Hail Mary

Out of It with Mary Gatiskill

Now that Mary Gaitskill is on Substack, this fucked up world just got a little better.  I say that because I love her writing and her thinking, but, for me, it’s also personal.

When I was in high school, from 1987-1991, those Vintage Contemporary paperbacks advertised a world of cool we could just imagine in Dallas, TX.  I read Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City on a city bus when I was 14 and commuting on a city bus to a performing arts high school downtown.  I quickly learned that asking a cool sophomore girl if she had read it was a non-starter.  They had all read it. 

Bight Lights, Big City was a Syracuse Creative Writing Master’s thesis, written under the direction of Raymond Carver, and I devoured his entire Vintage Contemporary output around that time, too.  But there was another Vintage Contemporary who really blew my mind.  Just as I learned from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet that sex could be dark and weird and full of contradictions, I learned this from Gaitskill’s debut collection, Bad Behavior, a major staple of my non-required reading.  The collection is most famous for “Secretary” because of the film that was sort of based on it with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, but what really blew my mind was what did not get into the film.  Mary was inspired by a news item about a secretary who allowed herself to be spanked by her boss.  The boss does not look like the James Spader in the film.  I met Spader a few years ago, and maybe he looked more like that.  This was not a BDSM fairy tale.  It was really about how people do things that don’t seem to make sense.  They do them for their own reasons.  This ending is everything the film missed:

For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all.

Imagine reading that as a teenager and being completely gobsmacked by it, then looking at a picture of the author, more cool and worldly and literary than I could ever hope to become, then, many years later, being hired for a job as a professor at Syracuse University at 32, where Mary Gaitskill was right down the hall.  At this point, I was the age of Mary Gaitskill when she published Bad Behavior, the year when my first book would be published.  We had talked a little, but I barely knew her when something small was causing a disproportionate emotional response.  Something compelled me to knock on Mary Gaitskill’s door. 

“Do you find,” I asked, “that the thing that makes you a writer—attuned to details and descriptions—also makes it impossible to get through daily life?”

Without pause, she said, “Yes!”

And so we would meet regularly at a Mexican restaurant called Alto Cinco, or meet in the lobby of an elegant hotel where she graded papers, which then looked like the lobby of The Shining.    I don’t know how I would have survived those first years without her.  Her relationship to Nabokov transfigured mine.  We all have our exemplars, and it is up to us to write the perfect sentence, then do it again.  We talked about writing through insomnia.  “Tired energy,” she told me, can be good.  I still tell myself this if I am moving the blinking cursor across the screen, even if it feels like I’m dragging it.  Her novel Veronica, which had just come out, was a masterpiece of slow reading.  I wasn’t reading to find out what happened.  I was immersed in its glorious prose, the entire book a master class. 

Mary left Syracuse after my second year there.  I would still see her occasionally.  The last time I saw her was in Claremont, CA, in the same week where I also had consequential encounters with Maggie Nelson, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell. Later, I read her masterpiece “This is Pleasure,” which is not about Leon Wieseltier, though he thought it was.  It is about a flawed but talented man brought down low.

Life is big enough for any story. I walk in the street with tears running down my face; I walk in a world of sales racks and flavored refreshments, marching crowds, broken streets, and steam pouring through the cracks. Jackhammers, roaring buses, women striding into traffic, knifelike in their high, sharp heels, past windows full of faces, products, bright admonishments, light, and dust. Slouching employees smoke in doorways; waiters clear outdoor tables. Eaters lounge before empty plates, legs spread, working their phones. Flocks of pigeons, a careful rat. At this newsstand, I know the proprietor; he catches my eye and tactfully registers my tears with the slightest change in his expression. Deep in his cave of fevered headlines and gaudy faces, he shivers with cold and fights to breathe; his lungs are failing as he sells magazines and bottled water, mints and little basil plants. We greet each other; I don’t say but I think, Hello, brother. And life rushes by. On the corner, people play instruments and sing. Sullen men sit with filthy dogs and beg. In the subway, a hawk-nosed boy with dyed, stringy, somehow elegant hair squats and manipulates crude puppets to sexy music amid a weird tableau of old toys. There is something sinister; he looks up with a pale, lewd eye. An older woman laughs too loudly, trying to get his attention. A beggar looks at me and says, “Don’t be so sad. It’ll get better by and by.” And I believe him. There will be something else for me. If not here, then in London, I can feel it. I am on the ground and bleeding, but I will stand up again. I will sing songs of praise.

The beggar laughs behind me, shouts something I can’t hear. I turn, a dollar already in my hand.

This scene, Nabokovian in architecture, was so elaborate, so baroque, so beautifully wrought, and emotionally devastating, it made me feel like a bum for calling myself a writer.  And yet I strive.  We are lucky to know the ones who inspired us.  I learned to appreciate her writing at a tender age, and when I read her now, I still feel tender.  Now, everyone on Substack gets to have Mary Gaitskill right down the hall.  It is called “Out of It,” and it is a feeling I identified with when we first met, and I don’t see myself getting over it anytime soon. When you meet a simpatico spirit who shares your feeling of being out of it, you get into it. Her sentences are a guide for all of us.  “But play you must, a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” wrote Wallace Stevens.  I never took a class with Mary Gaitskill, but I have felt taught by her many times.  Maybe being outside yourself isn’t such a bad place after all.