There are a few people, a very few, that I have held in my mind, and heart, as those whose death would affect me profoundly. There are even fewer who would cause me to double check that I'd meant "affect", and not "effect". Normally, I'd offer creative and anatomically challenging suggestions for where they could stick their challenges to my choice of words. For this particular gentleman, however, I feel I oughta be concise, he'd prefer it that way. And yes, oughta, and concise, fit just fine in the same sentence.
This man, this Author, is one of the rare people, who, upon their death, I've worried I wouldn't know what I'd do, or how I'd handle it; one of those people, for whom the loss would seem impossible to me, because it would reflect my own mortality. These people are inseparable from my very own life, and what it means to be alive. How can one live without their most very crucial organs?
My own father's passing, as fond as I was of him, and who I did get to know and like, was met well, accepted, and understood. There are a few people, however, whose death will shake me. And I already know who they are. These people will go, possibly gently, but viscerally, into the good night. Fortunately, those whose death (and I say death, cause passing always makes me think of farting) Those whose death will be met with hardship by me, even though I say fortunately, are those who have most prepared me for their death, precisely because they are the ones who have helped me to understand, and form, the LIFE, and the person I have become. It's a strange dichotomy, but one that that is so very real to me, and exact. So exact, I feel, that I'm afraid I've put too fine a point on it, for nothing could be so rude as to call them out by name, but to those people, who know who they are, I won't miss you, because I AM you. I am the person I am, because of your love and dedication, and your inspiration is like a new life in my own, that helps me push forward in ways I didn't know by myself.
Anyhow, (This is getting embarrassingly personal) moving on, since I've already got a lot on my plate today, this man, J.D. Salinger, is one of these people. I've often thought of this day, and knew it would come.
I suppose I should begin by admitting that I didn't particularly care for The Catcher in the Rye when I first read it. (Where the fuck is the underline button on blogspot?) If ever there were an Author whose books deserved to be underlined it'd be Salinger. Perhaps though, he'd laugh, and love that I don't underline his titles. In fact, I know he would. This is a man I can speak for on the day of his death. And I really can, because I knew him that well. I did. No, I never met the man, but there's no writer ever, seclusion or not, who shared so much of himself with me. And this particular man would feel it to be the highest honor NOT to have his book underlined. And this is no false humility mind you, but rather a man with the greatest respect for the truth, with an invisible capital T.
Back when I was writing, and actually did any, I would read lesser authors and feel great. I'd say to myself, if this crap can get published, then I sure as shit can, I've got it covered. But not Jerry. I'd read his work, and it would break my heart; I'd never come near the truth this guy seemed to simply drip off his pen, I couldn't begin to get near him- but I never hated him for it. I loved him for it, and understood, it was a trade off. It was a secret trade we'd made, I'd learn about me, in exchange for ever thinking I could write about a world I knew so little of. I'd let go, and have him remind me of what I'd forgotten. Perhaps that sounds too intimate, and maybe you don't get it, or maybe you do, and maybe you've found the artists that can do that for you. I've met many who can capture my imagination, but few that could help me create it. Mr J.D. Salinger was one of these people.
However, in the end, there's only one man who can speak for Salinger, and that's Salinger:
I think a part of my mind has been vulgarly laying for this next bit. I haven't thought of it in years and years.
One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on - some on, some still off- I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to - his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's - and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended, and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness, and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me. It came as a pleasant shock that there was a third person in the universe, and to this feeling was added the justness of its being Seymour. I turned around, totally, and I suspect Ira must have, too. The bulby bright lights had just gone on under the canopy of our house. Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat. With the canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out. He was ten. From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from - well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. 'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.' He stepped down off the curb, his hands still in the slash pockets of his coat, and came over to us. But a thinking Seymour didn't cross a twilit street quickly, or surely didn't seem to. In that light, he came toward us much like a sailboat. Pride, on the other hand, is one of the fastest-moving things in this world, and before he got within five feet of us, I said hurriedly to Ira, 'It's getting dark anyway,' effectively breaking up the game.
This last little pentimento, or whatever it is, has started me sweating literally from head to foot. I want a cigarette, but my pack is empty, and I don't feel up to leaving this chair. Oh, God, what a noble profession this is. How well do I know the reader? How much can I tell him without unnecessarily embarrassing either of us? I can tell him this: A place has been prepared for each of us in his own mind. Until a minute ago, I'd seen mine four times during my life. This is the fifth time. I'm going to stretch out on the floor for a half hour or so. I beg you to excuse me.
