Nancy Campbell/IFC Films: Spalding Gray
By RON ROSENBAUM
The New York Times
Published: October 28, 2011
In “Swimming to Cambodia” — the monologue that made Spalding Gray (relatively) famous, about the time he spent in Thailand playing a small role in “The Killing Fields,” the film about the Cambodian genocide — Gray tells a strange, disconcerting story about the death of Thomas Merton. Merton, the Trappist monk celebrated for his devotion to an eloquently spiritualized silence, was “a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up,” Gray, the compulsive verbalizer, tells us.
As Gray describes Merton’s death, “the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly.”
This account, as it happens, dramatizes the conflict found throughout Gray’s extensive journals: between his own relentless search for transcendence (“perfect moments” and the like) and the often shocking absurdity of worldly contingency of the sort that will, eventually, tragically, short-circuit him too.
Absurd contradictions were Gray’s métier. One of the offhand, heartbreaking epigrams to be found in these journals goes like this: “The worst fear is that I’ll learn to be happy at last and then get real sad when I see what I’ve missed.” Better to be miserable! No wonder he called one of his monologues “Terrors of Pleasure.”
It’s distressing to read, the way happiness generates sadness and terror in Gray’s psyche, because his work could be the source of so much pleasure to his audiences. Even offstage: one friend tells the editor Nell Casey — who has done an admirable job knitting together a selection of Gray’s journal entries with interviews and her own thoughtful take — that Gray was so seductive a storyteller that just sitting around a downtown loft, hearing him recount the mundane details of his day, could “torture you with pleasure.”
He made a career, invented a performance genre out of this narrative prowess. But the dark side, the journals reveal, was just how much Gray himself was tortured with, well, self-torture.
He’d make light of it in his monologues. One story line of the journals is the way he evolved the radical form of these performances. They were nurtured at first by Elizabeth LeCompte and the postmodern theater troupe that centered on the Performing Garage (later the Wooster Group) in SoHo, but they were, in many respects, premodern. Stripped to the minimum of voice and story, Homeric in that respect, Gray’s odysseys were performed on a bare stage with a bare wooden desk and chair, no props except a water pitcher and glass. Then Gray, this über-WASP figure who looked as if he’d stepped out of the L. L. Bean catalog with his plaid shirt and pale, ghostly New England transcendentalist mien, would sit down, open a notebook and begin talking.
“Get me out of here!” was my first thought when a friend dragged me to one of Gray’s pre-“Cambodia” monologues. But then, in a funny, charming, self-deprecatory way he’d start telling rambling, digressive, but observant and intelligent stories that would bare his soul and crack you up, with a repertoire of subtle facial gestures, pauses, double takes and the like, a kabuki that said: “Yeah, I know I’m kind of a jerk, but the fact that I know it makes me a meta-jerk, and admit it, you’re laughing because you recognize yourself. I speak for the metaphysical jerk in all of us.”
Or that’s how I interpreted it. In some ways it was ancient, Gray as the Homer of small things. In some ways it spoke to the moment, with a light touch of philosophical and spiritual consciousness that disclosed itself now and then. It had that artful quality of seeming artless, but somehow he had found the sweet spot where remorse and laughter meet, and it was like attending a therapy session on laughing gas.
Looking backward, he spoke for a generation of people who had learned to doubt everything conventional but couldn’t find sure satisfaction in the unconventional, even as they (and Gray) turned to Eastern spirituality as an alternative to Western tradition.
And looking forward, he helped inspire (for better and worse) a generation of memoirists, most of whom lacked his self-deprecatory humor and, instead of finding the large in the small, found their smallness in the melodramatic, self-congratulatory accounts of their tribulations.
Then again, even Gray didn’t always pull it off. As he reports in his journals, his girlfriend Renée Shafransky (who later became his first wife and his collaborator) summed up this difficulty thus: “She said I was confessional but not honest.”
