If I could stick my pen in my heart
Spill it all over the stage
Would it satisfy you? Would it slide on by you?
— Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1974
Joan Didion has opened her veins on the page, as we pretty much knew she would. Her only choices, given what has befallen her, were to die herself or to write about it.
The world — and you know what I mean, in this case, by “the world” — has responded accordingly. In the last four weeks, the New York Times alone has reviewed Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” twice (one of the reviews was by the former poet laureate of the United States, and it was just as tedious as that sounds, if not more so), published an interview/profile piece by Rachel Donadio (quite a good one), and run a lengthy excerpt from the book itself, complete with color photographs of the bone-thin Didion and her personal Ground Zero, the rambling Upper East Side apartment where her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly in December 2003.
How has the personal tragedy of a famous writer become a sort of public ritual, a media event in its own right? If Salman Rushdie or Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates were to publish an account of surviving the sudden death of a spouse and the lingering fatal illness of an adult child, would we be reading about it at such length and in such depth? I hope they and we don’t have to discover the answer, but I don’t think so. The ingredients of Joan Didion’s current media moment are various, but they all have to do with her unique symbolic importance in American culture.
It’s one thing to say that Didion is the greatest living writer of American prose, or that “The Year of Magical Thinking” is an unusual book. Viewed through the fishy eye of the literary critic, it’s one of the best and most adventurous things she has written. Those are judgments to which I would subscribe, but they tell us only so much. Most of the response to this book is not in fact a response to the book but to the life situation that occasioned it, and perhaps to the fact that it exists at all. A cynical, and not entirely wrongheaded, thing to say here is that our culture is obsessed with “real” events because we hardly experience any, and that the private deaths of Didion’s husband and daughter, along with her own private suffering, are in danger of being transformed by endless publicity into spectacles or pseudo-events.
There’s more to it than that. Our response is fed by an all too human river of emotions, some of it fast and shallow and some of it deep and black and swollen. Some of it is compassion for a human being many of us imagine we know, and with whom we feel perhaps too strong a sense of identification; some is horrified fascination, even schadenfreude; some of it — a fair bit, I think — is hearing the bell toll. It has not wholly escaped our attention that some version of what has befallen Joan Didion and her family will befall us too. Sooner or later people we love will die and if we are what is considered lucky, if we keep living after that happens, we will be left alone waiting for our own appointment.
In her work Didion has sometimes seemed to be the conscience of journalism, while in her life she has enacted its most grandiose dreams about itself. Whether this is a contradiction or just a fact is not clear to me, but in either case it’s the source of her symbolic power. She is a piercing intelligence in a field that values rapid response, savvy framework and an ability to regurgitate familiar narratives in clever language, but has almost no patience for actual intellectual activity. Her sharply analytical cast of mind and her evisceration of piety and bullshit — whether found in the ’60s counterculture, the Reagan White House or, as in her new book, the mist-occluded temples of medicine — have reached us in a muscular but elegant prose style that owes as much to Emily Dickinson as to Hemingway.
Perhaps even more important, Didion framed her intelligence in a persona that was distinctly female, often vulnerable, sometimes neurotic. She was a well-bred California WASP who lived through the epochal experiences of the ’60s but never imbibed their mythological essence — when I interviewed her in 2003, she described herself as a sorority girl during her undergraduate years at Berkeley in the mid-’50s. This voice of self-aware entitlement and breeding, of the skeptical and observant outsider, an acerbic observer of her own foibles as much as those of her society, provoked a profound identification among two or three generations of upper-middle-class readers. In describing her own progress through troubled times, Didion seemed to be describing ours as well.
At the same time, Didion and her husband lived a life of Establishment privilege and glamour, on a scale not exactly replicable today (since the Establishment in question essentially no longer exists). She and Dunne were paid well to write avowedly serious articles for serious publications, most of which have evaporated or bite-sized themselves. They were paid even better to write scripts for Hollywood movies, which involved the ambiguous bargain of being flown around the world, put up in luxurious hotels, treated like minor celebrities and asked to work long hours on rewrites for films that might not get made or might not turn out to be worth making. They dined repeatedly in the fashionable restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London; as Didion observes in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” they were the sort of people who dealt with a short-term cash flow crisis by decamping to a Hawaiian resort for several weeks.
We all imagine we could endure such experiences and emerge uncorrupted, our critical faculties intact; at any rate, most of us would be willing to try. On the one hand, it was gratifying on a prurient level to have people who seemed like us living that way; on the other hand it was gratifying to learn from Didion’s writing that such a life did not apparently free one from the pandemic anxieties and uncertainties of the age. One of the reasons Didion’s work is so influential among her fellow writers is that it catalyzes twin reactions that are linked at an unconscious level: the impulse toward self-flagellation (see also: Miller, Judith) and the impulse toward envy. If our work were smarter, sharper, less superficial, we’d get our earthly reward at Elaine’s, Zadie Smith at one elbow and Johnny Depp at the other.
All of this is to say that Didion’s fans experience her work on an intimate, personal level as well as an intellectual one. (Because of that, her influence on journalism is much more profound than the macho histrionics of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson.) One of the reasons I’m not quoting from “The Year of Magical Thinking” is because you’ve probably read enough of it by now, if you’re interested; another is that your reading of it belongs to you, and mine to me. I found out about this during that interview two years ago, after the publication of her California memoir, “Where I Was From.”
