How to Be Alone : Essays

Scavenging

Not many warehouses masquerade as chateaux, and of those that do, the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is surely one of the largest. The museum is a hundred feet tall, has the flat face and square turrets of a reform school or a sandcastle, and is made entirely of poured concrete. A wealthy eccentric named Henry Mercer built it in the first decade of the century, in part as an advertisement for concrete and in part as housing for his unparalleled collection of the tools that American industrialization was rendering useless. Mercer had cruised the barns and auctions of his changing world and had brought back to Bucks County every imaginable style of cobbler’s last, cider press, and blacksmith’s bellows, also a whaling launch complete with harpoons. In the museum’s highest turret you’ll find a trapdoor gallows and a horse-drawn hearse. Dozens of hand-carved sleds and cradles are stuck, as by poltergeist, to the vaulted concrete ceiling of the seven-story atrium.

The Mercer can be a very frosty place. Toward the end of a visit on a recent December afternoon, I was devoting my most serious attention to the displays on the ground floor, where the heaters are. It was here, to my considerable surprise, that I encountered my own telephone, lodged in a glass case labeled OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGY.

My telephone is a basic black AT&T rotary, first leased from New England Bell in 1982, then acquired outright in the chaos of Ma Bell’s breakup two years later. (I seem to recall not paying for it.) The Mercer’s identical copy was perched uneasily on a heap of eight-track tapes — a pairing that I right away found hurtful. Eight-track tapes are one of the great clichés of obsolescence; they reek of Ray Coniff and wide-wale corduroy. A rotary phone, on the other hand, still served proudly in my living room. Not long ago I’d used it to order computer peripherals from the 408 area code, if you want to talk about modem.

The display at the Mercer was an obvious provocation. And yet the harder I tried to dismiss it, the more deeply I felt accused. I became aware, for example, of the repressive energy it was costing me to ignore my visits to the Touch-Tone in my bedroom, which I now relied on for account balances and flight information and train schedules. I became aware of additional energy spent on hating the voice-mail systems that relegate a rotary to second-class (“please hold for an operator”) status. I became aware, in a word, of codependency. My rotary was losing its ability to cope with the modem world, but I continued to cover for it and to keep it on display downstairs, because I loved it and was afraid of change. Nor was it the only thing I protected in this way. I was suddenly aware of having a whole dysfunctional family of obsolete machines.

My TV set was a hulking old thing that showed only snow unless the extension-cord wire that served as an antenna was in direct contact with my skin. I wonder, is it possible to imagine a grimmer vision of codependency than the hundreds of hours I logged with sharp strands of copper wire squeezed between my thumb and forefinger, helping my TV with its picture? As for a VCR, it happened that the friend with whom I was visiting the Mercer had stepped off a plane from Los Angeles, the night before, with a VCR in a plastic shopping bag. He was giving it to me to make me stop talking about not having one.

I do still talk about not owning a CD player, and I pretend not to own any CDs. But for more than a year I’ve been finding myself in the houses of friends, in borrowed apartments, even in an artists’ colony library, furtively making tapes of CD-only releases. Afterward I play the tapes on my tape deck and forget where they came from — until, in one of those squalid repetitions that codependency fosters, I need to convert another CD.

The display at the Mercer, on that cold December afternoon, was like a slap in the face from the modem world: It was time to grow up. Time to retire the rotary. Time to recall: Change is healthy. Accepting the inevitable is healthy. If you don’t watch out, you’ll be an old, old man at thirty-five.

As I write this, however, months later, my rotary phone is still in service. I’ve portrayed my appliances’ obsolescence as a character defect of theirs for which I, like an addict’s spouse, am trying to compensate. The truth is that the defect, the disease, inheres in me. The obsolescence is my own. It stems directly from what I do and don’t do for a living. At the root of both of my reasons for keeping the rotary is a fiction writer’s life.

One reason, the obvious one, is that while phones may be cheap, they’re not free. The four-figure income that a young artist typically pulls down enforces thrift. I’d be delighted if the audience for serious fiction increased by an order of magnitude, so that I could spare $129 for a CD player. But who really thinks that people are suddenly going to start reading more literary novels? Until they do, and the sun rises in the west, I’m the de facto inheritor of two hopelessly obsolete value systems: the Depression-era thrift of my parents’ generation and the sixties radicalism of my older brothers’ generation. People in the sixties were innocent enough to wonder: “Why should I work a job all week to pump more consumer dollars into a corrupt and dehumanizing system?” This is not a question you often hear asked anymore, except among artists and writers who need long, unguarded hours to do their work in. And even for us, the obsolescence that thrift confers is not particularly welcome.

