A Preparation for Death Read online

  I skipped the free lunch, roast chicken – who would I sit with, and what would we talk about? – and made my way through Stephen’s Green. The morning had been bright and warm, but by the time I left the conference the day had come down cold and soapy, and it was beginning to rain. A few black umbrellas emerged from and disappeared into the trees. The rain was falling softly into the treetops and loudly into the little ponds. My bag was heavy. I had crammed a lot of books into it that morning – I never know what mood I will be in – assuming the weather would hold and I could grab a little sunlit patch of grass and read for an hour or two. But I was happier this way. For my first two years in Ireland, the rain depressed me. Now, whenever it is warm and agreeable, I lie around dreaming of grey skies and wind and short days in December.

  I stopped in to McDaid’s – a regular spot for me – and took a seat at a stool in the window, where I could watch the rain intensify and bash the little alleyway between the Westbury and Bruxelles. The glass was fogged at the four corners. Nobody knew then that we were headed for the rainiest summer in a hundred years. I ordered a pint of Guinness. I only drink Guinness when I want to avoid becoming unreasonably drunk.

  There was one man at the bar, a big black man in a Nike tracksuit and bling sunglasses – surely a Westbury resident – and a white-haired couple at one of the small tables in the very back. The television was showing rugby, a repeat from the southern hemisphere, and only the bartender, who looked much like Anthony Perkins in Psycho, but shorter, with a more pronounced chin, was watching, and only then from time to time. The black man, an American, drank a gin and tonic and said things about the music industry – who was who in New York, LA, etc., and old stories about people he considered legends. The bartender, the only person to whom he could possibly have been speaking, agreed in nods but had nothing to add. Two German girls came in and sat at the short side of the bar, their backs directly to mine, and when the cold blew in the black man said, Merry Christmas, motherfucker! to no one in particular. Outside, tourists in bright jackets and hoods stopped to consider McDaid’s and Bruxelles, wondering if they were restaurants, if they might find some Irish stew and soda bread.

  I placed my books on the ledge in front of the window – one was the book Evelyn had brought back from New York, which I always carried with me. I wanted to reread the stories we’d be talking about in class that night. My pint came. It was a cold glass and the head had spilled over the sides, and it was pleasant to behold. I took a sip immediately.

  I opened two of the books – Mansfield and Hemingway. I teach ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and, depending on my mood, any number of Hemingway stories; that evening I’d be teaching ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’. I took my notebook out in order to write a few things I wanted to say about them. But this seemed to desecrate the calm of the moment so I decided to write nothing.

  I turned to find the black guy staring at me. He said something like, Shit, how many books are you reading?

  I moved so he could see them better.

  That’s a lot of motherfucking reading. You teach?

  Yeah, I said.

  All fucking right, he said – I remember he said that. He went back to his gin and tonic. He had nothing with him. No reading. No phone. He just seemed to want to stir his straw and now and again take a drink, but not get drunk. I waited a moment and went back to my pint.

  Resentment, if you let it, will weave itself into your DNA, and replicate. Every cell in your body becomes it. You feel nothing authentically, and, if you are a writer, you produce reactionary trash. You must let go of the desire to bring down the society you loathe. You must learn to discard any hope of making a difference. You must stop asking dumb questions.

  I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. [Woolf]

  When I think of growing, it is in a lowly way, with a constrained and cowardly growth, strictly for myself. [Montaigne]

  What I like about Dudley and some of the others is that they know enough not to want to do a stroke of honest work … Sink or swim is their motto. They look at their fathers and grandfathers, all brilliant successes in the world of American flapdoodle. They prefer to be shit-heels, if they have to be. [Miller]

  I had become a resentful and jealous and desperate would-be writer in Louisiana, and I was that same man in Ireland. I woke every morning at dawn and put on three or four layers and a winter hat and bashed revisions into my first book. And when that failed I bashed a second book into existence. No thought I had was quiet. Everything was a military march. I could not imagine a fate of anonymity – life was meaningless without impact. I believed that I could alter society. How pathetic that self seems to me now.

