James Frey
Incredibly Expensive Apartment
New York, NY

A big thanks to James[1] for prodding the Lonely Voice out of retirement. He got me thinking about why we do what we do, why we read what we read. I’m not sure that any great story can be summed up in a high concept pitch, capable of being summed up in one sentence. In spite of what Frey and countless others are ceaselessly peddling, fiction deserves better than to be stuffed into pre-packaged boxes, heavy on plot and action.

I know I’m not alone in this. At least I hope I’m not. But a lot of times, I actually prefer stories where not much happens, where plot is not king. For me, clever plots can often be tedious and forced. I don’t want my fiction movie-ready. No, character is what I’m after. In a world where human contact seems to becoming less and less important, I find myself craving, now more than ever, the ability of a good story to bring me into the mind of a stranger. Don’t burden me with something happening all the time. What I want is to know people. I want to invade their most intimate spaces. Aren’t the greatest dramas of our lives mostly centered around who we wake up with in the morning? By this I mean, ourselves and of course that other person (or lack of that other person.) Is this me? And who is this other person, really? And how different would it be if this other person was that other person? In fiction, as in nowhere else, I can cross the most forbidden borders.

In today’s Lonely Voice, a man sleeps until noon and then spends the afternoon looking out the window at the dying day remembering the only authentic love he’s ever truly known.

Saul Bellow’s “The Old System” opens like this:

It was a thoughtful day for Dr. Braun. Winter. Saturday. The short end of December.

Bellow’s not kidding. It is a thoughtful day for Dr. Braun. A very thoughtful day. Dr. Braun will now spend the next 20 pages thinking. It is also, for me, one example of a certain kind of great short story, a meditation on death and grief that stops time while at the same time animating the past. On this winter morning, Dr. Braun, a scientist, is thinking of the two people on earth he may have actually loved. Two cousins, Isaac and Tina. Schenectady, New York in the 1920’s and 30’s. Nothing about this particular morning sends (or in that terrible writingish word, triggers) Dr. Braun back to the past unless it is only the fading light of a foreshortened day. Bellow doesn’t need to create any false cause and effect.

Dr. Braun remembers because he happens to remember. He looks out across the alley from his kitchen window, at the circular tank of a laundry and discovers, “a sentiment approaching.” That’s all. A sentiment, a feeling nudged, not forced, into his head by the dark December noon.

The sentiment, as he drank his coffee, was for two cousins in upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley. They were dead. Isaac Braun and his sister Tina. Tina was first to go. Two years later, Isaac died. Braun now discovered that he and Cousin Isaac loved each other. For whatever use or meaning this fact might have within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact and perishing in which he tried to find stability. Toward Tina, Dr. Braun’s feelings were less clear. More passionate once, but at present more detached.

In his quest to find stability, Dr. Braun continues to remember. He remembers a certain sycamore tree beside the Mohawk River. He remembers a country cottage in the Adirondacks. He remembers drainage ditches, polliwogs, cousin Mutt (Isaac and Tina’s less loved brother) dancing in his undershirt, singing that old song about sticking his nose up a nanny goats ass. He remembers Tina coming to his sick bed where he is recovering from a bee sting and lifting up her dress…

As with any other piece of writing by Bellow, the writing here catapults not on action but on the language, in this case the language of Dr. Braun’s memories. This story, in spite of the fact that literally nothing happens in the sense of present action, is not at all static. First, there is the movement of, and relationship between, Bellow’s sentences. Take a look at this description of Isaac and Tina’s mother, the hard-hearted battleaxe Aunt Rose.

Her face was red, her hair powerful, black. She had a sharp nose. To cut mercy like a cotton thread.

Powerful hair? All right, not Bellow’s greatest line. But I would give my toes to have followed the sentence ‘She had a sharp nose’ with To cut mercy like a cotton thread. Don’t you know Aunt Rose now? Can’t you not only see her knife-like nose but also into her soul?

Or listen to this, about a minor character, Tina’s husband, a minor hoodlum whose father sold peanuts at Coney Island. “His baldness was total, like a purge.”

