85A Log: Joshua Furst, Salieri Complex, Virginia Woolf, Humility, and the White Horse Tavern

This is how Virginia Woolf agonized over Marcel Proust’s talent in a letter to a friend:

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures–there’s something sexual in it–that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. . . . How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped–and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp.

Then, even after writing Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she continued to give herself the short end of the stick in relation to Proust:

I wonder if this time I have achieved something? . . . Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.

It’s good to know that a writer of Woolf’s stature had these feelings toward a contemporary too.

It’s exactly how I’ve been feeling – diffident, self-loathing – while reading Joshua Furst’s The Sabotage Cafe. It’s how I felt yesterday, reading him on the subway on my way to see Mike at White Horse Tavern. It seemed like I was underlining every other line of well-turned phrases, wishing I had it in me to write them. Take this one, for example, about 15-year-old, punk-rock runaway Cheryl getting it on with her new boyfriend Trent:

It was oceanic, a salt-heavy weight roiling under her skin, lapping at her pelvis, dampening everything, condensing on the surface in filmy layers. She imagined taking him whole into her system – like that weird spiny fish she and Jarod had seen on the Discovery Channel – and holding him there, soaking him in her juices, until the two of them became a single organism, sharing veins and arteries and internal organs, never to be parted again.

Mind you, these are just two sentences. Most of the sentences I’ve read so far approach this level of brilliance. Furst’s narration is both documentary – capturing all sides of these kids’ interactions – and unfathomably deep, probing each character’s unconscious. Every sentence is so exacting and panoramic. Also, Furst knows his hardcore, he knows the punk scene, he’s not just guessing at it. It’s like D.H. Lawrence meets Lester Bangs.

To make matters worse, he’s writing about the same subject I am in 85A. I mean, Seamus is totally different from Cheryl and Trent, but Seamus is dabbling in the same subculture and, just like Cheryl, dreams of freedom from teenage confinement. Reading Furst, I think much the same thoughts that Woolf thought about Proust: “I can’t write like that”; “And he will I suppose both influence me and make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.”

I got a big ole Salieri complex. According to Peter Shaffer at least, Salieri felt cursed with a lethal combination of mediocrity and burning ambition. I think it’d make my life a lot easier if I’d just accept that there are many people – maybe many, many – who are better writers than I am.

When I was flunking out of high school, I consoled myself by thinking, “I will grow up to be among the greatest writers.” It’s embarrassing to admit that, but that’s what got me through each day. I did my best to walk like a writer, talk like a writer, master all the books that writers master, and even write like a writer. I felt like an impostor, but still I persevered, thinking that I’d have to fake it until I made it – all the way up to the summit; I had to redeem myself for not being a prodigy sooner.

Plus, it’s also true that many had told me, “You have a gift.” Not only that, but I also had so much sorrow, disillusionment and angst that I felt I was a shoo-in for greatness.

The years went by. I wrote my ass off. A lot of people were still giving me a lot of credit for my writing, but I still wasn’t producing major works. In my twenties, this bothered me. But I took solace in the belief that, in my thirties, I’d wake up one morning, possessed by some spirit of genius and my hand would move across the pages of my notebook – or the keys on my keyboard – without my will or effort. I wouldn’t have to depend on a limited human brain. I could rely solely on the muse. I could produce canonical works and then sit pretty on my laurels.

Here I am, though, in my thirties, wishing I had the talent of Joshua Furst and many other 30-something (or even twenty-something) authors. It’s one of the most humbling experiences I know. I mean, Jonathan Saffron Foer is literally my backyard neighbor. Sometimes, I catch myself resenting that whole tribe of elites, shaking my fist at the heavens, saying, “I’ve done my time on the bottom! I’ve suffered! I’ve worked myself into exhaustion! Won’t you please move me up!”

As Salieri learned, though, these things are beyond our will. The gods have given some people drive and other people talent and still other people genius. Yet we’re left with a choice. We can either train ourselves to honor and learn from geniuses (whether or not they’re humble about their genius) or we can let our envy and self-hatred eat us up for the rest of our lives. It’s a wretched ultimatum, but what other choice do we have?

In the final chapters of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes how he predicated his whole form of psychotherapy, which he called Logotherapy, on the following idea that he evolved while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp:

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life.

A man came to him in enormous grief over the sudden passing of his wife. Frankl asked the man (this is not word-perfect): “What if it had been the other way around? What if you had died and your wife was left to mourn?” The man said, “That would have been terrible. She would have suffered horribly.” Frankl then pointed out to the man that, by dying before him, his wife had been spared the suffering of having to bear his death. Now it was up to him to bear that suffering for her. The man nodded. He didn’t walk away happy, but he had at least found a reasonable and meaningful explanation for why he had to endure this struggle.

Maybe my struggle is to accept my Salieri complex for what it is, a test, and other people’s genius for what it is, a gift. Actually, Virginia Woolf elucidates this struggle extremely well in To The Lighthouse (1927) when she describes Mr. Ramsay’s Salieri complex over his shortfalls of intelligence and artfulness:

It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is arranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q…But after Q? What comes next? After Q, there are a number of letters, the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached by one man in a generation…

He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reached Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, “One perhaps.” One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one?…Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her – who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Last night, all those thoughts had run through my mind on my way to see Mike at the White Horse Tavern. He had lost his debit card yesterday morning, so he got there late after having to haggle another debit card out of his bank. That was fine. I had a lot of journaling to do.

He got there eventually. We sat at one of the outside tables. We celebrated a great new job he just got, managing the website of the 92nd Street Y. Like a lot of people, he has had to manage through a lot of twists and turns and flotsam and jetsam in this economy. It’s good to see him safe and secure in such an excellent institution as that. He likes it a lot. He got the job partly because of all that he learned creating my website! I’m glad this was a win-win.

We talked for hours about everything under the sun. Then he asked me how the book was going. He hasn’t been reading my blog, so he didn’t know the rundown of my lunch with Shell. I told him that Shell’s suggestions were excellent and now I’m back to Square One with 85A.

Then I pulled The Sabotage Cafe out of my bag. I raved about it. Then I said, “I have to face it. I could never write a book this good. It’s hard as hell, but I just have to face the fact that some people are better writers than I am.”

He listened, but he didn’t nod or shake his head. All he said was, “Well, that guy has one thing to say with one voice. You have another thing to say with another voice. Don’t let that stop you.”

Simple words, simple idea, but it was enough to silence the monsters in my head.

Then I told him that I wrote a new opening sentence to 85A. This was after I read an essay by a writing teacher who said that the first sentence of a book should promise not only the beginning of the story, but also the end. So, this is the working opening sentence for 85A:

“Every detention, every spear of glass swimming up through my forearm, every minute the 85A is late brings me one step closer to London.”