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke draws a parallel between the development of a poet and the history of Venice. He describes Venice as a city that has made something out of a nothing, as a city “willed in the midst of the void on sunken forests,” a “hardened body, stripped to necessities,” a “resourceful state, which bartered the salt and glass of its poverty for the treasures of the nations.” Rilke himself was a paragon of mooching, the nonpareil of total avoidance of gainful employment, and he helped as much as anyone to shape my idea of what literature ought to be and of how a young writer might best achieve it. Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Although I get it from Rilke, this model of mine has an American flavor. In a country dedicated to the exploitation of a raw continent’s resources, the engine of economic development creates a backwash of unparalleled strength, pulverizing and reassembling dreams on a vast industrial scale, sloughing off and churning under all manner of human and material detritus. On the muscular captains of the mainstream — the fictional Silas Lapham, George Babbitt, Tom Buchanan, Recktall Brown — the business of big money so reliably confers opacity that you finally have to conclude these men are simply shallow. The really memorable characters of U.S. fiction, from Bartleby and Flem Snopes to Oedipa Maas and the Invisible Man, all seem to inhabit muddy backwaters where broken orange crates bob and bluebottles hum. And like one of those New Guineans who allegedly are unable to distinguish between a photograph and what is photographed, I spent my twenties literally combing weeds and Dumpsters and incinerator rooms for material, trying to make my life a more perfect metaphor for my art. The triumphant return home with scavenged loot — snow shovels, the business end of a broken rake, floor lamps, still-viable poinsettias, aluminum cookware — was as much a part of writing fiction as the typing up of final drafts. An old phone was as much a character in a narrative as an appliance in a home.

Thrift, then, literal and metaphoric, is one reason the rotary is still around. The other reason is that Ibuch-Tones repel me. I don’t like their sterile rings, their Taiwanese feel, their belatedness of design, the whole complacency of their hegemony. It’s an axiom of contemporary art that America’s political economy has reduced aesthetics to a matter of resistance. The unpoor friends of mine who continue to buy cassettes despite the superiority and inevitability of CDs are choosing, for as long as they can, to resist the ugliness of the bloated profit margin that is a CD’s most prominent feature. I similarly appreciate the seventies clunkiness of my brown stereo components for the insult it delivers to the regiments of tasteful black boxes billeted in every house across the land.

For a long time resistance like this seemed valuable, or at least innocuous. But one day I wake up and find I’ve been left behind by everyone. One day the beauty of thrift and the ideal of simplicity end up petrified into barren, time-devouring obsessions. One day the victim of the market turns out to be not a trivial thing, like a rotary phone or a vinyl disc, but a thing of life-and-death importance to me, like the literary novel. One day at the Mercer it’s not my telephone but my copies of Singer and Gaddis and O’Connor that are piled on top of eight-tracks with inflammatory carelessness (“OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGY, OR: THE JUDGMENT OF THE MARKET”), as on the ash heap of history. One day I visit the Mercer, and the next day I wake up depressed.

For six years the antidepressant drug Prozac has been lifting the spirits of millions of Americans and thousands of Eli Lilly shareholders.

— lead sentence of a New York Times story, January 9, 1994

IT’S HEALTHY to adjust to reality. It’s healthy, recognizing that fiction such as Proust and Faulkner wrote is doomed, to interest yourself in the victorious technology, to fashion a niche for yourself in the new information order, to discard and then forget the values and methods of literary modernism which older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate in your work and which younger readers, bred on television and educated in the new orthodoxy of identity politics and the reader’s superiority to the text, are almost entirely deaf and blind to. It’s healthy to stop giving yourself ulcers and migraines doing demanding work that may please a few harried peers but otherwise instills unease or outright resentment in would-be readers. It’s healthy to cry uncle when your bone’s about to break. Likewise healthy, almost by definition, to forget about death in order to live your life: healthy to settle for (and thereby participate in) your own marginalization as a writer, to accept as inevitable a shrinking audience, an ever-deteriorating relationship with the publishing conglomerates, a retreat into the special Protective Isolation Units that universities now provide for writers within the larger confines of their English departments (since otherwise the more numerous and ferocious lifers would eat the creative writers alive). Healthy to slacken your standards, to call “great” what five years ago you might have called “decent but nothing special.” Healthy, when you discover that your graduate writing students can’t distinguish between “lie” and “lay” and have never read Jane Austen, not to rage or agitate but simply bite the bullet and do the necessary time-consuming teaching. Healthier yet not to worry about it — to nod and smile in your workshops and let sleeping dogs lay, let the students discover Austen when Merchant and Ivory film her.