This sounds to me very suspiciously like a playbill note, but after the last, theatrical paragraph, I feel I have it coming to me. The time is three hours later. I fell asleep on the floor. (I'm quite myself again, dear Baroness. Dear me, what can you have thought of me? You'll allow me, I beg of you, to ring for a rather interesting little bottle of wine. It's from my own little vineyard, and I think you might just ...) I'd like to announce - as briskly as possible - that whatever it precisely was that caused the disturbance on the page three hours ago, I was not, am not now, and never have been, the least bit intoxicated by my own powers (my own little powers, dear Baroness) of almost total recall. At the instant that I became, or made of myself, a dripping wreck, I was not strictly mindful of what Seymour was saying - or of Seymour himself, for that matter. What essentially struck me, incapacitated me, I think, was the sudden realization that Seymour is my Davega bicycle. I've been waiting most of my life for even the faintest inclination, let alone the follow-through required, to give away a Davega bicycle. I rush, of course, to explain
When Seymour and I were fifteen and thirteen, we came out of our room one night to listen, I believe, to Stoopnagle and Budd on the radio, and we walked into a great and very ominously hushed commotion in the living room. There were only three people present - our father, our mother, and our brother Waker - but I have a notion there were other, smaller folk eavesdropping from concealed vantage points. Les was rather horribly flushed, Bessie's lips were compressed almost out of existence, and our brother Waker - who was at that instant, according to my figures, almost exactly nine years and fourteen hours old - was standing near the piano, in his pajamas, barefooted, with tears streaming down his face. My own first impulse in a family situation of that sort was to make for the hills, but since Seymour didn't look at all ready to leave, I stuck around, too. Les, with partly suppressed heat, at once laid the case for the prosecution before Seymour. That morning, as we already knew, Waker and Walt had been given matching, beautiful, well-over-the-budget birthday presents - two red-and-white striped, double-barred twenty-six inch bicycles, the very vehicles in the window of Davega's Sports Store, on Eighty-sixth between Lexington and Third, that they'd both been pointedly admiring for the better part of a year. About ten minutes before Seymour and I came out of the bedroom, Les had found out that Waker's bicycle wasn't safely stored in the basement of our apartment building with Walt's. That afternoon, in Central Park, Waker had given his away. An unknown boy ('some shnook he never saw before in his life') had come up to Waker and asked him for his bicycle, and Waker had handed it over. Neither Les nor Bessie, of course, was unmindful of Waker's 'very nice, generous intentions', but both of them also saw the details of the transaction with an implacable logic of their own. What, substantially, they felt that Waker should have done - and Les now repeated this opinion, with great vehemence, for Seymour's benefit - was to give the boy a nice, long ride on the bicycle. Here Waker broke in, sobbing. The boy didn't want a nice, long ride, he wanted the bicycle. He'd never had one, the boy; he'd always wanted one. I looked at Seymour. He was getting excited. He was acquiring a look of well-meaning, but absolute inaptitude for arbitrating, a difficult dispute of this kind - and I knew, from experience, that peace in our living room was about to be restored, however miraculously. ('The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful.'- Book XXVI, The Texts of Chuang-tzu.) I won't describe in detail (for once) how Seymour - and there must be a better way of putting this, but I don't know it - competently blundered his way to the heart of the matter so that, a few minutes later, the three belligerents actually kissed and made up. My real point here is a blatantly personal one, and I think I've already stated it.
What Seymour called over to me - or, rather, coached over to me - that evening at curb marbles in 1927 seems to me Contributive and important, and I think I must certainly discuss it a little. Even though, somewhat shocking to say, almost nothing seems more contributive and important in my eyes at this interval than the fact of Seymour's flatulent brother, aged forty, at long last being presented with a Davega bicycle of his own to give away, preferably to the first asker. I find myself wondering, amusing, whether it's quite correct to pass on from one pseudo-metaphysical fine point, however puny or personal, to another, however robust or impersonal. That is, without first lingering, lolling around a bit, in the wordy style to which I'm accustomed. Nonetheless, here goes: When he was coaching me, from the curb-stone across the street, to quit aiming my marble at Ira Yankauer's - and he was ten, please remember - I believe he was instinctively getting at something very close in spirit to the sort of instructions a master archer in Japan will give when he forbids a willful new student to aim his arrows at the target; that is, when the archery master permits, as it were, Aiming but no aiming. I'd much prefer, though, to leave Zen archery and Zen itself out of this pint-size dissertation - partly, no doubt, because Zen is rapidly becoming a rather smutty, cultish word to the discriminating ear, and with great, if superficial, justification. (I say superficial because pure Zen will surely survive its Western champions, who, in the main, appear to confound its near-doctrine of Detachment with an invitation to spiritual indifference, even callousness - and who evidently don't hesitate to knock a Buddha down without first growing a golden fist. Pure Zen, need I add - and I think I do need, at the rate I'm going - will be here even after snobs like me have departed.) Mostly, however, I would prefer not to compare Seymour's marble-shooting advice with Zen archery simply because I am neither a Zen archer nor a Zen Buddhist, much less a Zen adept. (Would it be out of order for me to say that both Seymour's and my roots in Eastern philosophy - if I may hesitantly call them 'roots' - were, are, planted in the New and Old Testaments, Advaita Vedanta, and classical Taoism? I tend to regard myself, if at all by anything as sweet as an Eastern name, as a fourth-class Karma Yogin, with perhaps a little Jnana Yoga thrown in to spice up the pot. I'm profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. Largely because Seymour himself literally begged me to do so, and I never knew him to be wrong in these matters.) Happily for me, and probably for everybody, I don't believe it's really necessary to bring Zen into this. The method of marble-shooting that Seymour, by sheer intuition, was recommending to me can be related, I'd say, legitimately and un-Easternly, to the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket from across a room. An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him.