Like many other Californians in New York, I identified, in a gross and general way, with her transcontinental peregrination, and said so in the piece. In person and in her book, Didion reminded me of my mother, and I said that too. A reader sent me a furious e-mail on the day my interview appeared; she thought I was a condescending sexist, seeking to defang a formidable female writer by comparing her to Mommy. I tried to explain that she didn’t know my Mommy, who, if not one-tenth as famous as Joan Didion, is nonetheless a writer and roughly the same breed of finishing-school, tough-yet-neurotic and un-defanged California WASP, a breed now rare to the point of extinction. We ended up by extending mutual apologies and forgiving each other for our perceived sins, but I learned two things that should have been clear all along: 1) My profoundly meaningful anecdote had only interfered with this reader’s Didion experience (which she apparently preferred to an O’Hehir experience); and 2) The Didion trick, of framing your journalistic encounters with the world in personal terms, isn’t as easy as it looks.
During our interview, I followed Didion into the kitchen of that vast 71st Street apartment (a source of awe and envy for any New Yorker) so she could fetch me an Evian water. This might seem unlikely — Joan Didion, of all people, fetching drinks for random visitors — but in reading “The Year of Magical Thinking” you develop a clear sense of how closely the persona of Joan Didion, writer, was intertwined with those of John Gregory Dunne’s wife and Quintana Roo Dunne’s mother. When her husband had his fatal heart attack on the night of Dec. 30, 2003, she had just poured him a second scotch and was fixing their dinner.
Dunne came in the kitchen while we were there and introduced himself. I shook his hand and said something conventional about how I admired his work. I felt a faint tingle of dishonesty and guilt in that moment. Like a lot of Didion’s fans I held the view that Dunne was the other writer in the household. I had read a lot of his work for a project of my own, a book about Irish-American writers that never got off the ground. If you had pressed me, I guess I would have said that Dunne had frittered away too much of his considerable talent on insubstantial projects.
All along I understood that that opinion had something specious about it, the superior wisdom of a younger and much less accomplished writer. After reading “The Year of Magical Thinking” I understand more. I understand how crucial Didion and Dunne were in each other’s writing lives, how Dunne was her first editor, first critic and primary audience, and how difficult it is for her to write without him. I understand that Dunne in his last months — when he seemed enveloped in depression and premonitions of his death — viewed his own career in a harsher light than anyone else ever could. Finally, Didion’s self-examining prose has worked its usual magic, and I understand that the person I was judging (as happens so often when we criticize others) was not John Gregory Dunne but myself.
Didion’s family tragedy could be seen as a signal event in the baby-boom generation’s gradual loss of power (even if, at 70, she is a shade too old to be a boomer herself). If the person appointed to explain a certain slice of American history to itself, to disabuse it of its illusions while honoring its dreams, has seen her world implode and her family destroyed, then an epistemological crack has opened in the world. (Again, you know what I mean by the world.) The 20th century is fading in the rear-view mirror — Nixon brandishing the Bomb, Che Guevara hopped up on LSD — and the road ahead is liable to end suddenly and send us flying out into the abyss, like Wile E. Coyote, at any moment.
All true. But given lemons, Didion has made lemonade. As I said earlier, “The Year of Magical Thinking” is more than a painful memoir; it’s a moving and ambitious work, novelistic in sweep and character, that happens to be nonfictional. In it, Didion accomplishes something she has only gestured at in previous books: She mimics the digressive, self-narrating workings of the mind, in this case a mind disordered by grief. Her subject, you could say, has always been story, the narratives we construct to make our lives possible or tolerable or meaningful. This is the first sentence of her most famous essay: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
As Didion documents her reaction to Dunne’s death and her efforts to manage her daughter’s Kafkaesque odyssey from one intensive-care unit to the next — although Quintana was still alive when she finished the book, Didion knew her long-term odds were not good — she finds herself, at unwary moments, being dragged into the past. Sometimes the catalysts are large and obvious ones, such as driving the streets of Los Angeles, where Didion and Dunne raised their daughter, or seeing a television commercial that was filmed outside a house above the Pacific Ocean, on the Palos Verdes peninsula, where they lived when they brought Quintana home from the hospital and parked her in a bassinet under the wisteria. Sometimes they are completely random: a visit to the Parker House hotel in Boston, a city where she has never lived; an escalator at Madison Square Garden, a building she hasn’t often visited.
In this most tender of Didion’s books, these unsummoned memories are the most vivid elements, forging an endearing portrait of a family where bourgeois convention and bohemian eccentricity were mixed in odd quantities. She remembers Dunne standing in the pool at their Brentwood house, reading and rereading “Sophie’s Choice” while she worked in the garden. She tells us they were very rarely apart; once, when she had to work an extra day in San Francisco, Dunne took the $17 commuter flight from LAX in an airplane with a smile painted on its nose and took her to dinner at Ernie’s, where Jimmy Stewart sees Kim Novak in “Vertigo.” She digs up the traces of Quintana’s girlhood Dunne buried in his novel “Dutch Shea, Jr.,” and recalls a late-summer funeral in 1978 after which Dunne told her that his cardiologist had warned him about the blocked ventricular artery leading to his heart.
Didion’s form of grief-madness goes beyond the now-famous detail that she refused to give away Dunne’s shoes after he died because, she reasoned, he would need them when he came back. Her memories were more than sad or bittersweet reminiscence; they were active attempts to force a new outcome. She believed, or suspected, that she could reach into the past and change whatever it was that had led her to this place. Would Dunne not be dead, and Quintana not dying, if they had bought a house in Hawaii (as she once wanted)? Or if she had not understood the ambulance lights outside their Brentwood house one night in 1988 as an omen, and agreed to move to New York (as Dunne wanted)? And if we can reach into the past and change it, how do we avoid what Didion calls the appointment-in-Samarra problem, meaning that whenever and however we alter the direction of our lives, the Grim Reaper will always be waiting at our new destination, smiling in toothy satisfaction?
