JOLLY DAYS

Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate knows he is a narcissist. He says the birth of his daughter “…may finally convince me there are other human beings as real as myself.”

He describes his approach to writing as “confessional realism”. He is very easy to read, in the sense that a very good writer makes you feel at ease, trusting. He has said he likes “long, loping sentences”; his rhythms are translucent, they flow. Years ago I read Lopate's Being With Children, the best book to come out of the alternative schooling movement. I realized later I wasn't interested in teaching, I was interested in the roots of creativity, of the wisdom of growth as it expressed itself in the primordial act: learning. But Lopate's navel-gazing was worth reading independent of any alternative motive.

I'm currently reading his collection of essays, Portrait Of My Body — an unfortunate title — but like his other writing, engaging.

He mixes psychological and sociological observation with a close reading of his own responses. It's like being in the mind of someone as they are in a session with their therapist. It could be this, it could be that, I like this and don't that, but I may be missing this, but probably not…in fact his intro has him asking the reader to approach the material sequentially, which concludes with “forget it”. Lopate is the Gilda Radner character on the old SNL, Emily LaTela, who, after being told her tirade was based on a misunderstanding, would end by saying “never mind”, and smile.

Lopate's observations are sharp, often shockingly honest, and reward with shrewd insight; he is a poet as well, so he has a real feeling for language — there isn't that burden the reader endures from a plodding descriptive drone, the garden variety author, who makes you grit your attention to take in the uni-layered content — writing which leaves out all the ambiguity and richness of texture in which our consciousness daily bathes.

I found this collection a bit much however. Lopate writes best when he is assessing others within a context — his essay on Donald Barthelme for example — and not recalling relationships or mulling locales. Lopate has the fault he ascribes to his father, he tends to brag out of insecurity — it can get tiresome. He tries to balance out the narcissistic focus, which is the predicate of his approach — the indirect self-congratulation always nipping at the reader's heels — with self-deprecation. (Self-deprecation can itself, in a certain context, be an ego assertion: who cares what anyone thinks?, he seems to say; I can admit anything and still be superior to all I survey.) Finally, the danger of self-centered subject matter is that you have to find the personality winning to go on — buy the premise, buy the joke. Only celebrities and public figures seem to have mastered that one — authors seldom have likable personas — it goes against the enterprise — truth and likability are often at odds.

Lopate has some solid things to say about influence and the struggles of artists when they are young to resist received notions:

…I don't really care about extending modernism; I'd rather read Dead Souls and other juicy classics…I drew a blank before the imperative of providing the next link in the avant-garde chain. Moreover, the solemnly heroic, self-congratulatory claims of modernism, its founders' myths of struggle to break new wood, started to bore me…I resist the notion of a progressive dialectic in art…

He is equally eloquent when assessing a conceptual artist, as she sells tickets:

…My eyes glanced over (and glazed over) the artspeak about “questioning the nature of 'truth,'” “decontextualizing,” “methodologies,” “reinforce a wide range of female steotypes,” “the categories of representation,” blahblahblah. Were such a document put in a time capsule, what would our descendants make of this mixture of flat assertion and theory; of the exaggerated taste for undercutting and subversions; of the way simple values like “work,” “truth,” and “fact” were punished for presuming to exist by being placed in the stocks of quotation marks?…