Understanding Don DeLillo

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Don DeLillo

Criticism and Biography

When literary critics refer to authorship today, the term no longer carries with it the assumption of a personal style. I refer here to the argument that a literary work such as a novel or poem communicates a writer’s biography, intentions, or selfhood in any transparent manner to the reader. The matter applies to the most impersonal writers as well as the most confessional and autobiographical. DeLillo would seem to belong with the former group of writers whose literature appears immune to biographical interpretation. Furthermore, in interviews he has consistently evaded extensive commentary on his own life and also avoided writing about his own life in any explicit way, in fiction or elsewhere. It would seem that both DeLillo and some of his more influential readers and critics, the latter group reinforced by the tremendously influential twentieth-century theories of language, mind, and literature that reconfigured all our assumptions about how we can experience art, have obstructed possible discussions of DeLillo’s biography. This is not to suggest they conspired to do so: it simply works out that DeLillo’s fiction does not explicitly disclose personal information about the writer’s life. Curiously, however, DeLillo writes often about biography (if not his own). In addition, critical studies of DeLillo’s career often contain important observations on the relationship between his life, career, and art, observations that would seem to contradict the premise of much critical writing about DeLillo. It is a curious, and rather productive, series of contradictions.

Contemporary critics begin from the position that the study of literature cannot presume any easy relationship between the artist’s life and the art. Some take this position as the starting point for a discussion of the cultural forces that shape literary works; literature, they argue, is to be read as a social text, something determined by forces a writer cannot control: class, race, gender, language, and so on. Literature becomes in this view a catch basin into which language is diverted by external social forces. There is little if any agency afforded to the writer in such treatments of literature, wherein the work is generally regarded as a sort of passive commodity that suddenly appears as the result of predetermined social pressures. In another, less current view, we might still regard the literary work as an artifact also without any relation to the author’s life or experience, and one whose relationship to that life is furthermore immaterial. In this view, we study literature according to certain rules that govern the evaluation of literary works. What are its rhetorical properties? Is it ironic? Paradoxical? Is it a generic work? How so? Where might it be categorized? Literature is thus severed from biography and history, these being modes of reading that formal literary analysis regards as extraneous to literary experience. While both views have their legitimate scientific models and merits, both also eliminate biography or reduce it to the status of an unwelcome guest in the house of literary criticism and cultural analysis.

It does not require much thought to admit that these views defy the laws of physics. A writer must sit down somewhere and write for hours and days and weeks and even years. In doing so, he or she chooses words and assembles literary artifice, labors through genres, modes, and styles, reflects (or deflects) personal predilections and takes positions with respect to widely recognized traditions and debates. Biographical criticism therefore works from the reasonable assumption that there exists a significant relationship between a writer’s life and the writer’s art. Rather than view the writer as an unwelcome guest in the house of criticism, the literary biographer views the writer as a reluctant host. Critics visit, eat the appetizers, and move on to ruin someone else’s carpets. The biographer stays behind trying to coax the writer’s life out from a room that it refuses to leave. The writer may very well become available, but the life is always somewhere else.

And so while the great modern theories and critics have made the literary art of biography a rather difficult one, there may also be opportunity for it in that chaos. After all, longing for prior modes of expression is widely accepted as a defining feature of postmodern literature such as that written by DeLillo. Who is to say that the art of biography is not the expression of a postmodern longing to describe a life, even if that previous notion of individual life (the romantic hero, the fragmented modern subject, and so forth) was itself a myth—and a useful one at that? A postmodern biography of DeLillo’s life and career would require accounting in some way for the artifice of biography. For example, it might very well resemble what DeLillo composed when he wrote Libra (1988), a novel depicting the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. After one reads Libra it is difficult to avoid noticing DeLillo’s career-long habit of depicting characters who are concerned with recounting the lives of others or even setting out to recount their own lives. (For example, the latter is the central dilemma of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, published in 1971.) Understood in this way, the writing of a fictional biography (or obituary, or fictional interview about an artist’s work) appears as an evasive, difficult, yet entirely worthwhile endeavor insofar as DeLillo treats it as a literary genre rather than as a statement of fact designed to reduce art to the evidence or alleged facts of a life.