The entire story, as I’ve been saying, takes place over the course of one afternoon while Dr. Braun drinks coffee and looks out the window at the icicles hanging off the tank across the alley. Isaac and Tina had a falling out as siblings sometimes do. Over money. Tina accused Isaac of fleecing her. Isaac said she abandoned him at his moment of greatest need. The years pass. Isaac gets richer and richer. He’s a real estate developer. Strip malls and cheap apartment buildings. Tina watches with increasing envy and hate. Here’s her take (through the brain of Dr. Braun) of her wealthy, pious, Orthodox brother:

He, too, kept the psalms near. As active worldly Jews for centuries had done. One copy lay in the glove compartment of his Cadillac. To which his great gloomy sister referred with a twist of the face…She said, ‘He reads the Tehillim aloud in his air conditioned Caddy when there’s a long freight train at the crossing. That crook! He’d pick God’s pocket!

Memory, of course, is not only unreliable; it is very often a spool of wholesale lies. And thank god for it. What if what you remembered was actually true? Be careful what you wish for. You wouldn’t be able to lie to yourself if your memory had a truth meter. But the fact is that ordinarily we aren’t after truth when we remember. Often, we are going for something far more elusive, something that is just out of our grasp, something that increases mystery rather than answers concrete questions.

Or as Bellow puts it when speaking about our inability to know even those who are closest to us “Those who try to interpret humankind through its eyes are in for much strangeness – perplexity.”

As well as Dr. Braun knows his people, their love for each other (and his love for them) rests upon the great perplexity of love itself. He remembers much but this doesn’t mean he has it all figured out. He never will. He only knows there is something about these two cousins – Isaac and Tina – that holds him, today, in his kitchen, with his cold coffee.

One especially remarkable aspect of the story is not only does Dr. Braun sit and think but he also – like any fiction writer – invents thoughts for the characters he’s thinking about. In other words, a character thinks about another character thinking! For me this borders on story ecstasy. Dr. Braun is making this stuff up and I’m buying everything he’s selling. I got a put a story this good down and take a walk around the block.

This is dead Isaac thinking about his dead parents:

Isaac was concerned about his parents. Down there, how were they? The wet, the cold, above all the worms worried him. In frost, his hearth shrank for Aunt Rose and Uncle Braun, though as a builder he knew they were beneath the frost line.

Knowing you’ll be buried under the frost line, does this make you feel better about the grave? Notice something else? Isaac’s mother and father are referred to as Aunt Rose and Uncle Braun. That’s not how Isaac would, in his own mind, think of his own parents. And yet Bellow isn’t making a mistake here. It’s how Isaac via Dr. Braun refers to them – so what you get is a kind of linguistic fusion. The grief of the dead and the grief of the living come together through a man who in twenty pages hasn’t moved an inch.

Eventually something does happen in “The Old System.” Tina is diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. On her deathbed, she refuses to see Isaac who, as a good brother and a pious Jew, keeps trying to see her before she dies. I won’t give away what happens. I’ll only say its hilarious and moving. So there’s plot after all! Yes. But plot born of character born of memory.

Great stories, great characters, will be written so long as people, in their confusion, love and laugh and grieve. And to hell with what really happened. Memory is nothing if not invention. I quote a portion of the glorious ending of “The Old System.” This won’t give anything away. It’s only Dr. Braun beginning, silently, to soar.

Oh, these Jews – these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts! Dr. Braun often wanted nothing more than to stop all this. For what came of it? One after another you gave over your dying. One by one they went. You went. Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When you wept them from the heart. You felt you justified something, understood something. Again, nothing! It was only an imitation of understanding. A promise that mankind might – might, mind you – eventually, through its gift which might – might again! – be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.

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Condensing his life into 10,000-word mini-biographies made Wallace’s struggle with depression and eventual suicide seem like a smooth transition. But depression is anything but smooth. It is flat. It’s as close to catatonic as you can get without being in a coma. So if the writing here is flat, that’s probably a good thing, or at least somewhat honest. To write about depression in electric, page-turner prose is disingenuous, untrue to the experience, and is a persisting problem with writing and depression. Put simply, it’s really fucking hard to get this illness onto the page. And, as both Max and Lipsky noted, it’s something Wallace never did. He wrote a lot about depression, but never directly detailed his own suffering. So what makes me think I have any right to? Why should I expect someone to be interested? What do you care if I ate a whole jar of pickles in one go?