In describing as “healthy” these responses to the death sentence obsolescence represents, I’m being no more than halfway ironic. Health really is the issue here. The pain of consciousness, the pain of knowing, grows apace with the information we have about the degradation of our planet and the insufficiency of our political system and the incivility of our society and the insolvency of our treasury and the injustice in the one-fifth of our country and four-fifths of our world that isn’t rich like us. Traditionally, since religion lost its lock on the educated classes, writers and other artists have assumed extra pain to ease the burden for the rest of us, voluntarily shouldered some of the painful knowing in exchange for a shot at fame or immortality (or simply because they had no choice, it was their nature). The compact was never entirely stable, but there was a certain general workability to it. Men and women with especially sharp vision undertook to be the wardens of our discontent. They took the terror and ugliness and general lousiness of the world and returned it to the public as a gift: as works of anger or sadness, perhaps, but always of beauty too.

For better or worse, ours is now a technological society, and whatever the benefits to the health and affluence of the upper half of society, it would be difficult to argue that either technology or the free-market capitalism that is its Siamese twin has done much to solve the ancient problems of mortality and the world’s unfairness. Moreover, they have created, exacerbated, or at least glaringly failed to address a whole host of further anxieties that give pain to thinking people. It’s easy to see how a technoconsumerism that creates lots of Wal-Marts and inexpensive dishwashers will have vastly higher approval ratings than a system, such as the former Soviet Union’s, that does not. But why must the bad cultural currency drive out the good? Why are former readers now renting videos? Why are families that never read books and never bought classical-music recordings suddenly going ape over CD-ROM?

There are familiar answers. Television and other modem technologies are ingratiating and effortless, are designed to enable and promote passivity, and, being corporate enterprises, are burdened with none of the troublesome scruples or complexity that individual talents are. The answer on a deeper level, however, is that a new compact has been made. We have agreed to let technology take care of us. Technology takes its cue from medicine, which, when it cannot cure, seeks to relieve suffering as efficiently as possible. And so we have a society in which the pain of knowledge is only increasing (because the society is getting more savage and less controllable, and the future ever less imaginable, and — most important — the individual worrying consciousness ever more isolated from others like it), which already puts a nearly impossible burden on structures such as the Bible and The Brothers Karamazov and Beethoven and Matisse, which were designed to account for everything in humanity but not for science and technology. And, relations between the public and art never having been exactly comfortable, it’s understandable that a large segment of the population not wait around for some genius writers and artists to come up with more adequate structures, but should instead take comfort in the powerful narcotics technology offers in the form of TV, pop culture, and endless gadgetry, even though these narcotics are addictive and in the long run only make the society’s problems worse.

The more popular these narcotics become, the more socially acceptable their use. Though it hasn’t quite happened yet, though some books are still read and much lip service is still paid them, we writers now easily foresee the day when the old generation of readers has gotten tired and no new generation has taken its place: when we ourselves are all that will remain of our audience. And this is where that pain of knowing comes in. The pain is real, the burden of carrying the knowledge is real. Look what happens when the compact between society and art is abrogated. We lose most, then all, of our audience to television and its similarly ingratiating cousins. We don’t blame the audience for defecting, we know it hurts to have to stay conscious, we understand the need to drug yourself, to feel the warmth of up-to-the-minute hipness or whatever. But the loss of that audience makes us feel all the more alone. Aloneness makes the burden of knowledge heavier. And then the quest for health begins to claim some of our own. Claims more and more of them. They deny that literature is threatened. They make their peace with the new technology. They decide it’s exciting. They swallow the idea that if infinite choice is good in the marketplace it must be good in a reading experience. They find it a relief to reconcile themselves with striving always to please their audience, as the market insists they do; what a load off the shoulders! They begin to take the “characters” that corporate culture offers — various Kennedys, Arnold Schwarzenegger — and tell stories about them. They call themselves postmodernists and imagine they’re using the system rather than its using them. They make the case that these “characters” are more interesting than anything you could invent, and indeed it’s getting harder, in a nation of couch potatoes, to imagine an interesting life. .