For the present purpose it is necessary simply to acknowledge that DeLillo often writes from the intersection where life and fiction collide. Granted that life is not his own, but reading the sections of Libra that are set in DeLillo’s childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, one cannot help but sense a certain sympathy between writer and milieu. I would borrow from an early work by the late Edward W. Said to explain briefly that effect in a manner that does not reduce a novel to biography but rather sustains a relationship between the two. In a shrewd book entitled Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Said argued that Conrad’s seafaring fictions were effective because their author diminished his own maritime experience in those writings, thereby making room for literary characterization and event. In Said’s words, Conrad "economized himself."¹ The relationship between DeLillo’s fiction and life may be said to do the same. In addition, he has often admitted his debt to modernist narrative techniques (if not Conrad) that are circumspect regarding their authors’ personal lives. (Joyce’s fiction would seem significant in this respect.) More important, DeLillo’s fiction often makes that same circumspection into the subject of a novel. The result is a literary fiction wherein characters or narrators dissolve into art. DeLillo’s beautiful and moving short novel The Body Artist (2001) exemplifies the process. We might say that as DeLillo economizes himself by withholding autobiography from his fiction, his fiction does something more in that it makes self-effacement into literary art.

And so we are precluded by much of a century of argument that prohibits reconstructing life from art. Further still, even if such a thing were possible, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reverse engineer DeLillo’s biography from his art, even if certain critics I will later mention have made persuasive cases for it. Readers can nonetheless keep in mind that life and biography play a constant role in his work even when the life or biography in question is not necessarily his own, or when a life is being artfully immersed in fiction rather than substantiated off the page.

One biographical fact about DeLillo has remained constant, however, through the clamor and debate: in interviews, readings, and public conversation, DeLillo prefers to discuss his art, and art in general, rather than his life. If an interviewer asks a question of a biographical nature, DeLillo may briefly entertain it only to direct his answer to other discussions of writing, art, and culture. This much can be said with certainty: DeLillo loves to discuss the relationship between art and life, but he does so at times by avoiding the very questions that would offer perspective on their relationship to his own life and art. If one were to write a biography of DeLillo based only upon DeLillo the public figure, his would appear to be a life thoroughly preoccupied with writing, art, and thoughtful consideration of the role of literature in the world. Regarded in this way, his career seems less enigmatic. Perhaps it would appear selfless in some other, more important or more substantive way.

The situation is complicated by the lack of verifiable facts. Until recently the only information available about DeLillo’s life came from his interviews or a scant public record. Over the past decade, however, the accumulation of interviews he has given, paired with the digitization and public dissemination of U.S. government records, provides a more thorough account. One cannot say it is comprehensive, or that one might say to the writer as the government operative says to Jack Gladney in White Noise (1985), that you are the sum total of your data (181). In addition to the available materials, a biography of DeLillo’s life and career might even one day use DeLillo’s papers and correspondence, which he recently gave to the archives of the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Transcripts, records, and archives do not, however, speak for themselves; rather, the biographer speaks through them, distorting or clarifying them in order to tell a story of a life. This process is complicated by the migration of facts to new technological platforms. For most of modern history, nameless clerks compiled forms, filed them, and kept the archives we refer to as historical record. Today that information becomes the aforementioned data, a metastatic body of information that is not so much kept as it is sorted, stored by, and accessed through powerful computer servers. On memorable occasions, as when Jack Gladney of White Noise learns from a computer of the statistical probability of his own death following a spill of toxic waste, DeLillo describes how we encounter and react to such things—in rather comical ways, in this case. It is also useful to approach the material in the way that the CIA archivist/historian Nicholas Branch considers the computerized archive of facts about Lee Harvey Oswald in DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra: with an eye for how information betrays patterns and connections. As is often the case in DeLillo’s fiction, orders emerge from such patterns, orders that suggest other ways of apprehending a writer’s life or work, but also in ways that may never amount to any absolute truth. Biography, in this sense, is a form of speculation that proceeds by a self-effacement comparable to that of DeLillo’s most evasive characterizations.

