What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (2 page)

Lynne Tillman’s essays, and indeed the interviews she has given and conducted, are thus an essential part of her work. Her response to books is daring, sharp; she allows for mystery, beauty, strangeness, but she also allows for complexity, coolness, distance.
She does not accept that there is a mystical relationship between the world and the book. In contemplating Warhol in “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol,” for example, Tillman writes: “Books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing.” Writing, for her, is like writing, if it is like anything, and it probably isn’t like anything; words, for her, come from words, they have their own shape and sound. When, in the same essay, she arrives at the phrase “in real time,” she knows to ask “whatever that is.” Naming for her is re-naming. There are words and concepts that do not connect for her. “Existence,” for example, is “a shaggy-dog story.” “Redemption,” she writes, “from my point of view, is an American disease.” And she adds, in her essay on Paula Fox’s
Borrowed Finery:
“Contemporary novels have become a repository for salvation; characters—and consequentially readers—are supposed to be saved at the end.”

Tillman is, as she quotes the photographer William Eggleston saying of his own work, “at war with the obvious.” Some allies matter to her in this war, and they include Jane and Paul Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, Paula Fox, Chet Baker, Etel Adnan, Harry Mathews, John Waters, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton.

While writing for her does not reflect life, whatever life is, this does not mean that, for her, fiction does not somehow come from the world and is not a strange and angled response in language to what is beyond its pages. She insists, for example, on the importance of the public realm and the place of literature within the public realm, indeed the connection between literary form itself and the shape of politics. “These days,” she writes in “Body Parts for Sale”:

the west gloats over the demise of communism, the premise being that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The demise of totalitarianism from the left or right is something to be happy about, but I’m left wondering what capitalism offers, apart from a certain economic system, to the spirit that haunts our Gothic stories, and to a sense of how society should be run, to a sense of what common goals can be. Dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest are appropriate metaphors for not just the capitalist ethic but also for the production of Gothic perambulations. In our country without adequate health care and housing, a country first decimated by Reagan’s criminal grotesqueries and Bush’s new world order, what more credible form is there
?

Tillman allows her intelligence to range over many questions. In “Downtown’s Room in Hotel History” her analysis in one paragraph of the power and lure of downtown Manhattan for a generation of artists is definitive:

Downtown’s shows and parties, held inside a small perimeter, allowed for quick comings and goings. You never had to stay; you could usually walk home. This cosmopolitan life, rootless, maybe, sometimes unheimlich, uncanny, ordained that home wasn’t necessarily homey. The city grew fields of the unfamiliar and unexpected, which trumped the humdrum. The city’s virtues and Modernist values—such as strangers and strangeness—were the small town’s vices and fears
.

Tillman has no time for the unexamined sentence, and, since the process of examination gives her prose an energy, the more she thinks the more she can make sparks fly. This, for example, is a paragraph about John Waters, from her essay “Guide for the Misbegotten”:

Though irony is mother’s milk to him, Waters’s quest for genuine communication inside bullshit-free zones propels him toward worlds with and without irony. Sincerely insincere, insincerely sincere, authentically inauthentic, inauthentically authentic, his work vexes the normative and all the usual binaries. Oppositional terms can’t tell the stories he wants to tell. The mash-up of in-betweenness sparks Waters’s imagination, where insincerity can be sincere, sincerity ironic. Waters prodigiously exaggerates the deficiencies of false dichotomies; each side of the aisle is desperately wanting. All this ongoing worry about “authenticity” in art and life, his oeuvre suggests, is moot, since human beings may be incapable of inauthenticity. Con artist Bernie Madoff’s commission of fraud doesn’t make Madoff a fraud: he’s absolutely Madoff
.

Tillman is also funny. “At parties I observe people acting much like dogs,” she writes in her essay “Blame It on Andy,” “except for sniffing rear ends, which is generally done in private.” In her review of a history of shit, she remarks that the author’s “tongue is often in his cheek.” Sometimes, the wit is unsettling. When she writes, for example, in “Doing Laps Without a Pool,” that “fish probably don’t know they’re in water” and then adds, “(who can be certain though),” I, as the reader, become uncertain. I think about fish, and the sheer tragedy—or maybe sadness is a better word, or maybe even comedy—of their not perhaps knowing something so obvious, so—how can we put it?—clear-cut, staring you in the face. And then I think about certainty. I stand up and move around the room, opening and shutting my mouth like a fish, wondering if I really know where I am, forgetting about fish for the moment. Then I go back and look at the last two sentences Tillman has written in that paragraph about fish to see if
there is any comfort there. “Complacency is writing’s most determined enemy,” she writes, “and we writers, and readers, have been handed an ambivalent gift: doubt. It robs us of assurance, while it raises possibility.” That last sentence is very beautiful, but you would have to be not a fish to appreciate it. Or at least I think so. I wonder what Joni Mitchell would think.

*

Lynne Tillman’s essay on Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth
is the finest essay that anyone has written on that book. This essay, “A Mole in the House of the Modern,” is also a key to elements in Tillman’s own work and indeed to her sensibility as an artist. Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth
, in Tillman’s telling, wants something from life that life cannot give her, and it is that desire, “her magnificent desire to be herself,” in all its complexity and seriousness and richness, which destroys her for the world but re-creates her for the reader. Slowly, as her power diminishes, another force in Lily, the force released by her imagination, becomes dominant, as voice in a novel becomes dominant over character, as tone and texture over plot.

By emphasising questions of space in Wharton, Tillman focuses on confinement. In doing this, she manages to capture the idea that Lily Bart is trapped in a cell of her own making, a cell which is the only place where someone as original as she can feel enclosed and nurtured and engaged and then destroyed.

