"I am like a tight-rope dancer who in the midst of his performances should suddenly discover that he knows nothing about tight-rope dancing"

“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours, I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. …

I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife. It’s no joking matter. After such crises of despair I doze for hours half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again – and at last go to bed completely done-up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.

I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. I haven’t read for days. You know how bad it is when one feels one’s liver, or lungs. Well I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid – in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there – to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it no more than you can grasp a handful of water. “

Joseph Conrad in a letter to Edward Garnett (husband to Constance).
P424-5 of Joseph Conrad: Three Lives by Frederick Karl, FSG 1979

According to Karl, in the days after his first child had been born, before he started writing "Youth" and The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad struggled to make progress in his novel, The Rescuer, and "began to split into pieces." "One result," Karl writes, "was the emergence of Marlow... Conrad’s route toward the discovery of Marlow is mysterious; we really do not know precisely how or why he came to depend on this figure. Nevertheless, his next three works all used Marlow in varying degrees of dependency."

"O les beaux jours!"

The first time I saw Beckett’s Happy Days I was sitting in French class in front of a wheeled tv-vcr unit that our high school called a “multimedia cart.” It was the spring of my senior year, after the AP exams; the certainty that high school would soon be behind us had exaggerated our ironic detachment from academics. That day, our French teacher, who had wanted all her life to be an actress instead of a French teacher, played us a video of her performance as Winnie, showing us her life on the stage, buried up to her waist and then to her neck, chattering and smiling frantically.

We snickered, I think, yet it was a traumatic moment: a vision of hell, as a place not of endless light or timelessness, but a place where your finest performance of the person you believe yourself to be ends up passing as comedy for the amusement of people who will forget you.

"Where John Henry Fell Dead"

John Henry had a little woman,
The dress that she wore was red,
She went down the track and she never came back,
Said she was going where John Henry fell dead.

There was a time in my life when I listened to a lot of old songs, dirt music, folk, blues, shape-note singing, and believed in a strange theory: that the fact that “red” and “dead” rhymed, the fact that that the line “went down the track” demanded that “she never came back,” that “blue” and “you” were inseparable meant that in spite of the utopia we thought we were promised in words, we were doomed by the rhymes and inner harmonies of our common language to live out the same old sad songs.

I know now that there are many authors of our doom, and fates that the finest machinations of language cannot escape.

Famous First Words

This is a negative way to begin, I know. Let me stress that my main impulse is not to poke fun (the sentence, by the way, is a pastiche […]).

A pair of examples might make my point more obvious. The first is a portion of the opening passage of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady:

Now here is the opening paragraph of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier:

I would like to explore this transition by looking at the opening passage of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift:

Consider the squared-off diction of the opening sentence of Wilson's 1925 review of a work by Mencken:

Pynchon's opening sentence is, it's true, arrestingly declarative:

Breathing Lessons opens as follows:

He announced his new prose in On the Road's first lines:

Boris Pasternak chose to begin his memoir, Safe Conduct, with a curious description of an incident:

With the opening sentence Mr. McFarland not only situates us, but also plants the subliminal conviction that Francis is wrong, that there will be some other metamorphosis and that the 'slow, affable decline' will be anything but.

Here is a fairly random sampling of some opening lines:

I could go on, but the point is made.

(Sven Birkerts)

An Op-Ed for the Chairman

Guy in government exclaim that no reading which is fun equals not doing good in school on grades. Also fewer money in life after school. Also not "communicating clearly." He say "fact" is number people reading say "I am enjoy books" who are rich. Like dorks with flashlight in bed i.e. unathletic. This guy spend dollars from people pay taxes! For this tax money? Not right. This guy has write books around poems. Maybe he also write poems? I not knowing. But basically what is? Is government poetry. Is such right? No is not right. Thus I contain many questionings. I demand knowing! Why government having poems instead of more extra wars? Why not one more very small war in tiny country for more gas? My gas costing many more dollars. Maybe I pay less taxes to government for more wars not poetry? Hey is this threat? No no threat is simply one idea I am suggest. Is free. So federal poem guy you exclaim reading "fun." Well I am disagree. Also I am make money too which I spend on like excellent big television. Is this not being patriot? Hey I thought dollars were for helping America not for nagging America in re book reports. Whoa the truth "hard"? Easy. I just "call a spade a spade." Perhaps you are from olden times when all had was books. Well excuse me this is now when we are watch athletic television and are make more money than you did in times of old. Hey government poet this is way things are why not "wake up and smell coffee." As they say this is not your grandfather's "fun"! What it all boils down? Welcome to America now get out. Really why not you up to Canada? Canadites all sit inside and read books and get sickly. Canadite government has lots of tax dollars but Communist bad medicine! Not like America! Maybe in olden times there was equation "reading for pleasurable equals later make money." But not modern now. Read your report? I have not. I skim article on Internet. If there one thing I learn while schooling? I am important. I matter. If skim something? Therefore opinionated. And robustly! Then I am voicing democracy. Ergo "hell and damnation" if my dollars going for your poems! Are we back to tax dollars thrown for artists smearing selves with chocolate inside the hot and tangy? I am vote no on chocolate book report! Go back Soviet Union Mister Poems because we are have had it! For you I am "communicating clearly" enough?