Biography

Donald Richard DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City. His parents were Italian immigrants. His paternal name, DeLillo, is not uncommon in the Apennine Mountains that bisect the boot of Southern Italy. The Ellis Island passenger records of debarked immigrants list a total of forty-eight entries with the last name DeLillo between 1893 and 1922, the majority being from that region. Of those forty-eight names, two claimed the United States as residence (suggesting a return from a trip to Italy), and three others are unintelligible or list no place of origin. Of the forty-three remaining names, eighteen are from the town of Savignano, a small municipality in the Apennine range, to the north and west of the city of Avellino. Another ten names declare Grumo, presumably the Grumo in the province of Naples (there are at least four other Italian towns with the name, three of those in the south, one in the north). Nine towns (including Caivano, Montagano, Irsona, Matrice, Montecalo, Modugno, and Vitadazio) account for the fifteen remaining DeLillo names on the Ellis Island registers during that period. In sum, nearly one third of the Italian immigrants named DeLillo who came to the United States near or after the turn of the last century hailed from a small town (Savignano) located in the Apennine mountain range, and the rest emigrated from similar towns in the region. Emigration from these towns reflects a broader pattern: the immigrants departed in clusters. There are four entries from Savignano from 1900 to 1901, and five entries from there in 1906 alone.

In a 1991 interview Don DeLillo told the British journalist Gordon Burn that his family immigrated to the United States in 1916. There is, however, no entry for the name DeLillo in the Ellis Island rolls for that year.² But there are two names, those of Rocco and Nicola DeLillo, who emigrated from Modugno, a town close to the Adriatic city of Bari, in the year 1915. One of the immigrants is listed as being three years of age, the other thirty—likely a father and his son. No other persons by the name of DeLillo are recorded as having entered the United States during World War I (1914–1918). The decline in Italian emigration was a direct result of Italy’s involvement in the war, during which time the young republic fought to drive the Habsburgs out from its northern provinces and finally unify the nation. The nation’s fathers and sons were thus sent to war and therefore could not emigrate. For mothers, wives, children, and daughters who wanted to leave, there were also German U-Boats to consider.

Thus the official immigration record seems a dead end. Yet history never ends in DeLillo’s fiction; a new path is sure to open at some point. We have a clue to it from DeLillo himself, and it is the matriarchal possibility noted above. In the same interview in which he provided the date 1916, DeLillo described his family’s immigration to America as follows: There was my grandmother, my father and his brothers and sisters. There was a total of about seven people, including a dwarf, and a child my grandmother picked up in Naples along the way.³ Naples, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, is on the opposite coast from Bari. Rocco and Nicholas are thereby eliminated as likely ancestors. We can surmise that DeLillo’s family likely boarded a ship from the port of Naples or passed through Naples in transit to the larger port of Genoa. More important, it also raises the possibility that his grandmother was a widow; if that is true, then she likely gave her maiden name, according to Italian custom. Perhaps the family crossed in 1916, after all, through the Rubicon of submarine death and against the American war machine that was moving in the other direction across the sea, ultimately to give a name we do not know. Another dead end.

In the 1980s DeLillo offered yet another account of his family history, this time to the Italian writer and literary critic Fernanda Pivano. In her book Amici Scrittori: Quarant’ Anni di Incontri e Scoperte con gli Autori Americani, Pivano devotes a long section of one chapter to DeLillo. There she describes his telling of a more thorough account—possibly the most thorough one—of his family history. Here is my