Stephen Koch

By pure coincidence, Cambridge University Press has published the letters of Samuel Beckett in the same week that The New Yorker has published, in its March 9 issue, D.T. Max’s intellectually floodlit and desperately sad profile of the decline and death by suicide of a great literary star of the nineties, the late David Foster Wallace.

I confess that neither Beckett nor Wallace ever got much beyond the outer rooms of my life as a reader. I feel a lot of respect for Beckett and a fair amount for Wallace, but I’ve never loved or even much liked either one of them.  Wallace always struck me as a young person’s artist: a brilliant, driven kid who insisted on showing off in ways no fully grownup writer would permit, running himself (and me) ragged in a squirrel cage of academic platitudes. (Modernism! Pomo! Irony! Ya-Da-Yaaaaa!)  Beckett? In the years since his death, his reputation has shrunk a little, but thanks to three wonderful plays, (Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape, and okay, Godot) plus the prose trilogy, (Molloy, Malone Dies, and  The Unnamable), his position as a Major Figure is secure.

Yet D.T. Max’s harrowing account of Wallace’s depressive illness has gripped me as much as the poor guy’s work ever quite did, and it brings my feelings about both Beckett and Wallace, and the rough, ragged muse of depression they both served, into tight alignment.

Wherever Beckett’s work may land in the twenty-first century, I have some pretty severe reservations about its role in the cultural politics of the twentieth. Starting around 1955, high-toned upper-tier opinion—routine highbrowism—became all-too enchanted with the sort of depressive ironies that Beckett knew how to play so very well: the elegance of impasse, for example; or the sly, desolate humor of joylessness; or a close to mindless preoccupation with a negating irony as the superior form of consciousness. Bleakness became beauty. Unmediated emotion looked like banality. Purposelessness was the highest truth. All the very best people went slumming on desolation row.

Samuel Beckett didn’t invent this kind of attitude, and certainly he never served its vulgarization, but he was one of its main artistic eminences, and that vulgarization did serve his success. The vulgarization ran deep, and after forty years of it, much assisted by the academy, a highly ironized pessimism degenerated into the smog of a dime-store nihilism, a pack of clichés cluttering the cultural Identikits of several generations. And Max’s profile makes clear that, precisely because those clichés were prime intellectual fodder for his mental disease, David Foster Wallace’s immersion in them—and his struggle against them—played no small part in his ultimate defeat by the noonday demon.

Dwight Garner’s New York Times review of Beckett’s letters quotes the Irish master: “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” A very elegant turn, really the perfection of irony. I happen to think its elegance is more than a little fatuous. It is stupefied, even slightly stupid, irony.  It sounds like wisdom. It is really the reverse of wisdom. It looks like an insight. It is really a symptom—I mean this literally, medically—of a life-threatening disease. All terribly ironic, no?

The sad truth is that David Foster Wallace, as his brilliant gifts were being murdered within him by his disease, actually believed this kind of nihilistic nonsense and died in the grip of a pathology that left him fatally disarmed before its emptiness and falsehood. His death—which may have been preventable—is filled with meaning, but the falsity of those clichés is part of it.

The American generation that came of age in the late eighties and nineties has lost its first culture hero. That leaves a large lump in my throat. I feel for all the tens of thousands of bright young people—many were my students—who loved Infinite Jest and felt David Foster Wallace spoke for them. Maybe this indescribably sad artist may turn out to be more meaningful in death than in life.  In any case, T.D. Max tells his life and death story in what is also one of the most challenging pieces of literary criticism I have read in a long time.

Read the piece.  Before you read Malone Dies or Infinite Jest, read it. It’s a map of the bloody crossroads where art and psychiatry meet.

Slip me some truth serum, and I might confess what I see as the unseen flaw of every book I’ve ever written. Even though I work very hard on every one and invariably hand my publisher the very best I can do, I know in my heart that each book has its flaws. I even know pretty much what those flaws are.  Mind you, this is not an apology. I am plenty proud of my writing.

But perfection?  Even a book like The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, which regularly revels in warmth of generous praise like this has …well, its special little secret. And so far, it seems only I know what that secret is. At least, not one of the book’s countless critics has guessed it so far. And now, even without any sodium pentathol in my Christmas martini, I’ve decided to reveal it now. So get ready, get set… revelation!

There’s a whole chapter missing from the book. It’s a major, mind-changing, indispensable chapter, about something that defines writers’ lives like nothing else, and it’s just not there. It never got written.  In fact, I never even contemplated writing that chapter until well after The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop was out and in the stores.

There is no chapter on the writer’s subject. Except for some passages in the chapter called “The Story of the Self,” the MLWW says next to nothing about the elephant in the room, the big, blunt question: What are you going to write about?

My only defense—and it’s a poor defense—is that I am not alone. My impression is that a failure to explore finding your subject matter is one of the most common shortcomings of writers’ workshops all across the country…very possibly including the one you’re in right now. Many writing teachers have precious little to say about the subject of subject, and that little is often not very helpful. All too often, the attitude seems to be that a writer’s relation to her or his subject should be intuited, found by magic, defined by some ineffable process that is beyond discussion. The real subject of art is lies…  um, within. Right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In my experience, writers who start out with a firm grip on whatever turns out to be the right subject for them are in the minute minority. Gifted young writers are almost always in touch with their talent long before they have a clue about what they should be writing about. That is a very real problem, and young writers rarely get much help with it—including, I regret to say, from The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop.

I can’t provide the whole missing chapter of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop in this blog, but I can get down some basic thoughts on the subject of subject. Some of my points will be obvious. Some are counterintuitive. One is controversial. All are important.

• You must have a subject. Neglect it at your peril. It is impossible and pointless to say you’re writing about “yourself,” or about “everything,” or about “whatever.” Almost always, the firmer your grip on your subject, the better your prose will be.
• You are not a subject.  You are a person. Even in a memoir, your story must be shaped by your relationship to people or things other than yourself, and they define your subject more than you do.
• Your subject must be interesting. And I mean objectively interesting, interesting to to you and the other people whom you have to make care about what you have to say. Your own interest alone is never enough. We are all interesting to ourselves. The path to subject is genre. And the path to genre is subject. No subject, including that “big story” you want to tell about your own life, will come alive until you find the right way to talk about it. That means, until you find the kind of story—the genre—you need to make it live.  The union of genre with subject is the way—the only way—things become meaningful on the page.

This last point is the controversial one. What I insist is the vital bond between subject and genre is a real table-pounder. Among writers, the issue of genre almost always starts some sort of argument—over commercialism, over modernism, over good and bad taste…it’s just endless. That’s why so many writing teachers shy away from the subject of subject.

No matter. You’ve got to face it. The living link between subject and genre is baffling and mysterious, but like many mysteries, it is also ridiculously simple once solved. And every writer must resolve it, usually more than once, in her or his own way.

I’ll be returning to the subject of subject here many times.

Until then, I hope you’re enjoying a good end-of-the-year glow. The Most-Important-Grown-Up and I and the teenager Angelica are currently visiting Grandma in Waltham, Massachusetts. We all celebrated Christmas quite happily, though I’m the only one also celebrated the Feast of the Nativity.

In church, I mean.

That’s because I’m the religiously observant one. Betcha didn’t know that! There’s real controversy for you.

And a good subject.