Know Nothing

A full-page ad in The New Yorker. The May 21 issue. A young girl, staring confidently at the camera, smiling. The copy at the top of the page, the copy ostensibly transcribing this girl's voice, reads: "I just saw my first Broadway show. Now I'm writing one, too." I see this, and I just want to punch a wall or something. Is this what it's come to? You only need to experience one of something before you're qualified to create one of those things? The usual comparisons spring to mind, the usual clichés: brain surgery, rocket science. Ah, but yes, of course, the beauty of the arts is that you don't need to have experienced any of them in order to create one of them. You don't actually need to have read a single novel in order to sit down and string a hundred thousand words together. But what is writing supposed to be? Is it just self-expression? Is it just therapeutic? Is it some kind of psychic equivalent of taking a dump? You don't have to be in awe of the pile of shit that humanity has already created in order to add your own small contribution every day. You don't ever need to consider it. You make yours, you get rid of it, you feel better, you feel like you've accomplished something. Is it Weinberger who mentions casually in one of his essays that in Egypt three thousand years ago there was an entire school of poetry devoted to the subject of anxiety that everything had already been said? Everything has already been said, but if you don't read, if you don't go to the theater every night, if you never go to the library, if you never go all the museums you can afford, go to them over and over again, if you don't have any awareness or knowledge of the mountain of everything that's already been created, if all you are is empowered, then you don't have to even know that everything has already been said, you don't have to have anxiety about it, you don't have to be concerned about where your play, opera, poem fits in the magnificent, aggregating, oceanic temple of what has come before, you don't have to even worry about ever having a reader, a viewer, an audience, all you need do is sit down, and let it out, and feel better. (My conscience: Is my worrying here just one miniscule reiteration of the long war between the Classical and the Romantic?) This ad is an ad for an investment firm that funds some sort of theater program in the schools. The girl in the photograph—is she a model, or could she actually be a beneficiary of this program, could these actually be her words?—is (partly?) of African descent; I am (mostly, as far as I know, but who knows?) of European descent. Do I have a right to complain in any way about any amount of money shuffling from Wall Street to (presumably) underfunded arts programs, to kids who benefit from those programs? (From yet another corner of my conscience: What about the irony of complaining about the celebration of empowerment and self-expression on a blog post?) And yet, and yet, there's some great wrong here. Does this have something to do with The Cult of the Amateur? (Why do I have this sinking feeling that the contemporary celebration of the untrained has something to do with a Will Rogers populism mutated by Ronald Reagan economics into a new and subtle way of keeping the citizenry crushed under the heel of its own proud ignorance?) In this same issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes: "In commencement speeches and the like, people say that education is all about opportunity and expanding your horizons. But some part of it is about shrinking people, about teaching them that they are not the measure of everything. […] We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence. Humility is good. There is not enough of it these days." Is this what's missing? Do I want the young girl, rather, to be saying, "I just saw my first Broadway show; I feel humbled and in awe of this dying art, and I'm immediately writing my senators, even though I can't yet vote, to urge increased funding for the arts; and I'm going to get an after-school job in order to pay for my new habit of going to see Broadway shows, because in the next few years I'm going to see a hundred of them, and then, if I'm lucky and I work my ass off, I'm going to go to Tisch, and I'll keep writing all this while, but I'll know, from all my reading and theater-going, that my work will surely be nothing in comparison, because as Jean Rhys said: 'All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.'" But investment firms presumably don't have any interest in funding awe; and I don't want the world to revert to what it was before Free to Be, You and Me, because that was even worse; but maybe my real subject here is this: Shouldn't the teaching of writing really—secretly, ultimately—be the teaching of reading?

