The Journals of Spalding Gray Paperback - 2012

Excerpt

The following entries span five decades of Spalding Gray’s life and are culled from The Journals of Spalding Gray. The book is organized chronologically by decade. Each decade is given its own prologue, a passage from Gray’s private writing from that time that offers a glimpse of this era in his life. 
 
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I had been brought up to look forward to heaven then began to think of heaven as history, that I would lie old and forever in the arms of someone while they accounted my life. That no matter what the pain, it would all have distance when it was recounted at another time. Told as a story in front of a fi re through a very long night, left with a slight memory of it in the morning. This was in a way what I came to see as hope. Hope was a fantasy of the future and now with age the future has shrunk and so has the investment of hope in that future. What was there left to do but to report to myself the condition of the world that is out there, as I saw it. What was there left to do but to ask you to listen?
 
Spalding Gray
(1941–2004)


The Sixties


Somewhere there was a war going on and back in Rhode Island, my mother was having her second nervous breakdown. Perhaps she was having it because of the war. I couldn’t stand being around her anymore. I didn’t know what to do. I’d try to read to her from the Alan Watts book Psychotherapy, East and West but it didn’t make sense to either of us. What she needed was something else no one could give. My father sent her to a psychiatrist but that didn’t help because she was a Christian Scientist and didn’t trust doctors so she wouldn’t talk to him. But she did call her Christian Science practitioner and he gave her some phrase to repeat like, “God is all loving and I’m His perfect reflection.” Then she’d hang up the phone and pace the living room while repeating that phrase over and over while tearing the hair out of the back of her head. There was a ratty bald spot there. Then, afraid that my father would catch her in that demented state and pack her off to yet another institution for more shock treatments, she’d begin to try to pull herself together by starting to make the evening meal. Mumbling to herself over the frozen peas, “Oh God, don’t let him see me this way. Oh God, help me get through another day.” I just watched it all like a very sad and confusing performance. A crazy show; I didn’t know what else to do.

Undated


The Seventies

I suddenly felt as though my life has been lived like a man from the press. I’m always telling a story to myself or someone else. I’m telling a story about my life.

May 29, 1973


The Eighties

There is always a constant precarious balance between dark and light. The yin and yang. Civilization and its discontents.
Looking back on it after the fact, I realize that “Swimming to Cambodia” is an attempt to balance those poles. Like any work of art it is an attempt to become God out of a loss of contact.

An attempt to create a tiny, balanced universe. An attempt to play at being God out of a lack of contact with the real or imagined source.

And like life it is a fixed and imperfect text.

April 1985


The Nineties

That is when suicide comes. It comes when the shadow part or let’s say the part of you that you hate starts to take over and fill up or push out all the other parts until you are all the part that you hate and there is this one little part left that is the killer and the killer is closely related to the self hate and at last it does its dirty little deed.

April 1, 1995
 

2000– 2004


But I still remember how my children have been a blessing and these memories burn in my heart like a religious icon.

A) Marissa toasting me on my birthday for bringing her brother Forrest into the world.

B) Forrest waking and kissing me in all my lost agitated state on the way to MV in the Ford Escort.

C) Theo’s face at birth and the honest confusion it expressed. Kathie told me later how she had to hold him and comfort him and tell him it was alright.

Love is stronger than death, but life is stronger than love. (DARK, DARK, we all go into the DARK— ELIOT)

Undated from his 2000 journal


I began to realize I was acting as though the world were going to end and this was helping lead to its destruction. The only positive act would be to leave a record. To leave a chronicle of feelings, acts, reflections, something outside of me, something that might be useful in the unexpected future.

1970


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“The publication of The Journals of Spalding Gray is a significant event in American arts and letters. . . . This is not only a great book, it’s an important book.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

“A document of wrenching and exhilarating honesty, shot through with unremitting humor and irony.” –Daphne Merkin, Bookforum

"Gray comes across as a genuinely noble, striving, seeking soul, felled by a malignant fate. . . . [His] work deserves to last." —Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Times Book Review

“The Journals of Spalding Gray tell an important story that is painful to read but hard to put down. They bring you into a mind that is original and uncensoring even as it careens off the rails into deep destruction. Gray’s complex moods, dark imagination, and wit are often disturbing and deeply moving.” —Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind [set off in color or bold or something]
 
“[These] journals allow us to see the unreconstructed Spalding Gray. . . . The book has been superbly edited and annotated by Nell Casey; she also provides an excellent introduction. . . . Full of panic and despair, leavened with boyish misbehavior and dry wit…and lit with a kind of disembodied lyricism that honors even the blackest perceptions.” —Daphne Merkin, Bookforum
 
“One of the most disturbing yet insightful aspects of reading The Journals of Spalding Gray, Nell Casey’s distillation of Gray’s unpublished, personal writing, is learning how magnificently and artfully Gray constructed his appealing onstage and onscreen persona out of his own obsessions, neuroses, and troubled history. . . . These journals are perhaps most useful in helping one to understand the healing and purgative power that Gray and no doubt many other troubled artists have found in both writing and performing.” —The Boston Globe
 
“The brilliant, tormented performer mesmerized audiences with his autobiographical monologue, but most revealing are these diaries leading up to his suicide in 2004.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
 
“The journals in [the years after his car accident] record a harrowing descent into madness, when he turned one of his greatest talents as a storyteller—his ability to find connections between disparate observations and events—against himself.” —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books
 
“The publication of The Journals of Spalding Gray is a significant event in American arts and letters. If Walt Whitman was our great chronicler of American life toward the end of the nineteenth century, Gray was his ironic, darkly funny counterpart. He did more than anyone else to record what it was like to be human—achingly human—in the urban America of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is not only a great book, it’s an important book.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
 
“The Journals of Spalding Gray…reveal a daring melancholic (he committed suicide in 2004) who mined his chaotic inner life, troubled relationships, and tragic family history to create sterling works onstage anchored by his signature desk, water glass, notebook, and microphone.” —Elle
 
“During his nearly 30 years as a man onstage alone, Gray perfected the art of turning his life into art. . . . Gray’s journals show a man who was constantly walking a line between trying to keep something for himself and believing it was his artistic duty to share everything with his audience.” —The Austin Chronicle
 
“The Journals of Spalding Gray reveal someone who was at once addicted to the rush of self-exposure and yet was also deeply private. Brooklyn-based journalist Nell Casey has edited Gray’s literary anatomy down to a readable package. . . . As Gray’s journals show, he honed his craft carefully, tweaking and adjusting his stories for maximum narrative torque.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Citations

• New York Times Book Review, 11/25/2012, Page 32