The Personal and the Individual

Leonard Michaels

Nothing should be easier than talking about ways in which I write about myself, but I find it isn’t easy at all. Indeed, I want to say before anything else that a great problem for me, in writing about myself, is how not to write merely about myself. I think the problem is very common among writers even if they are unaware of it. Basic elements of writing–diction, grammar, tone, imagery, the patterns of sound made by your sentences–will say a good deal about you (whether you are conscious of it or not) so that it is possible for you to be writing about yourself before you even know you are writing about yourself. Regardless of your subject, these basic elements, as well as countless and immeasurable qualities of mind, are at play in your writing and will make your presence felt to a reader as palpably as your handwriting. You virtually write your name, as it were, before you literally sign your name, every time you write.

Spinoza wrote his Ethics in Latin, a language nobody spoke anymore, using a severely logical method of argument. The last thing he wanted was to make his presence felt, or to write about himself. The way he wrote his Ethics was rather like the way he lived–determined to remain obscure, uncompromised by a recognizable personal identity in the public world. The impersonal purity of his Ethics, then, couldn’t have been more self-expressive. The book wasn’t published in his lifetime partly because it would have been recognized as his book. He was, in his obscurity, too well known.

Shakespeare isn’t discoverable in a personal way in anything he wrote, and yet it is generally agreed that we know what Shakespeare personally wrote, or what only he is likely to have written. His sonnets, which are among the most personal poems ever written, are remarkably artificial in their quatrains, couplets, puns, and paradoxes–devices that are manifestly impersonal. It is curiously relevant that, in Shakespeare’s various signatures, he never spelled his name the same way twice, rather as if he thought his personal identity had very little to do with any particular way of spelling his name. A particular way, always the same, would simply be individual.

Montaigne said of his own essays, "I have no more made this book than this book has made me." I think he meant his writing revealed him to himself, and the revelations weren’t always consciously intended. Again and again in his essays he seems to discover himself inadvertently, though he says he wrote his essays for his family to help them remember him as he was in life. All this is to say only that your radically personal identity, with or without your consent, is made evident in your writing. Like a fingerprint. Or what is even more personally telling, a face print–according to experts there are eighty places in the human face that can be used to identify a person.

One rainy night many years ago, I went with a friend to a jazz club called Basin Street in Greenwich Village to hear a Miles Davis quartet. There was a small, sophisticated crowd. You could tell the crowd was sophisticated because it applauded in the right places. At a certain point Miles Davis began turning his back to the crowd whenever he played a solo. I don’t know what he thought he was doing, but the effect was to absent himself from the tune, as though he were saying, "Don’t look at me. I’m not here. Listen to it." He gave us a lesson in music appreciation, or the appreciation of any art. With Davis’s back turned, the music seemed to become more personal.

A professor of mathematics at Berkeley told me that, while reading a newspaper article about the Unabomber, he suddenly realized the man had been his student. The professor then went to his files, pulled out the Unabomber’s math papers and reviewed them. He said, "B/B+." Mathematics couldn’t be further from the kinds of self-presentation and self-revelation to which all of us are constantly susceptible, but even in the absolutely neutral language of equations, the Unabomber had declared his identity. From the point of view of a mathematician, B/B+ was the man.

I think we name ourselves, more or less, whenever we write, and we always tend to write about ourselves. When people ask if you write by hand or use a typewriter or a computer, they are interested to know how personal your writing is. But even now in the age of electronic writing, when the immediate revelations of handwriting have become rare, a ghostly electronic residue of persons remains faintly discernible in words and sentence structure. A more familiar example of what I’m getting at is phone calls. Imagine answering the phone and hearing a voice you haven’t heard in years, a voice that says only your name or even only hello, and you say instantly, "Aunt Molly, it’s been so long since you phoned." There’s a joke that touches on this experience: The phone rings, Molly says, "Hello," and a man’s voice says, "Molly, I know you and I know what you want. I’m coming over there and I’m going to throw you on the floor and do every dirty thing to you." Molly says, "You know all this from hello?"

