Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

Similarly, Buddy Glass, a writer (in two other institutions, the military and the academy — and all these institutions, these supporting structures, stand in for a neutral family), asserts his identity by claiming close inner knowledge of his dead brother, Seymour. His relation to Seymour is sacerdotal and similar to the Holden Antolini says he can imagine dying nobly for an unworthy cause. But even in the passage quoted and italicized above, in the middle of his assertion, Buddy’s already begun to undermine it, calling it a “conceit,” an instance of cleverness that, but for the writer’s vigilance, would have hardened into a fixed posture, would have become false, phony. And I would argue that only a little farther down this line of thinking we come to the idea that all writing, fixed on the page, claiming truth, is false. It’s imaginable that a writer, in the wake of a suicide, might find all coherent narratives suspect, all postures false, and, looking at life up close under a new magnifying hypervigilance, might finally come to question and mistrust the integrity of his own inventions as well. The word “conceit” cancels Buddy’s claim to know Seymour, dismissing it and sending it on its way toward silence. And silence — a kind of reunion with Seymour, or a way to equal or defeat him, head to head, silence for silence — is one possible response to this powerful but confused idea of falsity. If The Catcher in the Rye is noisy in its search for authenticity, then the rest of Salinger’s work looks for the real by stilling the very engine that drives Holden’s vast doubt — words. And this silence is related to and yet something beyond the interest in Zen quietude that crops up in Salinger’s later work.

Holden’s isolation in an institution as he tells his story points to a formal problem Salinger himself seems to have resolved through withdrawal and writerly silence. At least it’s tempting to see it that way. I’ve poked around in all the work for prodromal clues somehow indicating Salinger’s plunge into silence was symptomatic of something. What is the silence about? In some people (usually willful or grandiose or highly defended types) there’s only a very small difference between talking incessantly and saying nothing. I vaguely remember a quote from Roland Barthes, who claimed his rhetorical needs alternated between a little haiku that expressed everything and a great flood of banalities that said nothing. And in Seymour: An Introduction , Buddy Glass says of his brother, “Vocally, he was either as brief as a gatekeeper at a Trappist monastery — sometimes for days, weeks at a stretch — or he was a non-stop talker.” Interestingly, The Catcher in the Rye , Salinger’s most voluble book, begins and ends with specific comments concerning what will not be written.

Holden starts his story with a refusal: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” And he ends the novel with this hardened commandment: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

The quotes above bracket the book, suggesting prohibitions of both point of view and content. Holden will not look at the life of his parents or take the tack of examining his past or childhood — this is no remembrance — and by the end of the novel his instinct, in a sense, proves him right, proves that the process of writing only creates further problems. He’s not newly wise like Nick Carraway. He has no new perspective or understanding. The only thing Holden seems to learn from telling even this restricted story is that, confirming his first hunch, it would have been better to say nothing.

Silence is already there, waiting in the wings of Salinger’s most clamorous and fluent book.

Is silence for a writer tantamount to suicide? In some ways it is, I believe, but the question for me is why — why does the writer choose silence? The deliberate decision to quit clawing at the keyboard is too mechanical to be an answer. Stopping isn’t the real matter, but rather the result of some other prior disturbance that can’t be named. Silence in this sense isn’t the equivalent of suicide or death, but of secrecy. That’s what it’s about — what is not said. Taking Salinger’s oeuvre as a unified field I find a couple of elements that don’t square with either my experience or my avocational reading in the literature of suicide — elements where a silence rules. He never really looks at the role of parents in family life, and never examines, in particular, their position re: Seymour’s suicide. It’s a substantial omission, and perhaps not an omission at all but instead a protective silence. I don’t know, and on this point I don’t care to speculate beyond the observation that, in general, people from good, functioning families rarely kill themselves. And in crappy, broken-down families a child’s attention is often focused on nothing but the parents. Suffice it to say there’s something big missing in Salinger’s account. And the other thing not present in Salinger’s work is outright anger toward Seymour or a sense of doubt about him. As Buddy describes him Seymour has no flaws, and to me the absence of flaws and of anger and doubt is a texture that’s conspicuously missing. Why? I can’t say, although I feel the effects. In Seymour: An Introduction , Buddy never lets the reader forget that he, Buddy, is sitting alone at his desk, writing. It’s all just writing, he wants us to know, the lumber of it, the cut and stacked phrases, the punctuation nailed to the paper, the parentheses put up to frame different doubts, etc. — as if to say this project, this monument under construction, will always fall short of honoring the actual character. Where Holden insists on Phoebe’s innocence and pretty easily posits an idea of her essence, Buddy sees past his brother into the conceits and constructions that create him on the page. And because of this, perhaps, Seymour never feels real, never seems to emerge from the workbench of the writer, to live and walk among men.

The writer won’t or can’t let him die:

What I am , I think, is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him. I believe I essentially remain what I’ve almost always been — a narrator, but one with extremely pressing personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots, I want to follow my nose.

Here again you get a kind of intense identification with Seymour, one that blocks Buddy’s way — he’s “undetached,” he has “pressing personal needs,” and because of this he can only make “prefatory” remarks. The isolated “I am ” is telling; with the comma where it is, the weight of the sentence remains stuck to the subject, rather than shifting forward via the verb to its object. The “I am ” seems open-ended, perpetual. (Is time taken out of the sentence because the writer won’t let history happen, won’t let his character die? It’s curious that in a life that’s ended, that’s so emphatically finished, the writer can’t begin, can’t offer anything more than an introduction. Would finishing Seymour mean outliving him? Or the converse: Does failing to finish Seymour leave him alive?) The identity thing here is ruthless, close, smothering, endless. Consider that quote and the problem when set beside this:

I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged — buckle-legged — omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.