DAVID SHIELDS

LIFE & ART

DAVID SHIELDS

Dear Dad,

After our phone conversation last night—in which you said, apropos of Dead Languages and the "uncomfortably close" resemblance between yourself and the character of Teddy, that your pride in my accomplishment was at least matched by your anger and shame at seeing your foibles publicly paraded—I thought I would sit down and try to write to you some of my thoughts and feelings about the relationship between "real life" and fiction. Your response to all of the following may only be (though I hope it isn't): "Methinks he doth protest too much."

Any novel, no matter how autobiographical—and mine certainly looks plenty so—is a verbal machine that wants only to function, and the writer will do everything he can to get the book to work. More specifically, it seems to me that a writer uses a combination of characteristics from different characters or character types—based on memory, imagination, popular mythology, and his own odd will—to create "characters," who are pieces of language that the author wants to work together in a way that makes a meaningful puzzle. "Yeah, yeah," I'm sure you're thinking, "but how would he like it if I wrote a book in which all his most embarrassing moments (e.g., Lido Isle, summer of '55) had been resurrected for all to see?"

One of the things I've learned about writing a novel is that once you get certain characters and certain relationships set up, it's virtually impossible to alter these relationships or change these characteristics in any significant way. Once you put a character on a particular path, e.g., Teddy suffers from bouts of manic-depression, that's sort of what he tends to go on being throughout the book. The rhetoric, grammar, and coherence of the book demand that. I mean the portrait of Teddy (of you) as a sympathetic one, and I hope that comes across—the ferocious identification and empathy between Jeremy and Teddy. Some of my favorite scenes in the book—Jeremy observing his father at the dinner party in the opening chapter, Jeremy buying his father a lime Sno-Cone, Jeremy going to Montbel to tell his father that Annette has died—are pretty much, so far as I can tell, love letters from me to you.

Novels, at least the ones that I seem to want to write and read, are about problems, failures, pain, and so when I wrote Dead Languages, the characters tended to take on the one most problematic quality of members of my family as I remember them from my childhood. The dominant trait of each character in the book—in some ways almost the only trait of each character in the book—is the one that stood most powerfully to me as the symbol or symptom of some sort of tension: my stuttering, your manic-depression, Mom's obsession with political causes, Paula's struggles with her weight. The imagination—my imagination, in any case—feasts on one quality, takes that one quality and can't let go. All good novels are about fully-dimensional characters, and yet there is something, it seems to me, of the cartoon to all memorable characters in fiction.

Maybe I'm just not a good enough writer yet to create fully dimensional characters; maybe it takes an exceptionally talented or experienced or mature writer to create characters who are not only interesting but also not always pained; to show them in their happiness and fullness and glory, and yet not sentimentalize them, either. Maybe writers cartoonize what they can't fully understand.

I've tried to cut a subjective swath through my own patch of experience, as any writer must do, and I hope I haven't harmed anyone in the process, particularly you. Because this is a book about inconsolable pain, the portrait of Teddy leaves out many of the wonderful times and good moments and full feelings. I needn't tell you—or maybe I do, but certainly you must know—that I love you with all my heart and soul for all the love and support you have given me, all the nourishment and encouragement, all the laughs and discussions and insights, all the jokes and games and tears and tribulations, all the complicated, joyful, mysterious legacy handed down from father to son. If I didn't get all this into the book, it's because I'm not a good enough writer yet.

Love,