How to Be Alone (23 page)

HIKING IS WHAT I DO
for fun in Manhattan on windy days or after sundown, when the diesel fumes lift. I’m a recreational walker, and in the last few years I’ve noticed something odd when I’ve hit the sidewalks of suburban St. Louis and suburban Colorado: a not negligible percentage of the men speeding by me in their cars or sport-utility vehicles (it’s always men) feel moved to yell obscenities at me. It’s hard to know why they do this. The only things unusual about me are that I’m not driving and that I’m not wearing teal and purple or a backward baseball cap. My guess is that they yell at me simply because I’m a stranger, and from the perspective of their glassed-in vehicles I have no more human reality than the coach on their TV screens who has elected to punt on fourth and short.

I’ve been yelled at in New York, too, but only by deinstitutionalized psychotics, and then only in the midst of fellow subway riders who sympathized with me. Jane Jacobs identified as a hallmark of city life the existence of privacy in heavy crowds—a privacy whose maintenance depends not on the pseudoparental expedients of isolated houses and controlled shopping environments but on modes of adult behavior best learned in public spaces like the sidewalk. That the country’s widely decried “breakdown of civility” began at home, rather than in so-called urban jungles, can be confirmed at any movie theater, where audiences accustomed to watching videos in the bedroom have forgotten how to shut up.

In
Death and Life
Jacobs also quoted Paul Tillich, who believed that the city, by its very nature, “provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs,
I’m
the stranger; I feel exposed. Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

I’m not so innocently enamored of cities, of course, as not to see that the plate-glass windows of Silicon Alley serve purposes of display similar to those of the CRT screens behind them: that the hidden link between Fashion Café and Cyber Café is a culture of Being Seen. It’s possible to worry, too, that young people who come to Manhattan seeking what I seek—centrality, the privacy of crowds, the satisfaction of being a fly in the ointment—will eventually be repelled by the miasma of Disneyfication that is hanging over SoHo and Fifty-seventh Street and creeping into the East Village and Times Square. For now, though, I work and sleep in a building that houses two dressmakers, a realtor, an antiques dealer, a caterer, and a fish seller. When I lie on the floor and relax by listening to my breathing, I can hear the slower respirations of the city itself, a sound like the rumble of a surf: subway trains crowded with people who are teaching themselves how to be here.

[1995]

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.