In November 2008, two months after Wallace’s death, but before I’d read the Max and Lipsky pieces, I was due to give my first academic paper. It was on novels and short fiction that dealt with the events of September 11, 2001, for the aptly themed Creativity and Uncertainty conference at the University of Technology, Sydney. I was depressed, not with the theme – although it certainly could not have helped – but with the pressure I was putting on myself to be a writer.

In the 48 hours before my presentation, I wandered the cramped streets of Sydney, trying to figure out how I could edit the essay to the level that I imagined was expected of me. I stayed up until 4 am without changing a single word, scared as I was by the whole situation. After all, there’s no progress like no progress. On the morning of the conference, I panic-attacked and, consequently, experienced my first near-blackout from hyperventilation. I was using my girlfriend as a sounding board – between sobs – going from I’ll do it to I’ve probably got to pull out to I’m never writing another word ever again and I’m never coming back here again and I’m going to go out of my way to never see any of these people again. I was desperate, but I was also determined to pull myself together for the session before mine, in which novelist James Bradley was to give a paper on the links between creativity and depression. I was keen to crawl into the room, thinking it might say something to me in my current condition, but I was frozen in the corner of a communal space on campus, wrestling with my mind to stop the spread of anxiety. In other words, I was suffering from the very symptoms Bradley was likely to outline. At the time, I was aware of the irony but, as is often the case, couldn’t pull myself out of it.

The anxiety on that particular day stemmed partly from the public speaking side of the conference and partly from being programmed alongside PhD students and professors, myself having only just finished my undergrad degree. In any case, it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced feelings of that intensity. I had suffered the same steeply depreciating sense of self when writing for publication. The writing of prose – essay, fiction and memoir, in particular – can be an incubator for depressive moods more than other forms, in that it invites long periods of seeming inactivity, obsessiveness and over-analysis (analysis paralysis, as my mother so succinctly puts it).

Poet Les Murray made this incubator idea clear in his regularly reprinted (again just last year by Black Inc.) Killing The Black Dog—the title of which referred to Winston Churchill’s pet name for his major depressive episodes. Murray wrote, ‘I cut down on writing prose pieces because they were more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession.’

When I wrote prose, the same thing always tripped me up: trying to succeed in writing beyond realistic expectations. The desire to be above the level that I was could stop me from progressing on a draft entirely. I would be halted mid-sentence, with little else to do but stew on why I’d stopped. In the slowed-down process of revising work with editors, depressive moods prevailed. I couldn’t bring myself to email them on some days and would get up each morning frightened that the deadline – with the hard finality of the word pressing down on me – was one day closer, or worse, one day behind me, unmet. I would finish multiple drafts, but the piece could never be good enough, never up to the exacting standards that I, like many young writers, had invented for myself. I would stare blankly at the computer, the Word doc refusing to edit itself. Individual sentences would make sense, but the whole would be irreversibly tangled.

Bradley’s essay was eventually published in the Griffith Review, under the title Never Real and Always True, a quote from Anton Artaud used in Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon. I read its black details on a particularly sunny, clear-headed afternoon. I read it again out loud to my parents, and we hummed with the collective recognition at certain details. And we weren’t the only ones. Bradley’s piece had been cathartic for many, some leaving comments on his website to thank him for his honesty and insight.

Most writing on depression, however, doesn’t achieve this. It fails to move beyond Churchill’s ubiquitous black dog personification and a listing of the usual casualties: Woolf, Hemingway, Plath et al. Yet, in the lexicon of manic depressive writers, the ones who survived it are the least likely to make the list. Graham Greene, for example, suffered manic depression and lived to be 86. He is rarely mentioned among writers with the disorder, save for playing Russian roulette on his lonesome in his early twenties.

Bradley’s essay is important, not just because it skips these clichés of writing about depression, but because it engages with the realities of the illness while relating a personal take on it. And it was Bradley who inspired me to describe my own depressive episodes. I know I’m not alone – in the experience and the writing of it – and that makes it both easier and harder. The statistics, like most statistics, are scary.