  It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy. [Cioran]

  Before I found work at the paper, I took on a contract job that was humiliating and paid nothing. I listened to taped speeches and phone conversations and transcribed them. Because I type with four fingers, it took me hours to transcribe a few minutes’ worth of tape. And my work was so mistake-riddled that I was invariably docked twenty per cent of my pay. It was mainly corporate work, and often the voices were inaudible – French accents (it was a French company), bad tapes, words I had never heard of. I was like Akaky Akakievich, just copying. The guy who served as a kind of boss would call me every fifteen minutes asking how I was getting along. I told him I would be going a lot faster if he stopped calling me every fifteen minutes. He would laugh but he would call me fifteen minutes later. Apparently his other transcribers could type. In four months I probably made two hundred euro. I should have quit, but I needed the money – any amount was better than nothing. And I was writing my novel, which was going to be great, and revolutionize fiction, so I figured I had dignity. A man who believes in his own inviolability can withstand any cruelty, every form of humiliation imaginable.

  By the time I gave up the desire to write books that would annihilate society – which was nothing more than the desire to write myself back into society – I had almost nothing left of myself. I wasn’t a writer at all, just a slave to my own preoccupation with people who were published.

  I got another pint. I felt unusually tipsy and wanted a cigarette. I had set my phone to silent but I could see that the screen was flashing. It was work. I needed to get moving soon.

  All the successful journalists I know have one thing in common: they become excited by news, and when there is none of it, they are lost. When they have a story to write, they rush to write it. Their hearts will explode if they don’t. I, on the other hand, feel nothing but monotony. But after seven months of unemployment, you capitulate to monotony. No matter how much you might loathe an honest day’s work, no matter how little you want to be on phones or sitting through press conferences and writing down every infuriating detail of things that do not matter, you want that pay cheque. You want a drink or some new shoes, or some socks without holes in them. A bottle of wine that does not taste like vinegar. A steak you don’t have to stew four hours to make tender. A new winter coat.

  After three years of working as a journalist, my life had become a junkyard of comforts. It must be true that to many – to all but a few – this junkyard is the meaning of life. Otherwise the fabric would collapse. If there were not people whose whole life was an Audi, or toilet-roll holders, or a television, or fancy lampshades, or an expensive birthday party for their four-year-old, civilization would end today, this minute.

  My pint was finished. The black man was flirting with the German girls. My phone flashed again and I took the call. The news editor asked how the conference had gone. I said it had gone well. Anything front page? Oh, definitely. The rain was the same.
I had no umbrella and no waterproof jacket, so the walk to the quays was going to be wet, and for the rest of the afternoon I’d be sitting in an uncomfortable puddle at my desk.

  I put the books back into my bag and threw the bag over my shoulder – it seemed heavier now after two pints. The black guy gave me a nod. Earlier, the white-haired man from the back had walked out, rapping his knuckle on the bar as he went. Perhaps they had held a conversation earlier, or maybe they knew each other from the Westbury. Anyway, I had the feeling they didn’t expect to see each other again. The black man told the white-haired man to take it easy. The white-haired man told him to do the same. The black guy said, Ain’t nothing else to do.

  I stepped out and stood in the rain. Why hurry when it would not make a difference? No matter what I did, I was going to get wet.

  2

  That Lovely Season Now Expired

  In the summer of 2000, when I was twenty-five and unfathomable to myself, I drove with a friend, Brent Benoit, from Baton Rouge to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South, in Tennessee, where I hoped to announce myself to the world of Southern letters.

  Brent came by my house at seven in the morning. He had rented a lollipop-red Jeep Cherokee while his truck was in the shop. It took me half an hour to get out of the house. I had been out the night before and run into some girlfriends of friends. They were all beautiful, and I was only beginning to understand the dangers of being around beautiful women when you are so full of yourself. I was hungover, and so was Brent, and when we set off we were both green and quiet. Because it was July, it was already too hot to think, and we were good enough friends not to need chit-chat.