My Housemate

(After J. David Stevens's "The Death of the Short Story," originally published in North American Review, collected in both Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories and Stevens's Mexico Is Missing, the latter of which appears to be available in its entirety on the Ohio State University Web site.)

The night I first met the short story it had just been beaten up pretty badly by a couple of these aggro publishing kids. You know the type: they had their own lit mag, they had distro and a blog, they had a tire iron and a bone to pick. What is it with these Young Turks, always needing to take a brick to the skull of one genre or another? A generation ago they nearly killed the short story and the chivalric romance in one fell swoop in a bar brawl up in Oregon somewhere. This time around, the kids tried a sucker punch, invited the story to a release party for some new anthology they'd put together, at a swank restaurant down on the Bowery, they said—except there was no anthology, no party, no restaurant, and that's where I found it, bleeding adverbs all over my stoop.

No, the short story is not dead; it is alive, and well, and shacked up in my living room, actually, in a kind of mother-in-law apartment situation I've set up for it. It's constantly hearing reports of its death, though, has been hearing them for forever—or at least since around the time Collier's closed up shop—which, in spite of how often it's been jumped, kicked, pummeled, and stomped, it finds perpetually surprising.

"Like Mark Twain reading his own obit," says the story.

"Word to that," I say.

Almost more troubling than the reports, past tense, of its recent death, are the predictions of its imminent demise. The story gets this horribly anxious look. I tell it not to worry. It's okay. These are just death prognostications, I say—it's not like they're death threats! That thought usually just makes the story feel worse—what's the difference between a prophecy and a fatwah, when you're at the receiving end?—but it always pulls itself together quickly. That's not naïve optimism, that's just science, just the nature of a ruthlessly efficient little body with a spine of infinite possibility running through it.

Is it dead? No. Unwell? Hardly! But is it feeling a little apathetic, a little resigned, about all the diagnoses and prognoses it gets, the perennial baseball bats to its plots? The story shrugs.

"I meet a lot of people," it says.

And it's true. Some of these meetings are as long as the frequent one-night stands the story has. Or weekend-long benders. (I don't even bother asking for it to call me to let me know it's not coming home; I know now how resilient the story is; whether it's off fighting a distant war, or holed up in some hotel with a hooker, a bottle, and a copy of Stephen King's On Writing, I know it'll be back soon.) Sometimes people only meet the story for as long as it takes for it to buy a pack of cigarettes at a deli. Or hold up a bank. Or sprout wings and fly out through the emergency roof exit of the crosstown bus. Or have a quiet epiphany—in the living room, at the county fair, over dinner—about its drunken father and the meaning of life. So many drunk, absent fathers the story has! A million damaged childhoods! So many sad mothers who had to abandon it in the dark of night on the doorstep of their local creative writing program!

And so many quiet epiphanies! It's fun, all these crises, all these realizations; although I have to admit it gets a little exhausting, emotionally speaking, just from crying so much. We both cry a lot.

And yes, sometimes I get confused, living with the short story; sometimes it seems like it's trying to prove something to me, or like it's reverting to some very juvenile stage, where it wants to be smarter and more difficult than it is, where it wants to obfuscate all meaning, all sense. Where it wants to be cool.

Like last night. We were hanging out, having a mellow evening, watching some television. The story always likes to watch these great half-hour dramas you get these days—they're its grandchildren, after all. It's very fond. The story got this funny look.

"I worked for Kristin," it said.

"What?" I said. "Who's Kristin?"

The look got even funnier, like it wanted me to understand what it was talking about, but couldn't, or wouldn't, explain it directly. The story looked the way it often does, like its compact little self was bursting at the seams with meaning.

"Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious," it said.

"Do I know Jeff?" I asked. "Do I know these people?"

The story shut up again.

"Are these people you know from a workshop?" I said.

It waved at me, as if to say, forget it, I'm done with explaining what I'm on about for now. Then it pointed at the television. Check it out, I think is what it was telling me. This is good stuff. There was an hour-long dramatic series coming on—one of these shows with multiple, interwoven plotlines playing out over the years, bloated and baggy, but beautiful, impossible not to watch.

Then the doorbell rang.

"That'll be the novel," said the story. "It doesn't have cable."

Who am I to say no? These old genres have enough problems.

I went to get the door.

"Men and Women in Space" : Notes on a Reading by Don Delillo

We are waiting for Don Delillo to appear.

