Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (12 page)

[Beeper on his watch keeps going off.]

Let’s talk some more about this: this is
’
88—the really big difference is it was happening to you and not to somebody else
.

Sure.

This two years is
’90
to ’go: when was the suicide watch period?

When did I go in there?

This is at McLean’s?

How do you know that name?

I know people from Boston—not from there, who know you, but who—

No, there’s lot of places in Boston. But McLean is … Actually, I did end up going to McLean, ’cause that’s what the Harvard insurance was on the plan for.

Liz Wurtzel went
.

God, she and I probably were on the same fucking shuttle bus from this.

Never put on antidepressants?

Um, I was early on, I was for about two months in college. It was for something else—oh no, I had terrible
insomnia
. And I didn’t want to take Dalmane because I was drinking so much. So I told this long story, and they put me on something, they put me on a tricyclic. Which, I don’t know how antidepressants are supposed to work, but this had the opposite effect for me. It made me feel like I was stoned and in hell. So, no, that was never an option.

They talked about shock a little bit. [Like the Kate Gompert character in
Infinite Jest
] And I decided—in a weird way, there’s a whole chapter with sort of Kate Gompert lying there and the doctor talking, except it’s very kind of different.

She wants it, the shock
.

She wanted it. And I could see, I could see that if this got much worse, that I would be, it’s sort of like somebody …

[The tape side runs out.]

Should we just rush the Eagle desk?

We can wait ten minutes, because there’ll be a line there.

I could drive us to Chicago
.

Yeah, lemme chew this for two more minutes, and then let me call Holly, and I’m gonna do what Holly tells me to do. This is the great thing, I’m not the boss. She decides, and she’ll tell me what to do.

I’m not concerned about—I mean, I don’t mind havin’ somebody know I was on suicide watch in McLean. I’m concerned, I don’t want to make this into a romantic, lurid, tormented-artist thing. What I’m telling you is, this had way more to do with—I mean this wasn’t a chemical imbalance, and this wasn’t because of drugs and alcohol.

This was more just, I think I had lived an incredibly American life. That, “Boy, if I could just achieve X and Y and Z, everything would be OK.” And I think had really—I think I got very very lucky. I got to have a midlife crisis at like twenty-seven. Which at the time didn’t seem lucky; now it seems to me fairly lucky. And I know that you don’t quite believe some of my stuff about like why I’m not gonna take money for this book. But now maybe now you can understand. That period, nothing before or since has ever been that bad for me. And I am willing to make
enormous
sacrifices never to go back there.

And if giving up the chance at a lot of money for this book—it’s
an acceptable, that’s an acceptable price, and it’s not because I’m a great person. It’s because I think I got really lucky, feeling like I got given certain other reasons to work and to live during this time, and I
do not
want to fuck with it. I don’t. So I live—so I’m real
careful
now. And it’s also why I think I cultivate normality.

[Hard to feel steady with someone saying this: Normality can’t be cultivated, in the same way, as David points out in the books, that you can’t try to be sincere. You either are sincere or not: It needs to be affectless.]

Um, the thing about shock is, I never had shock, and they never gave me shock. But I
realized
, I realized, I sort of got an idea of the continuum I was on. You know? And at one side was the way I usually was. And I could see—there’s a fair amount of stuff in the book about depression, that is not, it’s not
exactly
autobiographical, but it’s lookin’ I think about a quarter mile farther down on the road. I mean, I could see the filter dropping over my vision, you know, I could see the distortions.

And I think at a certain point these folks—have I ever met? Yeah, I met somebody there who’d been given shock, which scares the
shit
—you know, I’m like you, my brain’s what I’ve got. The idea of the brain being hurt—but I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it, the same way, like in
Alien
, they say, “Kill me, kill me.” You know? Because it would be—right? There’s a thing in the book—I like this thing in the book: when people jump out of a burning skyscraper, it’s not that they’re not afraid of falling anymore, it’s that the alternative is so awful. And then you’re invited to consider what could be so awful, that leaping to your death, you know, seems like an escape from it.

And I admit I have got a grim fascination with that stuff. I’m not Elizabeth Wurtzel. I’m not biochemically depressed. But I feel like I got to dip my toe in that wading pool and, um, not going back there is more important to me than
anything
. It’s like worse than anything—I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with this. It’s worse than
any kind of physical injury, or any kind of—it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and
you
were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function. And it was
just
, it was just horrible. And trying to be at Harvard, and to read about “freedom of the will” with John Rawls while thinking this way was just extremely unpleasant.

Anyway, that’s that story. And I don’t mind—it’s not a privacy issue. I’d be concerned: I don’t want to come off like I’m romanticizing it or something. [Somehow this is the saddest.]

Not at all how it sounds. It clarifies to me why you don’t want to fuck with your rhythm
.

[Typical shift: Slurp-spits an ice cube into his glass; he’s chewing tobacco.]

Just between you and me, so I feel like I’m talking. Is that, do you have any experience with anything like this?

I think part of it, I just had never
lived
, everybody I knew was in that world. I had no idea, I had no idea that 90 percent of what I was getting out of books I really loved was this sense of a conversation around loneliness.

