Oct 112014
 

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It had begun to snow. Nieves lifted his head to the slow, slanted cascade of flakes and stuck out his tongue. He savored the cool on his tongue as he watched the dog charge across the parking lot and disappear down the trail head.

There was more to savor than snow. Nieves recalled the night before. He had attended a wedding reception held at an Italian social club Nieves frequented. He was seated next to the sister of one of the club’s executive. She was visiting from Rome. “How’d you learn to speak Italian so well?” she asked him. Years before, he said, he had played semi-pro soccer in Sicily. He told her a story from those days. His crew were locking horns with a cross-town rival, a gang of savages culled from the worst of the league by a dodgy, penny-pinching industrialist. One of the goons pulled Nieves down in the box and he was awarded a penalty. Nieves sauntered to the ball and hit it clean but the ball sailed on him and rattled off the cross bar. The goalie bolted from the net towards the stands where the rabble were already celebrating with gutter fervor. Nieves stood his ground in a pose of dejection. From behind his guise, he watched the ball as it began to roll towards the goal, propelled by a furious backspin and the uneven ground of the pitch. The ball crept across the line, the referee signaled a goal and the stadium died a death.

The woman threw her head back in laughter, a genuine guffaw and her hand had come down on his. She didn’t seem like a lady who expected much. At one time, she told Nieves, she had been a stewardess for an Italian airline. “I went everywhere. And nowhere.” She was thin and tall with black ringlets piled high above a lined but open face as tawny as his own. Just under fifty, he thought, a bit younger than himself but the same breed. They danced and when it was time to leave, tipsy as they were, he slipped his hand around waist and drew her in for a peck. In a week, she would be back in Italy. The thought gnawed at him.

As Nieves reached the trailhead, the dog scampered out of the woods to meet him. Nieves teased it for a moment, playfully batting at its face. The dog pulled back and kicked up clouds of snow. Nieves began to walk and the dog settled into a crisp saunter. In the summer, some dead trees had been cleared out and wood chips spread on all the main trails, leaving them well marked. But the dog was a tireless drifter and when they came to a fork, Nieves knew where they were headed. “You devil,” he said, reaching down give the dog a rub. The dog romped away down the small path that would take them deep into the woods.

The snow’s cascade seemed like the slow arpeggio of a harp, thought Nieves, sounding the notes in his head. It was early, too early. He woke up before dawn and the woman had already left his condo. He couldn’t fall back to sleep and waited restlessly in bed for the faint light of dawn. Nieves continued with the music as counterpoint to the whispering hush of wind and footfalls. As they moved to the back of the park, Nieves could make out the imposing hulk of the defunct racetrack through the scrim of barren trees. Its future loomed over the preserve. Developers were licking their chops as they dreamed of the wrecking ball swinging wild and hard.

The dog glanced at Nieves and picked up his pace, disappearing around a bend. He spent most of his time carousing at the farm where Nieves grew up in the county. Nieves traveled a lot for work and had only taken the puppy as a gift from one of his sisters. A dog like that had no business in the city, thought Nieves. His people on his mother’s side were tomato farmers off the boat from the Azores. His father had returned to Portugal shortly after the younger sister was born, leaving Nieves and the two girls alone with their mother. Money was always tight. The struggle marked them all, especially his sisters. They were beautiful but self-serving. Both married well. Divorced well too, with no kids to bog down future adventures in avarice.

They must be slipping some of their loot to his mother, Nieves was sure of it but she still worked a fruit stand in the summer, selling everything she could to locals and cottagers. Marie Nieves, tippling home-made wine, cajoling in broken English. Shit-faced but never showed it.

The dog returned, grumbling with short, sharp barks. Up ahead, the path was blocked. The obstacle soon revealed itself. Nieves noticed the savaged flank of the deer. The animal must have clipped itself on the fence as it moved from the grasslands on the other side of the preserve and the blood attracted the coyotes.

The dear’s gaze into oblivion caught Nieves short, as if he had bit his tongue. He felt a nature rapture overtake him. The woods suddenly seemed alive with animal spirits, inscrutable and imposing. When he was a teenager, his father had re-appeared, just like that. He behaved as if he had always been there and nobody questioned his return. One day, Nieves was driving back from the city with him. They had gone to the market to sell produce and on the way home, his father stopped at a bar. Nieves plugged the jukebox while his old man threw back rum, that was his drink. By the time they left, it was dark. His father should have seen the deer charging out of the woods but he didn’t and the deer took out the right fender before rolling into the ditch. Nieves remembered his old man pulling onto the shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s have a look.” He never spoke English, never liked it.

His father shone a flashlight. The deer was thrashing about, trying to right itself. But its front legs were destroyed and blood covered its breast. His father gave Nieves the flashlight and took out a sledge hammer from the back of the truck. He stepped smartly to the deer and swung. The deer wrenched its head from the blow and thrashed again. His father took another swing. The deer made a sound and moved and went still. A car whizzed by and then another.  “Hold that light steady,” his old man said. Nieves watched his father pause at the top of his next swing, staring at the deer, choosing his place for delivery. The hammer dropped. The deer’s head exploded.

Nieves stepped around the doe, the dog holding fast to his leg. Nieves glanced through the fence at the abandoned racetrack. Tomorrow, he would take the dog there, before he was due at his mother’s for Sunday dinner. He thought again of the woman, her hair spilling over him, but the deer crowded her out.

