Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (14 page)

I am sure that in rare cases there is a kernel of irreducible truth in a response like this. But my instinct, or my predilection, now and when I wrote
Giving Offense
, has been to treat such a response as a cover for a reactive impulse to which the offended party would be reluctant to confess: belligerence of spirit, an appetite for a good scrap.

One reason why I should be, or can afford to be, thick-skinned vis-à-vis reviewers is that I have never had to depend on my books for a livelihood. Until I retired from teaching not long ago, I had a perfectly adequate academic salary to depend on. I could have been panned by every critic on earth, my book sales could have plummeted to zero, and I would not have starved. The uglier side of Grub Street—the animosities, the fawning and backbiting, and so forth—comes from a sometimes desperate need to scrounge a living.

Anyway, bravo to you for your forbearance, and boo to the critic in question for failing to be ennobled by your example.

Yes, I am seventy now—thank you for your good wishes. I’ll look in the mirror, when I have a moment, to check whether I have entered upon the sixth or,
horribile dictu
, the seventh of the Shakespearean ages. I pray it is only the sixth, the age of the lean and slippered pantaloon with shrunken shanks and quavering voice, and not the last, the return to childishness, sans teeth etcetera.

Yours ever,

John

February 23, 2010

Dear John,

For reasons I can’t quite grasp (possibly because you are so far away and our meetings are so infrequent), I often find myself wanting to
give you things
. The package of books last month, for example, and now the enclosed DVD of the Italian edition of
Man on Wire
. The film is about the same man, Philippe Petit, whose book I translated years ago and included in that package. I was interviewed for the DVD in a hotel lobby in Milan last year, and now I have been sent ten copies. With nine to spare, off one goes to you.

I don’t know if you have already seen the film, which was released in 2008 and made something of a splash (Academy Award for best documentary), but if you haven’t seen it, it’s quite possible that you have no idea who Philippe Petit is. Most famously, he is the man who walked on a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

If you look at the interview I did for the DVD, you will learn of my connection to Philippe—so no need to rehash that here. There is also the essay I wrote in 1982 (“On the High Wire,” in
Collected Prose
), which was supposed to serve as the introduction to the book I translated but—for highly strange and amusing reasons—never appeared in the volume.

The essay mentions the name of Cyrus Vance, who served as secretary of state under Jimmy Carter and who was present at one of Philippe’s performances that I attended. I included Vance as a rhetorical point—to prove that high-wire walking is an entirely
democratic
art, able to excite the interest of all people, from young children to former secretaries of state. When I showed my piece to Philippe, however, he said—first—Who is Cyrus Vance?—and when I told him, he said—second—that he didn’t want the name of a politician in his book. I was dumbfounded. Don’t you understand? I said. I included him to make a point about what you do. No, no, Philippe replied, you have to cut out his name, I won’t stand for it. Exasperated and incensed, I told him that he was an idiot, refused to delete the name, and withdrew my introduction.

A small but maddening example of Philippe’s arrogance, self-importance, and single-minded, all-consuming vanity. Then again, without that personality, it is unimaginable that he ever would have tried to do what he did. Fortunately, the quarrel didn’t last. We remained friends, and some years later, when I found him a French publisher for the same book, he was all too happy to have my introduction included.

All that is secondary, not the reason for this letter today. I am far more interested in what Philippe does—particularly the three walks documented in the film: Nôtre Dame in Paris, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the World Trade Center. I don’t know how you will respond to these feats (or have responded to them), but for me they are among the most extraordinarily beautiful and thrilling accomplishments I have ever witnessed, acts of such stupefying grandeur that I tremble whenever I think about them.

In one of your earlier letters, you talked about watching Federer play tennis: “I have just seen something that is at the same time human and more than human; I have just seen something like the human ideal made visible.” Then, a couple of paragraphs down, referring to masterworks of art: “Yet it was done by a man . . . like me; what an honor to belong to the species that he exemplifies!”

Philippe’s exploits have inspired a similar kind of awe in me—and a similar pride in belonging to the human race.

The question I want to ask is why.

What he does is not, strictly speaking, art, is it? Nor does it fall within the domain of sports. From one point of view, I suppose it could be classified as an act of madness. After all, why risk your life for something that is at bottom utterly useless—a meaningless gesture? And yet, as I explain in the DVD interview, when I saw the footage of the Nôtre Dame walk, my eyes filled with tears when Philippe started juggling the wooden pins as he stood on the wire. It was so implausible, so terribly crazy, so beyond anything we can normally expect from a human being, that something inside me cracked.

For years, I have walked around with an idea for a documentary film (something I know I will never do) called
The Art of the Useless
. It would begin with a master cabinetmaker at work on the construction of an elaborate cupboard (utilitarian craft) interspersed with images of young girls in a ballet class straining to perfect their art (the quest for beauty, which is essentially useless, since it serves no practical purpose) and then move on to interviews and performances by various practitioners of neglected and under-appreciated “artistic” pursuits: Philippe and the high wire; Ricky Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and “up-close” magician; and Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist who turned the comic book into serious literature—in other words, arts generally associated with children and carnivals, and yet in the case of these three men, pursued with such rigor, intelligence, and originality that these popular forms are lifted to great heights of sophistication. I have known each of them for many years, and they have many traits in common: monomania, ferocious discipline, a sense of historical perspective (each one is an obsessive collector of material concerning his art), and the ability to write well. (I would signal Ricky’s history of magic,
Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women
, as an impressive example.)