  Brent and I were studying in the writing programme at Louisiana State University. I was getting along nicely– a few publications, some awards – and at that time Brent was the only other writer at LSU who I felt had a chance. He was a big fan of Hemingway and Faulkner, and he wrote like a great black river splashing out of its banks. He couldn’t spell, and he had no idea what a comma was, but he could write. We had sort of pledged allegiance to each other – we believed we were on similar ascensions – and although we didn’t say it, we saw the trip as a pilgrimage.

  We bought a loaf of bread, sliced cheese, ham, mayonnaise, a carton of cigarettes, some Kodiak chewing tobacco, and a few cases of beer. We were going to drive the whole way drunk. We had no interest in contemplative dialogues on Art. We wanted nothing more than the raw mayhem of existence. The only difference between us was that his mayhem took the form of constant awe and wonder; mine was venom.

  Brent wasn’t one of those Southern writers who glorify stereotypes and gaze at the navel of place-ness. But he was comfortable in the landscape, and his characters were very much of the places he wrote about. I, meanwhile, was fundamentally unhappy. Sometimes when I remember the unhappiness I felt at twenty-five, I can’t imagine why I didn’t kill myself. I sensed that I was an outcast everywhere. My characters were all exiles, and I hated them. In writing, Brent became fulfilled. I just felt eviscerated.

  By the time we crossed into Mississippi, we were awake and drunk and listening to music. We sank heavily into the landscape, the crumbling interstates, the dense piney highwaysides to Biloxi that broke expansively at exits, which were all the same, and full of romantic gloominess – grim hotels, food for gluttons, shopping for the poor. We drove it all with the windows down. In Meridian, Mississippi, we passed a chicken warehouse that made me never want to eat a chicken again – a hangar-like structure without walls, right on the side of the interstate, with giant fans propelling a breeze through a hundred shelves of stuffed-full cages. Although the chickens were too cramped to move, they struggled nevertheless, and white feathers floated over the town. In Alabama, we bought some net-backed hats and put on some fake redneck teeth Brent had bought back home, and were given threatening stares at a truck stop.

  The easiest way to drive to Sewanee, if you come from the west, is to overshoot it by a hundred miles on the interstate, get to Chattanooga, and take an easy two-lane highway back. But we were sick of interstates and running very late, so we got off and headed straight north, out of Alabama, through back roads of mountains and the Tennessee River valley. I had assumed it would be a lot like the set of Deliverance, that I would spot children with eyes in their nostrils and gills in their ankles. But the little towns we passed were just like everywhere else we’d passed: poor, boring. The scenery was nice but the mountains were really just hills, nothing special.

  On the long straightaways I got the truck up to a hundred, where it rose dangerously high off the surface of the road and swayed about like a balloon, and going up the switchback roads I had it fishtailing. When I swerved to avoid an eighteen-wheeler coming down the mountain, nearly causing the Jeep to tumble into the woody drop-off beside the road like something from a movie, Brent told me to slow down or he was going to kill me. He was green and I believed him. But we were getting close to Sewanee, and I felt my whole life wrenched forward by the force of my fate. I sensed that I had lifelong friends to meet, and great books ahead of me. I could feel the presence of Barry Hannah, the only living writer I considered a hero, as though the trees and rocks and little streams were whispering clamorously about him.

  We arrived late, and had missed the opening reading by the playwright Romulus Linney. We parked at the main reading venue, a small banquet hall at the edge of campus. A group of white-haired and weathered figures were standing around looking like Southern writers. If you’ve ever seen a group of them together, you know what I mean. The closest I can come to describing it accurately is a highbrow and slightly effeminate fishing trip. We asked them where the restaurant was and got an incredulous stare. One asked, Have you only just arrived? We told him we had driven from Louisiana that morning. We were beat, and we had hauled ass. Instead of giving us directions, he told us we had wasted our whole trip missing Linney and might as well go home. We waited a moment, until we realized he wasn’t joking and that he wasn’t going to tell us where the restaurant was.

