What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 18

  R is for Redux

  The Rolling Stones, The Academy of Music, New York City, May 1, 1965

  During college, I had to invent or reinvent myself every day, create a person who awoke, dragged herself out of bed, and went to class. I was morbidly depressed; life was futile. I had to move from despair and apathy to the shower, then find clothes to put on my naked body, even though for three years I wore a self-fashioned school uniform: Baggy Chinos and a long-sleeved, all-cotton, black T-shirt. A friend living near me on West 96th Street drove a Bucati, and when I could catch a ride on the back, getting to class was easier. She was depressed, too, but more manic, and sometimes she shouted above the engine and wind, “I want to kill myself.” I hugged her waist tighter then and felt my own desire to die tested.

  I met my other best college friend in a required Introduction to Sociology class. She had a bad attitude like me, she was two years older, not a freshman, very cool, but then she disappeared for a while. “I dropped out,” she told me when she returned. She also told me to take studio art classes, and I did. I listened closely to everything she said, because she knew what was really happening; for instance, she knew the night Linda Eastman and Paul McCartney slept together for the first time.

  The Beatles were cute, but they were too fresh and sunny for my dark, youthfully jaded, sort of hip character. The Rolling Stones existed for me and my friend, bad boys for bad girls. The Stones were anti-everything and suited my sensibility. My psychotherapist had asked me, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to rebel.” “Then,” she said, “my job is to make you effective.”

  The Stones were rebels—at least their songs sounded rebellious—and they appeared effective. They could have whatever they wanted: sex, drugs, cars, houses, more sex, drugs. I didn’t question the implications of their being middle class boys, the Beatles working class boys, or what rebellion worked in them. I lived inside my troubled mind, and each day had to awaken in the same bleak and unchanging world and do what I’d done yesterday or something a little different.

  Every night for dinner I broiled chicken wings and heated up canned, sliced beets. Like wearing the same shirt and pants to school, I ate the same dinner for three years, unless my knowing friend said, Come on, let’s eat out, or hear a band, or see a movie. Later, we shared a railroad apartment in the East Village. She fixed up her rooms reasonably, while I ripped plaster from a wall in one of mine, to uncover the brick, but it turned out to be the outside brick, so I stopped. The plaster lay on the floor of the room. I never cleaned it up; I couldn’t use the room anyway, because cold air blew in through the cracks.

  My friend found out when the Rolling Stones were doing their first concert in New York: May 1st, 1965, at the Academy of Music. “Satisfaction” wouldn’t come out in the States until June 1965, but we were already hardcore fans. We had to be at the Stones’ triumphal entrance into our city.

  The Academy of Music was on 14th Street between Third Avenue and Irving Place, where the Palladium would be in the ’80s. The first Academy of Music was a grand opera house, built in 1854 on the northwest corner of Irving Place and demolished in 1926. The Stones played the second Academy, erected in the ’20s across the street from the original. This one showed movies from the ’20s on, but by the ’60s, it was mostly a concert hall. Its marquee letters broken, its seats uncomfortable and seedy, its brilliance and glory faded, the Academy of Music was the right theater for the Stones, who were uncomfortable to parents, and seedy and glorious in their own way.

  We sat in the balcony, or we sat downstairs; wherever we sat, my sight lines weren’t impeded. I’m short and saw everything that happened, and a lot did and didn’t. Opening for the Stones, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, which was how she was billed, as a girl band. In their ice blue, space-age costumes and feather headdresses, with Patti’s big voice and their choreographed moves, they rocked. But the audience was indifferent. Stones fans were sullen like the band, and also we were there only for them. Patti must have been onstage an hour, and the audience grew restive. When the set ended, the group received some applause, but they didn’t get an encore. They were really fine; we were just lousy for the Stones.

  Then nothing, and nothing, and time went by, and no one came on stage, and nothing, and we were waiting and waiting. After a while, someone in the audience roared something, or there was an outbreak of off-the-beat white people’s clapping, and a few dispirited, feeble calls for the Stones. Waiting, we turned more sullen.

