A book always feels like a place I’ve been to
On reading, writing, and Elisa Gabbert's "Any Person Is the Only Self"
A little more than halfway through her deeply moving new collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert writes that “essays, like buildings, need structure and mood. The first paragraph should function as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood.” This is precisely what she’s achieved in the book’s first essay, “On Recently Returned Books,” in which she describes her attraction to the stochastic disorder of her local library’s “recently returned” shelves, which stand in opposition to literary trends. She writes:
The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me; they weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were often old and very ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype. It was negative hype. It was anti-curation… It was everyone’s nightstand, an average of all nightstands.
Indeed, one of the pleasures of Gabbert’s book, and the generosity of her mind, is how little its interests align with the zeitgeist. In her affection for forgotten or unfashionable books—she writes at length about The Catcher in the Rye and Rabbit, Run, among others—she presents as the literary equivalent of an animal lover who fosters abused dogs. Through these texts, Gabbert is able to expound on a collection of linked preoccupations: aging, the transformation of the self, death. Yet for all of its confrontation with mortality—or perhaps because of it—there is a shimmering ecstasy and urgency to these essays, which, in sum, amount to a sprawling love letter to the art of reading.
I first got to know Gabbert’s work through her poetry criticism in the London Review of Books. But in Any Person…, she offers a set of beguiling essays that are almost willfully out of step with the time. In addition to pieces on Plath, Proust, and Rilke, there’s one called “The Stupid Classics Book Club,” in which she recounts an effort by a group of friends to read, well, stupid classics. (To be clear, she and her cohort don’t actually think they’re stupid.) Here, she discovers unexpected profundity and pathos in such manhandled texts as Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while Fahrenheit 451 comes across as a defensive tract written “in response to [Bradbury’s] own critics, critics who had pointed out that his work was racist, sexist, and xenophobic.” At a moment when it is fashionable to trash the canon in our righteous attempts to make amends for centuries of exclusion, Gabbert pushes back against the zero-sum-ness of this proposition.
Of course you don’t have to read anything… But if you want to speak or write knowledgeably about [canonic texts], you really do have to read them. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. I’m glad I read Fahrenheit 451 even though I despised it. Now I know exactly how it’s bad, and I can hate it for the right reasons.
Gabbert’s allergy to the zeitgeist, to the shiny and readymade, seems connected to her attraction to writers’ diaries, to the provisional or unfinished. “‘Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished and composed work? That is my endeavor,’” writes Gabbert, quoting Virginia Woolf. Gabbert continues: “This is part of the beauty of journals—they remain forever sketchy, with the un-worked-over magic of first drafts.”
I have a friend who is a successful fiction writer, and as much as I enjoy her published prose, it’s her texts and emails, the things she jots down intuitively, that leave me slack-jawed. I guess the craft and magic of any kind of writing lies in creating the appearance of something tossed off, the immediacy of an idea that’s moved rapidly from heart to mind to pen, yet is nevertheless rendered legible. I’m reminded of a line from Avery Trufelman’s fashion podcast Articles of Interest, in which a men’s suit connoisseur explains the concept of sprezzatura, the Italian word for “studied nonchalance,” and one of the guiding principles behind men’s formalwear: a button left undone or a tie slightly askew gives the impression that you’re not trying too hard, despite the fact that those choices have been obsessively controlled. Gabbert: “there’s an intimate beauty in minor errors.”
This theme—of finding revelation in the imperfect—continues to play out in “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,” which finds Gabbert writing about her youthful aspirations to become an architect, and about the similarities between the construction of books and buildings. Describing Robert Venturi’s attraction to “chaotic juxtapositions… apparent mistakes, or apparently intentional mistakes, and mistakes of history," she writes:
All of this speaks also to poetry, to all books, I think—how much I prefer books that seem a little wrong or unfinished or somehow unprovable. Poets’ novels often are messy and strange transmutations of life, chimerical objects stuck in transition between fiction and non-, one state and another.
Amen! As much as I can appreciate tidy, well-made plays or novels or pieces of music, there’s something about the incandescence of a slightly misshapen art object that often moves me the most. I am mildly suspicious of the kind of work in which there are no dangling threads, in which every gesture functions as a means to an end, a well-chosen, calculated detail that pays off in the final act. Life is messy. So, too, ought to be art.