This is an important distinction, one Gray struggled with often as he sought to embody his persona onstage. He confessed to things in such a disarming way that you’d forgive him, but we learn in the journals he often couldn’t forgive himself.
One problem in assessing the confession-honesty divide in this book is that it has been distilled from what Casey estimates are 5,000 pages of writings and journals and that his family — especially his second wife, Kathleen Russo, who has custody of them — reserved the right to remove passages they felt would be hurtful or violate privacies. Understandable, but it leaves us not entirely sure in what ways this Spalding Gray is more or less “real” than the man onstage, or whether there’s a somewhat different creature behind both. He would probably relish the mystery, and not be able to solve it himself.
He certainly was aware of the ways confessing his infidelities, for instance, hurt others, without giving him the feeling of absolution he sought, though he doesn’t seem to have realized that compulsively recounting his affairs and longings for others to those he loved and betrayed wasn’t the best way of being honest. Or indeed to have considered whether honesty of this sort is the highest virtue.
But in some ways the journals help us understand Gray’s obsessive confessional impulse and his haphazard snatching at spiritual consolation. Religion played an inordinately important role in shaping this sensibility from the beginning.
We learn that his mother’s devout Christian Science — a faith that all one had to do was recognize the perfect love that pervaded existence (every moment a perfect moment) — did not prevent her nervous breakdowns and an eventual car-exhaust suicide when Spalding was away, acting, in Texas. All of which bequeathed him a lifelong sense of guilt for not being with her at the end.
And then he plunges into downtown avant-garde New York culture and partakes of what might be called salad-bar Buddhism, a little from here, a little from there, which doesn’t seem to supply much comfort. The confessional impulse is Catholic, the ineradicable guilt sounds Jewish, the stew he makes from them all his own.
Nonetheless he becomes one of America’s great talkers and theatrical raconteurs. Mark Twain, Oscar Levant, Jean Shepherd, Fran Lebowitz, Richard Pryor are his peers. He made holding an audience in the palm of his hand seem effortless, yet his journals reveal how much he rehearsed and revised, how dedicated to acting as much as spontaneity he was — to acting as if it were all spontaneous. The persona he created became beloved — almost too beloved, in a way that sometimes trivialized him into a Seinfeldian curmudgeon — and he jetted all over the world replicating it.
And just when he seemed to have transcended all that guilt and unhappiness over happiness, through family (particularly his love for his two sons and stepdaughter with Russo), one of those absurd contingencies struck the way it struck Merton.
Gray had spent years working on a novel called “Impossible Vacation,” largely about his inability to take a vacation. When he finally did, when he and his family were invited to enjoy the pleasures of a friend’s Irish estate, one night on a lonely road, a speeding veterinary van (of all things) smashed into their car.
He suffers a broken hip, leaving him with a permanent limp, but more awful, a serious head injury that drove skull fragments into his brain and seems to have, over time, exacerbated his lifelong depression.
The final sections of the journals are particularly painful to read as Gray struggles to maintain his life while undergoing endless rounds of antidepressive treatments including a week in a locked ward and electroshock, none of which had much effect. He can’t stop obsessing over his decision to move to a larger house isolated from the Sag Harbor Village home where he used to be able to stroll out the door into the streets and entertain his neighbors with stories.
Finally, on a wintry night in 2004, he disappeared. Two months later his body was found on a New York City shoreline, the assumption being that he had jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
These final pages radiate some of the unbearable sadness of the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Gray comes across as a genuinely noble, striving, seeking soul, felled by a malignant fate. Again, prophetically it seems, toward the close of “Swimming to Cambodia,” he tells a story of Sri Rama Krishna, “the last great poor Indian guru”: one who “was seen as a holy man and not as a psychotic. At last a naked sadhu ran out of the jungle, stuck a sharp stone between Sri Rama’s eyes and he saw Nothing.”
