My Bloody Motor Is Full

On October 29, 2014, Triple Canopy honored the novelist, short-story writer, and critic Lynne Tillman at our fall benefit. More than 600 guests joined us for cocktails, a seated dinner, and various celebrations of Tillman’s extraordinary life and work. Tillman was introduced by author Fran Lebowitz. Artists Robert Gober, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman created editions for the occasion. Writers Etel Adnan, Hilton Als, Lydia Davis, Sam Frank, and Ariana Reines contributed to a special program, featuring cover art by Paul Chan and Jean Paulhan. These appreciations have been republished here along with a video of Lebowitz introducing Tillman.

Lynne Tillman

(I try to be still … I try to control myself … I try to be unobtrusive … I try to leave … I try to be sensible … I try to find myself … I try to abstain … I try not to trust appearances … I try not to want to escape. I try not to laugh or cry. I try to remember. I try to act differently … I try to fool myself … I try not to jump to conclusions.)

It’s strangely unnerving, or worse, to write about yourself, and probably why I write fiction. But called upon to do it, I have to confess that the Lynne Tillman whom you are honoring is different from me, the Lynne who is not always writing, though is writing now and so shares some attributes with LT. Their common use of “I” often confounds readers and themselves. Yet pronouns, generous shifters, are beautiful for allowing their users to flow, imaginatively, into other positions and conditions. For instance: She is not I, and even I am not myself.

LT strongly believes that readers don’t need to “identify” with characters in stories, actual or fictional, but instead use their creative, productive capacities to understand them. I regularly don’t identify with “Lynne Tillman the writer.” She is, in some sense, a character to me, and I am trying to understand her, and live with her, which isn’t easy.

She (and I) wanted to be a writer from the age of eight, and continues to marvel at the child’s persistence. How did it happen? In interviews, LT has explained that she discovered her “calling” in third grade, when she and her classmates were asked to write a composition about Charlemagne. So excited in the act of writing, she wrote one, and then she wrote another. Her compositions were titled “Charlemagne, Man of War” and “Charlemagne, Man of Peace.” (The paradoxical is a household god in LT’s writing.) But saying at eight that she would be a writer, and becoming one, is still a mystery. That the child persisted probably arose from necessity—a need to compose a life—and from pleasure: a passion for reading and writing. LT and I credit her father, Nathan Tillman, who died before she published her first novel, for her becoming a writer. Her father, neurotic as hell, encouraged her to play and was playful himself.

Because she became a writer, LT is being honored by Triple Canopy, whose handle is strange—it is also the name of an infamous private security company. When LT was introduced to it, by way of an email and phone call from Sam Frank, one of its editors, she (and I) instantly imagined the canopy, or canopies, in a jungle. But the name was ironic, and the magazine and entire enterprise should not make anyone feel secure.

TC, LT, and I all appreciate irony, and LT would not be here without it. Thank you, friends and supporters, for being here too. Thank you, Triple Canopy. I hope you know what you’ve done.

Etel Adnan

My first desire concerning Lynne is to see her. I feel for her the kind of friendship one has for a childhood friend, for a friend with whom one has shared years of conversations, or with whom one has a familiarity that often makes words unnecessary. This didn’t happen, I seldom have a chance to be with her. I wish I did. But my friendship is as deep as if it did. Lynne whom I know more through her writing than through long encounter is a real writer because she’s first a real person, a human being of a constant presence. She’s also a writer who transcends periods, styles, theories. She does not so much describe as she makes, she creates. Behind every sentence of hers there’s flesh and blood, intelligence and humor. This is why I don’t know, sometimes, if I have read her, or heard her. This is why her writings will accompany generations. In times where most people feel lonely, abandoned to their destiny, there’s a generosity in Lynne’s ability to create character, and thoughts, that makes of her, her person, and her books a company that is there, at will, a miracle. That generosity is an inseparable part of her genius. Like in all great authors, it brings out the mystery of humanness, through the mystery of the power of writing. I read her books, and I remember. Once in a great while, I get in touch with her, and the moment resonates. They are one. And they bring me an enduring and special happiness.

Hilton Als

Lynne Tillman was one of the first writers I ever knew in the real world who taught me something about the real world, which included, of course, the universe of her prodigious imagination. I’m trying to remember, just now, which book I read first, it might have been her early novel Haunted Houses, and the feeling I had while reading it was fear, and this fear was based on Lynne’s ability to evoke terror in the everyday. All that she saw—all that she felt—was controlled by her commitment to the language, giving it shape and form, the better to elicit a number of feelings and thoughts that weren’t immediately available to the reader, or, more specifically, that they could never access on their own. Lynne’s writing was the key to my deepest imaginings, it unlocked doors onto worlds that she built brick by brick, leaf by leaf, as she led us down the garden path to various truths and any number of sad and radiant beginnings.

