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  • Talking to Myself
  • Eugene Goodheart (bio)

When you speak, an audience is present, and you need to calculate more quickly than you may be able to your effect upon it. You have no time to arrange or rearrange your face to the world. When you write, during the time that you write, you have nothing to fear but yourself. You are your own audience. Eventually there may be an audience of others for what you have written, but by then you have had time to premeditate how you wish to appear. Having yourself as an audience, however, doesn't free you to say everything that is on your mind. In becoming a reader of what you write or a listener to what you say you need to overcome the censor in you. There are always taboos that prevent you from exposing yourself, even from thinking certain thoughts. The writer in you has apprehensions about the reader in you. What is at stake is not the esteem of others, but your self-esteem.

A lifelong academic friend of mine for whom writing is such an ordeal that he has never managed to compose an extended piece of work imagines enviously that I find consolation in writing—as if the activity were the equivalent of a satisfying meal or an invigorating swim or a masterful game of tennis. [End Page 115] It is none of these things. I would never want to give my papers to a library because I would be ashamed of the scribblings that preceded my achievement of lucidity, ashamed even of the handwriting. There is nothing beautiful in the act of writing things down. Nor is it always the intense and focused activity that one thinks of as necessary to successful achievement. When I write, I am too often distracted, inclined to self-interruption, and susceptible to the feeling that what I am doing may not be worthwhile. Late in life I took up the writing of personal essays. It has become for me a compulsion and also an occasion for bemusement.

Growing up, you think about making a career. You want to succeed, to triumph. You have little time for reflection on the significance of success and failure. All you know is that you want to succeed and avoid failure. Aging gives you something else—an appreciation of the value of failure. You realize how much more interesting are our failures than our successes. The stories we read and that absorb us are devoted to the errancy of living. "In the middle of the journey of my life I lost my way." We are always losing our way, and, though the impulse is to refind it, we may look up and around at the place where we are lost and find things out about ourselves that we never suspected. In American Pastoral Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's stand-in, contemplates the hero of the novel, whom he had excessively admired for his exploits on the basketball court: "[The Swede] invoked in me, when I was a boy—as he did in hundreds of other boys—the strongest fantasy I had of being someone else. But to wish oneself into another's glory, as a boy or as a man, is an impossibility . . . on aesthetic grounds if you are [a writer]. To embrace your hero in his destruction, however—to let your hero's life occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself . . . not in his mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall—well, that's worth thinking about."

Why? Is this the natural sadism of the writer who needs failure and destruction to have a story to tell? There is the benign view, cultivated by moralists and psychoanalysts that stories (narratives is the fancier word) shape our lives. But the real discoveries may come when a life loses its shape, its routine look. The writer wants to pull things apart, so that he can see what has been hidden in the seams. Stephen Dedalus speaks of errors as the "portals of discovery." There are, of course, failed lives whose principals...

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