The big question Spalding Gray left behind, I believe, is the one raised by “Swimming to Cambodia,” and revisited several times in the journals: Is there a way to engage with genocide in art? While there is a miniaturist’s perfectionism, a minimalist’s grace and modesty, about the other monologues, what are we to make of his applying the method he used to evoke the minor trials of a downtown performance artist, with this material — the murder of millions of Cambodians by their fellow Cambodians, by once peaceful Buddhists turned insane, bloodthirsty Maoists? Even at two removes — a monologue about a minor actor in a film about a major human cataclysm — is it somehow inappropriate for him to tiptoe tipsily (the hash, the Thai whores) around the edges of the abyss as he does, recognizing our divide from it? Or has he found, somehow, a perversely respectful way of approaching the horrific tragedy? Rather than attempting to gaze directly at it, he allows that black hole to cast its malignant shadow over every quotidian act, but conspicuously avoids all but the bare facts — perhaps a rare act of artistic humility that doesn’t diminish but redeems the meta-Conradian horror at its heart?
Having read, and written about, more than my share of Holocaust literature and assimilated the arguments about the perils of its representation, I think a case can be made that Gray did the right thing. He knows the genocide is there but pays about as much direct attention to it as we did as a nation when it happened — or afterward, when (as Gray points out) we temporarily allied ourselves with the Khmer Rouge genocidaires protecting Pol Pot in the jungles. Gray performs a service in recounting the bare facts for many who might otherwise be unaware.
In its own way his monologue is as full of awe and tact, and illuminating about the way we fear to face the full extent of the horror because any response is inadequate. As one of the few responses of art to one of the dismally unusual genocides of the bloody century — auto-genocide: a people who slaughtered their own, not another, people — at the very least it serves as a critique of our superficiality. Gray’s work deserves to last and perhaps in his final dive off the Staten Island Ferry, he was, in his own way, finally bridging that divide, swimming to Cambodia.
Ron Rosenbaum, the author of “Explaining Hitler” and, most recently, “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III,” is a columnist for Slate.
By RON ROSENBAUM
The New York Times
Published: October 28, 2011
In “Swimming to Cambodia” — the monologue that made Spalding Gray (relatively) famous, about the time he spent in Thailand playing a small role in “The Killing Fields,” the film about the Cambodian genocide — Gray tells a strange, disconcerting story about the death of Thomas Merton. Merton, the Trappist monk celebrated for his devotion to an eloquently spiritualized silence, was “a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up,” Gray, the compulsive verbalizer, tells us.
As Gray describes Merton’s death, “the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly.”
This account, as it happens, dramatizes the conflict found throughout Gray’s extensive journals: between his own relentless search for transcendence (“perfect moments” and the like) and the often shocking absurdity of worldly contingency of the sort that will, eventually, tragically, short-circuit him too.
Absurd contradictions were Gray’s métier. One of the offhand, heartbreaking epigrams to be found in these journals goes like this: “The worst fear is that I’ll learn to be happy at last and then get real sad when I see what I’ve missed.” Better to be miserable! No wonder he called one of his monologues “Terrors of Pleasure.”
It’s distressing to read, the way happiness generates sadness and terror in Gray’s psyche, because his work could be the source of so much pleasure to his audiences. Even offstage: one friend tells the editor Nell Casey — who has done an admirable job knitting together a selection of Gray’s journal entries with interviews and her own thoughtful take — that Gray was so seductive a storyteller that just sitting around a downtown loft, hearing him recount the mundane details of his day, could “torture you with pleasure.”
He made a career, invented a performance genre out of this narrative prowess. But the dark side, the journals reveal, was just how much Gray himself was tortured with, well, self-torture.
