compatible. I tried to obliterate my teenage years in movie theaters because my teenage years embarrassed and saddened me. Between double features of French films, between putting one book down and picking up the next, I’d glance at my wristwatch to see if I was in my twenties yet.
And the beards—Michael, Paul, and Ian—were of course a beard for my hazardous love of my parents, in the period when survival had seemed to require numbing myself to my father as a response to the death of my mother. Each was a friend, but also a cover behind which I could engage in fragile experiments in provisional adulthood. The irony may be that for the three of them, single men just in their twenties, mentoring a mother-bereft kid may have been one of the most adult acts of their newly adult lives. Yet to do it at all they had to do it by my terms, which meant pretending we were equals.
So I may have been a beard for the beards as well. By seeming to irresponsibly hang out with a teenager (some would say, seeming to corrupt a teenager), they could dabble in responsibility. I suspect this notion would have startled the beards, precisely because I’d preselected each of them so carefully: not the surrogate-father type. By exchanging good companionship we were able, on both sides, to ignore the central fact in our friendships. Under that cover we were able to simultaneously explore versions of ourselves that would have seemed conflictual had we brought them to light.
In My Room (1974–present, mom, etc.)
Every room I’ve lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing—in my own collection and others— in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I’ve also bricked myself in with music—vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison—room as brain—is one I’ve often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I’d externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.
The simpler, and perhaps deeper, truth lies in the comparison more obvious to others: that the empires of data storage make up a castle or armor or hermit-crab’s shell for my tender self. My exoskeleton of books has peaked in baroque outcroppings and disorderly excess at times of lonely crisis. After my mother died I acquired a friend’s vast paperback collection, and the overflow shelving in my room consisted of books balanced on planks unfixed to any wall or support, so that no one apart from me dared lift a book for fear of calamity. Between marriages I’ve reached such fevers of acquisition that I twice resorted to sleeping on mattresses laid not atop a box spring but a pallet of cartons, the only way to disguise the excess without resorting to storage. Moving books off-site would have felt like putting my arms and legs in hock.
These confessions have begun to bore me, and I only want to make a few more. The adult life I’ve made—getting paid, reader, to tell you these things—bears a suspicious resemblance to the rooms themselves. My prose is a magpie’s, even when not larded with cultural name-dropping, as have been my last two novels, as is this piece of no-longer-particularly-veiled memoir. Perhaps anyone’s writing is ultimately bricolage, a welter of borrowings. But of the writers I know, I’ve been the most eager to point out my influences, to spoil the illusion of originality by elucidating my fiction’s resemblance to my book collection. I want it both ways, of course. At fifteen I wished to be like Michael, who drew admirers into a bookstore he seemed to be exhibiting almost grudgingly, as a private museum of his interests. My rooms might have been armor, a disguise or beard, but I wanted millions of admirers to peek inside and see me there, and when they did I wished for them to revere and pity me at once. The contradiction in this wish tormented me, so I ignored it. Then I became a writer and it began to sustain me. I may still be trying to make it come true now, by working here to arouse your pity and reverence for the child I was.
The Collected Works of Judith Lethem (1978–present, blah blah blah)
My mother, because of her verbal flair, and her passion for books, was taken or mistaken by her friends as a writer-to-be. She sometimes spoke of writing, but I doubt she ever tried. Pregnant at twenty-one, and a mother of three by the time she, at thirty-two, began to die, she never had much chance. It is impossible to know whether she would have made anything of the chance if she had.
Her gift to me on my fourteenth birthday, the last while she was alive, was a manual typewriter. The summer after her death, when I was fifteen, I wrote a 125-page “novel” with the manual typewriter, mostly on torn-out, blue-lined notebook paper. In that same year I typed poems, of a fragmentary and impulsive sort. Truthfully, they more resembled song lyrics, since I wasn’t a reader of poems then. I recall one which spoke of my mother and the possibility of her writing. “You can’t write when you’re sick in bed,” was its much-repeated chorus; I don’t remember more. This poem was on one hand sympathetic. I knew, at least consciously, that my mother’s illness was involuntary. So I offered forgiveness: she couldn’t be blamed for not having written. Yet it was also an admonitory poem—really, admonitory to myself.
Since then, I’ve been in a hurry. Writing is another meditation that’s also a frantic compensation. As if wearing headphones, I’m putting some of myself to sleep, rushing to the end of my days: there’s a death wish in reducing life to watching one’s fingers twitch on the alphabet. I’m as pathetic as that kid watching double features alone, but also as vain. Writing’s an aggression on the world of books, one reader’s bullying attempt to make himself known to others like him. My heroes Greene, Dick, and Highsmith left many dozens of novels; I’m on pace to write at best ten or twelve of the things. Still, I’m building my shelf. Like the comedian Steven Wright, who said “I keep my seashell collection scattered on the beaches of the world,” my teenage room is still expanding, like the universe itself. If writing’s a beard on loss, then, like some character drawn by Dr. Seuss, I live in my own beard.
What’s one supposed to say when the mask comes off? Is there an etiquette I’m breaking with? John Lennon recorded a song, for his first album after the breakup of the Beatles (what a grand beard
that
was, art and companionship blended together, and the worshiping world at his feet!), called “My Mummy’s Dead.” I suppose this is my version of that song. I sing it now in order to quit singing it. Mine has been a paltry beard anyway, the peach-fuzzy kind a fifteen-year-old grows, so you still see the childish face beneath. Each of my novels, antic as they may sometimes be, is fueled by loss. I find myself speaking about my mother’s death everywhere I go in this world.
A critic once said that every serious poem’s true subject, whether obvious or not, is death. Yet to write more than one poem you’d better find a way to forget you heard that. If life itself is, after all, only a beard for death, couldn’t the reverse be true as well?
JONATHAN LETHEM
The Disappointment Artist
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including
The Fortress of Solitude
and
Motherless Brooklyn
, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two short story collections,
Men and
Cartoons
and
The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye
, and the editor of
The Vintage Book of Amnesia
. His essays have appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Rolling Stone
,
Granta
, and
Harper’s
. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
BOOKS BY JONATHAN LETHEM
Amnesia Moon
As She Climbed Across the Table
The Disappointment Artist
Girl in Landscape
Gun, with Occasional Music
The Fortress of Solitude
Men and Cartoons
Motherless Brooklyn
This Shape We’re In
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Lethem
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Versions of some of these essays have appeared elsewhere: “Defending
The Searchers
” in
Tin House
; “The Disappointment Artist” in
Harper’s
; “13, 1977, 21” in
The New Yorker
and in A Galaxy Not So Far Away; “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” in Harper’s; “Indentifying with Your Parents” in
The London Review of Books
and
Give My Regards to
the Atomsmashers!
; “You Don’t Know Dick” in
Bookforum
; “Lives of the Bohemians” in
Modern Painters
; and “Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes” in
Granta
and in the Criterion Collection Cassavetes box set.
My thanks to the individual editors and in particular to Sean Howe, as well to David Shields, Laura Miller, Phillip Lopate, Zoë Rosenfeld, Kat Silverstein, David Hyde, Edward Kastenmeier, Richard Parks, and Bill Thomas.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Lethem, Jonathan.
The disappointment artist and other essays / Jonathan Lethem.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3562.E8544D57 2005
814’.54—dc22
2004055133
eISBN: 978-0-307-42840-0
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