In contemplating confinement and space, Tillman considers Wharton’s style:

But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lushness, display, every embellishment. Rarely extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and it in it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman dangling the world on a rich string. And she wrote, perhaps explained, early on in
The House of Mirth,
Lily Bart “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

As with any serious piece of critical writing, Tillman’s version of Wharton, while remaining true to the original, also tells us a great deal about Tillman’s own procedures as a novelist, her own scrupulousness, for example, her own refusal to take easy options, her knowledge that her characters are alone and that the style in which they are rendered arises from thought and strategy, from a willed and intelligent examination of the available possibilities, and the full knowledge, as Wharton writes, that “we are hampered at every turn by an artistic tradition of over two thousand years.”

—Colm Tóibín

September, 2013

A is for Andy

The Last Words Are Andy Warhol

I’m going to speculate about some of the issues raised and some of the ideas I found compelling and daunting in
a: A Novel
.
a: A Novel
is a narrative based on 24 audiotaped hours in the life of Warhol superstar Ondine, an articulate, funny, volatile man. When Pope Ondine acted in
Chelsea Girls
, his performance exceeded, crossed—even violated—the supposed boundary between life and art, a line Warhol wanted crossed. It’s blurred, if not effaced, in his only novel,
a
.

I’ve written this essay as a list, a shopping list in paragraphs. Warhol liked to shop. I don’t, but I like lists.

1. “A” is for Art, Andy, and Amphetamine—Ondine lived on speed, and the story is speed driven.

2. Reading
a: A Novel
, I sometimes felt like one of its participants: “Nine more hours to go,” said the Sugar Plum Fairy. Time was of the essence—actually it’s the essential element in the book. There are just so many tapes to fill, hours to stay awake, and so time’s on everyone’s mind. The tape recorder’s going, a book is being made. The Book is being made. In fact, the last words in the novel, spoken by Billy Name, are: “Out of the garbage, into THE BOOK.”
In a way, Warhol through Name is claiming garbage—the minutiae and tedium of daily life, the unedited flow—for literature.

3.
a: A Novel
is a project of—and an exercise in—consciousness and self-consciousness. Ondine and most of the others recorded are not unwitting characters or subjects. They’re self-conscious even when they’re nearly unconscious.

4. Ondine, the protagonist, sometimes fought against the chains of the tape recorder, a new master, asking Warhol many times to stop it. But Ondine continued to let himself be recorded, as did all the others who questioned Drella’s demands in making this novel-book. Maybe they knew they were participating in something new, or interesting, maybe even worthwhile, simply because it was Warhol. Though they struggled with him, they complied. Others may now be horrified by this compliance, believe that everyone in the Factory was manipulated, taken advantage of. They used and were used, perhaps, in every possible sense. But another view is that, given the problems in their lives at the time and their insecurities, which
A
documents, Warhol offered them something—work or a feeling of significance for that moment or a way to fill time. The tape recorder is on. You are being recorded. Your voice is being heard, and this is history.

5. What about authorship in
a: A Novel
? In Part 2, there’s talk about the typists who are transcribing the tapes, and who, in a way, through errors, mis-hearings, and incorrect spellings, contribute to or create the book with the speakers. It’s the typists’ book. It’s
the tape recorder’s book; it could not exist without it, just as the novel could not have been born without Gutenberg’s press. Or, it’s Ondine’s book, he’s the author of himself, and the protagonist, it’s his 24 hours. Or, and I think it is, it’s Warhol’s artwork, a conceptual and experimental book. Part of Warhol’s work was to regularly produce a blur around authorship.

6. Warhol dropped the mirror, let it crack into pieces, and instead held a tape recorder up to life. He saw a god in the machine and used as many as he could—
a
notes the arrival of video, a new toy, to the Factory—and Warhol didn’t fear the loss of authorship to machines, when his hand, literally, wasn’t in or on it; he constructed another kind of artist, who directs machines, people, uses technology, whose imprint was virtual.

7.
a
reveals realism as a form of writing, a type of fiction, a genre, not an unmediated, exact replica of life, not a mirror image. Books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing. Warhol’s novel is closer to life, reality, than a realist novel. It’s mediated by the elements I just mentioned—the apparatus, the speakers, the typists, and Warhol’s idea for it—and by the continuous 24-hour frame he wanted to use.

But Warhol was flummoxed by Ondine, who became exhausted or bored after just 12, so the book is not 24-hours straight. At the end of those 12 hours, Warhol asked Ondine for his last words, and he said, “My last words are Andy Warhol.” There’s a lot of reality in that—and self-consciousness and consciousness. In
a
, reality is gotten at differently, without any of the codes of realism.

8. If Warhol had recorded a continuous 24-hours,
a: A Novel
would have adhered to the classical idea of unity necessary for tragedy, compared with Joyce’s
Ulysses
, perhaps, which may have been on his mind, since it stands as the 20th century’s representative or exemplary modernist novel. (Bob Colacello says Truman Capote’s singular, brilliant novel,
In Cold Blood
, was on Warhol’s mind.)

The second half of
a
, instead of being continuous time, is a series of fragments, more out of joint, more out of time—more timeless or against time—than Warhol originally planned, and what started as a modernist novel became a postmodernist one. Warhol taped Ondine’s life, whenever he could get it, in all its discontinuous and disjointed glory, or gory, as the wit Dorothy Dean—DoDo in the book—might have put it. He abandoned his original idea,
a
’s purity. But the words “pure” and “purity” appear often.