Alice W. Flaherty states in The Midnight Disease (2005) that writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population, and poets are a staggering forty times more likely. The overriding concern then becomes a variation on the classic chicken-or-the-egg: does the act of writing invite mental illness, or does writing come from some need to cope with it? It’s not as clear-cut as one or the other, but if it were solely the former, who would go into it willingly? And if so, what can we do to make writers more aware of the realities of these statistics? Do you put up a white warning sticker, like on the packets of cigarettes, so that every time you bought a Moleskine notebook or a Uni-ball pen, they would be emblazoned with: Writing May Cause Harm?

This was what I struggled with as I published my first pieces. But the all-important question I should have considered was: if this is going to get me down – like so gloomed out I can’t operate on a normal level – is it really worth doing? It’s something others asked along the way for me, but which I never asked myself.

The reality of writing at a professional level is that the process isn’t exactly cheery. It can, in fact, mimic manic-depressive cycles: The inspiration that comes with an idea takes hold for weeks, bringing with it sleeplessness and excited energy, before slowly succumbing to the turgidity of rewriting and overworking. These were symptoms I first became familiar with vicariously, before experiencing them directly. In 2007 I’d watched Stephen Fry’s popular BBC documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive over and over on YouTube. I read the online transcript of an episode of Four Corners that profiled cartoonist Bill Leaks’ struggle with the disorder. Reading about the life of iconic bipolar Spike Milligan gave me hope in that he suffered ten nervous breakdowns but lived to be 83. This was during my first major depressive illness, when I was especially interested in the “manic” variety of depression, which, with its ups, seemed preferable to the sink-hole that I was set in. There is a danger that depression gets glamourised in reading like this, that to be a great writer you need to experience low moods and that depression can authenticate your efforts. (I know that in writing this piece, there is part of me that is very, very hungry for people’s pity and concession: if you think I suffer depression then you might also think I have the potential to be pretty fucking profound.)

I became infatuated with Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, a fictionalised take on the life of poet and manic depressive Delmore Schwartz, shortly before I was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Reading the book for the first time at 21, I took Martin Amis’ quip that Humboldt ‘is a very dangerous book to read in your twenties’ literally, so much so that the book itself became an evil omen and whenever I saw it lying around the house – hard to miss, an original Viking hardcover in gaudy bright yellow – it taunted me to open its pages and indulge in its vices. When the titular Humboldt tells Charlie Citrine (Saul Bellow’s barely disguised alter-ego) that he needs a drink before bed to quiet his thoughts, I feared for my sanity, imagining my own ideas spinning like a tornado inside my head.

My psychologists were always beguiled by the language I’d adopted from Humboldt and other depression novels. I’d say I’d been in a funk for three months, for example, to which the psychologist would giggle: ‘I’ve never heard that word used for depression before.’ What have you been reading, I thought, just the textbooks? Through my own reading I felt I’d come to know as much about depression and psychosis and all the rest as they did. I knew the details so well that I sometimes wondered if my manic depression were not, in fact, a fiction.

The details have the weird texture of fiction, at any rate. In my first hypomanic swing I completed an 80,000-word novel in three weeks, experiencing something close to hypergraphia. There’s a comic book super strength in your head when you’re in an upswing of that scale. It was great to finish the work, but the best of it was not exactly publishable and the worst of it failed to make sense on several very basic levels. Plots twisted and turned and didn’t connect, mirroring the mode my mind was working in. There were plenty of bipolar effects that had nothing to do with writing, of course (driving down the F3 at 140km at 3am, for instance), but writing was always the overriding obsession.