And there remains an ever tinier core of us who are temperamentally incapable of deluding ourselves that technology’s “culture” is anything but a malignant drug. We feel how scarce we are. And the work of showing the malignancy, and of reclaiming some perspective from which again to represent human hearts and minds within a society of their own making — this work has been left to us, along with the attendant pain of knowing how important such work is. And at some point the burden becomes overwhelming. It becomes a torture each time you see a friend stop reading books, and each time you read of another cheerful young writer doing TV in book form. You become depressed. And then you see what technology can do for those who become depressed. It can make them undepressed. It can bring them health. And this is the moment at which I find myself: I look around and see absolutely everyone (or so it seems) finding health. They enjoy their television and their children and they don’t worry inordinately. They take their Prozac and are undepressed. They are all civil with each other and smile undepressed smiles, and they look at me with eyes of such pure opacity that I begin to doubt myself. I seem to myself a person who shrilly hates health. I’m only a phone call away from asking for a prescription of my own. .) so ENDS THE FRAGMENT of essay that I’ve scavenged in assembling this one. I wrote the fragment two years ago when I was alone and unable to write fiction — unable, almost, to read a newspaper, the stories depressed me so much. The world hasn’t changed much in the last two years, but I feel as if I have. Who knows if I can generalize from my own experience. All I know is that, soon after I wrote that fragment, I gave up. Just plain gave up. No matter what it cost me, I didn’t want to be unhappy anymore. And so I stopped trying to be a writer-with-a-capital-W. Just to desire to get up in the morning was all I asked.

Months passed. I taught an undergraduate fiction workshop, and then I faced the problem of how to make a living. I wanted a little time to write privately, for myself, that was all I asked. Not to matter to the culture, but simply to be allowed the occasional visit to that solitary point of connection to the world of print. The way I finally chose to make a living (doing magazine journalism) felt painfully restrictive. But one small step into the world — a step that I’d been terrified of making — was all it took to be reminded of how unalone I was.

Then it was as if I began to remember. I remembered that as a boy I had spent long Saturday hours extracting rusty nails from the piles of paneling my father had torn out in the basement. I remembered hammering them straight on the piece of scrap iron my father had scavenged for an anvil, and then watching my father reuse these nails as he built himself a workshop and repaneled the basement. I remembered my adolescent adoration of my older brother Tom, who for a while in the seventies was an avant-garde filmmaker in Chicago, and who rehabbed an apartment in Pilsen with tools and materials largely scrounged from the now-defunct Maxwell Street market. Tom had two old Karmann Ghias, a bad yellow one handed down from our other brother, Bob, who’d finished med school and bought an Alfa Romeo, and an even worse pale blue one that had cost Tom $150. He alternately cannibalized each to feed the other; it was very time-consuming. I was riding with him the day the yellow one threw a rod and died and also the day the hood of the blue one blew open on the Dan Ryan Expressway and blocked the windshield and we nearly crashed. Do I sound nostalgic? I am not. I don’t hunger to return to those days, because I clearly remember wishing to be nowhere in the world but standing next to Tom on the muffler-and tailpipe-strewn shoulder as, with fingers stiff from the Chicago winter, he wired the Ghia’s hood back into place. I knew I was happy then, and so I can look back on those years and not miss them. I was present when they happened, and that’s enough.

When I began to write seriously in college, I used a hulking black Remington that rose nearly a foot off my desk, weighed as much as a small air-conditioner, and took all my carpal strength to operate. Later, I wrote my first novel and half of my second on two portable Silver-Reed typewriters (fifty dollars in 1980, still only sixty-nine dollars in 1985). When they broke, I fixed them. A triumph, in a week when various journals returned five short stories with rejection letters, was my substitution of dental floss for the nylon cord that supplied carriage-advancing tension.

For typing up clean drafts, my wife and I shared a forty-pound electric Smith-Corona. Our old Chevy Nova was strictly a fair-weather friend, and it always seemed to be snowing when the Smith-Corona broke down. In the early eighties, in Boston, snow would pile up in drifts that my wife and I would struggle over, bundled like peasants as we half-dragged and half-carried the Smith-Corona to the Harvard Coop. Somewhere in the Coop’s bowels dwelt a man named Mr. Palumbo. I never met Mr. Palumbo face to face, but we spoke on the telephone often. He had a raspy voice and you knew he was up to his elbows in machine oil. Mr. Palumbo loved the inexpensive fix, and I loved him for loving it. Once, on one of those prematurely indigo late afternoons that descend on Boston, he called to tell me that the main shaft had broken off the Smith-Corona’s motor and that the motor would have to be replaced, at a cost of fifty dollars. It was obvious that he hated to have to tell me this. An hour or two later, well after nightfall, he called me again. “I fixed it!” he shouted. “I glued it. I epoxy-glued the shaft back on the motor!” As I recall, he charged us eighteen dollars for this service.