Lydia Davis

When I want to feel that my brain is alive and active, and when I want to laugh at the same time, laugh at something really intelligent and interesting, I read Lynne Tillman’s stories. Sometimes, on a dark day, I find myself thinking that everything surprising has already been said and thought, even long ago. (Just as I sometimes think that every possible joke must surely have been told by now.) But then I have only to open a story of Lynne’s and spend some time with one or another of her smart, eccentric, strong-willed, obsessive, fallible, self-doubting, or bizarre characters to remember that the likelihood of surprise (and even of a new joke) is always here, and in her work even the most modest situation—a walk to the post office, an encounter by a windowsill with a mourning dove, a question posed by an uncomfortable German tourist in a plane in Miami—can be offered to the ever intelligent gaze of her canny narrator in such a way that it yields a new thought in every sentence, a new thought that is truly a philosophical one, since it is not idle, but turns crucially and critically on how we live and the choices we make.

Hers is the independence of spirit we see in the formal inventor, and the fearlessness of one who speaks out as she is moved to speak out. Such elements of reality as the facts of history and politics enter and participate in her work, quietly, naturally, as in the best sort of conversation, while she shapes discrete stories out of the continuum that is any typical life, and any of our lives, and yet still replicates the sense, and the value, of that continuum. Though her character Helen’s circling, or spiraling, monologue in American Genius, A Comedy, for instance, is part of a longer ongoing monologue that we are privileged to re-enter from book to book, at the same time, in a larger sense, the reading of any of Lynne Tillman’s work is something else, an endlessly enriching conversation.

Sam Frank

I was at loose ends in 2007 and thought to leave town. Books: I packed only The Making of Americans and American Genius, A Comedy, a galley copy of which I had stolen from work, sure for some reason it was then what I needed. I spent June on my sister’s couch in Los Angeles and drove with my high school best friend down to Austin. We arrived on the Fourth to queso and sparklers. The air mattress hurt my back; I would wake in the night in the Texas AC to type blindly into a Word document. Days I would take the bus downtown and read my two books and type now blind with anxiety. Sentences from Lynne helped, obscurely, and it soothed me to retype them, wondering at their truth-seeking lateral motion.

Everyone loves their own farts, which could get them kicked out of restaurants or humiliated in public settings, where people try not to act like animals but sensitively, if it serves their purposes, but no one is sensitive about other people.

I thought I was in love and was in distress. I broke down and flew back to New York, to a letter from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: An anesthesiologist from an operation two years before was suspected of spreading hepatitis B and C and, perhaps, HIV. As my checkup concluded, I asked about an itchy, painful rash bubbling up on my flank. The doctor looked at it a moment. “Did you have chicken pox as a child? The virus lurks in your nervous system, waiting to strike—when you’re at your most vulnerable—like a terrorist—shingles!” My dermis had, as foretold, read my mind. “Skin is a parchment for the body,” Lynne had written. She or her words knew things.

She read outdoors the next day. It was warm and breezy, no Texas heat, loud East Village calm. I asked her to sign American Genius, at a misprint in my galley where a sentence cuts off, one letter into its fifty-second word:

She speaks in Polish to those she calls or who call her, though not to clients like myself who don’t know the language, but especially to the owner who phones often; I don’t understand what she’s saying, I don’t seriously imagine she is talking about me, yet it’s not impossible, since this is a mistake —All best, Lynne Tillman, Aug. 1, ’07, Tompkins Sq. Park

It was or was not a mistake. She remembered. A year later we had lunch at Veselka, and she was as wise or as sane as I’d read her to be.

Ariana Reines

Dear Lynne,

I’m writing to thank you for What Would Lynne Tillman Do? It’s ravishing.

It has restored me to a world of dreams, or a world I’ve been recalling, in which I am capable of dreaming—I don’t know how long it’s been, now, that I’ve taken my exile from there or here as a matter of course; accepted it (my pretensions to “realism”) as fact.

About eight years ago I read Cast in Doubt. I found it in the apartment of a couple I spent a summer being in love with. I am sure I shall not have been the only person to’ve told you that novel is so bewitching, so authoritatively itself, that it is difficult to connect its voice to any author, mere person-worker. It’s perfection: It disappears into itself entirely, the way the greatest actors disappear into their roles. I haven’t seen Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine, or in anything, but perhaps it’s Goslinglike that we all would disappear if we could, little geese that we are; would have ourselves be. First the couple sold the apartment and moved into their studio, then they moved away altogether; I now know I read Cast in Doubt just before a certain world went under the surface for me.

You must forgive me, if you can, for having taken so long to return to your writing. As I have said, Cast in Doubt was so utterly itself I failed to associate it with you, or I was such a credulous greenhorn that, at that time, I still consumed art for its magic, and not for the sense that by trying to get a handle on its making I might better figure out how to be a person, a maker, myself.

It would have been fun to write this letter with a pen. But it will reach you more quickly this way.

your ardent fan,

Ariana

[Excerpt from an email written on July 20, 2014]