Something about David Foster Wallace’s suicide shocked me out of all that. Part of it was because I was beginning to see the effects of my depression on those around me and I was also beginning to seek real treatment. The accounts of Wallace’s depression make all of what I’ve felt feel real in a way that most other writing has not. It is real in a scary way but it’s also real in a very human way. There was a surprisingly common description of altered gustatory sensations in what I read. James Bradley described food as changing taste when he was depressed – he became disgusted by shellfish, mushrooms and Chinese food. Les Murray was pleased that depression had made the taste of cigars repellent to him – it was a very easy way to quit smoking. And Wallace, when being eased onto the anti-depressant Nadril, was warned off eating a menu of everyday foods – cured meats, certain cheeses and pickles. It was this small detail – pickles – hidden within Lipsky’s account, that stunned my parents and me. During my most intense hypomanic swings, I would stand at the fridge and eat simultaneously from a jar of anchovies and a jar of gherkins. It didn’t and doesn’t mean anything to me scientifically – I don’t have a degree in neuropsychology – but it resonates at a deep level when I read details like this. It means that these weird and out-there experiences are more common than you’d think. That’s what I needed to know when I wondered what Bradley would be talking about at the Creativity and Uncertainty conference. If the strange stuff is common, then surely the mundane – the suffering – must be too.

Unlike some writing, it wouldn’t have been very fun if this essay had turned meta-textual on me – if drafting ‘Don’t Get Me Down’ did, in fact, get me down. But it didn’t. I haven’t fallen into a depressive funk because I’ve learnt how to avoid those pitfalls. And here is basically what I’ve learnt: don’t spend too much time on a single draft; communicate with an editor if there’s a problem; don’t compare your writing to that of others; and stick to your medication like glue. I believe I’ve been able to gain these insights by separating the writing and depression. I don’t deny that they’re likely linked in very complex ways, but they need to be approached on their own. The depression is the serious thing that I will always prioritise over the writing. So yes, it’s nice having you read this, but if I’d had to lie in bed for three months for it to happen, it wouldn’t have been worth it. Because as the late Roberto Bolaño put it in an essay, while dying of liver disease, “Illness + Literature = Illness.”

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This essay was originally printed in the Australian journal The Reader.

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Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Check out some of these wonderful passages:

He enacted his inner life for his public on the stage he carried everywhere. Women loved him; men found him demanding but ingratiating. He managed to enlist the world in the narrative of his disasters. Later, Herzog, drawn partly as an act of revenge after one of his marriage and friendship convulsions, would depict a beloved protagonist in a state of despair. Herzog ranted comically and proceeded from the melodramatic scenes with his wife to episodes with women eager to offer nursery solace. Such a scenario is unreal to experience — when mired in despair, most of us are not beloved — but Saul’s star turn, dominating his own theater, helped to make it seem possible in his special case. [...] Saul’s prose style married classical elegance to Mark Twain and the pungency of street speech; Yiddish played stickball with Henry James. [...] His fate as a writer was to insist that words matter, his own most of all; suffering matters, his own absolutely; and he was able to enlist an audience in his struggle to survive, marked and measured by the works in progress which devoured his life.

An amusing story:

Until I came to live in San Francisco, our friendship went through ups and downs, with periods of intense intimacy; that is, Saul confided his troubles, I listened and felt warm about being invited in. Occasionally he stayed with me in New York and gave me the difficult gratification of hinting that I stood between him and some desperate act at the high window. These threats didn’t interfere with his intent sessions bent over the notebooks with their ruled lines upon which his fountain pen tracked his imagination and indignation. I learned that folks don’t usually kill themselves in the middle of composing the suicide note.

And this:

More than fifty years of friendship and non-friendship include too many harsh memories. They begin, after gratitude, with that ordinary puzzlement that a writer and man who inspired part of a generation, altered the tone of a literary period, wrote with such grace, nonetheless lived his life with flaws both large and petty, like other people. The flaws seemed to be magnified by the fineness of his achievement.

Gold ends with this fine passage:

He helped to create a new permission not only for Jewish writers, but also for others previously exiled to an odd regionality without regions — Blacks, Latinos, second and third generation immigrants, founding sons of not founding fathers. Like all artists, his personality was stuffed with surprises, and not always delightful ones; like all human beings.

When the days and nights end for a writer, something keeps going on if he has shed his magic light and darkness upon the miracle of life. “The death of the poet is kept from the poems.” And Saul Bellow struggled to leave us a record of days and nights which would not disappear after his troubled and fortunate time on earth.

The full essay is very much longer and very compelling, with many wonderful anecdotes and many more passages like the above. It can be found in The Pushcart Prize XXXII (2008).

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