Recursive Career Envy and the Wonderful Evils of Success
Shalom Auslander expresses my feelings with enviable lucidity
I was introduced to the work of Shalom Auslander one-hundred years ago, almost to the date, in 2005 when his short story collection Beware of God was first published. I immediately fell in love with his style and perspective on life, so I read everything of his I could find, which, at the time, included some internet humor pieces that seemed to be from his days of pre-success. When his memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, about growing up in a New York Conservative Jewish community was published, I read that. Loved that as well. And then I lost touch with his writing. I suspect the issue had something to do with how much I related to it. How much it felt of a piece with my own writing, or what I was fumbling towards with my own writing. With my own reconciling of lost religion. I have a tendency to do that — to recoil from things I want. The intensity of feeling is overwhelming, so I instinctually shy away. A form of cowardice, I think. I’m sure there’s a sharp jealousy component as well. “How dare this person be so like me, and yet so much more successful?”
Which brings me to one of Auslander’s essays —Beckett Drove a Deux Chevaux. In it, Auslander — now living at one of the lower rungs of professional success in Los Angeles — reckons with the incessant barrage of beautiful stuff that’s shoved in his face daily. It begins as such:
Los Angeles is the hideous demon spawn that might result if the Statue of Liberty went to a bar, ordered a drink, looked away for a moment and woke up two hours later to find herself being raped by The Golden Calf. It is a place of Things, of objects, of possessions; it is the material raised to the level of the spiritual; it is as if while God was busy battling Satan, Mammon crept up from behind and slayed them both.
How can you not fall in love with writing like that? But, of course, none of Mammon’s blessings are Auslander’s. None of them can be his. Because he’s a writer, and writers don’t get to buy houses with glass pools or some motorcycle which Auslander claims to be beautiful beyond compare. (I have no idea; vehicles aren’t my materialistic poison.) Unless you’re one of the rarified few. But even if you somehow win the nerd lottery and find yourself celebrated for your brain, and things suddenly become available to you, you’ve now got to deal with their potentially corrosive influence on the work that got you into this position to begin with:
If Netflix turned Watt into a limited series and set [Samuel] Beckett up with an overall first-look deal, would he have written “Waiting for Godot?” I doubt it. He was a human being after all, and Things tempt us. They’re designed to. And maybe, just like you and me, he would have seen a Thing he wanted — a nice house overlooking the Pacific, something with a pool and a hot tub — and maybe he would have changed Godot into a mindless rom-com and asked his agent to get it to Paul Rudd.
There is a precept in Judaism, from “The Ethics of our Fathers,” in which we are advised to “build a fence around the Torah (Bible).” To protect it. To make sure it survives. As with most things religious, that basically sage advice led over the years to volumes of arcane rules, strict prohibitions and generally backwards thinking. But the heart of it is true.
Maybe we as artists and writers need to build a fence around the lives we want to lead. Maybe even if we can afford to buy these amazing, beautiful, incredible Things, we can’t afford to have them. They’re just too dangerous.
Reading this, it occurred to me that I have had a protective fence imposed upon me. Against my will, it was built up plank by plank with each successive failure of my career. I kept trying to knock them away as they were nailed in, but the hammers were too fast, and my hands were bleeding. Before I knew it, I was completely safe from all the vile trappings of success. Praise be!
Of course, I didn’t want it. I never wanted it. Unless maybe I did? Who knows? I mean, I certainly didn’t make any overt attempt to commercialize my work. Well, not until long after the money train had pulled out of the station and was cresting the horizon. Regardless, the point is that this is what I have. This is my situation, and I can either keep bitching about it to my therapist (my wife has long since stopped listening), or I can shut the fuck and make due with the positive aspects. I am not tempted to buy a very nice car. I’m not tempted to buy a very nice anything. I’m wired for scarcity, and spending more than twenty dollars at a pop gives me nausea. So, all of those concerns are fully out of my life.
Just as I am jealous of Shalom Auslander’s success, he’s jealous of other people’s more successful success. I would one-hundred percent be in his position had I achieved any of what I used to need. And I don’t doubt that my writing would have suffered for it. It suffered well-enough for the attempt, and it’s only now that I’ve been broken to the point of acceptance that I’ve rediscovered what I loved about this writing habit to begin with. I don’t know if my new stuff is better or not, but I prefer it to what I used to write, which was not much.
Is it possible that all that failure was a blessing? Is it possible to ask that question in earnest without succumbing to rationalization? Would it even matter if it was a rationalization? I do not have an answer to these questions, and I question if they even have answers. I’m mostly just trying to reconcile the life that I used to want with the life that I have. I suspect that this one makes me happier than that one. But, as Auslander posits…
…maybe I’m just materialistic and jealous and making up excuses. It could be. I’m pretty shitty.
Yeah, that.