He’d make light of it in his monologues. One story line of the journals is the way he evolved the radical form of these performances. They were nurtured at first by Elizabeth LeCompte and the postmodern theater troupe that centered on the Performing Garage (later the Wooster Group) in SoHo, but they were, in many respects, premodern. Stripped to the minimum of voice and story, Homeric in that respect, Gray’s odysseys were performed on a bare stage with a bare wooden desk and chair, no props except a water pitcher and glass. Then Gray, this über-WASP figure who looked as if he’d stepped out of the L. L. Bean catalog with his plaid shirt and pale, ghostly New England transcendentalist mien, would sit down, open a notebook and begin talking.
“Get me out of here!” was my first thought when a friend dragged me to one of Gray’s pre-“Cambodia” monologues. But then, in a funny, charming, self-deprecatory way he’d start telling rambling, digressive, but observant and intelligent stories that would bare his soul and crack you up, with a repertoire of subtle facial gestures, pauses, double takes and the like, a kabuki that said: “Yeah, I know I’m kind of a jerk, but the fact that I know it makes me a meta-jerk, and admit it, you’re laughing because you recognize yourself. I speak for the metaphysical jerk in all of us.”
Or that’s how I interpreted it. In some ways it was ancient, Gray as the Homer of small things. In some ways it spoke to the moment, with a light touch of philosophical and spiritual consciousness that disclosed itself now and then. It had that artful quality of seeming artless, but somehow he had found the sweet spot where remorse and laughter meet, and it was like attending a therapy session on laughing gas.
Looking backward, he spoke for a generation of people who had learned to doubt everything conventional but couldn’t find sure satisfaction in the unconventional, even as they (and Gray) turned to Eastern spirituality as an alternative to Western tradition.
And looking forward, he helped inspire (for better and worse) a generation of memoirists, most of whom lacked his self-deprecatory humor and, instead of finding the large in the small, found their smallness in the melodramatic, self-congratulatory accounts of their tribulations.
Then again, even Gray didn’t always pull it off. As he reports in his journals, his girlfriend Renée Shafransky (who later became his first wife and his collaborator) summed up this difficulty thus: “She said I was confessional but not honest.”
This is an important distinction, one Gray struggled with often as he sought to embody his persona onstage. He confessed to things in such a disarming way that you’d forgive him, but we learn in the journals he often couldn’t forgive himself.
One problem in assessing the confession-honesty divide in this book is that it has been distilled from what Casey estimates are 5,000 pages of writings and journals and that his family — especially his second wife, Kathleen Russo, who has custody of them — reserved the right to remove passages they felt would be hurtful or violate privacies. Understandable, but it leaves us not entirely sure in what ways this Spalding Gray is more or less “real” than the man onstage, or whether there’s a somewhat different creature behind both. He would probably relish the mystery, and not be able to solve it himself.
He certainly was aware of the ways confessing his infidelities, for instance, hurt others, without giving him the feeling of absolution he sought, though he doesn’t seem to have realized that compulsively recounting his affairs and longings for others to those he loved and betrayed wasn’t the best way of being honest. Or indeed to have considered whether honesty of this sort is the highest virtue.
But in some ways the journals help us understand Gray’s obsessive confessional impulse and his haphazard snatching at spiritual consolation. Religion played an inordinately important role in shaping this sensibility from the beginning.
We learn that his mother’s devout Christian Science — a faith that all one had to do was recognize the perfect love that pervaded existence (every moment a perfect moment) — did not prevent her nervous breakdowns and an eventual car-exhaust suicide when Spalding was away, acting, in Texas. All of which bequeathed him a lifelong sense of guilt for not being with her at the end.
And then he plunges into downtown avant-garde New York culture and partakes of what might be called salad-bar Buddhism, a little from here, a little from there, which doesn’t seem to supply much comfort. The confessional impulse is Catholic, the ineradicable guilt sounds Jewish, the stew he makes from them all his own.