  Where were the fucking Stones.

  Forty-five, maybe 50 minutes passed. I don’t know how long it was, but still nothing. We were angry already; it didn’t take much to make us angrier. Where were the Stones. Where were the Stones. The question was our breath.

  People had slumped and settled into their lumpy seats, passive and aggressive both, because there was nothing to do but wait or leave, so we were trapped because we wanted the Stones. Wanting was hell, and while existentially waiting is all there is to do, we didn’t like it. There was no clapping now, no sudden shouts for the Stones, just enraged sedentary bodies.

  Then they walked out. They just walked onto the stage, as if they were going to the men’s room. They had no affect. There was no jumping or dancing or mugging. They walked onto the stage and plugged in their instruments and took their positions. They didn’t look at us, not once, except for Mick. Mick came to the front of the stage and sort of said, “Hello, New York.” He tried a little, but the rest of the band didn’t care. They didn’t want to be there, and they ignored us. Mick made another pathetic effort, that’s all it could be: “Hello, New York.”

  Brian Jones sat down on the floor. He was stage right, his head down, blond hair splayed over his face obscuring him further, his instrument lying in his lap. Maybe it was his Vox teardrop guitar or a Vox Phantom. He never looked up, the group didn’t look at us, they looked bored, and only Mick exerted himself a little, threw off some energy, but he didn’t try long. We were angry, deadened, too, and quickly Mick accepted defeat. Listlessly, the Stones started their first number. Probably they were very stoned.

  A matron stood at the edge of the stage, on the same side as Brian, but at the top of the stairs, which was the only way up there, except for leaping. She was a heavyset black woman, about 30—I don’t remember any black people in the audience—and she wore some kind of theater or usher uniform. She faced the audience, grim and solemn, with her arms crossed over her chest. The Stones were playing, and Mick was singing, Brian was sitting on the floor, head down, and I don’t remember what Keith was doing, but he wasn’t crouching the way he does now and uncoiling like a rattlesnake to strike. Charlie Watts was Charlie Watts, steady, imperturbable, playing the drums the way he’s always played the drums, and Bill Wyman was himself, unmoving and dour.

  There was a kind of stasis on stage, and in the audience. Into the third song, a hefty, dark-haired girl made a run for the stage, and up the stairs. But when she reached the top of the stairs, the matron blocked her. She gave her the hip. The girl flew down the stairs. One move, down she tumbled. The girl landed on the floor, stood up, and walked back to her seat. That was it, that was our resistance. The matron crossed her arms over her chest again and glared at us. The audience became more frustrated. The Stones hadn’t even noticed, and nothing happened again, and not one of us yelled or stood up, either, and soon the atmosphere turned solidly against the band.

  The Stones played eight songs, the songs were three or four minutes each. They were onstage less than half an hour. They finished their set and walked off the way they’d walked on. They just walked off. No one clapped or shouted, everyone was fed up, pissed off, let down. We’d become the anti-audience, and rose, grabbed our jackets, left our seats and filed out. There was no fighting, no talking. We’d all been rebuffed, like the hefty, dark-haired girl. The audience spilled onto 14th Street, a morose confederacy of rebels. It was early evening.

  I suppose my friend and I went out for something to eat. Or
maybe I went home and ate sliced beets and broiled chicken wings. Life continued, but something had changed: the Rolling Stones had played New York.

  By now, the Stones have changed a lot. Brian drowned, murdered, it’s alleged, by his assistant; Mick Taylor quit, so Ron Wood plays lead guitar; Darryl Jones plays bass, since Bill Wyman retired; and Mick’s, Keith’s and Charlie’s faces are cross-hatched and filigreed with event and experience. I’ve changed, too. For one thing, I have stopped eating wings exclusively, though I eat chicken. I still love beets, but now fresh and roasted, and order them whenever they’re on a menu. I still like to wear a uniform of sorts, but now I buy six or seven pairs of the same, usually black pants, about that number of the same all-cotton, long-sleeved T-shirts, and many of the same linen, rayon or silk blouses. I buy everything in different colors. Life isn’t as bleak, with some variety.