Thank God that's over. I can assure you I didn't order it.
I think - I know - this is going to be my last 'physical' notation. Let it be reasonably funny. I'd love to clear the air before I go to bed.
It's an Anecdote, sink me, but I'll let it rip: At about nine, I bad the very pleasant notion that I was the Fastest Boy Runner in the World. It's the kind of queer, basically extracurricular conceit, I'm inclined to add, that dies hard, and even today, at a super-sedentary forty, I can picture myself, in street clothes, whisking past a series of distinguished but hard-breathing Olympic milers and waving to them, amiably, without a trace of condescension. Anyway, one beautiful spring evening when we were still living over on Riverside Drive, Bessie sent me to the drugstore for a couple of quarts of ice cream. I came out of the building at that very same magical quarter hour described just a few paragraphs back. Equally fatal to the construction of this anecdote, I had sneakers on - sneakers surely being to anyone who happens to be the Fastest Boy Runner in the World almost exactly what red shoes were to Hans Christian Andersen's little girl. Once I was clear of the building, I was Mercury himself, and broke into a 'terrific' sprint up the long block to Broadway. I took the corner at Broadway on one wheel and kept going, doing the impossible: increasing speed. The drugstore that sold Louis Sherry ice cream, which was Bessie's adamant choice, was three blocks north, at 113th. About halfway there, I tore past the stationery store where we usually bought our newspapers and magazines, but blindly, without noticing any acquaintances or relatives in the vicinity. Then, about a block further on, I picked up the sound of pursuit at my rear, plainly conducted on foot. My first, perhaps typically New Yorkese thought was that the cops were after me - the charge, conceivably, Breaking Speed Records on a Non-School-Zone Street. I strained to get a little more speed out of my body, but it was no use. I felt a hand clutch out at me and grab hold of my sweater just where the winning-team numerals should have been, and, good and scared, I broke my speed with the awkwardness of a gooney bird coming to a stop. My pursuer was, of course, Seymour, and he was looking pretty damned scared himself. 'What's the matter? What happened?' he asked me frantically. He was still holding on to my sweater. I yanked myself loose from his hand and informed him, in the rather scatological idiom of the neighborhood, which I won't record here verbatim, that nothing had happened, nothing was the matter, that I was just running, for cryin' out loud. His relief was prodigious. 'Boy, did you scare me !' he said. 'Wow, were you moving ! I could hardly catch up with you!' We then went along, at a walk, to the drugstore together. Perhaps strangely, perhaps not strangely at all, the morale of the now Second-Fastest Boy Runner in the World had not been very perceptibly lowered. For one thing, I had been outrun by him. Besides, I was extremely busy noticing that he was panting a lot. It was oddly diverting to see him pant.
I'm finished with this. Or, rather, it's finished with me. Fundamentally, my mind has always balked at any kind of ending. How many stories have I torn up since I was a boy simply because they had what that old Chekhov-baiting noise Somerset Maugham calls a Beginning, a Middle, and an End? Thirty-five? Fifty? One of the thousand reasons I quit going to the theater when I was about twenty was that I resented like hell filing out of the theater just because some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain. (What ever became of that stalwart bore Fortinbras? Who eventually fixed his wagon?) Nonetheless, I'm done here. There are one or two more fragmentary physical-type remarks I'd like to make, but I feel too strongly that my time is up. Also, it's twenty to seven, and I have a nine-o'clock class. There's just enough time for a half-hour nap, a shave, and maybe a cool, refreshing blood bath. I have an impulse - more of an old urban reflex than an impulse, thank God - to say something mildly caustic about the twenty-four young ladies, just back from big weekends at Cambridge or Hanover or New Haven, who will be waiting for me in Room 307, but I can't finish writing a description of Seymour - even a bad description, even one where my ego, my perpetual lust to share top billing with him, is all over the place - without being conscious of the good, the real. This is too grand to be said (so I'm just the man to say it), but I can't be my brother's brother for nothing, and I know - not always, but I know - there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307. There isn't one girl in there, including the Terrible Miss Zabel, who is not as much my sister as Boo Boo or Franny. They may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine. This thought manages to stun me: There's no place I'd really rather go right now than into Room 307. Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from - one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?
Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.
That's J.D., I don't know why, I really don't, but these words put me in tears. It's as if he's striking me directly on whatever chords they are that run with these emotions. He speaks to me in ways I didn't know could be spoke, and that's why I use strange words like spoke. I am forever affected by J.D., and I have my F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact. (Inside joke)
