Gus Blaisdell Collected

Working Through It: Letters to Ross Feld

∙ 316 ∙ Working through it Writing, Reading, and Moviegoing in the Dark ■ Excerpts from Letters to Ross Feld [August 26, 1983] Iwrite now from the upping end of an occupational hazard that you are familiar with: a writer’s depression. Dürer recommended the study of a musical instrument as therapy; Burton, more writing, seeing it through, knowing an odd thing about writing: that the poison itself provides the substance of the antidote. Lately I have been able to read with pleasure only books of enormous suffering and ambition: Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beckett, which I liked enormously; and Tillmann Moser’s Apprenticeship on the Couch: A Report on a Training in Analysis. Both deal with megalomaniacs. I suffer from this; and share with Beckett the hope of late success, with which he also shows a seasoned kindness and generosity that are quite unexpected. In his receded, hermetic way, Beckett becomes a hero of his own work, but becomes also kindly and concerned with others. In the Moser, during one of his megalomaniacal outbursts, his analyst replies, “But Freud made his megalomania come true!” Indeed. I note I wrote “success,” a perverted word in our culture. I do mean it, in its real senses, and not in terms of fame or fortune. I recall Creeley’s quip that most people who say they want to write mean they want to be famous. Writing is lonely; it is isolation; it is one form of, and not a substitute for, that fear and trembling out of which one works out one’s salvation. (I loathe “one,” the chicken-shit pronoun!) I recall a moment in the Beckett bio when Bair tells how Beckett writes but is sickened at the thought of working through it ∙ 317 rereading. (That goes for me and my journal, the one therapeutic tool I use.) And when he did reread, the words were dead. The death of the word, its corpse on the page, and the paeans they sing to this fact, is one of the bad things about deconstructionism.When the corpse is the word it is not exquisite but horrifying. So the gloat over opacity and the mistrust of transparency are for me very dangerous poses among the deconstructionists. One Christian truth, its miracle, is the enfleshing of the word, making it flesh and all that flesh is heir to—fear, passion, pleasure, loss, tickles, aches, and pain—and its ability to reveal and conceal, even when it is of the most open beauty. The romantics, Coleridge especially, called what Beckett experienced “dejection,” and wrote odes to turn it back. I am displacing, subliming, etc.; but think of that (which I feel so often): to see beauty without feeling it. The horrendous qualities of meaning each of those words, through all of their possible inflections; in the face of the thought of it I feel myself sinking, losing ground. Seeing without feeling: registering what? Another informative moment in the Beckett bio is his triune point of view in composing his plays: audience, characters, and stage—i.e., sub species aeternitatis, God to his creatures, to his creation, wondering why he did it, and seeing what he has done, repenting of it. As Stanley [Cavell] asks in his essay on Endgame, what does it mean for God to repent? And of what? [May 7, 1983] I’m not sure about lying, liars, being lied to [in fiction]. There’s more to it than culpable gullibility, incredulity overcome. I’d eviscerate Coleridge for a willing suspension of disbelief. I am transported when I read the real thing, when events, people, flesh, achieve a density, as of flesh. Few novels do that these days. Lying steals another person’s freedom. Novels increase it—or, art does. For me art is what makes room, sets a table, nourishes, and sends the guest on his way, rejoicing. (It also terrifies and frightens and enrages—but this is the easier part for us writers to do.) After seating us at something that must be like the Last Supper, and giving us not stones but bread, not vinegar but wine, well, in that way indeed does art take over where the poorly imagined, institutionalized (which is almost my definition of poor imagination: entrenched tradition) religions fail. They fail because they do not bind us to anything but themselves, like the corporate loyalty of execs at IBM and AT&T. 318 ∙ shorts and excerpts...