  Underworld

  “Bigness is theoretical domain at this fin de siècle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential, reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility.”—Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL

  Contemporary writers worry about the place of writing the cultural space for books. The novel is an endangered species, as fiction faces down confessions and “real-life” stories. “True” today means “actually happened,” and invention and imagination are dirty words, viewed as suspiciously as communism in the 1950s. More fiction and nonfiction books are published, but most vanish without a trace, so not only writers, but also publishers and editors are depressed. The phrase “return of 1996,” the industry’s LA earthquake (when books were returned to publishers in record numbers), is repeated like a mantra. The picture is not getting better: “The latest survey from the Association of American Publishers shows that net sales of hardcover books are down by 12 per cent per year to date and books are being returned to publishers at an average rate of 45 per cent,” reports The New York Times. The context in which books are written and published is unstable, unpredictable, and who knows how to account for taste, anyway.

  In the 1950s, when Don DeLillo’s new novel Underworld begins, there was a notion—the great American novel. It has disappeared and in its place, probably under Reagan, great became big. Publishers publish big or little books: authors are big or little, midlist or midcareer. Big, mid, little don’t measure page-length, but how the book will be positioned. Marketing determines “big” or “little” more than the way the book is written, its ideas, length, cost. What it’s been paid, the advance, is a variable, but a book with a small advance may become “big,” depending upon how it’s seen in-house, whether editors and salespeople think it can “break out.” If a little book sells, it can become big, the surprise publisher and authors make money from. Martin Amis is reported to have called our big books “Big Macs.” In fast-food America, everyone agonizes about fat, but wants to be a big, fat deal. Undoubtedly, we’re a nation of size queens.

  Don DeLillo understands bigness, economics and capitalism. The underworld of Underworld, its base, is economic; its epilogue, titled Das Kapital, underscores that. Structurally, or superstructurally, DeLillo’s novel makes capital. Underworld opens with the 1951 World Series game where the series-winning home run baseball Bobby Thomson hit starts as a fan’s treasure, fought for, won, then stolen. It flies through Underworld’s pages as an underground economic and cultural signifier, its value unifying characters’ desires.

  The baseball circulates. Underworld is, in part, an examination of circulation whether marking a meeting of powerful men at that game—J. Edger Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra—or the fates of lovers, Nick Shay and Klara Sax, waste analyst and artist, respectively. After an illicit sexual moment, they go their separate ways, taking other into the world as memory.

  Memory is another underworld and, in Underworld, it functions as a kind of currency. When intact, memory is as hard as Thompson’s home-run ball, with its strange history that only fans and collectors care about. Along with the baseball, the atomic bomb, atomic energy, and waste blow treacherously. Taste as human excess and folly must be managed, like memory, and hangs in characters’ minds and in the air. If there’s an enemy in Underworld, it’s forgetfulness, the denial of history.

  DeLillo’s ambition in Underworld is to join the history of post-war America as a series of events to certain characters, who are shaped more by circumstance than psychology. Hoover’s power and paranoia, the Zapruder film, the firebombing of black churches, the Cuban missile crisis, Lenny Bruce, AIDS, cyberspace—events and things collect and make history. Terrifying weapons, mute objects and traumatic memories proliferate. Underworld’s a proliferation, or a collection, of 40 years of great issues and small ones. DeLillo seems to have wanted to put everything he could into it, as if a book could be a time capsule, which demonstrates DeLillo’s ongoing concern with what we leave to the future, with history. While history may be a collective memory that must be kept alive, fiction plays its role in keeping records for posterity. Like many writers, DeLillo may be concerned, too, with what his work will mean for posterity.