In another kind of personal revelation, you see a painting you’ve never seen before and you say: "Hokusai," or "Guercino," or "Cranach." With the names you announce that you have recognized a unique presence or personal being. The existence of any human being or personal presence tends to be an announcement, virtually a name, and this is just as true of my uncelebrated and obscure Aunt Molly as the very great and famous Hokusai. Adam was required to name the animals, but how could he have done that unless their names were already implicit in their individual being? "Obviously, this beast is Lion, and this can only be Pig." In regard to animals, the case is more individual than personal, as far as we know. If an animal could spell its name, it would be spelled the same way every time. Existence moves in the direction of names.

Diction, grammar, imagery, the sound of a person’s voice on the phone, the way an animal looks–if a thing has any sort of sensational existence, a name is being announced, and this is true even if it goes unrecognized. It is only God who can say "I am that I am" and remain nameless, accessible only through the via negativa. As Spinoza puts it, substance is conceived only in and through itself; that is, only in terms of itself. As for us folks, or any other finite individual entity, we are among the modes of substance and, ultimately, "Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees." This mournful line is from Wordsworth’s profoundly personal poem "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" about a woman who is never named. In fact, what makes the poem so haunting in its desperation is that it is almost entirely about Wordsworth himself. Inevitably, we are names. To say Henry IV or John Smith III is to say a name that precedes the being it names–the fourth Henry, the third John Smith.

In a story I wrote long ago, I quoted a freshman paper that had been submitted to my class. The student wrote: "Karl Marx, for that was his name. . . ." It’s as if Marx’s father had said to his wife, "I’ve decided to name our boy Karl," and his wife said, "No, no, anything but Karl," and the father said, "I’m afraid I have no choice, for that is his name."

For reasons I understand very imperfectly, though I suppose they might be obvious to anyone else by this point, it has always been more difficult for me to write about myself than any other subject. What I know for sure is that writing about myself always entails writing about other people, and there is a chance someone will be embarrassed or hurt even if my intentions are innocent.

One of my brightest and most likeable students was named Canterbury. He wanted me to direct his dissertation. I told him that wasn’t a good idea, and that he ought to ask one of my colleagues who is well known as a scholar and critic, and has clout and will be able to help him get a job. No. Canterbury wanted me to be the director. Finally, I agreed. Canterbury wrote a brilliant prospectus, and then became amazingly casual about the prospect of writing anymore. Upon graduation he left for West Virginia (his home state) where he made a name for himself in politics. It was as if, like Miles Davis, he’d turned his back on the audience–which was me. Canterbury had to escape individual distinction, in my eyes, to achieve the personal. Before he left for West Virginia, I asked if he would try to find a certain kind of old handmade tool, an adze, and bring it to me when he visited California. About six months later, he visited California and presented me with a handmade adze from West Virginia–the tool used to make the coffin in As I Lay Dying. I was very touched. Nothing remained of our former relationship of professor and student. We had become purely friends.

When I was writing my novel The Men’s Club, it occurred to me that Canterbury was the right name for one of the characters in my novel. The character looked nothing like the real Canterbury, and his personality couldn’t be more different, but my friend, the real Canterbury, was shocked. How could I have done this to him? "So that’s what you think about me," he said. He went on and on reminding me of what I had done to him. I couldn’t tell if he were serious or joking.

Usually, when writing about myself, I will disguise the people I talk about and never use their real names. Occasionally, when I want to say something innocuous or affectionate, I’ll ask permission to use their real name. One of my writer friends, also a former student, found it mysteriously impossible not to use real names when writing about herself, though it could make no difference to the quality or the sales of her book. She simply couldn’t bring herself to change the names. As a result, people were hurt and family relations were irreparably damaged. There is something horrific about seeing your name in print. For some of us, it’s almost as disturbing as a photograph. Even when writing only about myself, I’m very reluctant to use my name in a sentence, I do it only when I have no choice. It gives me the creeps to write "Leonard" or "Lenny."

