Reality Hunger (17 page)

The writing class met every Wednesday afternoon for the past few years: twenty women, a retired dentist, and my father, in his mid-nineties (he died last year at ninety-eight). Although he was plagued by manic depression for sixty years and received electroshock therapy countless times, in almost every piece he presented himself as a balanced okaynik, Mr. Bonhomie. He always threw a stone at every dog that bit, but in one story he sagely advises his friend, “You can’t throw a stone at every dog that bites.” His children from his first marriage, from whom he was estranged, didn’t attend his ninetieth birthday party, but now they did, bearing gifts. After forty, he was bald, but now his hair was only “nearly gone.” My mother, who died at fifty-one, died at sixty. His voice in these stories was that of a successful tough guy: “She was dressed to the nines in flame-red shorts and a low-cut halter that showed her heart was in the right place.” My dad, Sam Spade. His Waterloo was failing ever to see or call his childhood sweetheart, Pearl, after he had lost his virginity with a woman he met at a Catskills resort (the woman who became his first wife). In real life, at age sixty-eight, when he was visiting his sister, Fay, in Queens, Fay bumped into Pearl at the Queens Center Mall, got Pearl’s number, and suggested that my dad call her. Again, he couldn’t bring himself to call—which is a great, sad story. But in the story he wrote, he calls her, they get together, and
“Eleanor” tells “Herb”: “Please don’t be so hard on yourself. It happened. It’s all water under the bridge now. You did what you thought was right for you then. I understand. Maybe I didn’t then. But it’s all over now. That year, Joe and I got married, so I guess it’s all worked out for the best, right?” This was, according to my father, the “toughest thing I’ve ever written—painful. It hurt deep down just to write it, more than fifty-three years after it happened.” I wanted it to hurt more. My father and mother divorced shortly before her death thirty years ago, and they had, by common consent, an extremely bad relationship. But it was now a “solid-as-Gibraltar marriage.” My father, asking for time off from his boss, tells him, in a story, “I’m faced with a palace revolution, and the three revolutionaries at home are getting ready to depose the king.” The king he wasn’t. I wanted him to write about forever having to polish the queen’s crown according to her ever-changing and exacting specifications. I wanted to ask him,
What did that feel like? What was it like inside his skin? What was it like inside that bald, ill dome?
No aerial views or easy glibness.
Please, Dad
, I wanted to say:
Only ground level, which at least holds the promise of grit
.

Daniel Johnston, a manic-depressive singer and songwriter whose early songs were recorded on a sixty-dollar stereo, has a cult following (recipient of praise from Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder), due primarily to the unglamorous, raw, low-quality production of his music, which chronicles his mental illness.

All the best stories are true.

If Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin hadn’t been based closely on verbatim transcripts of Palin’s performances, it wouldn’t have been remotely as funny, and it wouldn’t have affected the election; the comedy derived precisely from its scrupulous reframing of the real.

That person over there? He’s doing one thing, thinking something else. Life is never false, and acting can be. Any person who comes in here as a customer is not phony, whereas if a guy comes in posing as a customer, there might be something phony about it, and the reason it’s phony is that he’s really thinking,
How am I doing? Do they like me?

He is to be accepted and forgiven because his faults are the sad, lovable, honorable faults of reality itself.

A didactic white arrow is superimposed on the left- and right-hand panels, pointing almost sardonically at the dying man. (These arrows, Francis Bacon’s favorite distancing device, are sometimes explained as merely formal ways of preventing the viewer from reading the image too literally. In reality, they do just the opposite and insist that one treat the image as hyper-exemplary, as though it came from a medical textbook.) The grief in the painting is intensified by the coolness of its layout and the detachment of its gaze. It was Bacon’s insight that it is precisely such seeming detachment—the rhetoric of the documentary, the film strip, and the medical textbook—that has provided the elegiac language of the last forty years.

Life isn’t about saying the right thing; life is about failing. It’s about letting the tape play. Bio/autobio:
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
. Jean Stein,
Edie. The Education of Henry Adams
. Julian Barnes,
Flaubert’s Parrot
. Geoffrey Wolff,
The Duke of Deception
(compare G. Wolff’s multivalent, self-contradictory contemplation of his childhood with T. Wolff’s naïvely straightforward account of somewhat the same childhood: in
This Boy’s Life
, dialogue is recalled verbatim from thirty years earlier—ironic, since the book is about a pathological liar).

After his family and psychiatrist sued for defamation, claiming that much of his depiction of them in his memoir
Running with Scissors
was invented or exaggerated, Augusten Burroughs agreed not to refer to the book as a memoir in his author’s note. It would simply be a “book,” identified as neither fiction nor nonfiction. Burroughs’s older brother, John Elder Robison, wrote a memoir,
Look Me in the Eye
, in which their father is portrayed as a very different kind of person.