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 works of fiction and—counting this book—three works of nonfiction, and whenever I'm discussing the supposed reality of a work of nonfiction, 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.
Both of my parents were journalists. For many years my mother was the West Coast correspondent for the Nation. My father, now ninety, wrote for dozens of left-wing publications and organizations and for the last twenty years has been a sports reporter for a weekly newspaper in suburban San Francisco. "The true poem," my father likes to say, quoting Walt Whitman, "is the daily paper." When I was growing up, the New York Times was air-mailed 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. (Actually, 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. My stutter 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 only communicating itself? I felt like I knew this from the inside out since I was six years old. In a stutterer's mind and mouth, everything is up for grabs.
I have a very vivid memory of being assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior in high school and playing hooky from my homework to read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Steinbeck's humorlessness, sentimentality, and sledgehammer symbolism hardly had a chance against Hunter S. Thompson's comedy, nihilism, and free-association. I loved how easily Fear and Loathing mixed reportage or pseudo-reportage with glimmers of memoir. My sister and I had a rather fierce debate about the authenticity of a scene in which Thompson has a conversation with Richard Nixon at an adjoining urinal. She wrote to Thompson to ask him which of us was right. I was wrong; he called me a "pencil-necked geek" for thinking the scene had been invented.
During freshman orientation, I joined the Brown Daily Herald, but by February I'd quit—or perhaps I was fired—when there was a big brouhaha surrounding the fact that I'd made stuff up. I started spending long hours in the Marxist bookstore just off campus, reading and eating my lunch bought at McDonald's; I loved slurping coffee milkshakes while reading and rereading Sartre's The Words. I closed the library nearly every night for four years; at the end of one particularly productive work-session, I actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, "I shall dethrone Shakespeare." Fueled by such ambition, I was a good bet for graduate school, where my first creative-writing instructor said she wished she were as famous to the world as she was to herself, and my second creative-writing instructor said that if he had to do it over again, he'd have become a screenwriter.
On my breakneck tour of European capitals the summer after grad school, I carried in my backpack two books: Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Proust's Swann's Way. Just as Steinbeck's allegory had bored me and Thompson's meditation on the real had enthralled me, Garcia Marquez failed to hold my attention and Proust become a year-long addiction. I loved how Marcel was both sort of the author and sort of a character; how the book was both a work of fiction and a philosophical treatise; how it could talk about whatever it wanted to for as long as it wanted to; how its deepest plot was uncovering the process by which it came into being.
And yet my first novel was pretty much whole-cloth invention. My second book was an extremely autobiographical growing-up novel. My last book of fiction was a collection of stories, most of which sounded more like essays. My next book was a collage memoir. My most recent book was a diary of a basketball season. You can see, I hope, how I'm going in the wrong direction from how I'm supposed to be going.
And now this: not only an autobiographical book but a book about the impulse to write autobiographically, to turn oneself into one's subject. A fiction writer (an ex-fiction writer?), knowing full well how invented such representations are, is hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real. He's bored by out-and-out fabrication, by himself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. He wants to explore his own damn, doomed character. He wants to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry. This book is an attempt to embody these ideas, to make the case that the only real journey is deeper inside and the only serious subject is the mystery of identity—mine, especially, but yours, too, I promise. Here, in other words, is how I give you me. Here, also, is how I give you you. Here, finally, is how you give me me.
The following chapter was published in "Writers on Writing" series in the New York Times, April 9, 2001:
Many writers pretend that they don't read reviews of their books and that in particular life is too short to subject themselves to reading bad reviews. Kingsley Amis said that a bad review may spoil your breakfast but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch. Jean Cocteau suggested, "Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don't like—then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."
Sane advice; I don't follow it. I read all my reviews, though not necessarily every word of every one of them. The really positive ones are boring after awhile—your own most generous self-appraisal quoted back to yourself—but I must admit I find bad reviews fascinating. They're like watching the proverbial train wreck, only you're in the train; will all those mangled bodies at the bottom of the ravine tell you something unexpected about yourself?
Recently—as an experiment, I suppose, in psychic survival—I reread every horrific review that I've ever received, to see what I would learn. This is what I learned: I'm right. They're wrong. (Smiley face.) It was a genuinely odd and in a way a riveting experience, the hour or so it took me to read bad reviews of five books. It felt like I was locked in a room, getting worked over by a dozen, supposedly well-meaning guidance counselors. Suddenly my body felt like it had gotten filled with liquid cement.