As usual for events of this sort, there are multiple introductions. Someone from the 92^nd St Y introduces the writer, Dana Spiota, whose job it is to introduce Delillo himself. The earnest reverence in Spiota's speech is both familiar and embarrassing. She praises his books as "the secret antidote to the depressing consumerist hum we all live with," but it's unclear whether she's suggesting that they stop the hum of consumerism or merely cure us of our depression, and, in either case, the claim sounds false. It might be true if you took out the word, "antidote." And what does she mean by "that particular American longing"? Is that an American quality? Is longing - longing itself, not the object of that longing – specific to a culture? No one asks these questions. There will be a time later for "select" questions, but the questions will be reserved for Delillo. In the ritual of the high literary reading, the introductions are only symbolic gestures; each is an incantation to transport the reader from the profane world at large into the sacred space of literature. The more introductions, one supposes, the deeper we go into the world of the book and the less we actually listen to the meta-language of praise.

The applause begins when she says his name.

Don Delillo is bigger in person, leggier, than what one expects. He's almost athletic as he walks to the podium. In his green buttoned-down shirt and brown pants, the author looks like a middle-aged man who has dressed himself. Maybe his wife tried to stop him – doesn't that look too earthy? – or maybe she's given up on trying to change his mind.

"There's a novel, and there is a reading," he says into the microphone. We are quiet. The audience has been awed by his books into a silence some of us believe is holy.

You think of the opening to Underworld: "He speaks in your voice American and there's a …" but he doesn't speak in your voice. His actual voice is not the voice that you heard in your head – why should it have been, when even your own voice doesn't match that sound? Don Delillo speaks in the voice of an old woman who's been smoking for so long that the years of ash and fumes have ravaged her vocal chords to something mannish, but underneath the velvet and gravel, there remains a fundamental womanliness. At times, you wonder if he has a lisp; there's a cottony thickness around some of his consonants, the word "troop" seems to have more letters, an extra 'h.' You hear it again in the end of the first chapter, which sounds stickier than when you read it by yourself: "Call or fold. Felt or baize."

He sniffles.

There is a novel, and there is a reading. The sentence sounds odd; it would be easier to hear if he'd used plurals. He tells the audience that he has reordered the novel for the reading, choosing two characters, Keith and Lianne, and following their stories chronologically, alternating back and forth.

It's surprising to hear people laughing. You never laugh reading his work. Nothing escapes that dire tone or your awareness of his work as the performance of a writer.

He pauses to drink. The microphone picks up and amplifies the fleshy, gurgling sound of a man swallowing. Smacking his lips. The way he might say "Pafko at the Wall."

He says "police" instead of "priest." He is the high priest of American letters, but he looks like the guy sitting across from you on the subway. He shifts back and forth on the balls of his feet as he fields questions from the moderator, questions written by the people in the audience on blank, white index cards that had been tucked into their pamphlets.

In response to one question, he says that he was not happy about the idea of including a terrorist in the novel. He says, "I felt I had to. I felt it would not be a fully responsible novel if I did not include a terrorist." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by the novel's responsibility, except to say that he had to try to understand the individual inside the structure, the individual "bonding with a group of more or less like-minded men…this blood connection that becomes more important than politics or religion finally." He doesn't elaborate on what he means by "finally."

When the moderator, that same boyish, bearded man from the 92^nd St Y who gave the first introduction, asks him a question about architecture, Delillo says that he thinks that his novels are more three-dimensional than others' are. It's hard to know how to take this, except in a literal sense as a joke, and he isn't joking. "I don't tend to feel as comfortable," he says, "with abstract thoughts as I am with men and women in space." This answer catches some people by surprise because it goes against the mainstream criticism of Delillo as a brilliant, heady writer more interested in cerebral dialogue and aphorism than in the way real people interact with real objects in the real world. A friend turns to you and arches his eyebrow. Of course, what makes Delillo feel comfortable is not necessarily what ends up in his books, and what ends up in his books rarely makes us feel comfortable. His books do not stop "the depressing … hum" of the present, but they make the white noise seem meaningful, and that is all the comfort we can hope for.

The moderator, who has been sitting all this time at the edge of the stage in a little chair at a respectful remove from the "talent," thanks the author, and the crowd claps. Some stand in ovation, others gather their things to reach the book signing line first or to catch a cab home. Delillo disappears to the sound of applause, and the holy temple of literature falls apart, but those who leave believe they bear with them its sacred aura like a stone from the ruins.