As literary critic George Steiner once explained, it’s symptomatic of modernity that the present is ruled by images of the past. I suspect we all lead lives dominated in large part by this variety of magical thinking, and while it undoubtedly gets worse as we get older, it can start when we’re very young indeed. That old flame whose appearance in your dreams fills you with joy, that Arts and Crafts house your parents sold in 1983, that one afternoon when it rained but you all went in the lake anyway — these moments can seem more vivid to us, seem more pregnant with lives unlived and directions untaken, the farther away they recede.
Certainly the unfulfillable quest to recover the past is the great theme of modern literature; it drives all of Faulkner’s work, all of Joyce’s, all of Nabokov’s. The paradigmatic work of modernist fiction is called “In Search of Lost Time,” for Christ’s sake. The most famous sentence in American literature informs us that we are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Knowingly or not, Joan Didion — who has already brought nonfiction into psychological and emotional terrain previously reserved for the novel — has enlisted herself in this tradition. This chronicle of genuine grief and madness, this loving tribute to her real family, is also Didion’s crowning literary achievement.
If we have lost faith in a literal paradise, we can still find a literary or artistic one, precious fragments of the past preserved living on the page, undimmed by the passage of time. Gatsby will always stand hypnotized by the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock; the narrator of “Swann’s Way” will always be in bed with his famous cookie, awaiting his mother’s goodnight kiss. In that universe John Dunne and his wife will always enjoy an evening drink on their Malibu deck or their Honolulu hotel balcony, smelling the jacaranda or hearing the mynahs sing. They will always keep their daughter safe; they will never grow old. Joan Didion has given her dead husband and daughter the gift Humbert Humbert gives his lost love at the end of “Lolita”: By placing the three of them and the life they made together in “the refuge of art,” by making them “live in the minds of later generations,” she has given them the only form of immortality they may share.
Children can ask a lot of very annoying questions. Starting at about 2 years of age, they begin barraging their parents with endless queries, from “Are we there yet?” to “Why is the moon round?” — questions that often seem more like desperate ploys for parental attention than anything else. And, to make things worse, cooperative parents are often treated to a relentless barrage of follow-up questions, many of which involve one word: “Why?” Is this process infuriating? Yes. But is it crucial to their development? Far more than most of us think. And furthermore, the frequency and form of those questions can tell us a lot, not only about how children learn but also about cultural and class differences in America.
In his new book, “Trusting What You’re Told,” Paul L. Harris, a Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard, argues that much of what we’ve assumed about our kids’ early learning may be misguided. Although many parents and teachers think of children as primarily independent “scientific” learners who best absorb knowledge by physically interacting with the world — an idea that informs everything from Montessori education to museum planning — Harris believes it woefully underestimates the importance of dialogue in young kids’ lives. Conversation — and question asking — allows young children to grasp highly abstract concepts, from religion to history, at an earlier age. However, as Harris points out, the way young children learn can vary surprisingly between working-class and middle-class children, and people from different ethnic backgrounds.
Salon spoke to Harris over the phone about Montessori’s mistakes, Asian-American kids’ deference levels, and why working-class kids ask fewer questions.
Why is it so important to determine where young children actually get their information?
A lot of research on cognitive development has argued that children do best when they’re exploring the world for themselves in a scientific fashion. That idea has a long pedigree. If you read someone like Rousseau, that’s what he’s basically advocating — along with more recent researchers or educators like Paget or Montessori. Even in the last decade or so there have been a lot of titles within the popular science mode that have focused on the “scientist in the crib” or the “child as a scientist.” But I think it dramatically underestimates children.
Where is this, as you argue, misguided approach to early education reflected?
If you go into a Montessori classroom, which is the archetype of this, the child is given materials to play with — be they rods or cones or things to assemble — and the assumption is that the child learns best about numbers and space from interacting with those concrete materials. I’m not quarreling with this as an educational device; I just don’t think it’s the whole story. You also see this philosophy in progressive science museums for children that pride themselves on being hands-on experiences: The child is not necessarily told very much, and he or she is encouraged to try things out for themselves.
You argue that, rather than allowing children simply to figure things out for themselves, it’s incredibly important that children learn things by interacting with adults from a young age. When does that form of learning start?
Probably before the child learns how to talk. There was a nice set of experiments where toddlers who were barely able to walk were given a slope to go down. The slope was made a little bit too steep for them to be confident on, and they’d often turn toward a parent of caregiver looking for advice. The evidence showed that if the parent looked anxious and apprehensive, the toddler would probably hesitate to tackle the slope, and if the caregiver looked encouraging and optimistic, the toddler would go ahead and try to negotiate it.
But this process of learning from others really comes into its own when the child is starting to talk, from 18 to 24 months upward. If, for example, the child puts a toy in a box in a room, and the child comes back into the room, and you tell the child that you’ve moved the toy to a different box, by around two and a half, children are very good at listening to you and will go search in the new place. This is a very early illustration of the way human children realize that the world may not be as they saw it, or as they see it, and that their best bet is to listen and trust other people for guidance.
At a certain point in their childhood, kids start asking lots and lots of inane question where they don’t even seem to be interested in the answer. It can be insanely annoying, and a lot of parents dismiss this as a way to get attention, but you argue that it’s actually incredibly important.