I think I know why my student couldn’t help using real names despite the consequences for her family relations. From my experience when writing about myself, the moment I begin making up names for the real people in my life, there seems to be a loss of seriousness, and then I can’t get rid of the feeling and everything begins to seem like a lie even if everything–except for a few names–is entirely true. The impulse toward truth is built into our existence just as the shape of our eyes is built into our genes, and the truth, like murder, wants out. Of course there are different kinds of truth. My friend should have changed the real names of the people in her book, but she couldn’t do it. She was possessed by a sort of demonic righteousness. "I’m writing the truth and nothing but. These are the true names." People often say when accused of slanderous gossip, "But it’s the truth," as if that were a justification. The truth is in the heart of the speaker.

Another reason I have trouble writing about myself, aside from what it entails in regard to other people, has to do with the essential nature of writing. According to Freud, "Writing is the record of an absent person." This is a condensation of what Socrates said about not writing. He said, if you have something to say, you ought to be present to answer questions from your audience, because truth lies only in the practice of the dialectic, which is a very difficult thing to arrive at, or to experience. When it happens it is like a sudden flame. In Plato’s Seventh Letter, he goes on about the frivolousness that is inevitable in writing, and says that any man who tries to write the absolute truth, as it is known to himself, must be insane. There is no better definition of insanity.

Freud’s way of restating Socrates’s point, "the record of an absent person," is very suggestive. If you are absent when you write, you must be absent to the second power when you write about yourself. It’s time for me to confess that I’m trying to reconcile the idea of presence in one’s writing with the idea of absence, which is what I intend to do, finally, in talking about how I write about myself. First, I’d like to tell a joke that touches on this complexity of simultaneous presence and absence:

The king and his court are out hunting elk in the royal forest. A poacher sees them coming and becomes terrified. He leaps from behind a bush and cries, "I am not an elk." Immediately, the king shoots him. One of the courtiers says, "But your majesty, he said, ‘I am not an elk.’" The king slaps his forehead and says, "I thought he said ‘I am an elk.’"

Whenever I write anything, my presence and absence are in constant tension–especially when writing about myself. What makes things worse for me is that because of this excruciating tension, I always feel very much out of fashion, since it is now very common for writers to be more than usually present–even outrageously present–in their writing, whether or not they are writing about themselves. Some writers don’t know how to be otherwise than fully present. There has never been such extraordinary directness and candor. The effect is comparable to pornography, not because of explicit sexual content, but rather because the directness and candor tend to be shockingly impersonal. The way I write about myself or anything else is, I’m afraid, personal or it’s nothing. This means I must always find some appropriate form. One relation of being personal and finding an appropriate form can be seen in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy where he thinks about suicide. He says, "That it should come to this." As opposed to Hamlet, a contemporary in the same situation would say, "Incredible," or some version of incredible, which is a cry of me-feeling.

The difference between the contemporary speaker and Hamlet isn’t simply in the loss of the subjunctive mood, but rather the loss of a significant intervening form between speaker and audience. When Hamlet says "That it should come to this," he is noticing the convergence of terrific forces outside himself. One force is justice. The other is necessity. A grammatical form, the subjunctive mood, makes it possible for the reader and Hamlet to convene in the understanding of his personal situation. This convening is the experience of the personal. In order for it to have happened, Hamlet absents himself in the sentence as definitively as Miles Davis turning his back to the audience.

You might argue that Hamlet isn’t using the subjunctive. He is stating a fact; so his comment has indicative force. I’m not a grammarian, but insofar as what Hamlet says implies that it could have come to something other than this, he is using the subjunctive in a peculiarly delicate and personal way.

When the contemporary says "Incredible," we are forbidden to convene in any understanding and obliged merely to notice a figure of emotion, all of which emotion is locked within his cry, "Incredible." This kind of expression in which all meaning and feeling are at once sensationally apparent and completely unavailable to you, which I take to be emblematic of contemporary writing and much else that is contemporary, resembles greed. It’s probably somehow related to the culture of capitalism, where we are constantly assaulted by images that demand attention to what we can’t have, mainly beautiful faces and bodies, but also a lot of other things–vast fortunes, celebrity, power, love–almost anything you might suppose people want.

