{"id":116375,"date":"2017-10-04T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116375"},"modified":"2017-10-04T10:30:45","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T14:30:45","slug":"foul-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/04\/foul-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Foul Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Edwaert Collier, Vanitas<\/em>,\u00a01663.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I nearly deleted it.\u00a0 The email\u2019s subject line was \u201cFoulMatter\u201d\u2014an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some \u201cfoul\u00a0matter\u201d and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in \u201ca guinea\u00a0foul farm\u201d?<\/p>\n

No. That wasn\u2019t it. The email was from my publisher, from the heart of my publisher\u2014the editorial department. Now I really didn\u2019t want to open it. Maybe I\u2019d missed a deadline.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019d changed their mind about my contract. Or found an error so grievous they were recalling my books. Or found a new and more appropriate term for my writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cDear John,\u201d\u00a0the editorial assistant had written, \u201cwould you like to keep your\u00a0foul\u00a0matter\u00a0from\u00a0American Philosophy: A Love Story<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

My foul\u00a0matter? As if I had a choice.\u00a0American Philosophy<\/em>, published last year with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a memoir about facing a father\u2019s death, a divorce and a remarriage, and how American philosophy (the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James) helped me survive. I am now in the weeds of writing my second book, another hybrid of memoir and intellectual history, this time about parenthood and Friedrich Nietzsche. If I\u2019ve learned one thing it\u2019s that you are largely stuck with yourself, most especially with your foulest parts.<\/p>\n

Foul\u00a0matter, it turns out, as I learned by reading the rest of the note, is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book\u2014the notes, page proofs, drafts, and rejected covers and art. Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as the art of removing stone until a beautiful form emerges from a block of granite. If writing is at all like this, foul\u00a0matter is the stuff strewn across the studio floor. The question remained: Did I want it?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not really.\u00a0For someone in the midst of writing, the\u00a0foul\u00a0matter is a reminder of how much work is left to be done: most of the\u00a0wordsmithery\u00a0that goes into drafting a book runs the very real risk of being scrapped. This is the case for any\u2014or at least most\u2014books, but the\u00a0foul\u00a0matter\u00a0for a memoir, I suspected, was especially disturbing. It wasn\u2019t just literary detritus, it was a spare part of myself. The French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir writes, \u201cWhat an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.\u201d That might be true, but they\u2019re usually omitted from a diary or a memoir for good reason, and the reviewing of foul\u00a0matter was a willing return to something that I\u2019d tried to leave behind.<\/p>\n

But perhaps I was avoiding something important. Nietzsche wrote eighteen autobiographical essays before he reached middle age. In his later years, whether through intellectually bravery or sadomasochism, he returned to them repeatedly as a way of analyzing what he had become and how he had become it. The earliest stories about himself were vitriolic screeds against his idol-turned-mortal-enemy: the Romantic composer Richard Wagner. Wagner had, according to the young Nietzsche, done him and Germany and music\u00a0tout court wrong. Wagner\u2019s music lacked nuance and grace. Wagner\u2019s music was \u201csick.\u201d Wagner\u2019s music invited idolatry and patriotic zeal rather than genuine aesthetic appreciation. In truth, Wagner had turned on Nietzsche and spread rumors about his personal life, and the young philosopher hated him for it.<\/p>\n

As Nietzsche grew older, however, he returned to his harsh critique of the composer and, as many angry people do upon reflection, tempered it: \u201cAll things considered,\u201d he writes in Ecce Homo<\/em>, his final attempt at autobiography, \u201cI could never have survived my youth without Wagnerian music. For I seemed condemned to the society of Germans. If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take to hashish. Well, I had to take to Wagner … \u201d At the same time, in the late 1880s, Nietzsche was beginning to articulate an important kernel of his philosophy known as the amor fati, the love of fate. To neither evade nor bear but to ardently love what one once found most objectionable about life\u2014this is the imperative of the\u00a0amor fati.\u00a0 It is to affirm and accept what one once denied or escaped. In Nietzsche\u2019s words, \u201cI shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.\u201d Looking away is the only thing that is forbidden and undesirable.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure, send the foul\u00a0matter,\u201d\u00a0 I wrote, almost against my will.<\/p>\n