It’s true that children ask a lot of questions, but if you look more closely at the kinds of questions they ask, about 70 percent of them are seeking information as opposed to things like, for example, asking permission. And then when you look at those questions, 20 to 25 percent of them go beyond asking for bare facts like “Where are my socks?” Children ask for explanations, like “Why is my brother crying?” If a child spends one hour a day between the ages of 2 and 5 with a caregiver who is talking to them and interacting with them, they will ask 40,000 questions in which they are asking for some kind of explanation. That’s an enormous number of questions.
And it’s not just attention seeking. When children ask questions and you answer them, that is actually a setting for a sustained dialogue, and they’re trying to get clear in their minds about a particular issue that’s confusing to them or bothering them.
One disturbing finding you highlight in the book is that children in less wealthy families are far less likely to ask these kinds of inquisitive questions.
The most critical variable is the education of the mother. The more educated the mother, the greater the richness of the vocabulary and sentences they use with their children, and to some extent the greater the amount of time they talk to their children. One study was done in the U.K. with a group of working-class 4-year-olds and middle-class 4-year-olds, and the middle-class 4-year-olds were more likely to ask questions than the working-class 4-year-olds. This was also true not just of the single one-off questions but more persistent series of questions. That study also showed that children asked many more questions at home than at preschool, so when we send kids to preschool we’re giving them opportunities to play with other children and pretend play or whatever, but in terms of one-to-one dialogue where these kinds of sustained explorations can take place, we may be limiting the opportunities.
Children also seem to trust answers that come from parents more than other people they don’t know as well.
We’ve done a variety of experiments, and children seem to have a variety of biases that steer them more toward some informants than others. One of the most basic is that they’ll often turn to familiar people rather than strangers. Though by the time the child is 5, if a familiar person starts saying things that from the child’s point of view are incorrect or implausible, the child will become less receptive to that person.
There’s a surprising finding in the book that Asian-American children are more deferential in their early learning than others. What does that mean?
There is data comparing American children who are European-American and children from Asian-American families, and to cut a long story short, it looks as if the first-generation Asian-Americans children are more likely to scan the social horizon, more likely to listen to other people. I don’t think we should automatically jump to the conclusion that’s an intellectually inferior strategy; it’s actually an intellectually sophisticated strategy. We don’t know exactly what brings this cultural difference about, but our best guess is that it goes back to the dialogue between caregiver and children — that mothers differ in the extent to which they encourage children to voice their own opinions or record a child’s opinion as worthy of attention.
But the willingness to provide and act on what you’re told is not something that’s peculiar to any particular culture. Deference has been an important tool for the transmission of culture. Human technology becomes more elaborate, more complicated, from one generation to the next, and deference allows information to be picked up and acted upon. Chimpanzees, for example, deprive themselves of the ability to learn culturally inherited wisdom passed on from generation to generation. If we look at chimpanzee tool use, it tends to be unsophisticated; it doesn’t accumulate over generations.
You draw parallels and contrasts between childhood beliefs in religion, in the sense of the existence of God, and in more scientific things, like germs. What are the conclusions you can draw from that?
This is another illustration of how the traditional portrait of the child as a little scientist doesn’t work. A 4- or 5-year-old child isn’t in a position to observe germs, but talk to one, and they are pretty convinced they exist. It’s perfectly routine for children to believe in things that they can’t observe, and they do that presumably by listening to what other people say and looking at the presuppositions in what people say. This is as much true of germs and oxygen as it is of special beings such as God or Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. From the perspective of the child the primary evidence they have is what other people tell them about these entities.
The making of that distinction between scientifically established and more religious or supernatural entities is far from straightforward. There’s a sense that children are a little bit like psephologists: They look at what people say around them, and they do a head count, and they see that there’s nobody who’s a skeptic about germs. But on the other hand there are very subtle signs that God has a different status. Then of course when it comes to Santa Claus and the tooth fairy — and eventually in the schoolyard — they’re going to meet a skeptic if not several, so their belief in those entities is going to suffer a heavy blow at some point.
What do findings tell us about how children first learn about death and understand it?
They start by understanding that the body has a life cycle, and that people have these internal organs that have to be working for them to live — and that at a certain point in time the life cycle comes to an end. These internal organs cease to function. The biological account of death implies that once you’re dead, that’s it. Life has ceased. By contrast the religious conception of death typically carries with it the implication of some sort of afterlife. But it takes them a longer time to start accepting the claims that a particular community will make about the afterlife. The other interesting finding is that it’s not as if those two accounts are in competition with one another. So when children subscribe in the end to a Christian notion of the afterlife, it doesn’t lead them to abandon the biological conception. Both coexist in the child’s mind — and get recruited in different contexts.
Given your findings, how should we be changing the way we educate and parent our children?
One thing that it calls attention to is how much children can learn just by talking to people and engaging in dialogue with someone they’re familiar with. Even at a fairly young age, children can be guided to think about episodes, places, periods in history which are fairly remote from their own immediate experience. Part of the human experience is the capacity to leave behind the here and now and to think about very different times and times and places. I suppose the other aspect of the book that I didn’t dwell on, though it’s increasingly on our mind, is the fact that thanks to technology, children’s access to information is now amplified. At an early age children have these spontaneous filters. They’re trusting some people more than others; navigating the Internet, which is tricky; and many of them are left to their own devices in figuring out how to do that. It’s not as if we have educational programs which encourage children to think more carefully about where they gather information from. What we tend to do is try to guarantee that children’s access to certain misleading sources or difficult sources is blocked rather than giving them the tools to make assessments for themselves. In the future we’ll have to address that question more systematically than we do and at an earlier age.