The haiku, a poem of three lines and seventeen syllables, which is usually about nature, offers a form in which writer and reader personally convene. I can’t write haiku, but when writing about myself, I feel the impulse to write in that terse and essentializing way. This should be apparent in my book, Time Out of Mind, a selection of journal entries made over thirty years. In these entries I say more about myself personally than in any other place. I also say less since the entries contain far more implication than explication. For example, I wrote an entry on December 12, 1993, in Hawaii, that reads:

Birdcalls wake me, a sound like names, like

the trees repeating themselves in the dawn mist, each

holding its place, awaiting recognition, like names.

The context for this entry is omitted. A reader could figure it out from things said in other entries, though many autobiographical details that might seem relevant to a biographer or a gossip aren’t given. In this entry I don’t say that I had awakened lying beside my girlfriend and that we had been together for almost three years. Not long after this moment she would leave me. I don’t say that I knew she would leave me, and I don’t mention the fact that she was twenty-seven years younger than me. I don’t say that I knew the age difference was of concern to her, or that it somehow hadn’t yet troubled me as much. I don’t say our backgrounds and interests were nothing alike. I don’t say that she didn’t enjoy lectures given by visiting scholars at Berkeley where we lived during our three years together, or that she hated Berkeley dinner parties with academic or literary celebrities. I don’t say that I was crazy about her. I don’t say that I would have happily not gone to lectures and dinner parties and stayed home with her and watched Monday Night Football, or, if she insisted, I’d even have gone bowling. I don’t say that what she found interesting–running small businesses, investment banking, managing the finances and personnel of an office–didn’t much interest me. I don’t say that I tried to be interested, and I would ask her questions about her work, but I would end up feeling more intrusive than properly engaged. The innerness of business life, and the whole realm of action and money were never accessible to my brain. I don’t say that once, after a lecture in Berkeley given by the chairman of the Harvard English department, she said, "We’re basically different. You listened to the lecture and I wondered how much it cost the university for the lighting and janitorial service that made the lecture possible. Now you want to talk about the lecture, but I’m still wondering about the maintenance of the building. All that glass had to be washed, the floors polished. Someone had to take care of the garden outside, the landscaping." I don’t say that I woke up beside my girlfriend who was twenty-seven years younger than I was and would soon leave me, which I knew, though I didn’t know she would leave me for a businessman.

My girlfriend and I had gone to Hawaii, the Puna coast of the Big Island. We were staying in one room of a primitive but elegant shack in an artist colony. The shack had no windows. You could sense the magnificent luxuriance and vitality outside, the trees, the weather, the light, the ocean. In the other room of the shack, there were three men. One of them coughed all night. He had AIDS and so did several other men at the colony. The wall between our rooms was a thin sheet of wood. Listening to him cough, and knowing my girlfriend would leave me, are elements in the journal entry, and a reader might get a sense of them from other entries, but they aren’t emphasized. I don’t say that her youth didn’t make me feel young, but rather the opposite, and I don’t say that the coughing all night was heartbreaking and that it intensified the heartbreak I’d begun to feel, knowing I was much closer to the end than my girlfriend and knowing she would soon leave me. I don’t say that in the beginning of our love affair she said she would never leave me. I don’t say that I didn’t pity myself. I felt an overwhelming melancholy. I don’t know a word for it in English. In German, I think it is called Weltschmerz. I say only that the birdcalls and the trees were like names. I watched the trees emerging in the mist, and I listened to the birdcalls. I was struck by the repetition of things and by the pathos there is in the way individual being is always emerging and calling its name as if to distinguish itself amid the mindless proliferation and density of life in general. I don’t say much of this in the journal. When writing about myself, I find that I am interested in the expressive value of form and its relation to the personal more than I am interested in particular revelations of my individual life.