Minutes later, I received the response:\u00a0\u201cI will mail it off today. Most authors throw it away, but you have a nice amount. Definitely on the larger side.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Great.<\/p>\n

It arrived in three giant packing envelopes, which, after being retrieved from the front step, remained unopened on our kitchen table for a week.\u00a0 My five-year-old daughter eyed one of them carefully at breakfast one morning and, once she finished her toast, once the dishes were cleared and the room was empty, opened it. When I returned, my foul\u00a0matter was spread across the table where we ate. The most objectionable piece was a bound manuscript titled Finding West Wind<\/em>. Four years ago, I\u2019d proudly taken it to a bindery before placing it in the mail to my editor. She sent it back to me, thoroughly annotated\u2014\u201cThis is somewhat juvenile,\u201d \u201cThis sounds a bit petulant,\u201d \u201cThis writing is not acceptable\u201d\u2014with the brief note that I should try writing it again. That\u2019s how good it was.<\/p>\n

The writer’s \u201cfoul matter.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

And then there was the draft of A Wilderness of Books: American Philosophy, A Love Story<\/em>. By that point, I\u2019d nearly given up on the idea that the book would ever exist. The pages of my manuscript were loose and dog-eared and now decorated with a child\u2019s markers. It was even more heavily annotated: \u201cThis title is not working,\u201d \u201cThis needs tightening,\u201d \u201cLosing the thread,\u201d and the very occasional \u201cGood.\u201d\u00a0 But this time there was no brief note at the end: I didn\u2019t have to write the whole thing again. I could put away the hacksaw. What I needed was the scalpel and to clean up behind myself. The manuscript\u2014this memoir\u2014was still too self-involved.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf all that is written,\u201d Nietzsche tells his reader, \u201cI only love what has been written in a man\u2019s own blood.\u201d The point of writing, if I understand Nietzsche correctly, is to cut it close\u2014to put your real no-bullshit self on paper. But it is also to suffer. At one point, in the not-so-distant past, I\u2019d cherished these rumpled pages as the most accurate renderings of myself. In the process of writing, however, one sometimes has to sacrifice the self-knowledge that one thinks he or she already has.<\/p>\n

Editing is not a\u00a0matter\u00a0of \u201cmurdering your darlings\u201d but sacrificing them so something else can take their place. The traces of mistakes and failed attempts haunt many books, but the best authors, like Nietzsche, incorporate them into the vibrancy of a literary corpus. \u201cI have often asked myself,\u201d Nietzsche writes, \u201cwhether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others.\u201d An author is similarly obligated to the failures in the course of writing, the mistakes that allow a book to become what it is.<\/p>\n

As I perused the penultimate draft of American Philosophy: A Love Story<\/em>, I found a note that was absent in earlier versions: \u201cstet,\u201d from the Latin\u00a0stare<\/em>, \u201cto let stand.\u201d I\u2019d become accustomed to reading the tight cursive of my respected editor, so I didn\u2019t recognize the handwriting at first\u2014my own. This was my first successful effort at pushing back, insisting that something should stand instead of being cut away. This stet indicated a phrase\u2014just four short words\u2014that would find its way into the finished book. What doesn\u2019t kill you, according to Nietzsche, makes you stronger. Maybe even strong enough to work through your\u00a0foul\u00a0matter\u00a0and learn to let it stand.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John<\/span> Kaag<\/span> is the author of <\/em>American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), which\u00a0was published in paperback this month, and <\/em>Hiking with Nietzsche,\u00a0which will be published\u00a0in 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I nearly deleted it.\u00a0 The email\u2019s subject line was \u201cFoulMatter\u201d\u2014an obvious Internet phishing scheme, I thought. A Russian heiress was embroiled in some \u201cfoul\u00a0matter\u201d and needed my Social Security number so she could deposit money into my account for safekeeping? A Nigerian prince requesting initial investment in \u201ca guinea\u00a0foul farm\u201d? No. That wasn\u2019t it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[29398,30916,30917,9288,16131,30915],"class_list":["post-116375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-american-philosophy","tag-ecce-homo","tag-finding-west-wind","tag-friedrich-nietzsche","tag-michelangelo","tag-richard-wagner"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFoul Matter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Foul matter is the inevitable literary flotsam that is generated in writing a book. 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