One Hundred Autobiographies

A Memoir

David Lehman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501746475
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir, " as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story.

One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

1

Execution Poem Expert

On June 11, 2001, CBS News in New York City called to see whether I, a poet and professor, would appear on a daytime news show to explain why Timothy McVeigh’s last words took the form of W. E. Henley’s “Invictus” (1875), an old warhorse of a poem, sixteen lines long, handwritten by the prisoner on death row and handed to the warden. McVeigh was facing the lethal injection because he had detonated the bomb that killed 168, wounding hundreds more, in Oklahoma City in 1995, in the single worst act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history.

McVeigh was convicted, he was condemned, but he wasn’t ready to flinch. “Invictus” is Latin for “invincible,” and McVeigh was presenting himself as defiant, proud: “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” The poem’s conclusion: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” That the bomber would represent himself with a poem was noteworthy, and CBS needed someone with the literary credentials to talk about the choice and how it reflected the mind of a mass murderer facing execution.

It was my birthday, and the TV appearance was, as far as I was concerned, a lark, an adventure, or an auspicious omen. I went through the various stages that precede even a bit performance on television—the endless rehearsals of things you have told them you would say, the application of makeup. The task was not onerous. I knew just enough about Henley to locate him in the anchorperson’s mind, and the poem is straightforward enough. You could tell what McVeigh meant to say.

The CBS producer, an efficient Wellesley alumna, was in a rush, as the job required. But she took the time to ask me whether I pronounce my name “Lee-man” or “Lay-man.”

“Lee-man,” I said.

As I sat in the greenroom waiting for my three-minute stint before the cameras, I watched the program. Heading for break, the screen announced what was coming: “Execution Poem Expert.”

What a wonderful distinction, I thought. My wife, Stacey, made me business cards with these words on them.

And when I got on the air, I was introduced as David Lay-man.

That is what I mean by a spot of time.

2

Spots of Time

It was Wordsworth who introduced the phrase. In The Prelude, his autobiographical epic, Wordsworth wrote, “There are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue,” such that, in unhappy or humdrum circumstances, they leave our minds “nourished and invisibly repaired.” A spot of time, recollected and stored in the memory, “enables us to mount, / When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.”

This is a deservedly famous passage—or used to be, when English majors were many and all were required to read the major romantic poets. I would, however, insist that the moments and hours that transcend the here-and-now and make so lasting an impression are not limited to ones that gave pleasure the first time around. On the contrary, the recollection of a melancholy or painful episode—an emotional crisis, an illness, an accident, a humiliation, even the death of a loved one—may perform the “renovating virtue” that Wordsworth described. The memory may be involuntary, triggered by an uncanny sense of repetition, or provoked by the act of writing, as I hope to demonstrate here.

3

Café Loup

The Harvard professor’s lecture on The Prelude was as brilliant as advertised. The professor linked the passage I just quoted to comparable instances of recollection and “renovating virtue” in Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” When he quoted from memory the magnificent last paragraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s great essay “Compensation,” the audience was as moved as it was impressed. I moderated the lively question-and-answer session that followed, which went off without a hitch, and the students lined up to get their books signed by the distinguished lecturer. It was a perk of the job that I got to take the professor out to dinner and drinks to cap off the evening in celebratory fashion, and we went to Café Loup, the bar on Thirteenth Street west of Sixth Avenue where the food is lousy but the pour is generous. We arrived in good cheer but, to my astonishment, our guest, so erudite and knowledgeable in the lecture hall, was, when relaxed, an old-fashioned bore: someone who talks your head off without pause. From the first taste of his single-malt scotch on the rocks, my guest talked, and talked, and talked. Now he was holding forth to a captive audience of three of my colleagues, a graduate student, and my wife about China’s theft of our intellectual property while the listeners sipped their cocktails and fidgeted with their napkins. I motioned to the waiter (“another round for everyone”) and excused myself to the men’s room. But instead of finding refuge, I glanced down to see that I had pissed blood in the icy white urinal. It was ugly, like cracking an egg to find a spot of blood on the yolk. When I returned to the table, my guest had changed the subject, now orating on the effort to unionize the adjuncts at his university—“the wrong union at the wrong time”—and the others continued to pretend to be paying attention, and I did my best to appear as though nothing unusual had just taken place.

4

No Big Deal

“Probably a UTI,” says my GP. She phones in a prescription for Cipro. “Take these twice a day for ten days and you’ll be okay.” But I’m not okay. I watch the blood in the toilet bloom like one of those time-lapse photos of an exotic flower transformed from bud to blossom. Every morning I stand in front of the toilet praying for a stream the color of sunlight. For weeks it would be. Then the blood returns, like the first plague God visits upon the Egyptians in Exodus.

“I’m freaking out,” Stacey tells her sister Amy on the phone when she thinks I’m not listening. She’s in the bedroom, door shut, and I’m in the living room watching The Wild Bunch for the eleventh time, but the wall is thin and I’ve lowered the volume.

“The doctor says it’s a remote possibility,” Stacey says after a listening pause. “I’ve been googling—I know, I know, that way madness lies, but still.

“You mean, besides the blood in the urine?

“Lower back pain on one side (check, since the summer) and upper thigh and pelvic pain (check, he’s had pain in his groin which he thinks was a muscle pull from too vigorous swimming).

