What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read online

  What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

  For Dr. Stanley Grand

  Red Lemonade

  a Cursor publishing community

  Brooklyn

  Copyright © 2014 by Lynne Tillman.

  Library of Congress Control Number available from the Library of Congress.

  Book Design by Luke Gerwe

  Copyediting by Nora Nussbaum

  eBook ISBN:978-1-9358-6922-1

  Red Lemonade

  a Cursor publishing community

  Brooklyn, New York

  www.redlemona.de

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Table of Contents

  Lynne Tillman by Colm Tóibín

  A is for Andy

  B is for the Bowleses

  C is for Character

  C is for Cool

  D is for Dictionary

  E is for Etel and Eggleston

  F is for Fox

  F is for the Future

  G is for Goldin

  H is for Harry

  I is for I

  J is for Jokes

  K is for Kafka

  L is for Lamentation

  M is for Marx

  M is for Mordant

  N is for New York

  O is for Outlaw

  P is for Points of View

  Q is for Quiet

  R is for Redux

  S is for Stein and Saunders

  T is for What Would Lynne Tillman Do

  U is for Unheimlich

  V is for Virtual

  W is for Wharton

  X is for X-rated

  Y is for Yearning

  Z is for Jonze

  Lynne Tillman

  Her aura as she moved onto the stage was both casual and nervous. It was clear that she had done this before. She was not going to stumble or fumble to get the audience on her side, but that confidence was matched by a guardedness, an unease, and a way of maintaining a distance that might have been theatrical. I was not sure. In one of her books, she writes of a character: “Once she dreamed, on the night before a reading she was to give, that rather than words on paper, there were tiny objects linked one to another, which she had to decipher instantly, and turn into words, sentences, a story, flawlessly, of course.”

  She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate. There was an ironic undertow in her voice, and a sense that she had it in for earnestness, easy emotion, realism. She exuded a tone which was considered, examined and then re-examined. She understood, it seemed to me, that everything she said would have to be able to survive the listeners’ intelligence and sense of irony; her own intelligence was high and refined, her sense of irony knowing and humorous.

  I had not come across anyone like her before. It was May 1990 and both of us were touring what they call the United Kingdom in the company of an English writer. All three of us were promoting books. Although I had been in New York once and had read American fiction and seen the movies, I had never really known any Americans. Thus I could not place Lynne Tillman. All I could do was watch her.

  One thing she said made me laugh. When our English friend spoke of London and how hard it was to live there since it was so large and one had to travel miles and miles to have supper with friends, and then, if they moved, one often had to travel farther and indeed farther to see them, Lynne looked pained at all this talk of traveling and said: “Oh, no. In New York, if someone moves more than a few blocks away, you just drop them.”

  In one of the cities, there was a friend of mine in the audience. The following morning, as we were setting out on a long journey by car, our English colleague having found her own transport, I had a feeling that Lynne was fragile. But it did not stop her asking about my friend. I still could not read her tone and was not certain that there was not an edge of mockery in her voice, perhaps mockery at the very idea of having a friend who lived in a provincial part of the United Kingdom.

  I decided it was time to do something.

  “Do you like Joni Mitchell?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied instantly.

  “Well, my friend was like Richard in Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard.’ Would you like me to sing the relevant lines?”

  “No,” she said again.

  As I seemed to be preparing to sing, she appealed to the driver.

  I began to sing. (I am not a good singer.)

  Richard got married to a figure skater

  And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator

  And he drinks at home now most night with the TV on

  And all the house lights left up bright.

  Lynne Tillman moaned as we drove north. And even when the singing ended, she moaned more in case it might start again. I gave her ample feeling that the risk was high, as I took her though the lyrics of “A Case of You,” “California,” and “Little Green.” Often, I threatened to sing the words out, rather than simply recite them, just to help us on our journey, but even the driver protested. I liked the idea that Lynne Tillman, who I thought then—wrongly, as I discovered—was the coolest person alive, had met me, a boy from a small town in Ireland who was a complete fool and had not learned any strategies to disguise this dreadful and shameful fact. It might not have helped that my reading the previous evening had given strong intimations that I had been trained in the old school to understand the importance of being earnest and that I had not gone to any other school.

  During the days that followed, Lynne Tillman got a pain in her back. She often had to lie flat on the ground. Maybe it was caused by the English motorways; maybe it was caused by having to do a reading every night; maybe it was a leftover from jet lag. But there remained a feeling in the air that her back pain had been caused by me. The pain was not improved by my attempting at one point to pat her heartily on the afflicted region and telling her that she would be better soon. But slowly, perhaps because I was reading her book in the evenings and listening carefully to her readings, I was learning that she was a much more complex figure than I had imagined when I saw her first. She was more thoughtful and serious somehow, also kinder and more considerate and oddly vulnerable. And also, more than anything, she was a rich noticer of strange things and a good maker of sentences and phrases.

