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The truth is: People harbor all kinds of terrible, not-useful, perverse feelings. For instance, every time I ride a ferryboat, I experience the strange desire to throw my car keys overboard. Moreover, occasionally I experience the desire to throw myself overboard. I don’t act on these feelings—and no more, according to every extant biography, did Nabokov act on any feelings he might (or might not) have harbored.
And yet only by stepping into the role of a person with these feelings was he able to write Lolita. Every good artist knows this is true of the best work: It takes some plundering of the self. You go in there and you have a look around and you bring back something that might make people uncomfortable and you write it down—even if it’s awful, even if people don’t want to hear it, even if it makes you, the artist, seem like a freak.
Because the great writer trusts that the most terrible feeling is hardly unique.
There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.
I have to wonder: maybe I’m not monstrous enough. I’m aware of my own failings as a writer—indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I’m failing to know—but a little part of me has to ask: If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?
Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.
Larkin shows us the ideal writer’s life: the (male) author whose needs are tended to, whose emotional connections are secondary to his work, whose selfishness is unquestioned, whose freedom is total. I mean, it sounds heavenly, right? From the point of view of a regular well-adjusted member of society, you would think that loneliness would be a serious problem. If you retreat from the world, and serve only your own needs, you’re bound to get lonely, right? The thing is, writers don’t really get lonely. Liking being alone—even liking loneliness itself—is part of what makes a writer a writer. After I had children, I was an almost full-time mom, working about a quarter time at freelance writing. I thought to myself, how lucky that I am a writer, so that when I am working I get all this lovely restorative alone time. It was years before I realized: Oh. I became a writer so I could be alone all the time. It wasn’t a by-product, it was a motivator.
The kinds of lives that are typically thought of as nice by non-writers, lives that involve things like unending vacations; things like never having to work again—these kinds of lives don’t sound nice to writers. Not really. Writers want be left alone to write, and be waited on.
When I first read The Golden Notebook, I was in fact a free woman. I was twenty-one years old, a college dropout living in a little house on the wild coast of New South Wales. I had ended up in the faraway antipodes for reasons I didn’t really understand. Okay, I followed a boy there—a relationship that didn’t work out. Now I had a tiny room to myself and I worked in a warehouse and aside from that I spent my time drinking beer, going to punk rock shows, hopping trains, and reading. Reading was my vocation, if a vocation is what you do when you are left entirely to your own devices.
I liked massive books then—like many free people, I found myself confronted with a string of empty days, and the longer a book kept me occupied, the better. The Golden Notebook was picked at least in part for its size, after a long bout with Anna Karenina. The problems faced by Anna Wulf were unknown to me; these were problems that had to do with commitments—to a child, to a politics, to a future. I was committed only to the pleasure of the day. But I chimed to the idea of freedom, and I could feel I was doing it wrong. Freedom, I intuited, ought to have higher stakes, and much much greater rewards than all the time in the world to read fat novels and steal a ride on a train to a rock show in the sticks somewhere.
In other words, my luck, in Marfa, was very good. I had everything I could possibly want: a beautiful house, a stipend for food, all the time and sunshine I could ask for. Even so, I never quite relaxed. The self I was asked to be there was janky and uncomfortable.
Marfa was confusing. I didn’t know what I was, exactly. I became a non-wife, a non-mother.
I had become a taker; something other than a mother; a person with self-ness. In Marfa, I was taken care of so I could be a pure writer, full of torments and crazes, up till four a.m. if need be, drooping over my enchiladas the next day at lunch, wrung out by the sheer exhaustion of being my writer self. I discovered I liked my empty life, my empty hours. For the first time since I was a kid, I watched a square of sunshine make its way across the floor.
By the time I had the courage to think of myself as an artist—had the courage even to ask these questions—I already was in possession of two very adorable and needy children, and abandoning them was a non-option as far as I was concerned. So I wasn’t taking notes on Joni putting her baby up for adoption—but I was noting the savagery with which she proceeded, the difficulty, the non-caring. I needed the model of her, the blazing comet trail of her life as an artist, the heat of which maybe came at least in part from the fact that she’d already given up the thing that women are never supposed to give up. I read her story, and I was galvanized. To do what, I did not know. But I was learning, once again, that a savage drive to vindication was one and the same as making art. For me.