Jonathan Franzen wants you to like him. In “Mr. Difficult,” a 2002 New Yorker essay, Franzen identifies two types of authorship: the Status model, devoted to the pursuit of difficult art at the expense of commercial gain, and the Contract model, which privileges the enjoyment and connectedness of the reader. Franzen is, in his own estimation, “a Contract kind of person.” His novels don’t ask more of the reader than she is willing to give in turn. “[T]o build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn’t want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer.”
But if Franzen the fiction writer diligently abides by this Kantian fiat, Franzen the essayist is not in the business of building comfortable houses. In his nonfiction, Franzen violates the writerly contract he so vaunts, not by high-art subversion but simply by being a grouch. “How to Be Alone,” which appeared in 2003 two years after the breakout success of “The Corrections,” collected his essays of the previous decade into an angry bundle. Anchored by his famous Harper’s essay on the plight of the modern novelist, the book lambasted our national preference for cultural pablum and lamented the demise of a virtuous solitude. “Farther Away,” coming nearly two years on the heels of “Freedom,” follows much the same pattern. Like its predecessor, this assemblage of essays finds Franzen in a curmudgeonly mood — ranting against the encroachments of social media and other people’s cellphone “I love yous” — and like its predecessor, it contains one long essay that has already proved a lightning rod.
“Farther Away,” the essay that lends the book its title, arrived with the force of a gathering storm, an electric anticipation (literally: the New Yorker used it to bait new fans on Facebook, never mind Franzen’s public denunciation of the Like button) giving way to a blustery fracas. Here was a major novelist, possibly even the novelist of his generation, prepared to issue a public verdict on the life and work of another literary titan, his late friend and friendly rival, David Foster Wallace. And what a mournful, vengeful, bitter, sad, ambivalent verdict it was.
“Farther Away” has a deliberately inorganic quality: Franzen, having deferred the emotional work of making sense of his friend’s suicide to deal with the professional work of finishing and promoting “Freedom,” decides to isolate himself on the same remote Chilean island where Defoe set “Robinson Crusoe,” in order to contemplate the origins of the novel and work through his feelings about Wallace’s death. In Franzen’s mind, these subjects are not unrelated. The modern novel, whose genealogy begins with “Robinson Crusoe,” was born of a need to fill the leisure hours of a newly emergent bourgeoisie in 18th-century England; Wallace “in one interpretation of his suicide … had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels.” The novel was meant to be a solution to boredom, and Wallace, in taking boredom as his subject in the work eventually published as “The Pale King,” had plunged into a fatal nihilism.
While Franzen never admits subscribing to this interpretation, he has elsewhere described his and Wallace’s shared understanding of fiction as “a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance” — a conclusion that Wallace, by his suicide, would seem to have abandoned. And yet what makes Franzen angriest, and where his sense of injury over Wallace’s death begins to show through most fully, isn’t Wallace’s implicit rejection of the redemptive possibilities of fiction. It’s the way in which Wallace’s suicide has itself transmogrified into an unlikely act of connection:
But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also know that he was more lovable — funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies — than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.
The story of their friendship is the story of two great writers caught in a dialectic of mutual admiration and resentment, each finding in the other a counterpart against whom to define his own relationship both to his art and to his public. As Franzen said in his interview for the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series, “I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a competition between the writer who was pursuing art for art’s sake and the writer who was trying to be out in the world. The art-for-art’s-sake writer gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books written about him or his work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public attention and money.” Some of Franzen’s bitterness in “Farther Away” seems to be directed at the ways in which Wallace’s inexplicable act thwarts the narrative he had constructed around their respective relationships to the Contract and the Status models:
[W]e who loved him were left feeling betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took him away from us and made him a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure.
Wallace dies not only with his cult credibility intact; he also gets public attention and money.
The fact that “Farther Away” (the collection, not the essay) opens with Franzen’s own commencement address at Kenyon makes for an instructive irony: Was Franzen ever really the populist of the two? Certainly, when we enter the terrain of nonfiction, the dichotomy begins to break down. Franzen’s essays hold his reader at arm’s length, whereas Wallace’s are more readily welcoming than his fiction. Both Kenyon speeches — Wallace’s from 2005, Franzen’s from last spring — warn against the lure of narcissism. Wallace asks the graduating class to do the hard work of consciousness, of keeping their brains from flying on autopilot; Franzen rails against the techno-consumerist threats of Facebook and the iPhone. For a talk so concerned with the importance of connecting with other people, Franzen comes across as willfully obtuse: “Very probably you’re sick to death of hearing social media dissed by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love.”
There are, it is worth noting, other essays in this collection: “Farther Away” is one of 22 pieces assembled from Franzen’s extra-fictional writing career since 1998. There are his environmental writings from the New Yorker, born of a midlife love affair with birdwatching; assorted literary criticism; and a handful of essays in which he uses his pedestal to plead the case of deserving, overlooked authors: Christina Stead, Donald Antrim, Alice Munro. In this last category, Franzen is at his best, shedding his perennial irritation to treat them with a nuance he fails to bring to his readings of the 21st-century cultural landscape. But it’s “Farther Away” — a document of one great writer tangling with the ghost of another — that we’re going to be reading 30 years from now. It’s the only essay Franzen has written that directs the current of anger that runs through all of his nonfiction at a subject actually worthy of it: the suicide of his best friend. His willingness to say the unsayable, to let all his ugly feelings show through, may not make him likable, but in finally writing for himself instead of for his reader, he’s given us a fitting tribute to Wallace — a confrontation with the problem of actual love.