Nonetheless he becomes one of America’s great talkers and theatrical raconteurs. Mark Twain, Oscar Levant, Jean Shepherd, Fran Lebowitz, Richard Pryor are his peers. He made holding an audience in the palm of his hand seem effortless, yet his journals reveal how much he rehearsed and revised, how dedicated to acting as much as spontaneity he was — to acting as if it were all spontaneous. The persona he created became beloved — almost too beloved, in a way that sometimes trivialized him into a Seinfeldian curmudgeon — and he jetted all over the world replicating it.
And just when he seemed to have transcended all that guilt and unhappiness over happiness, through family (particularly his love for his two sons and stepdaughter with Russo), one of those absurd contingencies struck the way it struck Merton.
Gray had spent years working on a novel called “Impossible Vacation,” largely about his inability to take a vacation. When he finally did, when he and his family were invited to enjoy the pleasures of a friend’s Irish estate, one night on a lonely road, a speeding veterinary van (of all things) smashed into their car.
He suffers a broken hip, leaving him with a permanent limp, but more awful, a serious head injury that drove skull fragments into his brain and seems to have, over time, exacerbated his lifelong depression.
The final sections of the journals are particularly painful to read as Gray struggles to maintain his life while undergoing endless rounds of antidepressive treatments including a week in a locked ward and electroshock, none of which had much effect. He can’t stop obsessing over his decision to move to a larger house isolated from the Sag Harbor Village home where he used to be able to stroll out the door into the streets and entertain his neighbors with stories.
Finally, on a wintry night in 2004, he disappeared. Two months later his body was found on a New York City shoreline, the assumption being that he had jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
These final pages radiate some of the unbearable sadness of the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Gray comes across as a genuinely noble, striving, seeking soul, felled by a malignant fate. Again, prophetically it seems, toward the close of “Swimming to Cambodia,” he tells a story of Sri Rama Krishna, “the last great poor Indian guru”: one who “was seen as a holy man and not as a psychotic. At last a naked sadhu ran out of the jungle, stuck a sharp stone between Sri Rama’s eyes and he saw Nothing.”
The big question Spalding Gray left behind, I believe, is the one raised by “Swimming to Cambodia,” and revisited several times in the journals: Is there a way to engage with genocide in art? While there is a miniaturist’s perfectionism, a minimalist’s grace and modesty, about the other monologues, what are we to make of his applying the method he used to evoke the minor trials of a downtown performance artist, with this material — the murder of millions of Cambodians by their fellow Cambodians, by once peaceful Buddhists turned insane, bloodthirsty Maoists? Even at two removes — a monologue about a minor actor in a film about a major human cataclysm — is it somehow inappropriate for him to tiptoe tipsily (the hash, the Thai whores) around the edges of the abyss as he does, recognizing our divide from it? Or has he found, somehow, a perversely respectful way of approaching the horrific tragedy? Rather than attempting to gaze directly at it, he allows that black hole to cast its malignant shadow over every quotidian act, but conspicuously avoids all but the bare facts — perhaps a rare act of artistic humility that doesn’t diminish but redeems the meta-Conradian horror at its heart?
Having read, and written about, more than my share of Holocaust literature and assimilated the arguments about the perils of its representation, I think a case can be made that Gray did the right thing. He knows the genocide is there but pays about as much direct attention to it as we did as a nation when it happened — or afterward, when (as Gray points out) we temporarily allied ourselves with the Khmer Rouge genocidaires protecting Pol Pot in the jungles. Gray performs a service in recounting the bare facts for many who might otherwise be unaware.
In its own way his monologue is as full of awe and tact, and illuminating about the way we fear to face the full extent of the horror because any response is inadequate. As one of the few responses of art to one of the dismally unusual genocides of the bloody century — auto-genocide: a people who slaughtered their own, not another, people — at the very least it serves as a critique of our superficiality. Gray’s work deserves to last and perhaps in his final dive off the Staten Island Ferry, he was, in his own way, finally bridging that divide, swimming to Cambodia.
Ron Rosenbaum, the author of “Explaining Hitler” and, most recently, “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III,” is a columnist for Slate.
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