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“Look at me,” the ghastly maître d’, who was not a native English speaker, said, sitting back again. He made a sweeping gesture there in the back seat of the taxi, taking in his kingdom whole. “I have a nice lunch, and I kiss two very pretty girls.”
Whitney and I hadn’t perceived an id so unchecked, an imbalance of power so vast, that the maître d’ felt entitled to his own personal editorial assistant harem. She and I had gone into this lunch thinking that it would be a weird, fun little adventure, thinking we were all on the same team, thinking that each actor at the table would play an equal role, and we left it thinking, Man, your soul is just so bad.
But maybe I wasn’t exactly the ideal reader for Infinite Jest then. Maybe I never was. I became peculiarly fixated on my loathing for the loathsome character Orin Incandenza, the anti–Sydney Carton and a serial seducer of young mothers whom I wanted to drag out onto the balustrade and slap across the face with an evening glove; the females in the novel seemed archetypes rather than successfully credible characters; I was confounded by the narrative’s chronology; I was unnerved by its lack of warmth; I had no interest in drugs; I hated tennis. At the same time, I loved the stagecraft and the theatricality, and the language was so audaciously charged with life—even as the world it depicted was dead: a thing. A book at total cross-purposes with itself: a maximalist work with nothing to celebrate.
Yet at the same time, there was something godlike about it.
I had a hard time squaring the whole together. Did the beautiful and elating parts outweigh the exasperating ones? If you happened to have a conversation in those weeks with someone who was also scrambling to read a review copy of Infinite Jest, this was the overarching question. Come to think of it, this was also much like the experience of knowing David Wallace himself—joy and delight, countered by exceptional frustration and disillusionment.
hmmm
What else was I doing with my life? Not enough. There were more readings; there were movie screenings (the best: Sergei Eisenstein’s restored Alexander Nevsky, with a new recording of the Prokofiev score; the prescreening party, with its mounds of caviar and fountains of vodka, has now in memory expanded to the status of legend). Occasionally, fashion department people would give me their tickets to the shows. I had no professional reason whatsoever for attending a fashion show, but I did enjoy them (though I was too high-toned to have admitted that to anyone). Fashion shows always started late, so I’d bring along Pale Fire as my go-to reading material. (Yeah, I was just that way: the young lady who brings a Nabokov novel—and that Nabokov novel—to a fashion show.)
There were press luncheons. There were drinks dates, there were dinners, there were parties. And then there was the subset of the party, the dread book party. My tales of the peculiar torment of the book party are many, and in my growing view they now had to be avoided at all costs: invite me on a walk, to dinner, to a play—I’ll see anything (I’m just a Broadway baby)—or to plant some flowers, but do not ever, ever, ever invite me to a book party (unless you are my actual friend, in which case you must). I can’t bear them. The using of people as props. The instrumental nature of most literary relationships: What can you do for me? The fact that Charlie Rose was often to be found skeeving around at the more prestigious of them. Weren’t these things supposed to have been fun, way back when? And none of them ever had the energy of the Infinite Jest party, I’ll tell you that much.
lmao
Mailer’s talk, a stop in the publicity campaign for his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, was at a school on the Upper East Side. The typical Mailer loyalist out in the audience looked as if he’d died about ten years before. The novel: the “autobiography” of Jesus. Mailer as God. The jokes just wrote themselves, folks. Onstage, Mailer, who had a weirdly affected Brahmin (was it?) accent, held forth about God, Jesus, Christians, and Christianity as if he alone had the special wisdom monopoly on these topics—and all others. It seemed to me even then dangerous for a writer to come to regard himself as grandee; the writer’s concern should always be getting to the truth—and how can you get to the truth of the story if you are the story, not the one standing outside of it? (In his irritatingly excellent book The Spooky Art, Mailer in fact acknowledges his early fame as the central tragedy of his career.) Never get too comfortable in the temple: this was another message in a bottle I’d send my future self.
