There’s a remarkable interview with writer Dave Eggers, published in the Harvard Advocate in 2000, just after he turned 30, which is about the time you stop worrying if you’re cool. It’s since become quasi-iconic among the cool, a kind of proclamation against the tyranny of cool and the hipster and the fear of selling out. In 2000, Eggers, Lake Forest native, novelist, memoirist, founder of McSweeney’s, was an avatar of literary cool, the kind of whom an interviewer might earnestly ask: “Are you taking any steps to keep (expletive) real?” Which is exactly what Eggers was asked in that interview. Twenty-six years later, his response is a fascinating portrait of an artist no longer a young man, unwilling anymore to keep years of self-consciousness in check.
Create, don’t dismiss, he says. (“Oh, how gloriously comforting, to write someone off.”)
And whenever an artist disappoints you, save the bridge-burning dismals. He wishes he had. (“Any band that sold 30,000 albums was a sellout … and (expletive) if I don’t wish I could take all that back — because I knew nothing then, just as you know nothing now.”)
He remembers his “orange-carpeted bedroom” on the North Shore, where he read about cutting-edge artists: “I thought I had my ear to the railroad tracks of avant-garde America.” Now he just wants his interviewer, wondering if he takes steps to stay cool, “to look back on this time as being a time when those words came out of your mouth.”
He’s annoyed, mean and honest.
I mention this because Eggers, who is now 56, and appearing on June 10 at the Old Town School of Folk Music, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, has a new novel, “Contrapposto,” his finest in years, about being young and living in Chicago, completely absorbed in culture. His hero, Cricket, an art student, is surrounded by other artists. Except he’s modest, casual — he sounds nothing like the pre-millennium Eggers.
“Actually, Cricket is drastically different from anyone I even know,” Eggers said the other day, by phone from his home in San Francisco. “I went to art school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the American Academy of Art, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and even as a kid I had a lot of training (in visual art) — it was always something I loved to do. I was interested in people like (Cricket), artists who have talent but can’t make a living in doing what they’re good at. And yet I don’t think Cricket regrets the path he takes. He knows himself, he knows the bliss he feels when he’s drawing is 99.9% the point. He is in love with just creating art, the meditative quality of painting and drawing, but he is also unskilled or, I suppose, unwilling to acquiesce to the rules and the guidelines and the conventional wisdom of the art world.”
Cricket, in other words, is Eggers in that interview, clear-eyed, almost optimistic.
“Contrapposto” is a rare thing, a smart book about the joy of being creative and open to everything, and finding an apartment in Chicago, and settling into a group of friends, and just making stuff, every day, because you absolutely must. Tucked in there, at its heart, is also a friendship that spans a lifetime, between Cricket, who comes from a small Indiana town, and Olympia, an art-school friend who comes from money and moves comfortably through the business end of the art world, the galleries, the dealers.
The title comes from an art-class pose, a model slightly tilted, with more weight on one foot than the other, hips going one way, shoulders going another. He wanted Cricket and Olympia to pair that way, as two parts of the same body, leaning into each other.
At 826 Valencia, the San Francisco-based creative writing center he co-founded in 2002 — which expanded into nine additional writing centers across the country, including the longtime 826Chi, a partner-in-residence at the Steppenwolf Theatre — as you enter, there’s a famous quotation from Toni Morrison fixed to a wall: “If there’s a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Eggers said it’s taken him decades to take that advice, which he’s been offering writing students for decades.
“And it’s funny because ‘Contrapposto’ has been in my mind forever, since my early 20s. I suppose there was never an art-world novel that spoke to my experience. I mean, at 56, you realize how little changes in your body and soul. I have friends in their 80s are at their most vital and curious and social and searching now. With every decade, you can grow a little calmer in your perspective — the day-to-day tremors matter less.”
He was a painting major at UI for three semesters but ended up with a journalism degree. “Actually, I changed majors five times at UI, starting out with English, but there were classes I couldn’t get into unless I declared a major, and so I would work the system, and change my major to get into the classes I wanted — it was so bureaucratic. And semesters cost $1,200 then, so there was less risk to experimenting. I could pay tuition with lawn-cutting money, which is what I did. And by working at the Daily Illini (the UI student newspaper), which paid us so well that I think I actually left school financially ahead, you could get $74 dollars for a 200-word record review! In the early 1990s.”
“The solitary nature of painting couldn’t compete with the excitement of a newsroom,” he said. Eventually, he settled into publishing (McSweeney’s), wrote an acclaimed memoir (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) and made an eclectic career of nonfiction (“Zeitoun”) and fiction. “The Circle” (2013) and “The Every” (2021), two of his best-known works (“The Circle” was adapted into a 2017 Tom Hanks film), are set in the Bay Area tech world, where he has called home for years. Yet Eggers still writes on a desktop computer, unconnected to the internet, that he bought in 1998. He said the pro-AI billboards of Northern California are more dystopian than anything he could write.
He also never really stopped painting and drawing.
About 15 years ago, he began showing work in galleries. “What’s weird is people don’t realize you work on a deadline, as in a newsroom. There’s a show a month away and they need 20 new pieces — I love the urgency. It’s pure bliss. And I get to do it without a sense of obligation. Like, well, could we sell some drawings? In the basement (of 826 Valencia), we have a print studio, we put out a new piece every week, it helps pay the rent on the building. There’s something so simple to it. It’s what you’d want if you’re creating something. There’s not 20 layers between your work and an audience.
“It’s what Cricket and maybe Olympia and maybe you too are seeking with creativity — you want it to stay fun. There is no reason why any part of the art world should be anything but enjoyable. When it’s miserable and anxious, it feels like such a paradox of all the ways to live. If you’re making art and you’re miserable, that’s a lost opportunity.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
If you go
“Dave Eggers: Contrapposto” is 7 p.m. June 10 in the Maurer Concert Hall at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.; chicagohumanities.org
