The Best American Essays 2014 (36 page)

His own painting is wan. It is easy to say that the grays and rusts are part of the shabby, hopeless era, the lines of identical-seeming men looking for work or waiting patiently for a bowl of soup, but it is his soul that is gray and rusty. He labors at each painting but destroys most of what he does. He has guiding notions in his head—the masters are alive for him—but the gap between his head and the canvas seems unbridgeable. It would be easy for him not to trust himself. That happens sometimes. He bulls ahead, hoping that the hard work which he adores and to which he is inured will save him. It doesn't. What is left are painterly ashes.

Other painters who see his work don't feel that way. They realize something exquisite is present. They realize that there is more sensitivity than anyone might know what to do with. The painters talk with him, but however invigorating the talk is, it remains talk. The essential thing is to figure out how to be modern in ways that are convincing and individual and profound. The painters and he don't say that exactly, but they feel it and they know it is in part silly. No one anymore could be Michelangelo. There is no pedestal of spirit to stand on. At best they can be grandly assertive in the way Picasso is grandly assertive. That is not all Picasso is, but that is part of it—the willingness to engage everything through the medium of painting. When they see his
Guernica
they weep inside. The power and the broken glory of it are irrefutable. That is what they tell one another art should be—irrefutable. Yet the world they live in practices its refutations daily. All he has to do is open the window of his studio and listen to the automobile horns. He doesn't despise the horns, but their tidings are empty ones.

He whistles while he works. He is full of good cheer despite what the paintings look like. He is like a harlequin, always wearing two or more colors. His inner weather is the mist and cold that come off the North Sea. His inner weather is joy in the physical facts of existence. He would not change anything and has, accordingly, little interest in the leftism of his friends. Progress seems foolish to him. The issue is to appreciate what has happened already and what is here now. Looking ahead is a bromide, what the purposeful will tells the anarchic soul. His whistling is habit, but it is feeling too. He likes Stravinsky and jazz and folk tunes. He owns an impressive record player good for the parties he and his wife give occasionally. Everyone dances at these parties. Full of fun, he dances too.

It is not just painting he faces. It is the task of the painting, how it seeks to maintain its history, how it must be fresh yet not at all, as they say in America, born yesterday. History's shadow is a welcome one to him, though that makes him, to use the strange word of Americans, un-American. As an immigrant he is nervous about that. Other artists make pronouncements, but he is inclined to speak in riddles, axioms, and parables. Part of that is uncertainty; part of that is humility; part of that is covert ambition, and part of that is how he sees the world. Each day he is busy with his brushes defining the indefinable. No wonder he paints over endlessly, changes what is before him endlessly, and then discards most of what he creates. He wants the painting to come alive and be still at the same time. He wants to make his own miracles. Is that too much to ask?

He sits in restaurants and eats good meals and indifferent ones. He goes to cafeterias late at night and over a cup of strong coffee talks more. Sometimes he goes into a bar where other painters go and has a drink or two. People brag, people gossip, people complain. What he prefers above all is to walk the narrow downtown streets alone. If someone he knows recognizes him, they exchange greetings, but he doesn't linger to talk. He is possessed by a quiet torment. It can't be any other way. He is the one who fell out of the cradle long ago. There is no crawling back in, no telling himself that he is someone else. He is doomed to return to the painting at hand.

He loathes his own melodrama. Walking the streets in the quiet, after midnight hours, he whistles in the dark.

 

He succeeds. Like a slot machine, the three matching images come up at the same time: critical acclaim, museums and patrons who want to buy his paintings, and the work itself. He becomes someone whose name is known to people who are strangers to him. He has worked hard all his life to hold on to himself. At times this has made him seem selfish and cold. Now he has lost his hold. Strangers come up to him and start talking. Women lie down for him. Acquaintances act as though they are ancient friends. Friends look warily at him. He has been identified, yet the whole gist of his painting is not to be identified with any one particular, to keep moving, searching, pursuing and resisting identity. Identity means that you are more
was
than
is.
To combat that, you must prove yourself continually. It is wearying. You are supposed to be perpetually excited about who you are. But you aren't that person.

That person is someone like the artist he calls Andy Asshole. Andy is unexcited about himself, which translates into ironic excitement, the excitement of anti-excitement. Andy adores identity. Andy's work mocks any notions of inwardness. Everyone is a product. Externals are externals. There is nothing below or beneath or within. By accepting and glorifying the beast of commerce, Andy has tamed it. He has given the world a canny, heaping portion of nothingness. The efforts of a painter trying to get some strokes and forms to come to magical life might as well be going on millennia ago. The modernist Willem de Kooning might as well be a cave painter.

One thing replaces another in America, even if the thing is a person.

He drinks for days on end. He wanders the streets of lower Manhattan and hangs out with derelicts. He looks like a derelict himself. He starts fights. He collapses on sidewalks. He knows he is playing out a grisly notion of the romantic artist. He knows the truth of his squalor, however, in ways few people know. How could they? They believe that achievements make a person secure and important. They don't understand that there are no achievements. There is only the restlessness of the work, of trying to get the impossible right. They aren't haunted. The purpose of the country he has made his homeland is to allow people to live lives that are not haunted. The oblivion of alcohol recommends itself all the more.