If you are a reader who cares about nature, wilderness, our place in nature, writing and nature, how to choose a course of action when something you care about is threatened, the lifelong search for voice, and what it means to be a woman in this world, you will have crossed paths with the work of Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps you grew up reading Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder and Bill McKibben and, loving their work, still felt something missing — that your relationship with these issues was not fully rendered. Then you discovered Williams, and, not unlike Alfred Stieglitz’s famous response when he first saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, you might have breathed: “At last! A woman on paper!”
A woman on paper.
When Williams was 22 her beloved mother, then 54, died of cancer. She left her only daughter all of her journals, rows of cloth-covered books. When Williams opened them, the pages were blank. Disappointed, she used some of them for her own; others were put away and forgotten. Quite simply, she was too young to know what to make of them. Decades later, at fifty-four, Williams seeks an explanation for these white, white pages. The result is “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice.” “My mother was a great reader,” she writes. “She left me her journals, and all her journals were blank. I believe she wanted them read. How do I read them now?”
If you’re like many readers, your first introduction to Williams’s work was her fourth book, “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” published in 1991, when the author, who hails from a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, was 36. This was a memoir in which Williams tried to understand how 10 women in her family, living downwind from the atomic bomb testing grounds in Utah, had died from or been diagnosed with breast cancer. She struggled at the same time to capture a world in which the rising of the Great Salt Lake was flooding the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a much-beloved ecosystem. She knew that somehow, in the deep aquifer that contains the American, the western, the feminine, and the human subconscious, these events were connected.
Williams went on to create 13 more books: essays, poetry, edited volumes. She protested nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert in the late eighties and early nineties, testified in Congress on women’s health and environmental links to cancer, opposed the war in Iraq and joined the Wilderness Society in support of the Redrock Wilderness Act, which would limit the ravaging of 5.7 million acres in that state. She has served on the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society and was a member of the western team for the President’s Council for Sustainable Development. She is currently on the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, the Nature Conservancy, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
You might say she found her voice.
With each new book, the reader feels she knows a little more about the writer; each book is autobiographical but finds a different angle of repose. Threads run through the books like rivers — a love of birds, revelations inspired by paintings, silence and sound, a lifelong conversation with the Mormon Church in which Williams challenges, confronts, encourages, illuminates the dark corners and keeps her fingers crossed that she will not be excommunicated. Women in the Mormon Church are expected to keep a journal and to bear children (“The only things I’ve done religiously are keep a journal and use birth control.”) Williams has thought a great deal about motherhood. In “When Women Were Birds,” she writes that the first voice she heard was her mother’s. She writes about the many ways that mothers withhold their voices to allow their children to develop their own. “She spoke through gestures,” she writes of her mother, Diane Dixon Tempest, “largely quiet and graceful. A letter. A meal. A walk together. Her touch.”
Williams traces the evolution of her own voice. She remembers long hours as a child listening to Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and memorizing the music and the voices of the animals and birds. She remembers a kind teacher who helped her to overcome a speech impediment, and some of her fear of speaking out loud, by reciting poems about birds. Her new husband, Brooke, also a lover of wilderness and wildness, understood “when I threw back my head and howled.”
And then there were the silencers: a terrifying man in Idaho’s Sawtooth wilderness who tried to kill her with an axe when she was doing fieldwork in college — the story was too terrifying to tell anyone except Brooke. Or the headmistress at the ultra-conservative school where Williams taught biology, who told her environmentalism was the work of the Devil. Or Congressman Jim Hansen, who looked over his glasses at Williams when she testified to preserve Utah’s wilderness against extractive and other industries and said: “I’m sorry Ms. Williams, there is something about your voice I cannot hear.”
And then in 2010, Williams receives a diagnosis with the power to silence: a cavernous hemangioma, “located in what doctors call the ‘eloquent’ part of my brain, or Wernicke’s brain, the home of language comprehension, where metaphor and the patterned mind live.” She is given two possible treatments: brain surgery or waiting. “How well do you live with uncertainty?” the neurosurgeon asks. “What else is there?” Williams responds. This is not my story, she thinks. This is not my story.
“When Women Were Birds” is in many ways a thank-you letter to a mother who gave her daughter the gift of words, the gift of locating herself in the world with words and the gift of recognizing, describing, and protecting beauty in the world, using words. But there is more. Diane Dixon Tempest’s blank journals gave her daughter the great gift of peace with a terrible fact: words are often inadequate. “I will never be able to say what is in my heart,” Williams realizes, “because words fail us, because it is in our nature to protect, because there are times when what is public and what is private must be discerned.” Looking at a photograph of her mother, she remembers this poem by Wallace Stevens, called “The Bird Listener”:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
“My mother’s journals,” Williams writes, are ‘just after.’ ”
In “Memoir: A History,” Ben Yagoda defines “shtick lit” as “[b]ooks perpetrated by people who undertook an unusual project with the express purpose of writing about it.” He identifies “Walden” as the earliest example of the genre, which would seem to establish a respectable pedigree, but the word perpetrated leaves little doubt as to Yagoda’s opinion of more recent efforts. He can’t be alone in casting a skeptical eye on shtick-lit superstar A. J. Jacobs, the Esquire writer responsible for “The Know-It-All” (shtick: reading the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” in its entirety), “The Year of Living Biblically” (shtick: following every biblical injunction to the letter for 12 lushly bearded, annoying months), and now “Drop Dead Healthy,” evidently a reboot of Remar Sutton’s out-of-print “Body Worry.”