I bought my first computer in 1989. It was a noisy metal box made by Amdek, with a paper-white VGA monitor. In good codependent form, I came to appreciate the noise of the Amdek’s fan’s hum. I told myself I liked the way it cut out the noise from the street and other apartments. But after about two years of heavy use the Amdek developed a new, frictive squeal whose appearance and disappearance seemed (although I was never quite sure of this) to follow the rise and fall of the air’s relative humidity. My first solution was to wear earplugs on muggy days. After six months of earplugs, however, with the squeal becoming more persistent, I removed the computer’s sheet-metal casing. Holding my ear close, I fiddled and poked. Then the squeal stopped for no reason, and for several days I wrote fiction on a topless machine, its motherboard and colorful wires exposed. And when the squeal returned, I discovered that I could make it stop by applying pressure to the printed-circuit board that controlled the hard disk. There was a space that I could wedge a pencil into, and if I torqued the pencil with a rubber band, the corrective pressure held. The cover of the computer didn’t fit right when I put it back on; I accidentally stripped the threads off a screw and had to leave one corner of the cover sort of flapping.

To some extent, of course, everyone who is less than wealthy learns to cope with ailing equipment. Some of us are simply more vain about our coping. But it’s not simply for their affirmation of my nature that I value my memories of writing prose on half-broken machines. The image of my decrepit but still-functional Amdek is also, for me, an image of America’s enduring raggedness. Obsolescence is the leading product of our national infatuation with technology, and I now believe that obsolescence is not a darkness but a beauty: not perdition but salvation. The more headlong the progress of technological development, the greater the volume of obsolete detritus. And the detritus isn’t simply material. It’s angry religion, resurgent countercultural ideologies, the newly unemployed, the eternally unemployable. These are the fiction writers’ guarantee that they will never be alone. Ineluctable obsolescence is our legacy.

Imaginative writing is fundamentally amateur. It’s the lone person scouring the trash heap, not the skilled team assembling an entertainment, and we Americans are lucky enough to live in the most wonderful world of junk. Once, when I lived in Munich, I stole two cobblestones from a sidewalk construction site. I intended to wrap them in newspaper and make bookends. It was a Saturday afternoon, the streets were empty, and yet my theft seemed so terribly, terribly transgressive that I ran for blocks, a stone in each hand, before I was sure I was safe. And still I felt the stern eye of the State on me. Whereas in New York, where I now live, the Dumpsters practically invite me to relieve them of their useful bricks and lumber. Street people share lore with me over curbside dumps at midnight, under streetlamps. In the wee hours they spread their finds on soiled quilts at the corner of Lexington and Eighty-sixth Street and barter dubious clock radios for chipped glass doorknobs. Use and abandonment are the aquifer through which consumer objects percolate, shedding the taint of mass production and emerging as historied individuals.

It’s tempting to imagine the American writer’s resistance to technoconsumerism — a resistance which unfortunately in most cases takes the form of enforced economic hardship — as some kind of fungible political resistance. Not long ago, one of my former undergraduate workshop students came to visit, and I took him on a walk in my neighborhood. Jeff is a skilled, ambitious young person, gaga over Pynchon’s critique of technology and capitalism, and teetering between pursuing a Ph.D. in English and trying his hand at fiction. On our walk I ranted at him. I said that I too had once been seduced by critical theory’s promise of a life unco-opted by the System, but that after my initial seduction I came to see that university tenure itself — the half-million-dollar TIAA-CREF account in your name, the state-of-the-art computer supplied to you at a university discount by the Apple Corporation for the composition of your “subversive” monographs — is the means by which the System co-opts the critical theorist. I said that fiction is refuge, not agency.

Then we passed a delicious trash pile, and I pulled from it a paint-and plaster-spattered wooden chair with a broken seat and found a scrap of two-by-four to knock the bigger clumps of plaster off. It was grubby work. Jeff said: “This is what my life will be like if I write fiction?”

After years of depression, I didn’t care how forgiving of myself I sounded. I said that what mattered to me was the rescue. I could probably afford a new chair; that I prefer to live among the scavenged and reborn is my own private choice.

A sponge bath, a scrap of sturdy ash plywood from a dresser drawer abandoned at curbside, eight scavenged brass screws to attach the plywood to the underside of the seat, and a black magic marker to mask the spatters of white paint: this is how the chair was rescued.

[1996]