Plath, of course, wields the powerful and subtle hammer of her art. Solanas on the other hand is like a rat in a trap by the end. She understands, on some level, that material circumstances shape our lives, and must be altered if we are to improve the world. But she’s held back by the limits of her critique—she can’t see past gender. In this way, she exposes the limits of radical feminism. Seeing the world through a binary lens—men versus women—has its uses, but she can’t build a revolution out of that schism. The divide between male and female becomes a kind of spectacle she loses herself in.
There are glimmers in her work of an understanding of the actual material circumstances that shape our lives: “There is no human reason for money for anyone to work more than two or three hours a week at the very most” is a Marxist (a Marx-ish?) thought, and one that echoes Debord’s NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS. She’s reaching, just for a moment here and a moment there, for a revolution that would free everyone. But then she hoists her ice pick over her shoulder and continues on her way, looking for more assholes.
Even so, she’s left us with something unexpected: by taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism. She makes me wonder: How much is my preoccupation with the crimes of men blinkering me? What am I not seeing when I monster the monstrous men?
However: Carver, in the grip of happiness, no longer sounded quite like that. Compare the sheer dizzying sad-sackery of “Why Don’t You Dance?” to the sense of communion that can be found in Carver’s next story collection, Cathedral. The book is still terse, still concerned with working-class people, but there is a new generosity. The title story tells of a couple hosting the wife’s old friend, who is blind, for a visit. The narrator—the husband—is skeptical of his wife’s friend before the two meet, as husbands sometimes are, but the evening goes more pleasantly than promised. The two men share a love of scotch, and the blind man accepts the narrator’s offer of weed. Relaxing on the couch, they watch a TV documentary about cathedrals, and the narrator realizes the blind man has no idea what a cathedral looks like. The narrator unfolds a grocery bag that previously held onions (like the narrator, earthy and sharp), and together they draw a cathedral: “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.”
The narrator has escaped himself, and the story closes with this simple (simplistic, even) line: “ ‘It’s really something,’ I said.”
It’s almost like a joke on the idea of the epiphanic short story—all that Joycean whatness, all those Cheeveresque intimations, boiled down into the flat vernacular. And it allows for human connection; in fact the possibility of connection is what the story is about.
All those years I had chimed to Raymond Carver as a Pacific Northwest writer, as my Pacific Northwest writer, there was something else I recognized as well: the lost man, the drunk man. I was him. I loved him most when I was in my twenties, my party-drinking era—when once every year or so, or maybe every financial quarter, I would wake up and wonder if I should be going to AA. Carver was my avatar, though I refused to see it at the time; refused to see it until that strange sunlit morning when suddenly a new kind of knowledge was available to me; who knows why.
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The recovery movement tells us we are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. If we believed otherwise, wouldn’t the alcoholic just stay in the gutter, an XXX bottle tipped to her lips like a cartoon drunkard? What would be the point of even trying, if we’re only going to be defined by our shittiest moment?
The idea of redemption is crucial to the survival of the drunk, the addict, who must believe in a future that is at least a little free of what she was.
Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster’s point of view. You see things from his point of view because you are him. You sit in the rooms and listen and you hear terrible, terrible things, but they are also ordinary things. Because everyone in that room has been through them. Leslie Jamison has written about this gift of the ordinary—your own story is not paramount after all. It’s a new experience of empathy for me—the empathy of saying what is worst about me, what is most monstrous, and having it accepted not because I am special, but because I’m not. (An uncomfortable echo here of Humbert’s not-specialness.)
When that happens to you, when you receive that very specific kind of empathy: You learn to give it to others as well. Not as a kind of painstaking reciprocity, or out of fairness, or because you are good, but because hearing that you are ordinary in your badness, and extending that understanding of ordinariness to others—doing that helps you continue to not-drink. And therefore continue to live.