Full disclosure: I undertook the project of reading an A. J. Jacobs’ book with the express purpose of writing about it. My plan was to acknowledge, with a touch of self-deprecating humor, the unlikeliness of my enterprise: I know this seems like a crazy waste of time, guys, but just hear me out…. I’d suffer a few well-timed setbacks, and — this is de rigueur — get chastised by my wife for neglecting her, the kids or my household chores. (I’m not married, but if memoir can massage the truth, why can’t reviews of memoir?) I thought about failing to finish the book. In the end, I may not have made it to my goal of 375 pages, but I did learn a whole lot about the value of shtick lit. Would I do it all again? Probably not, but I’m still glad I made the effort…
Well, I did finish the book, and I did learn a lot about the value of shtick lit. The truth is, despite the warnings of Yagoda and others whose opinions I trust, I was never reluctant to read Jacobs. I find autodidacticism and self-improvement fascinating, and greatly to be encouraged. When I took up Jacobs, my hope was to defend him and his beleaguered genre from the cynics, the ones who can’t believe that anyone acts in a spirit of genuine curiosity or enthusiasm. I’d point out, too, that nobody is forcing them to buy shtick lit; if they have a philosophical objection to bogus projects undertaken expressly to be written about, they should make themselves useful and campaign to abolish the college essay.
The cover photo of Jacobs mock-struggling to do a pull-up is a clue to the fatal flaw of this book. It is not going to be, as advertised, a “quest for bodily perfection.” It is going to be a litany of shortcomings, a chronicle of thwartings and chastenings. It will consist of Jacobs dipping his toes in a thousand different dietary and fitness fads and will read like a novelization of every health-scare story and dubious medical study that ever beckoned from a website sidebar or nagged you from your Facebook feed. And because Jacobs will flit from topic to topic, body part to body part, anxiety to anxiety, the reader will almost but not quite fail to notice that Jacobs isn’t accomplishing very much at all.
It’s not that I wasn’t expecting this. I’m familiar with the conventions of the genre. It just took seeing them at their most conventional to realize that they’re dragging the genre down. Paradoxically, Jacobs expended an astonishing amount of hard work to produce a book this lazy. In just two years, he learned to eat better, to lift weights, to reduce his exposure to environmental toxins, to run correctly, and so on. He shed 16 pounds, or eight pounds per year — a little more impressive than it sounds when you consider that he must have gained muscle weight in the process. He cut his fat in half. He wrote his entire book on a treadmill, walking over a thousand miles in the process.
His labors culminate in conclusions any fool could have seen coming: “I’ll incorporate much of what I learned” and “I’ll follow fitness expert Oscar Wilde’s advice: Be moderate in all things, including moderation.” It’s not even really fair to call these conclusions, since they probably appeared verbatim in his book proposal. You aren’t supposed to criticize an author for not having written a different book, but what if the book he’s written doesn’t need to exist? What if everyone already knows that health fads are zany and that moderation is good? A book trading on such modest insights had better be mind-bendingly funny. A quick test: Jacobs is sold on skin care when he sees two guys — “leather jackets, Harley tattoos” — at Penn Station, talking moisturizers. Do you find this a) funny, b) funny but implausible, or c) so Shoebox Greetings unfunny that it doesn’t matter if it happened or not?
Most of Jacobs’ humor is of the self-deprecating or auto-emasculating variety. “[A]s an experiment,” Jacobs writes, “I’ve been wearing my blue bike helmet as I run my errands.” Have you been, man? Is anyone laughing at this? Hack comedy is one thing, but what irks me is that someone gave Jacobs a great deal of money — he mentions his advance repeatedly — to challenge himself, and instead of doing that he’s screwing around with stuff like wearing a bike helmet in public. “Bodily perfection” implies that your 44-year-old carcass is going to scale Half Dome or complete Marine Corps boot camp. I don’t care that you ate a bushel of vegetables, tried on a CPAP, or submitted to the indignity of wearing Vibram FiveFingers sneakers. I’d like to see some results. As it stands, we don’t even get an “after” photo.
Jacobs’ crowning achievement is a modest triathlon: 11 minutes of swimming, 33 minutes of bicycling, and an unspecified amount of jogging, probably 3.1 miles. Here lies the problem with shtick lit: the pedestrian nature of its goals. When men get old and retire — when they become the target market for books making light of their Jacobs-like ineptitude — they tend to read a lot of biography. Why? Perhaps it’s because age, regret and self-criticism conspire to produce a craving for real achievement, or at least for stories about real achievement. Most of us have been half-assing it since the day we were born. Self-deprecation has become a reflex, a preemptive excuse — which is why books like Jacobs’ will climb the bestseller lists and, let’s be fair, actually entertain the average reader. Yet if shtick lit is ever to live up to its promise, it’ll have to abandon its jokesy “points for trying” mentality and start attempting the impossible in earnest.
When James Madison died, he still owned about 100 slaves. He freed none of them, not even Paul Jennings, his valet. Jennings could read and write, and in fact published the first White House memoir, declaring that Madison was “one of the best men who ever lived.” Modern biographers of Madison, such as Richard Brookhiser and Jeff Broadwater, have frankly acknowledged the shocking truth that such a politically astute and sensitive founding father utterly failed to address the problem of slavery seriously. But most, including not only Mr. Brookhiser and Mr. Broadwater, but also Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Andrew Burstein, and Nancy Isenberg, treat the issue of slavery as a thing apart, in separate chapters, instead dealing with the place of the “peculiar institution” in Madison’s life in the years after he left the presidency.