The specter of the pandemic looms at the edges of this book, and thus death is never far off. Virginia Woolf: “Of course I shall lie there too before that gate and slide in.” In her essay on the shared concerns of architecture and literature, Gabbert returns several times to Christopher Alexander’s book, A Pattern Language, from which she quotes memorably: “No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.”
At first I read this as a comment on the politics of the pandemic, and the ways in which some wanted to get back to business-as-usual as quickly as possible, even when that meant sweeping death under the national rug. But “the presence of the dead” is also a through line in the texts that interest Gabbert here. About the conclusion of …Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Jekyll describes the increasing difficulty of transforming back into himself, she writes:
I can read the final pages, which Jekyll narrates from the knowledge that it’s his last change to “think his own thoughts or see his own face,” as a metaphor for aging or addiction or illness, the approach of death as a loss of the self— Jekyll’s last moments of lucidity where you recognize yourself as you are and remember the self that is disappearing, and can fathom the gap in between.
Indeed, Any Person… is also a book about middle-age, and the ways in which we register the casting off of old skins, the growing of new ones, and how reading and writing make such transformations legible. In the final essay, “Same River, Same Man,” Gabbert explains her partner’s theory that “everyone is either a squid or an eel. Baby squids are born as perfectly formed but teeny versions of their later selves. Eels go through radical changes over the course of one lifetime… I’ve been rereading books in part to test my squidness.”
When she re-reads The Waste Land, references to Baudelaire get deliriously mixed up with lyrics by the band Okkervil River, which in turn refer back to Baudelaire. She concludes:
This is why it’s worth reading the classics—to spend enough time with a text that a reference to it isn’t just outside you, but connected to your intimate experience of the text and all the other texts it connects to. Sometimes, lately, I get a glistening feeling that references, which are often, in any case, unintentional, are not one-way but reciprocal… In the right mood, reading The Waste Land, I can feel unhooked from time…the poem seems to allude both backward and forward, to reference the future.
But Gabbert is the kind of thinker who happily holds simultaneous, and seemingly contradictory ideas. Contra those who claim that “rereading is the only reading,” she argues that “first readings are the only rereading.”
[P]eople who urge you to reread books so you can form a new opinion, to update or overwrite the old one, want you to betray your younger self… I think some books are better encountered when you’ve read less, lived less, and know less. You can’t wait to read everything until you’re wiser, nor can you already have read everything once.
Here, as elsewhere, Gabbert is effortlessly informal; one has the sense that she’s chatting you up over a pint of Fat Tire, never lecturing. Stripped almost entirely of academic jargon, the book seethes with immediacy, its ideas always direct and unadorned. Reading it, I felt envious of the plainspokenness of Gabbert’s language, itself a sign of intellectual self-assuredness.
It’s possible that this book spoke to me as deeply as it did because of my own frustration with a blighted ecosystem for art criticism. As algorithms, rapacious capitalism, and an impoverished media landscape enervate and diminish the critical discourse about art, what remains is a feedback loop in which a few anointed works receive outsize attention, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
But it’s more than merely nodding along with a cultural critique with which I agree. Like all great critics, Gabbert’s love not only of the texts she’s writing about, but of the act of reading, is infectious. She makes you want to run to the nearest used bookstore or library to pick up a well-loved paperback, and to find within its yellowed pages “the life detritus of the last person to open” it: “boarding passes or receipts; oil stains or flecks of melted chocolate (I also read while eating); even drops of blood. An eyelash… These books always conjured a borrower—a faceless but familiar stranger.”
Finally, it may be that my affection for these essays is a function of having recently entered middle-age. Increasingly, the liminality afforded by reading allows me to daydream the past, while opening up a space in which to touch the murk and fear of a finite future, increasingly contingent and limited. Gabbert: “I still contain a child and a fool inside me. I have all their memories. I know more, but I still know nothing.”
Thank you as always for reading. For those in the NYC area, there are eight more performances of Magnificent Bird/Book of Travelers, which closes on October 13th. There aren’t a ton of tickets left, but have a look at the website if you’d like to pay us a visit.
