"Introduction"
from Kevin Kopelson's Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk

I shared my first desk with my brother Steve, a rickety affair our father made out of an old headboard. We did grade school homework there--nothing memorable. I did housework too, because the finches I kept nearby left it messy.

Steve got our brother Eric's desk when Eric wandered off to California. I got brother Bob's. But the drawers still contained their stuff, including index cards covered with quotations from writers like Dostoevsky, Rilke, and Proust. (Imagine Zooey Glass perusing the bedroom walls his oldest brothers--Seymour and Buddy--had covered with Kafka.) In addition to junior high and high school homework, I myself wrote fiction there--all of it terrible, of course, and only one story I can recall with any specificity: something about brothers who build a house of cards that represents something or other. All I can recall of the desktop is the gun-metal blue desk set. Oh--and a manual typewriter which never worked very well.

I didn't write fiction in college, where my school supplied the furniture. I wrote term papers and poetry--terrible, formless love poetry. Plus a pretty good sestina--after Elizabeth Bishop--about playing the piano.  All I can recall of those desktops is an electric typewriter which, in addition to not working very well either, weighed a ton.

I didn't need a desk in law school--where I lived off campus--because I didn't have to write much. I did, however, have a kitchen table, which is where I must have written those course outlines. (Neatness counts.) I'm less sure about letters, which I may have done in bed.

I did need a desk as a lawyer, of course. I even needed one at home, where I preferred to do as much work as possible. I bought an ugly modern one with a secret compartment, not knowing--ironically enough--that I did have something to hide. The law firm fired me for being gay, which was legal at the time. I also began a novel there--a confessional narrative I discarded a long time ago and only one line of which, about a sexual encounter, comes to mind: "My body embarrassed me." Having discarded the electric typewriter even longer ago, I wrote the thing by hand. The only item on the desktop: an incandescent lamp Dad gave me.

I wrote my first book--a Barthesian dissertation on "modern homoerotics"--at the same desk but in another home and on my first computer. (I'd left law for literary criticism.) The only other item on the desktop: a halogen lamp I stole from the firm. I wrote my second book--Barthesian essays on "pianism"--at the same desk and on the same computer but in yet another home. (I'd been hired by a university to teach "queer theory.") The only other item on the desktop: another incandescent lamp I bought when I got the job. I wrote my third--Barthesian essays on Nijinsky--in a messy friend's home, at a folding card table cleared of his debris, and once again, the computer having died, by hand. (I'd been given a residential fellowship where Marc lived.) I'm writing this book on a new, portable computer at two different--but equally uncluttered--desks. One of them is the beautiful bureau-plat I bought when I got tenure. (No more secret compartments.) The other--a roll-top--is my beautiful partner's. David and I share separate homes.

This book is about the poetics of the desk, a subject Bachelard--notwithstanding his interest in related areas such as drawers and "nests"--fails to address in The Poetics of Space.  Nor, to my knowledge, do any Anglo-American critics.  What do desks represent for writers? How do writers represent desks? For whom does the topography of the desk correspond to the topography of literary creation? For whom does it not correspond? I hope my brief auto-bibliography has suggested some of the reasons--or at least the main reason--I'm drawn to these and related questions: I find it hard to understand how some people find disorder productive. I also hope it indicates my idiosyncratic, impressionistic approach. (Instead of attempting a comprehensive, conventionally rigorous analysis, I'll simply discuss several twentieth-century authors I like a lot: a poet, a novelist, a critic, a playwright, and a travel writer. With Bishop, the poet, I address the cluttered desk; with Proust, the novelist, the nest-like desk--or writing in bed; with Roland Barthes, the schematic desk--or structural idiosyncrasy; with Tom Stoppard, the dramatic desk--or structural irony; with Bruce Chatwin--let's just say I used "bureau-plat" for a reason.) It's the kind of writing I find most pleasurable, the kind of formal challenge I find most compelling, and the kind of intellectual exhibition I find least, well, embarrassing. Why this should be so is, I confess, a bit of a mystery. All I know is that I learned the approach from Barthes, a mentor who happens--or pretends--not to believe in "authors" nor to consider himself intellectual, and who, like me, is decidedly undecided about psychoanalysis. (I've learned quotation technique from both J.D. Salinger and Walter Benjamin.) So in a way, Neatness Counts is also all about him. And in a different way, my brother Steve--something else I've tried to indicate. But it's for David, who among other attributes--like making space and keeping birds of his own--happens to believe in me.

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