John Haskell

Trying to Be

Trying to Be, John Haskell’s sublimely disquieting sequence of variations on perhaps the only theme that ever matters—the difficulty, in the messy jumblement of experience that passes for our lives, to become oneself—is a work of such oracular clarities, of such roiling telling of truth after truth, that I found myself hanging on every grave and exacting word. It is a book to which I expect to keep returning until my end of days.                       

  --Garielle Lutz

Francis Bacon the painter, Anthony Perkins the actor, and Ulrike Meinhof the terrorist are all part of this book. As is Danny Kaye dancing with Gene Kelly, as is Jane Birkin, the briefly famous pop star, demonstrating how the human body understands itself. Using language that is both poetic and commonplace, Haskell weaves a narrative of personal, philosophical connections, not impersonating his characters but seeing what they do to him, feeling what they do. In the end, constructing a life means deconstructing the various biographies that create that life, and when, for instance, he writes about trying to learn how to dance like the inimitable Yvonne Rainer, the emphasis is always on trying. These stories (which are also essays) attempt to shine some thought on the world we’ve been given, on the human body, on friendship, on history, on identify and family and love. And also, they’re meant to be read aloud.

In Trying to Be, John Haskell braids essay, fiction, memoir, and cultural history into a haunting meditation on loss, artistic legacy, and the unfinished project of the self. From dance studios to prison cells, from dying friends to dying fathers, Haskell maps the ways we inhabit—and resist—the roles we’ve been given.

The stories in John Haskell’s Trying to Be wrestle in exhilarating ways with the relationships between fiction and other arts—painting, film, dance—in a manner that feels natural and seamless. Painter, narrator, spectator, reader, writer—it doesn’t matter which. What matters is how they speak and think and create in relation to each other, always shifting, always refashioning themselves. Haskell’s narrators are porous, and it is perhaps this permeability that forms them, and forms the stories themselves. For what I most admire about Trying to Be is that the stories aren’t just thinking about visual art, film, and dance; they are coming together with them. It feels as though this book is as close to artmaking as it is to writing, that Haskell’s gaze is cast in different directions at the same time, that what happened when he wrote these stories is somehow still happening.

--Amina Cain, judge of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize

Trying to Be is a book about presence, absence, and the intricate art of inhabiting one’s own life. And is that even possible? If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably heard the old adage: I can’t go on. I’ll go on. In these pages are traces of Beckett, Berger, Godard, and Didion. And like Shakespeare, they map what a relationship aspires to be, and what it is.

The cultural commentary isn’t just ornament. These figures mirror Haskell’s attempts to grapple with grief, estrangement, memory, and the failures of language. The result is a book that blurs the line between criticism and confession, art history and personal inventory. Whether recalling a botched friendship, a beloved mentor, or the carefully choreographed movement in a dance workshop, Haskell searches for new ways of becoming—through art, through awareness, through stories that have the quality of song.