  These concerns are probably being fanned by fin-de-siècle anxiety. DeLillo’s previous novel, Mao II, focused on the place of the novelist, with a desire, perhaps, to “reclaim maximum possibility” for fiction. Appearing after the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Mao II and its protagonist Bill Gray may have spoken for many writers: “In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence . . . I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. . . Because we’re giving way to terror, to news of terror . . . news of disaster is the only narrative people need.” His interlocutor argues: “Are you crazy? Writers have long-range influence.”

  Do writers have long-range influence? Long-range like missiles? Reading Underworld, one wonders if the author of Mao II decided that for a novel to make an impact now, it must be big in all senses, cover a wide swath of history over many pages, “to reconstruct the Whole.” Though the Whole has never existed and the Real is not available, these illusions nourish fiction. Fiction responds to a multitude of losses, fantasies and wishes. Underworld’s Lenny Bruce’s monologues, reconstructed from Bruce’s LPs and DeLillo’s memory, and its marking of actual events appear to address what Mao II’s Gray thinks novels must do—compete with, or at least challenge, the big, nightly news.

  Whether it’s a conscious or unconscious gesture, making things big also responds to being scaled back and down, to holes that need filling or to significance that needs restoring, from an America that never was—innocent—to fiction’s shaky, minimized place. The circulation of books may be thwarted by capitalism looking for fast profits, but the meanings of books accrue, slowly, over time. Especially fiction. Fiction imagines lives and ideas and doesn’t immediately announce its value.

  S is for Gertrude Stein and George Saunders

  Who’s Afraid of Gertrude Stein?

  Approaching Gertrude Stein’s writing critically is tricky. She strove to reshape literary conventions—syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense—so any comment on Stein’s choices may already be rebuffed or unsettled in her poetics and practice. Actually, Stein is tricky, even a trickster. This may be why, as I read IDA and Stanzas in Meditation, both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered John Cale’s singing, “Nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole.”

  Gertrude Stein is called a genius, and through that brilliant lens her writing gets read or is not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. Curiously, other writers are called geniuses, but the term doesn’t suffocate the reception of their writing as much. Obviously, readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer Shakespeare’s Richard III to Richard II or Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Orlando. They feel at liberty to discriminate.

  F
ewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand. Maybe this happened because she has been claimed as the sine qua non of the avant-garde. But she aligned herself with her time. Being part of the “contemporary composition” is at the heart of Stein’s trenchant essay, originally a lecture, “Composition as Explanation.” “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” Stein inscribed novelty and surprise, through her special prose, to explain their appearance generation to generation and theorized why the new in art and writing may first be thought “ugly,” then later “beautiful” or “classic.” In that same essay, she declared: “No one is ahead of his time.” A future artist, Andy Warhol, said, “I’m part of my time, like rockets and television.” Uncannily, both Stein and Warhol occupy ambivalent places in American culture. They’re adored and also big jokes, both recognized even if only for a single utterance. Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Warhol: “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” But people have called Warhol an asshole.

  “For Stein,” Peter Nicholls writes in his important book, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, “language is to be grasped not as a means of reference to a world of objects which can be dominated, but as a medium of consciousness.” Stein’s works of consciousness depend on a reader’s consciousness, and unconscious-ness, to engage them. Otherwise, her writing is flat, dead, the rhythms and her play with words, her biting wit and clarity, lost.

  IDA: A Novel was published by Random House in 1941, but excerpts appeared from 1937. The Yale reissue contains reviews from the day and versions from Stein’s notebooks, showing the novel’s development during those years. Its editor, Logan Esdale, has written an excellent introduction (and notes throughout) containing necessary biographical and textual information. One learns that fame was much on Stein’s mind when writing IDA, her own and Wallis Simpson’s, the American divorcee who became the Duchess of Windsor. Stein’s new fame rested on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in America in 1933. The book became very popular and gained Stein a wide readership and celebrity. With the onset of fame, Stein questioned how her work would be received because of it.