One otherwise fairly positive review of my novel Dead Languages concluded, "The novel as a whole doesn't quite uncurl from its fetal position, doesn't open out from self-consciousness toward reconciliation." A reviewer of my collection of linked stories, A Handbook for Drowning, said about the book's protagonist, "The smudged eye turns into the eye that smudges what it sees. Clinging to the child role of bearing witness to itself, it doesn't undertake the adult role of bearing witness to everything else. Cramped, Walter tells a cramped story. The glimpses we see, varied and subtle as they may be, are all gray. It is the grayness of life seen through a caul that has never been shed." My first reaction, when I reread these reviews, was to think, "You know, they're right. I must figure out how to open out from self-consciousness toward reconciliation. I must undertake the adult role of bearing witness to everything else." But then I realized that I don't do reconciliation; I don't do witness to everything else. Sorry. Nabokov said, "I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego." I think of my work as being relentlessly loyal to this existential truth, whereas one reviewer of my most recent book, Black Planet, called it the "wretched musings of one white guy with a panicky ego, a pitiable heart, and too much time on his hands."
"Pitiable heart" interests me, as does this judgment about the same book: "At least it should make some white readers feel good about themselves. They may be screwed up about race, but they're not as annoyingly screwed up as David Shields." The impulse on reviewers' part to use me to get well, to brandish their own more evolved morality, psyche, humanity, flies in the face of what is to me an essential assumption of the compact between reader and writer, especially between the reader and writer of autobiography: doesn't everybody have a pitiable heart? Aren't we all Bozos on this bus? Robert Dana explains it like this: "Was Keats a confessional poet? When he talks about youth that grows 'pale and spectre-thin, and dies,' he's talking about his kid brother, Tom, who died of tuberculosis. But he's talking about more than that. The word 'confessional' implies the need to purge oneself and go receive forgiveness for one's life. I don't think that's what confessional poetry is about at all. I think it's a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet's personal life, but he's trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called 'universal,' terms. He's presenting himself as a representative human being. He's saying, 'This is what happens to us because we're human beings in this human world, this flawed and difficult world where joy is rare.' Sylvia Plath is certainly one of the outstanding 'confessional' poets, but when she entitles a poem 'Lady Lazarus,' she's trying to connect herself to the whole tradition of pain and death and resurrection. She's not presenting herself as Sylvia Plath, but as a part of a larger pattern. A more grotesque manifestation of it." My shtick, exactly. When I present myself as a "tube boob" (one review) in Remote or as a "pathetically guilty white liberal" (another review) in Black Planet, I mean for "David Shields" to be a highly stylized representative through whom cultural energies and all manner of mad human needs flow.
One reviewer said about Remote, "The futuristically formless nature of the collection gets irritating; it's an ambivalent comment on bookmaking, and before long it's got us feeling ambivalent, too." Another reviewer said about the same book, "The danger, of course, in writing about fluff and modern life is that you spend too much time thinking about fluff and modern life, until you resemble not a little the prostitutes in You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again, trapped, mired, in it." I understand the comments are meant as dispraise, but if you're feeling ambivalent about it, that's a good thing; if I seem to you to be trapped, mired in it, that's the point. Theodor Adorno says that a "successful work is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure." This is what I am always seeking to do: embody the contradictions.
A reviewer of Remote said, "Mr. Shields wouldn't thank anyone who suggested, on the basis of the material presented in this book, that as the child of 'Jewish liberal activists,' he might have chosen passivism as the subtlest form of rebellion." Why would the reviewer think I included this information, unless I wanted readers to make precisely this kind of connection? If via my pitiable heart the reader intuits something about his own, that, to me, is a worthwhile trade-off. What a guy, what a guy. This Remote reviewer concluded by mentioning a relatively minor misdeed I acknowledged committing, and then said, "Presumably, by now we're past the stage of being expected to say, 'Hell, we've all done that.'" Not done that—imagined that; Goethe said, "I've never heard of a crime which I could not imagine committing myself." To me, it's almost unfathomable that a reviewer would say, as one did about Black Planet, "The author escapes the morass of self-doubt as so many others do—by vicarious identification with a professional athlete; Shields idolizes Sonics player Gary Payton to the point of unnerving fixation," and then not figure that I'm up to something other than chronicling my own fandom. Another reviewer of Black Planet asked, "Do we really need to know what David Shields is fantasizing about when he's having sex? Does he imagine his foibles are our own?" I'm certain my foibles are your own, if only you're willing to acknowledge them. "A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory," said Keats, who should know.