I remarked to him that I wanted to find someone to review books for Esquire; I would suggest that writer to the boss and hope for the best. It was damn hard to get too excited about most book reviewers, or reviews—so many were cribbed from press releases or plagiarized from other reviews. I had a dream: I wanted drollery, I wanted elegance and (occasional) vehemence, I wanted someone immune from that dreadful phenomenon of critical consensus. I wanted someone godlike, someone who understood the whole intellectual history of literature and culture, someone who could do high and low but never middle: I wanted the young Robert Hughes of books. As a matter of fact, what I wanted was the actual Robert Hughes—irascible art critic and author of the following sentence: “Truly bad art is always sincere, and there is a kind of forcible vulgarity, as American as a meatball hero, that takes itself for genius; Jacqueline Susann died believing she was the peer of Charles Dickens.” Hughes, please. Get me Hughes.
There were plenty of things I couldn’t handle about my job, but they weren’t the ones David was thinking about then. The main thing: I’d believed that if I got this job, or even if I got any sort of power, that I wouldn’t be scared anymore. I had been hoping that power was the way to undo fear. But then you learn: the fear is here to stay. The fear was always there, except when I was at my desk, with a manuscript in front of me and a pen in hand.
you learn to live with it
I already understood that David would always define the terms of your reality. That’s what he did, that’s who he was. And I also already understood that I could never be a woman who slid into a man’s premade life and claimed it as her own. I had a world. I had a job. It had taken a lot of work to achieve those things. And no offense to downstate Illinois, but I was from the same sort of place—“Midwestern born, bred, and educated,” I used to say about myself, with pride, with self-abnegation, with a great big freaking chip on my shoulder—and there was no way that I was going back there already.
girl same
The truth: my career had been built around protecting male egos. This was the world I lived in. This was the world I knew, and I never believed this world could, or would, change. It seemed incomprehensible that the system could ever collapse. So I started trying out a new approach. I would change myself. I would become unattackable. I’d train myself not to let other people’s—men’s—opinions of me penetrate. I’d become a fortress to be approached, a Soviet tank of the spirit.
This was a strategy. This was a deeply antisocial strategy, in fact, and philosophically in direct conflict with the central precept of my job. When you’re trying to cultivate appreciation, you have to maintain an open heart.
i like this
Remember, remember, I’d tell myself, whatever power this job provides is an illusion.
Remember, remember, I’d say, when you get thrown back into who you are, you’d better have something there.
Another lesson: I had to remember to quit before I got fired. I didn’t want to become a Japanese soldier-holdout in the fifties, hiding on a Polynesian island, believing I was still fighting the war. I also knew this was an entitled approach to working life I couldn’t afford; I was no aristocrat, but I could be an aristocrat of the spirit, at least in theory. I could try to transfigure myself into that mind-set, maybe somewhat. I wanted to write. I started working on a novel.
Writers take an idea, and they make a world out of it. They dream up a different drama. This seemed important. It wasn’t power if you’d been granted it through someone else. You had to create your own power, your own stage, and, if I may say, your own reality.
The mind must be free and incoercible. Only when the mind is free can you live your life as if something is at stake.
Questions: Is there any more tenuous, insecure, and impossible job than a writer’s? Are there ever any judgments more unforgiving than literary judgments? Why do we, or did we (back when we, for better or worse, cared a little more than we do now), insist on evaluating a writer’s career—the career which is the life—so much more ruthlessly than we do other jobs? We don’t say of an engineer, “Obviously, she’s not too bright—she’s never been able to combine quantum physics and general relativity into one unified theory.” Or of a schoolteacher, “Poor thing. He’ll never be Aristotle.” We don’t need our plumber to have won the Most Famous Plumber in the World trophy. But it’s just perfectly fine to dismiss the whole of a writer’s life and career with “His work is not going to survive in fifty years.” The bar for literary achievement is remorselessly high—and so are the stakes.