Reality Hunger (52 page)

Self-study of any seriousness aspires to myth. Thus do we endlessly inscribe and magnify ourselves.

A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.

What is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.

All our stories are the same.

Every man has within himself the entire human condition.

Deep down, you know you’re him.

ds

When I was seventeen, I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit-card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art—art underwritten by reality hunger—is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art.” Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like—can be—art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.

I was nineteen years old and a virgin, and at first I read Rebecca’s journal because I needed to know what to do next and what she liked to hear. Every little gesture, every minor movement I made she passionately described and wholeheartedly admired. When we were kissing or swimming or walking
down the street, I could hardly wait to rush back to her room to find out what phrase or what twist of my body had been lauded in her journal. I loved her impatient handwriting, her purple ink, the melodrama of the whole thing. It was such a surprising and addictive respite, seeing every aspect of my being celebrated by someone else rather than excoriated by myself. She wrote, “I’ve never truly loved anyone the way I love D. and it’s never been so total and complete, yet so unpossessing and pure, and sometimes I want to drink him in like golden water.”
You
try to concentrate on your Milton midterm after reading that about yourself.… Weeks passed; guilt grew. I told Rebecca that I’d read her journal. Why couldn’t I just live with the knowledge and let the shame dissipate over time? What was—what is—the matter with me? Do I just have a bigger self-destruct button, and like to push it harder and more incessantly, than everyone else? True, but also the language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves, and when I was no longer reading her words, I was no longer very adamantly in love with Rebecca. This is what is known as a tragic flaw.

Standard operating procedure for fiction writers is to disavow any but the most insignificant link between the life lived and the novel written; similarly, for nonfiction writers, the main impulse is to insist upon the unassailable verisimilitude of the book they’ve produced. I’ve written three books of fiction and twice as many books of nonfiction, and whenever I’m discussing the supposed reality of a work of nonfiction I’ve written, I inevitably (and rapidly) move the conversation over to a contemplation of the ways in which I’ve fudged facts, exaggerated my emotions, cast myself as a symbolic figure, and
invented freely. So, too, whenever anyone asks me about the origins of a work of fiction, I always forget to say,
I made it all up
and instead start talking about, for lack of a better term, real life. Why can’t I get my stories straight? Why do I so resist generic boundaries, and why am I so drawn to generic fissures? Why do I always seem to want to fold one form into another?

Both of my parents were journalists. For many years my mother was the West Coast correspondent for the
Nation
. My father wrote for dozens of left-wing publications and organizations and, until he turned ninety, was a sports reporter for a weekly newspaper in suburban San Francisco. When I was growing up, the
New York Times
was airmailed to our house every day. Mornings, I would frequently find on the kitchen counter an article neatly scissored out of the
Times
for me to read as a model of journalistic something or other. (I may have made this detail up, but it sounds right, it feels right, maybe it happened once; I’m going to leave it in.) I was the editor of my junior high school newspaper. I was the editor of my high school newspaper. Woodward and Bernstein were my heroes. My parents’ heroes, interestingly enough, weren’t journalists but what they called “real writers”: Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow. My father stammered slightly, and in the verbal hothouse that was our family (dinner-table conversations always felt like a newsroom at deadline), I took his halting speech and turned it into a full-blown stutter, which not only qualified any ambition I might have had to become a journalist—I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever be able to imitate my mother’s acquaintance Daniel Schorr and confidently ask a question at a presidential press conference—but also made me, in general, wary of any too direct discourse. In graduate school, when I studied deconstruction, it all seemed very self-evident.
Language as self-canceling reverb that is always communicating only itself? I knew this from the inside out since I was six years old. In a stutterer’s mouth and mind, everything is up for grabs. Stuttering reminds me that lyricism turned counterclockwise is a bad block; my father reminds me that Walt Whitman once said, “The true poem is the daily paper.” Not, though, the daily paper as it’s published: both straight-ahead journalism and airtight art are, to me, insufficient; I want instead something teetering excitedly in between.