Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

Here’s the assumption behind my guesswork. Suicide is a kind of death that makes you doubt what you know about the deceased or what you can ever know about anybody. It strikes clear to the core of identity, reaching down into the heart of your life. Since my brother died I haven’t slept a single night alone with the lights off; I wake up afraid, and I have to know where I am, I need to see right away. And when I go out, I always leave a radio on, just so that when I come home I’ll hear voices or, more precisely, I won’t hear the silence and get all spooky imagining the surprises waiting for me. By a curious mechanism my brother’s death has extended the vivid fears of my childhood into my adult life. I find that I’m alert in ways that adults don’t need to be, and I’m ignorant of things grown-ups care most about. When a suicide happens within a family, that organism takes on the taint just as much as any individual. But that taint doesn’t necessarily mean the dissolution of the family; it might have an opposite effect, banding the family together even more tightly than before. (I felt like shameful secrets had been aired publicly, and I was first of all defensive, protective.) In reality, I think both things happen: you’re pulled together, and that intense proximity exposes lines of cleavage that had begun cracking years earlier. The suicide is just a piece finally falling out. And from then on the family’s story can’t be the same. Its identity must include death, a death shared in the blood. The old narrative breaks at precisely the moment you need it to speak for you. This death, this suicide, is shattering to what, at that exact moment, is your deepest need — family, security, identity.

Rereading Buddy’s statement about his ability to detect authenticity, I find a harmonic floating just above the fundamental tone, and I think it can be heard distinctly in isolation here:

For the terrible and undiscountable fact has just reached me, between paragraphs, that I yearn to talk, to be queried, to be interrogated, about this particular dead man. It’s just got through to me that, apart from my many other — and, I hope to God, less ignoble — motives, I’m stuck with the usual survivor’s conceit that he’s the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately. [Italics mine.]

This is the overtone you hear in Salinger’s work, the knowingness, the high proud insistent certainty, and what accounts for the sound — the instrument, so to speak — is the faculty of mind that’s meant to sift through supposed facts and separate the truth from what’s false; and the tone is this, the belief that he alone holds the key, the final authentic word on the deceased (or any other matter). The emphasis here is on the belief, not the particular key, whatever it may be. (And I want to make clear that for me this is a musical sound as much as a matter of content. It’s what makes Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters nearly unreadable for me — too much snotty, all-knowing prep-school smugness in the prose, a vague assumption of values, a social vulgarity found in the rich and privileged that’s just as revolting, and similar to, the arrogant know-nothingism of the various middle classes, upper to lower. Open the story to almost any page and you can hear the sound in the overpunctuated prose. It’s as if the pissy aggrieved prose itself were defending Seymour. You can even hear a trace of the problem in the quote above, in the word “undiscountable”—the leftover locution of a kid putting on adult airs, afraid that someone will realize he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.) And so, if there really is a single truth, and you alone possess it, there is also, by definition, a lot of falseness out there — the bulk of life, in fact. And this construction, this arrangement or priority, pitting the defense of your holy truth against the entire world’s falseness, is suicide refused, refused at least temporarily.

And it’s silence refused, too.

Here’s what I mean. A long-standing and widely accepted formulation is that suicide is redirected homicide. Edwin Shneidman, the father of the modern study of suicide, coined the phrase: “Suicide is murder in the 180th degree.” There are variations on this, of course. Suicide’s not always — probably never — an act of pure hostility. There’s a fairly old article by Ives Hendrick of the Harvard Medical School that argues the case for suicide as a form of identification with the lost love object, a fantasy of reunion rather than murder, and while this thinking doesn’t occupy a place in the fat mainstream of suicidology, it is accepted, a tributary that helps explain some cases. I’m throwing these ideas out scattershot, hoping to indicate a central theme within the wide range of psychodynamic meanings attributed to suicide: that it’s always accompanied by some shift away from life’s normal priority, where it’s perfectly natural and expected that you’d defend yourself from danger, to a condition where you give up, defenseless, or even join in on the attack. In Freud’s still fascinating “Mourning and Melancholia,” he begins by openly admitting to being flummoxed by suicide and the self’s attack on itself. He says the ego is usually fierce and robust in the protection of itself, rallying the troops when under siege, so how or why does ego-functioning break down and become defenseless in the suicide? In short, the self can hate the self to the point of suicide only when a lost internalized object — an object, moreover, of love — turns against the self. In other words, it’s your inner daddy — protected by your love of him — messing with your defenseless inner child — or whatever, some variation of that. Later (1933) Karl Menninger develops his triadic theory of suicide — the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed — to which, years afterward, he speculated on the need to add a fourth condition, the wish to be loved — and he talks about a mechanism by which the suicide’s “hostile component, since it would otherwise have to be directed against the whole world, is turned inward upon the self.” I’m really oversimplifying here, reducing complex theories into these candied bits, and I’m skipping the work of so many, of Maltsberger, Hendin, Leenaars, Jamison, etc., but I’m trying to get at something, this general tendency in suicide, that will bring us back to Salinger.

In suicide, then, a couple of the main poles of life flip, and the desire to talk or communicate turns into a longing for a colossal silence (most suicides don’t write a note), and the fierce defense of the self becomes an equally fierce and final defeat. It’s like the mind, exhausted by the enormous work of defending itself, turns around out of some need for efficiency or economy, and begins hating itself, doubting or attacking its reality. Being suicidal is really tiring. A lot of suicides are so lacking in affect and so lethargic that they aren’t able to kill themselves until their mood improves — spring, for that reason, has the highest rate of what people in the business call “completed” suicides. The ego first tries to protect itself and then can’t, in part because to do so would be to attack a forbidden love object. (Buddy Glass says he 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”—making a sideways admission of jealousy and also expressing resentment for the sainted brother he can no longer defeat and no longer even describe without desecration.) What’s salient in The Catcher in the Rye is that Holden achieves a fragile truce between hating himself and hating the world. Holden Caulfield is probably identified in the minds of most readers as a boy whose anger at and suspicion of the world is fragilely offset by his inviolate love for Allie and Phoebe. As long as he keeps that love immaculate, as long as he defends and protects it and maintains its purity, he’s alive, and that’s what I mean by suicide refused. Holden without his holy love is a goner, and the unalloyed quality of that love is really the register of his isolation. He’s cornered, and you can see the gargantuan project he’s set for himself, that vast defense. In the novel he ends up in an institution, which isn’t really a lasting solution to his problem but instead a sort of DMZ between himself and the world.