  *

  In the 1930s, as the writer Samuel Beckett tried to make sense of himself, he attended a lecture by Carl Jung in London in which Jung outlined the case of a patient, now adult in age, who had not actually been born, whose spirit, or essence, or essential self had not come into the world when the body did. For any writer of fiction, such an idea is fascinating. (“Sometimes,” Lynne Tillman wrote, “Madame Realism felt as if she just didn’t exist.”) For many people such a condition is almost normal; for writers it is almost a regular part of being alive in the world and a central part of the process of inventing character in fiction. In much fiction done in the years after Jung’s lecture, there is always something missing, something which has not been integrated. The point is to explore that lovely missing thing, a thing whose very absence may indeed constitute the self, the core, the ache. It is possible that the idea of a personality or a person without this flaw, or this gift, or whatever we want to call it—Beckett liked to call it Murphy or Watt or Malone or Moran or Winnie—is a myth or a dream or an image from an advertisement for something, and that it is the task of novelists to dramatize the gap between the strangeness of being alive filled with glittering and fleeting desires, filled with shattering absences, and the ideal, whole, and intolerable completed person—what we might also think of as creating the credible character. “Identity is such a fragile thing,” Til
lman’s Madame Realism muses in an essay on Freud. In an interview conducted by Tillman for Bomb magazine, the artist Peter Dreher remarked: “But maybe, more important, is a feeling that perhaps I was born with, that everybody is born with: that one is somehow floating between thoughts, between literature, speaking, continents, races, and so on. I think, more or less, each of us today, maybe more than a hundred years ago, has this feeling.”

  This feeling is inhabited with relish and sometimes with shivering awe by Lynne Tillman in her fiction and in her critical writing. Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing. An observation; a dry fact; a memory; something noticed; someone encountered; a joke; something wry; a provocation; something playful. This is not, as in Beckett, a way of inviting company to the dark and lonely ceremony of being. Tillman is content to put these items on the page, and hold and wield her tones, merely because they are in the world; they occurred to her at a certain time; they are part of the day and maybe the night. She is ready to admit them because they live in the mind, and she is excited by the mind, its freedoms and its restrictions, how it wanders and becomes voice and how the voice slowly takes on the guise of a presence moving from the ghostly to the almost real, as the pages are turned.

  *

  There is a game in David Lodge’s novel Small World in which the highly educated characters vie with each other to name famous and canonical books that they have not bothered to read. (The winner, by the way, has not read Hamlet.) For anyone writing now, or indeed for many readers, there is a serious edge to this game. Increasingly, the canon, the accepted list of great and good books, seems like merchandise, something created to be consumed, carefully packaged for you and all your family. The canon seems concerned to hold on to power, the power of the middle ground. Other voices, other systems of seeing, are excluded with something close to deliberation; they are reduced to being marginal, eccentric. Slowly then what is out of fashion moves out of print.

  For anyone serious about writing, it is often the book that has been forgotten or dismissed, the writer you found on your own, the story or poem or presence that has been too strange for others, that has mattered most, that has made you in its likeness. Creating space for your own work involves creating space for the work that made a difference to you. This is why artists write essays; they do so to reposition the way we read or the way we respond so that the work they do can be read or seen more clearly. It is the same reason, if there is a reason, plants grow toward light.

  Lynne Tillman’s essays, and indeed the interviews she has given and conducted, are thus an essential part of her work. Her response to books is daring, sharp; she allows for mystery, beauty, strangeness, but she also allows for complexity, coolness, distance. She does not accept that there is a mystical relationship between the world and the book. In contemplating Warhol in “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol,” for example, Tillman writes: “Books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing.” Writing, for her, is like writing, if it is like anything, and it probably isn’t like anything; words, for her, come from words, they have their own shape and sound. When, in the same essay, she arrives at the phrase “in real time,” she knows to ask “whatever that is.” Naming for her is re-naming. There are words and concepts that do not connect for her. “Existence,” for example, is “a shaggy-dog story.” “Redemption,” she writes, “from my point of view, is an American disease.” And she adds, in her essay on Paula Fox’s Borrowed Finery: “Contemporary novels have become a repository for salvation; characters—and consequentially readers—are supposed to be saved at the end.”

  Tillman is, as she quotes the photographer William Eggleston saying of his own work, “at war with the obvious.” Some allies matter to her in this war, and they include Jane and Paul Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, Paula Fox, Chet Baker, Etel Adnan, Harry Mathews, John Waters, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton.

