A Photo Essay
Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
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Paris to Provence, 2006
June 1, 2004
Writing a life.
After Spalding Gray committed suicide this spring by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry, the NPR journalist, Terry Gross, interviewed Gray’s wife and played tapes of previous interviews with Gray and excerpts from his performance monologues. In one of those interviews, Gray talked about the strange world that the confessional writer lives in where almost every personal experience, large or small, becomes grist for the writer’s mill. The practical reality of that is that the writer after a while is living on two levels: the level of ordinary reality and the level of constantly analyzing (or perhaps mining) ordinary reality (often while it is happening) for its literary and consequently professional and thus ultimately its monetary value. One of Gray’s monologues had contained a discussion of his experience with his wife of working through a crisis over whether or not to abort an unwanted pregnancy. The decision was made to have the child; and Gross, pointing out to Gray that that child is now old enough to understand how he almost did not make it into the world, asked Gray how he worked through his decisions about what to include in his monologues, and what might just be too personal to reveal. Gray’s response was that of course he thought about just that very slippery issue all the time but that in the end he had to think of himself as a person whose art was defined by a painful honesty. He decided that if he was to have a legacy at all or if he was to have any kind of impact on the world it would have to be by demonstrating the essential value and humanity of honesty. He recounted how he had tried to explain to this child and his other children and everyone else he knew that this was who he was and what he did. He tried to explain as honestly and accurately as he could what exactly his life had been and what it had meant to him. His faith in honesty led him to believe, and try to demonstrate in his art, that the great questions about the human condition can best be answered or at least understood by a painful self-examination and by the careful study of the examined lives of others. When the affable Gray was criticized by Gross for having left his wife for another woman, Gray simply replied, “I’m not a nice person, Terry. I never said that I was.”
Listening to Terry Gross’s interview of Spalding Gray was a painful reminder to me of my own struggle to find the universal in the particular. Samuel Beckett was better than Gray (and certainly better than I am) at portraying the inner life of the mind without resorting to personal anecdotes. Beckett’s plays and novels portray a bleak tragedy of life, seasoned with a dark gallows humor. But neither Gray, nor I, has possessed Beckett’s genius for what is generally called the absurd, but what I call simply the abstract. Gray on the other hand presented his life simply and without artifice asking the respondent to do the abstractions. I regret to inform my readers that that too is my fate. Beckett’s style may well be the highest point in modernism --the modern equivalent of Dante’s Inferno. But the universal art of storytelling, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Twain to Charles Bukowski, is always and forever based on personal experience and above all else, truth. Beckett did it his way and I am about to do it mine. I saw a decal on the front windshield of a muscle car the other day as I was walking my friend’s dog. It screamed in large letters: “ANSWER: Get in, shut up and hold on!” "A book title?" I thought. "Not really....but close."
Stay tuned,
--Larry L. Dill
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