Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

Real Risks

12 PHILLIP LOPATE Every time I momentarily lose a sense of orientation, like asking myself in the midst of some domestic family squabble what am I doing here or who am I (such moments of vagueness do not decrease with aging), I think back to the last piece I wrote and tell myself, “Aha, I am the author of—” it could be a lengthy tome, or a book review or semi-hack article I wrote last week, doesn’t matter, the point is that I experience an instantaneous congealing of self-confidence. Sometimes I walk about the streets of Brooklyn and tell myself, like a parent reassuring a child, that I am the author of a whole shelf of books, it was always my dream to take up a shelf in the library, and I’m almost at that point, having written maybe a dozen titles, edited a half-dozen more, and contributed ten more introductions to picture books or other authors’ reissued texts that get my name put on the cover and/or spine of the volume. You would think that anyone who had already generated so prolific a corpus (we will defer the question of quality for the moment, or indefinitely) would be mature enough not to need to have to resort to such petty incantations, but such is not the case. I need to pat myself on the back constantly because without this reminder of my literary output I fear I would vaporize. The negative corollary of this phenomenon is that every time I finish a book, I become very morbid and think I am going to die soon. It is as though, having cleared the decks, or the desk, I no longer have an excuse to live. Actually, even before finishing a book, when I am still in the final stages, I begin to have the hit-by-a-truck fantasy: walking through the streets of Brooklyn, I ask myself if my manuscript has reached a point sufficiently far along that, were I hit by a truck and killed instantly, it could still be published, with a short note, of course, by my widow or agent or editor explaining the circumstances. I brood about where I left my manuscript, and if it is in an overt enough place on my desk or the piles of papers beside the desk so that my wife could find it, after she Real Risks






















CH004.qxd 7/15/09 7:28 AM Page 12 REAL RISKS 13 has gone through the necessary grief-and-burial period, or so that she could locate it on my computer, and initiate the search for a publisher, assuming she liked it enough not to suppress it (one can never be sure about such things). Then the day comes when I have definitely finished the manuscript, for better or worse, and it is a book, or potential book. I take it to the photocopy shop and have three copies made. I give one to a friend and another to my agent. The third I leave with my wife. And I begin to think of death. Sometimes these thoughts take the form of fantasizing approaching some friend, and asking him to become my literary executor. This fantasy of the chosen friend is shot though with Hawthorne-Melville unconsummated homoeroticism , except the brunt of this romanticized turn in the relationship will start from the moment I die, necrophiliacally, so to speak: Who will love me enough, once I become a ghost, to put up with the bother of being my executor? First I have to go through a rigorous analysis of all my friendships and ask which one of them I trust the most. Many have let me down in the past; these are easily eliminated; but I must also cross off the list those dependable friends who are older than myself and who might not be around long enough to agitate to keep my books in print, or, even more improbably, get the out-of-print ones re-issued. There is also a large stack of my uncollected work (journalistic articles, film and book reviews, ephemeral essays, poems, juvenilia) which a really alert, industrious literary trustee might find a way to see into print. How to locate all that material? I have made the problem easier by tossing new pieces as I write them into a folder which I keep on the ledge of my bookcase, but the process is very...