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Authors: David Shields
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Kundera: “Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo—fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us; it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
And the more righteous our self-presentation, the more deeply we yearn to transgress, to fall, to fail—because being bad is more interesting/exciting/erotic than being good. Even little children, especially little children, know this. When Natalie was three, she was friends with two girls, sisters age three and four. The older girl, Julia, ran away from her mother, for which she was reprimanded. The younger girl, Emily, asked why and was told that running away was bad. “I wanna do it,” Emily said.
Tiger needed to demolish the perfect marble statue he’d made of himself: the image of perfect rectitude. We were shocked—
shocked
—that his furious will to dominate his opponents on the golf course also manifested in an insatiable desire to humiliate countless sexual partners. We all contrive different, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and revealing ways to remain blind to our own blindnesses. In the British television series
Cracker
, Eddie Fitzgerald is a brilliant forensic psychologist who can solve the riddle of every dark heart except his own (he gambles nonstop, drinks nonstop, smokes nonstop, isfat, and is estranged from his wife). Richard Nixon had to undo himself, because—as hard as he worked to get there—he didn’t believe he belonged there. Bill Clinton’s fatal charm was/is his charming fatality: his magnetism is his doom; they’re the same trait. Someone recently said to me about Clinton, “He could have been, should have been, one of the great presidents of the twentieth century, so it’s such a shame that—” No. No. No. There’s no “if only” in human nature. When W. was a young man, he said to Poppy, “Okay, then, let’s go. Mano a mano. Right now.” The war of terror was the not so indirect result. In short, what animates us inevitably ails us.
And vice versa: because I stutter, I became a writer (in order to return to the scene of the crime and convert the bloody fingerprints into abstract expressionism). As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe, but I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language. If I’m not writing it down, experience doesn’t really register. Language has gone from prison to refuge back to prison.
Picasso: “A great painting comes together, just barely” (I love that comma). And this fine edge of excellence gets more and more difficult to maintain. I yield to no one in my admiration of Renata Adler’s novel
Speedboat
, which is, I think, one of the most original and formally exciting books published by an American writer in the last forty years (and which now has been reissued on exactly the same day that this book of mine has been published).And I hesitate to heap any more dispraise upon her much-maligned memoir,
Gone
, which I must admit I still find utterly addictive. Surely, though, the difference between
Speedboat
and
Gone
derives from the fact that in the earlier book the panic tone is beautifully modulated and under complete control and often even mocked, whereas in the later book it’s been given, somewhat alarmingly, absolutely free rein. Success breeds self-indulgence. What was effectively bittersweet turns toxic.
When my difficult heroes (and all real heroes are difficult) self-destruct, I retreat and reassure myself that it’s safer here close to shore, where I live. I distance myself from the disaster, but I gawk in glee (no less assiduously than anyone else did I study Tiger’s sexts to and from Josyln James). I want the good in my heroes, the gift in them, not the nastiness, or so I pretend. Publicly, I tsk-tsk, chastising their transgressions. Secretly, I thrill to their violations,
And the more righteous our self-presentation, the more deeply we yearn to transgress, to fall, to fail—because being bad is more interesting/exciting/erotic than being good. Even little children, especially little children, know this. When Natalie was three, she was friends with two girls, sisters age three and four. The older girl, Julia, ran away from her mother, for which she was reprimanded. The younger girl, Emily, asked why and was told that running away was bad. “I wanna do it,” Emily said.
Tiger needed to demolish the perfect marble statue he’d made of himself: the image of perfect rectitude. We were shocked—
shocked
—that his furious will to dominate his opponents on the golf course also manifested in an insatiable desire to humiliate countless sexual partners. We all contrive different, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and revealing ways to remain blind to our own blindnesses. In the British television series
Cracker
, Eddie Fitzgerald is a brilliant forensic psychologist who can solve the riddle of every dark heart except his own (he gambles nonstop, drinks nonstop, smokes nonstop, isfat, and is estranged from his wife). Richard Nixon had to undo himself, because—as hard as he worked to get there—he didn’t believe he belonged there. Bill Clinton’s fatal charm was/is his charming fatality: his magnetism is his doom; they’re the same trait. Someone recently said to me about Clinton, “He could have been, should have been, one of the great presidents of the twentieth century, so it’s such a shame that—” No. No. No. There’s no “if only” in human nature. When W. was a young man, he said to Poppy, “Okay, then, let’s go. Mano a mano. Right now.” The war of terror was the not so indirect result. In short, what animates us inevitably ails us.
And vice versa: because I stutter, I became a writer (in order to return to the scene of the crime and convert the bloody fingerprints into abstract expressionism). As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe, but I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language. If I’m not writing it down, experience doesn’t really register. Language has gone from prison to refuge back to prison.
Picasso: “A great painting comes together, just barely” (I love that comma). And this fine edge of excellence gets more and more difficult to maintain. I yield to no one in my admiration of Renata Adler’s novel
Speedboat
, which is, I think, one of the most original and formally exciting books published by an American writer in the last forty years (and which now has been reissued on exactly the same day that this book of mine has been published).And I hesitate to heap any more dispraise upon her much-maligned memoir,
Gone
, which I must admit I still find utterly addictive. Surely, though, the difference between
Speedboat
and
Gone
derives from the fact that in the earlier book the panic tone is beautifully modulated and under complete control and often even mocked, whereas in the later book it’s been given, somewhat alarmingly, absolutely free rein. Success breeds self-indulgence. What was effectively bittersweet turns toxic.
When my difficult heroes (and all real heroes are difficult) self-destruct, I retreat and reassure myself that it’s safer here close to shore, where I live. I distance myself from the disaster, but I gawk in glee (no less assiduously than anyone else did I study Tiger’s sexts to and from Josyln James). I want the good in my heroes, the gift in them, not the nastiness, or so I pretend. Publicly, I tsk-tsk, chastising their transgressions. Secretly, I thrill to their violations,
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