[We’re standing at the entrance to Bloomington airport, smoking next to electric doors, talking about school and writing.]

I thought it was all, I really thought I was a head. That I was nothing but a head. And I think this period in my late twenties, when my head hurt so bad, that I had to find some other part of my body, you know, to like live in. And that I even started to suspect—and it’s not like I had any kind of experience. Or I’ve come to any conclusions. It’s more like I just threw a lot of stuff out.

And the great irony about this—maybe you can understand this. I, I, I’m not being disingenuous, the stuff about the fuss about the book [the soft glaze he keeps using for it: “the fuss about the book”], and people thinking the book is great, is
nice
. But the thing I really like is that it’s not more important to me. You know? Like, like I really loved workin’ on this book. I worked as hard, harder on it, than
anything
. You know? And I decided this is a little experiment. I was gonna do it for the sake of the book. Fuck it. If I couldn’t even sell it, fuck it. You know? That I really sort of—you know at the end of
Thief
, when James Caan tears up the picture of his life?

Michael Mann. I didn’t see it
.

Really? That’s not a bad movie. Well, the end is kind of stupid.

It means to me like, this is sort of what happened to me. You know, it was probably very much the same for you. You know, you’re in Brown, who’s gonna make it, who’s not? And then you get, like, you start being able to make a living. So you get all that affirmation from the exterior, that when you’re a young person you think will make everything
all right
. And I realize that sounds reductive and pop psych or whatever. But to realize—like you say, when it happens to
you
, when you yourself realize, “Holy shit, this
doesn’t
make everything all right.” Um, for me, it fucked with my sort of “metaphysics of living” in an incredibly deep way.

And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out
early
it doesn’t mean anything. Which means you get to start
early
the work of figuring out what
does
mean something. And the biggest thing that I like about what’s going on, to be totally honest—and see, you’re
being very good, ’cause now I’m starting to like you, and so I’m saying this stuff, and it may sound crazy. I really like that this doesn’t, that this isn’t that big a deal to me. That it like—it’s
nice
.

But what I really remember is the times when working on that book was really hard. And I just gutted it out, you know? And I finished something. And I did it for the book, not trying to imagine whether David Lipsky would like it, or Michael Pietsch would like it. And that I feel like I’ve built some muscles inside me that I can now use for the rest of my life. And I feel like, “All right, like I’m a writer now.” Whether I’m a successful writer or not, I don’t know. But like, like this is who I am, this is what I do. And I know now how to live in such a way that I’m doing it for the work itself. Which I’m aware can kinda come off sounding very pretentious. And it’s also, it’s what everybody says: “Ah, that other stuff doesn’t matter.”

What I’m trying to say to you is, I went through a period so bad, that that stuff
had
to stop mattering to me, or I think I would’ve blown my brains out. I came reasonably close. Or I could have at least tried in such a way that I would have damaged myself trying horribly.

[Break]

[We’re finishing two more cigarettes in the automatic airport door now. Flexing our fingers, smoking—it’s cold in the outdoor breeze.]

I suspect—I’m not saying I’ve been successful at it. But I think that
if avant-garde stuff can do its job, it is tremendously difficult and not that accessible, and seduces the reader into making extraordinary efforts that he wouldn’t normally make. And that that’s the kind of magic that really great art can do.

But the best thing is to show what TV can’t, to use the ways books are better than TV
.

Except of course the hard thing is to do both at the same time. Because a book has to teach a reader how to read it. So the structure stuff starts right at the beginning.

We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it’s done is given us the really precious gift of making our job harder. You know what I mean? And it seems to me like the harder it is to make a reader feel like it’s worthwhile to read your stuff, the better a chance you’ve got of making real art. Because it’s only real art that does that.

But as it gets more complex, reader will feel they’ve wandered into a classroom where they missed the first few weeks of the course
.

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart. And that there’s stuff that TV and movies—although they’re great at certain things—cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art. And I think you can see it in the visual arts, I think you can see it in music …

Easier though, I’d think. Makes them realize it’s more fun faster
.

Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

[Later: hoped to shift attention from himself. Note in front of his ISU office: “D. F. Wallace is out of town on weird personal authorized emergencyish leave from 2/17/96 to 3/3/96 and from 3/5/96 to 3/10/96.”]

The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening, and that’s our gift. That’s a very personal deal, and here are seventeen ways to do it.

[Later]

There’s a thing in Lester Bangs’s
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
, about certain music giving you an erection of the heart. And that term really resonates for me. “The Balloon” gave me an erection of the heart. [“The Balloon,” a Donald Barthelme short story.]

For me a fair amount of aesthetic experience is—is erotic. And I think a certain amount of it has to do with this weird kind of intimacy with the person who made it.

No other medium gives that to you?

Yeah—although you feel a kind of weird intimacy with actors in drama, although it’s a bit different.
That’s
more I think an enabling of the fantasy that you are them, or getting you to desire them as a body or something. It’s interesting: I’ve never read really good essays about the different kinds of seduction in different kinds of art.