What saves him is the sea. It is, after all, the same vast sea that took him to America, the sea that awed, frightened, and consoled him. Now he can gaze at it to his heart's content. It wants nothing from him. The consolations of nature are part of what lie at the center of painting—the dynamic between resisting and accepting those consolations. Painting is so human, so fraught with indecision, so laden with time. The sea offers its eternal terms. The sea teaches humility. If he must be someone who answers to recognition, he must be able to bow his head before all that dwarfs recognition.

He bicycles. He goes for walks. He makes paintings. He has rid himself of the excitement machine. If people want to see him as serene or wise or masterful, that is their business. He would like to say that he likes the world less, but he is an honest man who would never say that. He still feels a definite enchantment in the morning's light, in the colors on his palette and outside his window. He still feels the power in moving his brush. He still marvels at his hands and the tactile wonder of paint. There did not have to be paint, he likes to say to his assistants. Considering that he is a famous person, he seems to those assistants almost childlike.

“He's the painter,” he overhears someone say one day in the local post office.

“Imagine that,” another person says.

T
IMOTHY
A
UBRY
is an English professor at Baruch College, CUNY. He is the author of
Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans
(2011). His essays have appeared in
n+
1
,
the
Point, Paper Monument
, and the
Millions.

 

W
ENDY
B
RENNER
is the author of two short story collections,
Phone Calls from the Dead
and
Large Animals in Everyday Life
, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is currently completing a book of essays,
Misfits.
Her work has appeared in
Travel + Leisure, Allure, Seventeen, Mississippi Review, New England Review
, and
Ploughshares
, among other magazines, and has been anthologized in
Best American Magazine Writing
and
New Stories from the South.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is a contributing editor for
Oxford American.
She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

 

J
OHN
H. C
ULVER
continues to ride a three-legged horse while moving from academic to creative nonfiction and fiction writing. He taught political science at Missouri State University, Fort Lewis College, and then for twenty-eight years at Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo, California. His publications include four coauthored texts on California politics, American politics, and state judicial politics along with many chapters and articles in scholarly books and journals. After California voters elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor in 2002, Culver retired to Durango, Colorado, on the assumption that the state would be better off without one of them. He enjoys outdoor pursuits and spending time doing volunteer work in activities that have a progressive focus. He subscribes to the philosophy that life as a retiree is positive if you don't take everything seriously, can get up after a fall without help, read, and keep trying to figure out what it all means.

 

K
RISTIN
D
OMBEK
is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her essays can be found in
n+
1,
The Paris Review
, and
Painted Bride Quarterly
. The recipient of a 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, she writes an advice column called “The Help Desk” for the
n+
1 website, and her book on narcissism is forthcoming. She is at work on a book inspired by her essay “How to Quit.”

 

D
AVE
E
GGERS
is the author of seven books, most recently
A Hologram for the King
. He is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publisher based in San Francisco, and cofounder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth.

 

E
MILY
F
OX
G
ORDON
is the author of two memoirs,
Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy
and
Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered.
She has also published a novel,
It Will Come to Me
, and, most recently, a collection of personal essays,
Book of Days.
She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and is a 2014–2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

 

M
ARY
G
ORDON'S
works of fiction and nonfiction include
Final Payments, The Shadow Man, The Other Side, The Company of Women, Pearl, Seeing Through Places, Circling My Mother, Reading Jesus, The Stories of Mary Gordon
, and
The Love of My Youth.
She is McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.

 

V
IVIAN
G
ORNICK'S
most recent books are a biography of Emma Goldman and a collection of essays,
The Men in My Life.
Her newest memoir,
The Odd Woman and the City
, will be published next spring.

 

L
AWRENCE
J
ACKSON
has published essays and criticism in
n+
1
,
the
Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Review of Books, Baltimore Magazine, New England Quarterly, Baltimore Sunpapers, Antioch Review
, and
Harper's Magazine.
He has written biographies of Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison and an award-winning history of black postwar writers,
The Indignant Generation.
He teaches in the African American studies and English departments at Emory University.

 

L
ESLIE
J
AMISON
is the author of the novel
The Gin Closet
, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award, and an essay collection,
The Empathy Exams.
Her work has appeared in
Harper's Magazine, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review,
the
Believer
, and the
New York Times
, where she is a regular columnist for the
Sunday Book Review.

 

A
RIEL
L
EVY
is a staff writer at
The New Yorker.
She is writing a book based on the essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which won a National Magazine Award. Prior to joining
The New Yorker
she was a contributing editor at
New York
magazine for twelve years.

 

Y
IYUN
L
I
grew up in China and came to the United States in 1996. Her debut collection,
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her novel
The Vagrants
was shortlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award. Her second collection,
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
, was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a Story Prize finalist.
Kinder Than Solitude
, her latest novel, was published to critical acclaim. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Yiyun Li has received numerous other awards, including the Whiting Award, a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship, a 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and the 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was selected by
Granta
as one of the twenty-one best American novelists under thirty-five and was named by
The New Yorker
as one of the top twenty writers under forty.