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Sometimes, often, I’d told myself that it wouldn’t have been an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family. And how I had ever succeeded, how it’d even been possible to succeed in extricating myself from these unfathomable abysses and becoming a halfway normal human being—this I was incapable of puzzling out as I lay on the hotel bed staring at the ceiling, while outside, beneath my window, intoxicated Zurich youths caterwauled and celebrated their depressing intoxication.
In Switzerland one has the right to die, she had always said, and that’s what the doctors kept telling me as well. Even the clinic’s ethics committee told me that, advising that I give consent for them to cease further treatment, to just turn the plastic valve of the morphine tube up a little, because how was she to recover from this, what kind of life would that be in the end? And really, life—what was that?
But I found myself unable to give the desired consent, for I saw my mother in her Pucci bikini at the pool in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat whenever I closed my eyes, and not there on the gurney with that obscene tube dangling from the incision in her larynx, beneath her wrinkled chin. And naturally she rallied, woke one morning as though nothing had happened, and a few weeks later rode home again in a taxi.
Why did my father always buy houses in such places, hoping for some connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? I was fond of recalling that château on Lake Geneva in which he died, a somewhat abashed variation on the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I could picture the faded Baroque of the Van Dyck in the entrance hall, which in the time between two of my visits had been removed from the paneling, likely cut out, rolled up, and sent off to Sotheby’s. There was always a direct link between art and money—never the slightest doubt that they were as one. In my mind’s eye I saw the sofas upholstered with golden silk in the grand salon and, perched on the edge of one of them, my father, Christian, in his pale gray English flannel suit and narrow shoes. I saw his wily, icy-bright eyes. His gaze traveled out over the park, past Lake Geneva to Évian and on to the French Alps, orange red and yielding in the dusk. I saw his dressing room, lined floor to ceiling in fawn and orange leathers by Hermès, with hundreds of shallow teak drawers, one for each bespoke dress shirt from Harvie & Hudson. The collection of hundreds of diaphanous Chinese teacups he’d amassed over decades, like Chatwin’s Kaspar Utz, who suffered from that incurable porcelain sickness. My father’s fear of provinciality, of his own humble origins, emanated from him even after his death, a decade ago now. His own father had been a taxi driver in Hamburg, with everything that entails: the nightly barhopping the small boy had to tag along for, his father’s dull, inebriated blows. That was a place he never wanted to go back to, whatever the cost.
My mother had not been invited to the memorial service, which concluded with a family dinner at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We sat in a private back room, in neckties and in silence, the latter awkward but expressly desired by my stepmother, and disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who announced and described the courses in advance, in a gimmicky roundelay. It was abysmally, depressingly bourgeois, these loudly and proudly proclaimed lobster tails on pea essence, these Chateaubriands, these basil sorbets.
I reflected on the fact that Tiffany lamps would never again be appealing; they had ruined themselves for all time, these aberrant lamps, like Belle Epoque paintings and tapered Coca-Cola bottles and ballet dancers by Degas and handblown Murano glass figurines and those Toulouse-Lautrec absinthe bottles. This foppery would never come back in, and I was glad that my mother had nothing quite so repulsive in her apartment, except of course for the Tiffany lamps, a pair my father had given her so that he wouldn’t have to hand over the Nolde Flower Garden painting he had promised for her fiftieth birthday.
Well, when I was twenty-five I’d decided to write a novel in the first person, in which I would affect the air of an autistic snob and fool myself and the reader into thinking that I came from a good family and had suffered only from affluent neglect. Maybe it was supposed to be an affectionate caricature, with a dose of German Romanticism à la Eichendorff’s Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing and a dash of French humor à la Voltaire’s Candide. The first-person narrator, so, me, was supposed to like listening to the Eagles; I had cribbed that from Bret Easton Ellis. Actually, I—the real me, I mean, with my jodhpurs and hennaed hair and liquid eyeliner under my eyes and Airspun Soft by Coty on my face, smoking my Sobranies—thought the Eagles were awful, and not just the Eagles but the people who liked the Eagles, too. And so I had written this book, in the evenings, in my one-room apartment in Hamburg-Ottensen, subsisting on oven-crisped pizza baguettes and toast with Kühne mustard and ravioli from a tin. The same apartment I vacated, by the way, when I could no longer afford it, and which my friend Olaf Dante Marx then moved into, only to die of AIDS a few weeks later. Anyway, and now I’m getting to the point, either the character or his monologues—because there was no dialogue whatsoever in the book—were so believable that the readers of Faserland assumed the person writing like that was me.
Via social media, she knew words and phrases like gaslighting, trauma-informed, disorganized attachment, kink-friendly, pinkwashing, and could use them all in a sentence.
She was drawing near to the end of her life, and couldn’t imagine living more than another ten years. In that time, sick as she was, there wasn’t much she could accomplish. This was what she was. This was what she got.
[...] her greatest virtues as a writer of fiction are old-fashioned: exquisitely constructed sentences, a capacious moral imagination and a depth of feeling for human frailty, a near-hallucinatory precision in describing physical phenomena as well as emotional states, interpersonal dynamics, and shifts in consciousness so minute that they approach abstraction.
[...] “Something Nice” also definitely describes an experience I had, when I worked briefly as a prostitute, and that one was told entirely from the man’s point of view—an invented character with an invented life. That dynamic wasn’t as antagonistic, but it still took something to imagine myself into another person who was very different from me. I was pretty young when I wrote that story, and he’s an old guy in an unsatisfying marriage.
I’ve sometimes had my students try an exercise where they narrate an episode from their life in which they felt mistreated by someone, or had a conflict with them, from the perspective of that other person. You pick something that happened a while ago, at least a year, ideally, because your emotions won’t be as hot. It’s remarkable how many of them really can’t do it. They’re still portraying the other person as an asshole. It’s hard to sincerely occupy feelings that are fully oppositional to yours—to be able to look at yourself from that other position and think, What a twit!
INTERVIEWER
Did you sell any of the individual stories before the collection was published?
GAITSKILL
No. I sent them to every quarterly I could think of, and I would sometimes get five rejection letters in my mailbox at once. The main thing editors would write was that the characters were too hapless, and it was all too depressing. I think part of it was that some of the stories were a little whimsical by themselves. I can see somebody feeling that, say, “Daisy’s Valentine”—which I happen to really like—is a little wispy. It just wanders off at the end.
good to know :)