  We found it ourselves – it was a two-minute drive around the corner – but as we rushed in, smelling like thirteen hours of driving drunk, everyone was getting up and all the food was being cleared. There was no sign of Barry Hannah, who had just gone through chemotherapy for lymphoma and, I would learn, ate nothing but pink medicinal shakes through a straw. (I had met him a year earlier, before the chemotherapy, in Baton Rouge, when he sat down with some of the students at LSU to talk about his writing.) We got something to eat only because Dave Smith, a regular Sewanee conference faculty member, convinced the staff to leave some scraps out for us. Dave was my advisor at LSU and my boss at the Southern Review, and very much a father figure, whom I admired because of his own venom and followed like a disciple. This meant, of course, that our future held the inevitability of disappointment, of neither of us measuring up, which is how all my relationships, every one of them, even with Brent, have ended since that trip to Tennessee.

  That first night, after a short meet-and-greet at the main house, the nighthawks of the conference retreated to Rebel’s Rest, a large, old log cabin situated in the midst of a vast green lawn, for drinks. We met Marc and Adam, two writers in their early thirties who weren’t from the South, who seemed like pretty cool dudes, and when a little weasel-of-a-poet kicked us out at midnight, we stole a bunch of cans and drank on the street until four a.m. Drinking on the street in Sewanee is a serious offence, we would learn, and over the rest of the ten days we were frequently chased around the campus by university police and ratted upon by the kinds of people who saw our behaviour as a disgrace to the cause of art and decency. Rather than try to win toleration, we started a sort of parallel conference with a few like-minded young guys. Brent was more charming about it, so I was singled out as the Bad Seed. It was easy to single me out – not just because I was dislikable, but because I was the nobodiest of nobodies. Within a couple of days, the conference organizer wouldn’t even speak to me, s
ince I was sleeping through all the nine a.m. readings, or missing them and going straight to Rebel’s Rest for midday Bloody Marys and beer, and to talk to Barry, who sat on the back porch chain-smoking and reading.

  We met officially in the workshop he was co-teaching with the experimental writer Padgett Powell, though Barry missed some sessions, including the one in which my story was discussed, because he was so unwell. But at the Rest I sat beside him and listened and drank. Sometimes there were a lot of us, sometimes just a few. He made no sense – he spoke like a character in one of his stories, the kind of man who says he is crucified by the truth. These were not conversations but officiations of his wisdoms, sometimes profound, sometimes ludicrous, and often repetitive, but what did I care? The other writers, obsessed with status, treated me with loathing and suspicion. (William Gay was also friendly, but nobody could understand him at all.)

  Around the university campus, there were long and peaceful trails through the woods. I imagine it was very tranquil until we got there, a hundred writers, to pervert it. One day a few of us were walking around out of boredom when we came upon a group creeping quietly and reverently through Nature. There is nothing sillier in the universe than an excursion of mediocre Southern poets on a nature trail. You feel as though you have interrupted a dozen unborn compositions exploding sentimentally in their hearts, and there are probably dogs in them, or Confederate ghosts.

  There were softball games on a few afternoons, and this was the most popular of all activities. The teams usually fielded something like twenty-five players, which meant that everyone had a zone of about five square feet for which they were responsible, so the outfielders – dozens of them – mostly just stood dozily and watched balls fly over their heads. The dissident wing attended after a few hours at the Rest, by which time I had to close one eye to bat or field; otherwise I would see ten of everything. I narrowly avoided a fist fight when Powell, a writer I admired very much for Edisto and Typical, but who treated us like insects, knocked into me and the ball fell beside us. There was a lot of laughter from the gallery. We took a long look at each other, Powell and me. He was a bulldog of a man, and if he got his hands on me I was finished. But I could jab and dart. I had the speed and the reach. I’m certain his long look meant: Why are you even here? Mine meant: I had that fly ball. Anyway, what spectacle could have been more absurd than that fight? And if I touched him, I might as well have packed my bags that second. Brent ran over from right field and led me away.