Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

There’s that cowardly, obfuscating “un-” construction—“unpretentious,” “unflorally”—cropping up again (which nearly always works as a mask, sneaky and meaning the very opposite of what it states, meaning, in this case, pretentious, floral ), but the point now is to draw attention to the parentheses. (Although in working through various drafts of this essay I realized my second paragraph was full of precisely this construction, the un prefix with its absences and canceled actions. It appears five times, and occupies the privileged, key position as the last word in the paragraph: unbitten . It crossed my mind to correct the problem by burying it in some low geological stratum of the piece, but I haven’t. There’s that desire in writing, as in life, to rewind everything after a suicide, to return to some pristine moment, and so in this too Salinger is mon frère, mon semblable .) The parentheses sit like Kevlar jackets all through the writing, protecting Buddy’s identity from attack, keeping the sentences safe. Seymour: An Introduction is like a story in hiding, its prose on the lam, its characters putting on disguises, its ideas concealed. The whole thing is preambular, it’s all excursus, and it’s a bad sign that for me the best or most accurate language for describing the story comes from classical rhetoric and oratory. The sentences spin eloquently over an absence — it’s as if progress has stopped, and the last few words are draining out. Earlier I said that Holden is making a loud shouted appeal directly to the audience, over the heads of those who don’t understand. The whole story is directed at you, the reader. In Seymour , Buddy Glass speaks directly to the reader too, but now he resorts to the aside, the isolated whispered phrase, safely enclosed in parentheses, addressing the audience in a low voice supposedly inaudible to others nearby.

Who is nearby?

I know: his brother.

Salinger isn’t primarily a funny writer, and humor, except sporadically in The Catcher in the Rye , is largely absent from his work. His primary thing is empathy, the yearning for it, the hope and the need, both as a giver and receiver. Buddy’s desire for empathic union with his brother is single-minded and loyal and makes for an interesting case, but Seymour never finally comes to life. The book is one long stutter and a fascinating failure. Buddy can’t write Seymour because, when he tries, Seymour fragments and falls apart — you get the parts, you get the eyes, the nose, the voice, etc. He wants his brother so bad, it’s a sad thing to watch, to see Seymour breaking to pieces in Buddy’s hands. The Salinger I’ve been discussing seems at times to feel he’s got a corner on the Truth, this unwieldy lump he keeps hidden like the kid with the secret goldfish in D. B.’s story, who won’t show it to anybody because he bought it with his own money. Perhaps this Truth is centrally important because the suicide takes his secret with him, and it’s easy to get caught up in a monomaniacal search for the Answer, pinning your painfully vast hope to a single Idea. Up to a point, you believe the person who killed himself took the ultimate truth, and life afterward often feels like a sorrowful search for that last, unknown key to the life, which will explain everything. The paradox is that this hope or need for certainty seems to make the world less stable. The belief in a single Truth leads to doubt about everything. The need for empathic union makes the actual separation just terribly, terribly huge.

When we shift the relationship away from Buddy-Seymour to Salinger-Holden, then, as an act of writing, Salinger’s empathy for Holden Caulfield makes The Catcher in the Rye something special, an intense and fierce and intimate look at a character who arouses in readers — me, let’s say — a level of sympathetic identification nearly equal to the one felt for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.

After my brother’s death I felt I had too much feeling to be myself. I felt attacked by my emotions, under siege, and the sensation, day after day, was like life had stuck to me. Like it was pinned to my back. This whatever, this stab of feeling, probably influenced the fate of the doomed robin. I could have stood by until the crow killed it, or sat still until somebody a little more altruistic came down the street and stepped in to save it, rushing the bird off to a Humane Society shelter; or someone else could have come down the street, this time in a car, and run it over. Lots of things could have happened. But instead I scooped the bird up in my Filson cap, folding the hat like a taco shell so it couldn’t escape, and carried it to a vacant lot with a weedy path that led down to the lake. For some reason I thought the crow might follow us, but crows are comical birds and that one’s interest had already moved on to something new. I walked into the murky water of Lake Union, my mind blank, and, bending down, dunked the hat under. The bird was still trying to fly, brushing its one good wing against the fabric, and when that stopped I pulled my hat away. The robin floated to the surface, lifelessly riding the tiny waves, and I smacked the hat against my leg, knocking beads of water off the waxed cotton. I picked a few gray feathers from the inner brim and put the hat on, looking west across the water to the Aurora Bridge. And while now the bridge reminds me of my brother Mike, comically pratfalling through an indifferent universe, back then it made me think of Danny, tragically dead at twenty-one after shooting himself in my bedroom.

With Danny, years have passed and I still feel a deathly guilt. I never did anything but love my brother and that wasn’t enough. And now every breath I take is a betrayal, a refusal of his choice. It’s not sentimental indulgence, it’s not so much that I ask myself what happened to the hand I held in crosswalks, but rather that I cross all those streets again. I stay with him now, I’m always nearby. I am always ten and he is always three, and I sit in the kitchen spooning canned peas into his mouth, swallowing most of them myself, and he gets a bowl of spumoni for being a good boy and eating his vegetables. I’m with him and I never feel like I belong entirely to present-day life. I’ve never really held a serious job or applied myself to anything worthwhile, I’m an unreliable, shitty friend, and I’ve never loved anyone deeply or satisfactorily. Killing the robin was an early experiment in grieving and acceptance that didn’t work too well. I knew the bird had no life ahead of it and I wanted to anticipate that doom rather than stand off at a safe distance. I didn’t want to be uncertain. But where before I had too much feeling, after drowning the bird I felt nothing, I was indifferent, I was remorseless. I thought I could rejoin the universe by being cruel and unfeeling, but obviously I was having trouble with focal distance and zeroing in on the exact right place where most of life was happening.

Here is a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I treasure for capturing one side of how I feel. It gets me closer to acceptance and understanding than anything else. It’s from his Letters and Papers from Prison , and was written, I think, at a time when he knew he would die in the concentration camp, so he speaks from inside the heart of his death.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.