  While writing for her does not reflect life, whatever life is, this does not mean that, for her, fiction does not somehow come from the world and is not a strange and angled response in language to what is beyond its pages. She insists, for example, on the importance of the public realm and the place of literature within the public realm, indeed the connection between literary form itself and the shape of politics. “These days,” she writes in “Body Parts for Sale”:

  the west gloats over the demise of communism, the premise being that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The demise of totalitarianism from the left or right is something to be happy about, but I’m left wondering what capitalism offers, apart from a certain economic system, to the spirit that haunts our Gothic stories, and to a sense of how society should be run, to a sense of what common goals can be. Dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest are appropriate metaphors for not just the capitalist ethic but also for the production of Gothic perambulations. In our country without adequate health care and housing, a country first decimated by Reagan’s criminal grotesqueries and Bush’s new world order, what more credible form is there?

  Tillman allows her intelligence to range over many questions. In “Downtown’s Room in Hotel History” her analysis in one paragraph of the power and lure of downtown Manhattan for a generation of artists is definitive:

  Downtown’s shows and parties, held inside a small perimeter, allowed for quick comings and goings. You never had to stay; you could usually walk home. This cosmopolitan life, rootless, maybe, sometimes unheimlich, uncanny, ordained that home wasn’t necessarily homey. The city grew fields of the unfamiliar and unexpected, which trumped the humdrum. The city’s virtues and Modernist values—such as strangers and strangeness—were the small town’s vices and fears.

  Tillman has no time for the unexamined sentence, and, since the process of examination gives her prose an energy, the more she thinks the more she can make sparks fly. This, for example, is a paragraph about John Waters, from her essay “Guide for the Misbegotten”:

  Though irony is mother’s milk to him, Waters’s quest for genuine communication inside bullshit-free zones propels him toward worlds with and without irony. Sincerely insincere, insincerely sincere, authentically inauthentic, inauthentically authentic, his work vexes the normative and all the usual binaries. Oppositional terms can’t tell the stories he wants to tell. The mash-up of in-betweenness sparks Waters’s imagination, where insincerity can be sincere, sincerity ironic. Waters prodigiously exaggerates the deficiencies of false dichotomies; each side of the aisle is desperately wanting. All this ongoing worry about “authenticity” in art and life, his oeuvre suggests, is moot, since human beings may be incapable of inauthenticity. Con artist Bernie Madoff’s commission of fraud doesn’t make Madoff a fraud: he’s absolutely Madoff.

  Tillman is also funny. “At parties I observe people acting much like dogs,” she writes in her essay “Blame It on Andy,” “except for sniffing rear ends, which is generally done in private.” In her review of a history of shit, she remarks that the author’s “tongue is often in his cheek.” Sometimes, the wit is unsettling. When she writes, for example, in “Doing Laps Without a Pool,” that “fish probably don’t know they’re in water” and then adds, “(who can be certain though),” I, as the reader, become uncertain. I think about fish, and the sheer tragedy—or maybe sadness is a better word, or maybe even comedy—of their not perhaps knowing something so obvious, so—how can we put it?—clear-cut, staring you in the face. And then I think about certainty. I stand up and move around the room, opening and shutting my mouth like a fish, wondering if I really know where I am, forgetting about fish for the moment. Then I go back and look at the last two sentences Tillman has written in that paragraph about fish to see if there is any comfort there. “Complacency is writing’s most determined enemy,” she writes, “and we writers, and readers, have been handed an ambiva
lent gift: doubt. It robs us of assurance, while it raises possibility.” That last sentence is very beautiful, but you would have to be not a fish to appreciate it. Or at least I think so. I wonder what Joni Mitchell would think.

  *

  Lynne Tillman’s essay on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is the finest essay that anyone has written on that book. This essay, “A Mole in the House of the Modern,” is also a key to elements in Tillman’s own work and indeed to her sensibility as an artist. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, in Tillman’s telling, wants something from life that life cannot give her, and it is that desire, “her magnificent desire to be herself,” in all its complexity and seriousness and richness, which destroys her for the world but re-creates her for the reader. Slowly, as her power diminishes, another force in Lily, the force released by her imagination, becomes dominant, as voice in a novel becomes dominant over character, as tone and texture over plot.

  By emphasising questions of space in Wharton, Tillman focuses on confinement. In doing this, she manages to capture the idea that Lily Bart is trapped in a cell of her own making, a cell which is the only place where someone as original as she can feel enclosed and nurtured and engaged and then destroyed.

  In contemplating confinement and space, Tillman considers Wharton’s style:

  But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lushness, display, every embellishment. Rarely extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and it in it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman dangling the world on a rich string. And she wrote, perhaps explained, early on in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”