And yet there never was a time when James Madison (1751 – 1836), a third-generation slave owner, did not believe slavery was evil — or a time when he did not recognize the capabilities of African-Americans. In 1791, Madison wrote admiringly about the “industry & good management” of a free African-American landowner who could read, keep accounts and supervise six white hired men on a 2,500-acre farm. In April 1800, Madison dined with Christopher McPherson, a confident and free African-American, who came as a guest to Madison’s plantation home, Montpelier, to deliver books and letters that Madison and Jefferson sent to each other. During Madison’s terms as president, he often heard out his private secretary, Edward Coles, who objected to slavery as a violation of the natural rights doctrine that Jefferson and Madison espoused. In 1816, Jesse Torrey, a zealous abolitionist, visited Montpelier and treated Madison to a tirade against slavery, afterward sending a letter of apology — only to receive, in reply, a letter from Madison saying no apology was necessary. In 1824, Madison endured with good grace the disapproval of Lafayette, then on a triumphal tour of the United States, who visited Montpelier and told off the retired president, expressing disgust that both Jefferson and Madison, such champions of liberty, should still own slaves and support such a vile institution. In 1835, Harriet Martineau, an outspoken abolitionist and an old friend of Madison’s, visited him for the last time, afterward reporting that her host “talked more on the subject of slavery than on any other, acknowledging, without limitations or hesitation, all the evils with which it has ever been charged.”
Like Madison himself, his biographers treat slavery as a kind of dirge, faintly heard offstage and nearly drowned out by the stirring music of the freedom fighters making an American Revolution and the framers of the Constitution going about the glorious work of creating a democratic republic. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, however, wants us to listen to that more troubled theme, and the result is a revelation. In “A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons,” we’re asked to consider Madison as a “garden-variety slaveholder”: “He followed the basic patterns and norms for slaves’ living conditions and treatment that had long been established on Virginia plantations and like most owners respected the customary “rights” — such as Sundays off — that enslaved people had come to consider their due.” If it is not oxymoronic to say so, Madison was a humane slaveholder. He was also not very enterprising, in that his human holdings constituted — as they did for Jefferson — a losing economic proposition. As soon as her husband died, Dolley Madison, whose Quaker father had freed his slaves, sold off batches of her slaves in order to pay off debts.
Ms. Dowling crafts a narrative in which African-Americans are virtually never out of sight. And that makes a great deal of sense: It is unlikely that Madison ever spent a day without relying on the services of a slave. He took at least one of them with him when he traveled. And Paul Jennings was the last one out the door, clutching some of Dolley Madison’s treasures, as the British advanced during the War of 1812 and set fire to the White House.
Harriet Martineau observed with some surprise how Madison could discourse on the evils of slavery, even as slaves served him at table. It is that Madison we see in Ms. Dowling’s narrative. Here is a sample sentence: “The Virginia Resolutions [1799] was yet another appeal against tyranny that Madison drafted at the place where he lived with scores of slaves.” When Lafayette comes to Montpelier, Jennings is there beside Madison, listening, although we do not know what the slave thought. And this silence forces Ms. Dowling, all too often, to resort to what “must have been” going through Jennings’ mind. It is no wonder, then, that most historians and biographers are much more comfortable dealing with Madison’s well-documented mind. Thus Kevin R. C. Gutzman writes a stirring narrative, showing his subject’s dexterity as politician and statesman, while Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg portray how well the tag-team of Madison and Jefferson served their country.
The concluding pages of Richard Brookhiser’s concise biography seem to come closest to revealing why the mild-mannered Madison both deplored slavery and supported it; started the War of 1812, even as he was trying to negotiate peace with the British; and fought stoutly for maintaining the Union, even as he remained very much a son of the South. Mr. Brookhiser sees Madison as the epitome of the legislative mind. Madison was the man of principles who made deals, making sure the words “slave” and “slavery” did not appear in the Constitution, but also paying off his Southern vote-counting brethren with the three-fifths compromise. Slaves were partial “persons” for purposes of exerting political power. This political accommodation jibed with Madison’s statement that slaves were part of his family, but only a “degraded” part.
The legislative mind, Mr. Brookhiser suggests, has trouble with the idea of exerting executive power. Since Madison believed that he could secure no agreement among slaveholders to abolish slavery — let alone arrange some kind of compact with the North — then nothing could be done short of shipping African-Americans off to Liberia. But that strategy would work only if African-Americans themselves consented, Madison argued, and most did not. And the cost of reimbursing slaveholders proved a problem too large for Madison’s limited capacity as an economist.
But there is an even more important factor to consider in exploring why Madison, a mover and shaker of public opinion when it came to engineering such triumphs as the “Federalist Papers” to support the Constitution, never mounted a credible campaign to abolish or even attenuate the institution of slavery. From 1780 to 1784, William Gardner, Madison’s slave, resided in Philadelphia with his master, who attended meetings there of the Continental Congress. Upon Madison’s return to Virginia, Madison left Gardner behind, writing that his factotum’s mind had been “tainted” with ideas — the “contagion of liberty,” as Elizabeth Dowling Taylor puts it. This episode is reminiscent of that scene in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography when his white mistress is advised not to teach him to read, because doing so will only give him “notions” that do not befit a slave.
Madison’s idea of the American polity had no place for educated black men and women, let alone the masses of freed slaves that he believed had trouble governing themselves. No matter which biography you read, all of them eventually disclose this fundamental fact: Madison did not believe that white and black Americans could live side by side on terms of equality and amity. His failure to imagine a world more capacious and tolerant than his own helps explain a good deal of subsequent history, and America’s resistance to the very practice of equality that Madison otherwise did so much to foster.
(Credit: Bonita R. Cheshier via Shutterstock) 