The point being, I suppose, that by skirting past the traditional arts (literature, theater, music, painting), one could arrive at a better understanding of the aesthetic impulse in human beings, that the best argument for the importance of art lies precisely in its uselessness, that we are most deeply and powerfully human when we do things for the pure pleasure of doing them—even if it requires untold years of hard work and training (the young ballerinas) and even if the pleasure can entail frightening risk (the high wire). . . .

All that said, I hope you enjoy the film if you haven’t already seen it.

Concerning your letter: I don’t see any flaw at the heart of
Giving Offense,
which I consider to be an excellent book, and I doubt that the reason you are thick-skinned vis-à-vis your reviewers has anything to do with the fact that you earned your living as a teacher. You believe in your work, that’s all there is to it. You believe in it and know that it’s good.

Some months ago, we were wondering why no new sports had been invented in recent decades. Having taken a couple of peeks at the Winter Olympics, I think we might have overstated our case. Ski cross! Snowboarding! Women tumbling head over heels in midair with skis attached to their feet!

My heart was in my throat.

All best,

Paul

P.S.: On the heels of the German publication of
The Shaking Woman
last month, Siri has now been invited to give the annual lecture at the Freud Foundation in Vienna. Imagine. How not to be proud of her?

March 29, 2010

Dear Paul,

Thanks very much for the Philippe Petit DVD, with the welcome bonus of a filmed interview with you. I enjoyed the interview. There is the pleasure of having you visit our living room, of hearing the enviably considered, just, and well-formed sentences you speak. Also the admirable generosity of your view of Petit himself, who strikes me, I am afraid to say, as a rather conceited fellow. But then, perhaps one needs to be conceited, or at least to have no doubts about oneself, if one is to prosper in funambulism or any other métier that requires absorption of the mental self in the physical self, an absorption that is indistinguishable—as you point out in the interview—from concentrated thought.

The film itself, I thought, was ill conceived. The moments that I bear away from it are still shots of Petit on the wire, taken from so far away that the wire vanishes and he seems to be standing in space. Too much of the rest of the movie consists of Petit promoting himself, telling us how “impossible” the feats are that he is about to perform, though we already know they were not impossible, since he performed them. All the tiresome recounting of how he and his friends evaded patrolling guards could also have been cut.

I can conceive of a better story about a funambulist than the one Petit embodies, a story that might have been sketched by Kafka in his early years and then discarded. A young man ventures out on a high wire over an abyss. He does not fall, he comes back safely, but he never ventures on the wire again, never even talks about it, though his friends remember his feat and reminisce about it among themselves. The young man resumes his life, eventually marries, has children, and in every outward respect prospers. Yet he is never his old self again: his friends know it, and so does he. It is as if he had met someone or something out in space, in the brief time he was there: a look passed, a recognition, and everything was changed.

What I want, I suppose, is not the actual Philippe Petit but a high-wire artist who is open to the metaphysical. But perhaps being open to the metaphysical is incompatible with having unquestioned faith that you are not going to fall.

Which brings me to a comment you made in your last letter to the effect that, as a writer, I seem to have solid faith in what I am doing. (You were responding to my remark that, hard though it might be to credit, I don’t get upset when reviewers give me a going-over.)

I think that for once you are wrong about me. I don’t have a great deal of faith in what I am doing. To be more precise, I have enough faith to get me through the writing itself—enough faith or perhaps enough hope, blind or blinkered hope, that if I give the project at hand enough time and attention it will “work,” will not be a palpable failure. But that is where my faith or hope runs out. I don’t have much faith that my work will endure. “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme”: that’s what true faith sounds like. I can’t echo it.

On quite another subject, I have been looking back at some remarks I made to you a while ago about the so-called global financial crisis, to the effect that it did not look to me like a real crisis, but on the contrary like a textbook example of people sitting in Plato’s cave, staring at shadows (on their computer monitors), which they mistook for reality. I suggested that if we simply reset the numbers, the “crisis” would be over.

This prescription of mine, it might be objected, is much like saying that if we scooped out the contents of everyone’s memories and replaced them with a new set of memories we would in effect be creating a new reality. What both prescriptions ignore, the objection might continue, is that memories are not just biochemical configurations in the brain (or configurations of bits in a computer) but the traces of things that really happened in a real past. Even the figures in the banks of monitors in the stock exchange have behind them a history from which they cannot be cut off—what we might call the historical memory of economics. In other words, the radical-idealist solution to the problem of how to make a better future (replace the past with a better past) is no more naive than the radical-idealist solution to the financial crisis: replace the bad figures with good ones.

To me (to skip several steps in the argument) the question boils down to how seriously we should take Jorge Luis Borges. Borges posits the irruption into our history (that is, into the body of historical memory that we broadly share) of an encyclopedia that, when completed, will have the potential to supplant the old past with a new past and thus a new present—that will, potentially, remake us. Is Borges’s fable to be enjoyed as a philosophical
jeu d’esprit
but not taken seriously, or is he floating an idea with real philosophical depth? I would like to think the latter.

Applied to the financial crisis, the Borgesian proposal seems to me at least feasible, in theory. Compared with the weight and density of human history, the numbers on the computer monitors don’t come trailing all that much historical freight behind them—not so much that we could not, if we truly wanted it, agree to dispense with them and start with a fresh set of numbers.

It is the question of whether we truly want a new financial dispensation, whether we can agree on a new set of figures, that is the rub. The figures themselves offer no resistance: the resistance is in ourselves. So, looking around us today, we see just what we might expect: we, “the world,” would rather live through the misery of the reality we have created (the entirely artificial reality of the crisis) than put together a new, negotiated reality.