Samuels - Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Also by David Samuels
The Runner

DAVID SAMUELS

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
Copyright 2008 by David Samuels

This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks,
a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2012, All rights reserved.

For My Parents

I know a wind in purpose strongIt spins against the way it drives.

Herman Melville,
The Conflict of Convictions

Tom Wolfe insisted that journalists were writing the American novels of today, he may have been secretly dreaming of writing novels. But the observation that there is something in the warp of American reality that resists the rule-bound nature of fiction was true, is true, and has always been true, and will probably continue to be true, in obedience to the eternal laws of nature that govern the movements of the stars and the curvature of our planet. Americans, individually or in groups of greater or lesser size, have sent men to the moon, invented a vaccine against polio, obliterated the past and large hunks of the present, and attempted to remake large chunks of the world in our own image. Walt Whitman wrote journalism. Hawthorne wrote journalism. Edgar Allan Poe wrote journalism, nearly all of which turned out to be fake. Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, which was both a novel and an extended riff on the philosophy and practice of fact-based reporting, written by a man who began his career by making up a true account of his life on a Polynesian island and ended it by becoming a poet. Ernest Hemingway wrote journalism. So did Saul Bellow. Nearly every notable American writer of the modern era has at least tried his or her hand at a stray magazine piece or two to pay for that precious vacation in Corsica or the Galapagos Islands. But that is not what concerns me here.

It hardly comes as news to even the most casual fan of the mongrel art of writing literature on deadline that the great American magazines are dying or dead. At some point around the year 2000 A.D., as future historians of the blogosphere will relate, the great wheel began to turn. Writers continued to write, of course. They wrote memoirs and novels and learned treatises. They wrote crime fiction and op-eds. The magazines that once recorded the results of the headlong collision between literary style and personal affectionwhat I once called a furious human wave assault on the far shores of realitylost their audience to art forms like cable television dramas that attempted to bridge the ever-widening gap between traditional storytelling and literary aesthetics and the protean, mind-blowing nature of an uncontrolled experiment in space and time inhabited by starry-eyed inventors, shit-heeled yokels, strong-arm men, hip-hop gangstas, rock stars, and other more or less distinctive types. It is startling to imagine that every one of the magazines that send out literary-minded ladies and gentlemen to chronicle the American scene, like Harpers and The New Yorker, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly, and even the New York Times Magazine, was once a profit-making enterprise supported by hosts of paying subscribers. Today, each of these magazines survives in whole or part thanks to the generosity of a wealthy individual or corporate patron who is content to cover losses incurred by writers and editors who have lost their connection with the public. Add to that the stifling legal constraints imposed by large corporations and lawyered-up big shots, and it has become harder and harder for freelancers like me to have any fun.

The magazines that people actually read, like Us Weekly, or the various shopping and lifestyle publications put out by the well-heeled corporate editorial brains of the Cond Nast empire, are hardly magazines in the ancient or not-so-ancient senses of the word. Rather, they are creations of talented people who work together in fancy offices with designer cafeterias, bottled water on tap, and free limos home to tiny apartments in downtown Manhattan or Park Slope. Their job is to shape a product according to the dictates of the people who sell adsnot too long and not too short, on subjects of fleeting but general interest. The result is a glossy, highly reflective environment populated by photographs of brand-name designer clothing, perfume bottles, skinny models in cigarette ads, fast cars, and private jets. The professionalism that this kind of environment prizes is nothing to be ashamed of. But its not the same thing as writing well.

I dont mean to seem ungrateful, but the truth is, I am. Being ungrateful is the first rule of magazine writing, the second and third rules of which are to issue sweeping pronouncements about people and places that you know very little about and to never, ever miss your deadlines. It is also a fact that the best magazine writers hit their peak within a decade or so of leaving college. By the time you make it to your late thirties, you should be thinking about getting a paying job and supporting a family somewhere outside New York. Magazine writers who survive into middle age are marvels of nature, or independently rich, or half-crazy, retailing fables about government secrets which are in turn part of larger conspiracies that never quite make their way into print. My advice for young writers who think about writing for magazines is to stay at home and sponge off your parents. Marry rich. Get thee to a gym. Spend a month holed up in some miserable Holiday Inn in the sticks, and then another two months trying to make sense of the sodden squiggles in your notebooks and dozens of hours of stoned conversation, and youll wish that someone like me had offered you this advice much earlier, and that you had chosen to pursue a career in accounting like your Uncle Maury.

The problem with the current setup does not lie in the generosity of the wealthy individuals who sponsor Americas money-losing, once-great print publications, but in the fact that these enterprises continue to lose money, which is another way of saying that they are completely detached from reality. It is no offense, I hope, to say that the world billionaires and their high-paid retainers inhabit bears not one iota of resemblance to the lived experience of most Americans. The inhabitants of Literary Cloud-Cuckoo-Land are concerned with very important subjects, like lesbian couples who raise mixed-race children conceived through artificial insemination, or Upper East Side private school kids who savor uni and rock shrimp at after-school courses designed to enliven tiny palates. But enough of all that.

During the course of the decade-long journey that is captured in these pageswhich contain my best magazine writing, beginning in the year of Bill Clintons reelection campaign and ending at a dog track in St. Petersburg, FloridaI lost five girlfriends, two stereo sets, stopped smoking at least half a dozen times only to start again, and was evicted or otherwise physically removed from no fewer than six apartments. The promise that I made to my subjects and my readers is that I would stay open to the full and actual range of human experiencemy own experiences, and those of the people I was trying to write about. Every writer I know shelters a truth somewhere deep inside that informs the stories they write, the best of which are often told slantwise. My story has something to do with our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves up from scratch, which is much the same thing as believing in the future.

In order to propagate my truth as far and wide as possible, and as a hedge against forgetting, I have prevailed on The New Press to publish