Page 16 - WTP Vol. IX #8

Criticism:
An excerpt from The Very Last Interview
“All criticism is a form of autobiography.”
—Oscar Wilde
Shields decided to gather every interview to which he’s ever been subjected, going back nearly 40 years. If it was a radio or TV interview, he transcribed it. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew he wasn’t interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested him, however—approximately 2,700, which he collated and curated and edited down into 22 tightly focused chapters. Then, according to Shields, “the real work began: remixing, rewriting, reimagining, reinventing the questions, and finding a through-line.”
During the pandemic, an interviewer pummels Shields (who never answers). What do interviewer and interviewee believe in? What—at the edge of the apocalypse—does the reader believe in, with absolute conviction? If nothing, then what sustains us? If something specific—love, family, art, civic engagement, “god”—to what degree are any such conso- lations actually quite illusory?
Shields burns himself and his own work down to the ground. Is he conducting a mad lab experiment or trying to open up a new space for himself or, weirdly, agreeing with his most benighted critics?
A writer is supposed to try to “tell the truth” about everything. What if he were to try to tell the truth about his own work? What if he were to “read against” the affirmations offered by his previous books? Could he survive such a self- dismantling? Would he be left all alone? The increasingly loud threat of suicide begins to echo.
Convulsive, urgent, lacerating, sui generis, The Very Last Interview is a major new book from Shields, a major new artistic statement, and a contribution to the centuries-old tradition in which a writer, in late middle age or early old age, confronting his own spiritual exhaustion and impending mortality, ruthlessly interrogates himself.
Is that something you still do—read all your reviews?
Every last word of every one? Both positive and negative? Really?
Why?
Are you unusual in that regard?
Didn’t you once look up every bad review of your first several books and quote the meanest lines?
What was up with that?
Do you see that as a not very subtle form of mas- ochism?
I guess what I’m asking is, how much do you hate yourself ?
Do you see a way going forward to mitigate and finally empty out that emotion?
Is the relationship between every critic and every writer sadomasochistic in essence?
What is that Conrad story called, “The Secret Sharer”? Is that not every critic and every writer?
Is there a sense in which most critics try to use most writers as a way to “get well,” pretending to be healthier than the putatively ill human who commit- ted the crime of writing the book?
Who was it who said, on the basis of one of your books, that your then wife should divorce you?
How could that not lodge indelibly in her psyche?
Karinsky’s one reservation about your second novel was that it was too nakedly autobiographical. Do you think that’s a fair criticism?
He also wanted less contemplation and more narra- tive, more scene. You more or less concur, don’t you?
You haven’t published any reviews in a very long time. Why not?
No takers?
No invites?
Are you too much of a “loose cannon”—a man with-
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