“I’m a nervous wreck.”

“Don’t panic,” Dr. Isamu says when the antibiotics fail to solve the problem, and sends me to Dr. Langsam, an expensive out-of-network urologist.

“The symptoms sometimes go away of their own accord, but that can be temporary,” Dr. Langsam says. He avoids making eye contact. “The sample you left contained trace elements of blood.”

“What does that mean? An infection?”

“Perhaps. The tests can be inconclusive. We sometimes get a false negative.”

I’m wondering whom he reminds me of—I mean in looks. The young Bruno Ganz, maybe?

“You need a cystoscopy,” he says, looking over his shoulder as he washes his hands. “I won’t jolly you along—most men wouldn’t volunteer to have one. That said, it’s over quickly. Here I’ll show you the apparatus.”

This guy radiates confidence. “Men come from hundreds of miles away for my cystoscopies.”

Maybe, but I almost pass out—from fear more than from pain—while the catheter is in me.

“You have a polyp—no big deal—but you’ll need to have it scooped out,” he says. He hands me the name and phone number of another urologist, a younger man, Dr. Caine. “Best surgeon in the city,” he says, “for what you have.”

“Which is?”

Cancer: so far no one has used the dread word, but I bring it up in Dr. Langsam’s office. “It’s unlikely,” he says. “It’s remote. But even if you have it, bladder cancer is one hundred percent curable if you catch it early.” The double if undid the rest. I knew it then. It was likely. It was not remote.

A week later, I visit Dr. Caine for another cystoscopy.

More than what he said, I remembered the enthusiasm in the brilliant young doctor’s voice when, after examining me, he announced, with the air of a mathematician who has solved a problem long thought insoluble, “You have bladder cancer.”

5

Cancer Alley

Like every cancer patient on getting the bad news, I wondered what I had done to deserve this punishment. How does one even get bladder cancer?

“We don’t really know,” Dr. Caine said. “Have you ever taken the New Jersey Turnpike from the Holland Tunnel?”

I nodded.

“Then you’ve inhaled the fumes from all of those processing plants. You know what we cal...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1 Execution Poem Expert
• 2 Spots of Time
• 3 Café Loup
• 4 No Big Deal
• 5 Cancer Alley
• 6 The Crisis
• 7 The Aftermath
• 8 The Procedure
• 9 The Protocol
• 10 The Good Kind
• 11 The Diarist
• 12 None But the Strong
• 13 Tropic of Cancer
• 14 Hospitals and Airports
• 15 Back to the Waiting Room
• 16 “Hurry up, please, it’s time”
• 17 Why 1963?
• 18 Good Friday
• 19 Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!
• 20 The Weekend Before
• 21 “Bladder cancer: Isn’t that what Sinatra died of?”
• 22 In a Technical Sense
• 23 Five O’Clock Rush
• 24 A Heart Event
• 25 Good Show
• 26 Metaport
• 27 If You Were an English Poet
• 28 The Regimen
• 29 A Few Beacons in the Quicksand
• 30 What’s the Story?
• 31 Time Is on My Side
• 32 Rush Job
• 33 Final Call
• 34 And Then You Crash
• 35 Chemo
• 36 Roid Rage
• 37 Under the Garden
• 38 The End
• 39 Falling in Love Again
• 40 Nothingness
• 41 Syllabus
• 42 Commencement Speech
• 43 The Exquisite Corpse
• 44 The Editorial “We”
• 45 Oblivion
• 46 Dostoyevsky
• 47 The Spiritual Connection
• 48 “Myself, When Stoned”
• 49 Bloomsday
• 50 Tom Collins
• 51 The Admissions Officer
• 52 Columbia
• 53 Classic Koch
• 54 The Poem Team
• 55 Shakespeare’s Birthday
• 56 Recovery Room
• 57 The Rebbe
• 58 Life Begins at Forty
• 59 Search for Meaning
• 60 The Old Religion
• 61 The Problem of Evil
• 62 Dean Martin’s Hat
• 63 740 Francs
• 64 Shalom Aleichem Rides to the Rescue
• 65 The Arrival of the Messiah
• 66 Sabbath Services
• 67 A Complicated Guy
• 68 The Patient Next to You
• 69 Cambridge
• 70 Armistice Day, 1970
• 71 The Sublime Pain of Being
• 72 The Glass Skeleton
• 73 Why Does the Bridge Not Progress?
• 74 Q & A
• 75 Ludlowville, 1981
• 76 Bio Note (Alt.)
• 77 Wedding Ceremony
• 78 Moscow, 2007
• 79 Group Therapy
• 80 Fort Tryon Park
• 81 A Fine Invention
• 82 Identity Theft
• 83 A Routine Visit
• 84 Doctor Jew
• 85 “Except for the cancer …”
• 86 The Heart Knows
• 87 A Black Dress
• 88 Heisenberg as Hero
• 89 Cheers!
• 90 Walter Lehmann
• 91 Rowing in Eden
• 92 I Remember Mama
• 93 No Regrets
• 94 If I Could
• 95 The Scar
• 96 The Secret
• 97 Like a Hurricane
• 98 In the Eyes of the Beholder
• 99 Champagne Cocktails
• 100 In the Swim