Back in the parking lot, with the dog settled in the backseat, Nieves reached into the glovebox and pulled out a flask of rum. He took a swig and watched the snow through the windscreen. Exhaustion and longing flooded through him and it was all he could do to turn on the engine. He put the car in gear and eased out of the lot.

—Timothy Dugdale

 

Timothy Dugdale is a senior copywriter, brand strategist and freelance journalist who writes for a variety of luxury lifestyle magazines in North America and the Caribbean. He also composes existential novellas and poetry.

 

Nov 042013
 

Sarah Sheard commented on Timothy Dugdale’s review of Salinger in the current issue of NC and brought to my attention this fascinating NPR story about a young writer and her correspondence with J. D. Salinger. The young writer in question was Marjorie Sheard, Sarah’s aunt. Wonderful to get this cross-reference, the little story, the moment. You can also read Tim’s review and view Sarah’s comments.

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Salinger’s first letter to Marjorie Sheard is dated Sept. 4, 1941.

“Dear Miss Sheard,” he writes. “Your warm, bright letter just reached me. Thanks very much. It’s unfair to authors that you write only to Aldous Huxley and me.”

Sheard had written to praise stories of Salinger’s that she’d seen in Esquire and Collier’s magazines. Like Salinger, she was in her early 20s and wanted to write fiction. He gives her advice: “Why don’t you try writing something for Mademoiselle or one of the other feminine magazines? Seems to me you have the instincts to avoid the usual Vassar-girl tripe those mags publish.”

He put his parents’ address (1133 Park Ave., on 91st Street in Manhattan) in the upper-right corner. He has typed the letter neatly — no cross-outs or erasures.

“He would have made a great secretary,” Kiely says.

Salinger, clearly thrilled to get a fan letter this early in his writing career, ends his note this way: “I hope you’ll always read my work with pleasure. So glad you liked the Esquire piece. I write for Marjorie Sheard and a few others. The fact that Esquire’s circulation is 600,000, and Collier’s is in millions is purely coincidental.”

Kiely thinks these letters reveal who Salinger was before Catcher in the Rye made him a literary star.

Read the rest at Pen Pal Of Young ‘Jerry’ Salinger May Have Been First To Meet Holden : NPR.

Nov 022013
 

Desktop28Salerno, Salinger & Shields

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Fame is a mask that eats the face – John Updike

Salinger
by David Shields and Shane Salerno
Doubleday; 331 pp; $37.50.

I was on YouTube the other night and I happened upon an old video that reminded me of this book and its subject. The clip was from 1969. Hugh Hefner was hosting the British group, Deep Purple, at his mansion in Chicago. Hef had a TV show back then, late night, a very loose piece of broadcasting that nonetheless was suffice with all the vibrations that drew millions of gents to Playboy. It was just before Hefner decamped to LA. Once amongst the palms, Hef traded in his tux for silk pyjamas and withdrew from the public eye almost altogether. He holed up in a mansion that ran on werewolf’s clock and a sybriate’s appetites. Hef built his own space-time continium in that mansion, a swinger’s paradise that gave American what it wanted without the swinger having to give himself up to America.

Perhaps that is what Salinger was after when he retreated to a modest cottage in New Hampshire not long after the publication of Catcher in the Rye. In this massive oral history, cobbled together from an unbelievable variety of sources, Shields and Salerno give us a Salinger who lost himself in an imaginary family, the Glasses, even while his own young family looked on with dismay and bewilderment.

Jerome David Salinger began well in life. His people had money and he had the looks and smarts to make the most of that advantage. Two events, not unrelated, conspired to lay him low. First, he fell for Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona. Salinger wanted her badly and hit her with his best shots, including what would become his preferred method of mashing – love letters. The radiant debuttante was unmoved, however, and cast her lot with Charlie Chaplin who married her a month after she turned eighteen. The thirty six year difference between them proved to be nothing; they had eight children and the marriage flourished for thirty four years until Chaplin departed the limelight for good. For Salinger, the rejection was particularly galling, as he was trapped in Europe fighting WWII when he learned of his defeat at the hands of the old musical hall rascal. Chaplin was everything Salinger would prove not to be – sociable, entertaining, comfortable in fame yet able to best its worst to the benefit of his privacy.

If O’Neill permanently marked Salinger with a lust for nubile flesh, WWII gutted his psyche. Salinger lived through the worst the war had to give a soldier. He survived a number of nasty combat episodes as the Allies moved to finish off the Nazis. Then he participated in the liberation of one of Hitler’s concentration camps.

The biographers state early and often that Salinger understandably cracked up. Jilted and spooked, Salinger came home to America unsuitable for American life. But his madness gave the literary world two bona fide treasures. In 1948, the New Yorker published A Perfect Day for Bananafish, a short story that blew the New York literary scene out of the water. Salinger was no Norman Mailer. He didn’t pride himself on coming out of WWII a hardened existential warrior. And he wasn’t Vonnegut who managed to take his own case of shellshock and transmute it into absurdist literature suffuse with playful, almost childish humanity. To the contrary, Bananafish is a communique from the front lines of untreated and untreatable PTSD. We learn that the first half of the story came in a crucial revision process demanded by The New Yorker editors. The comely young wife of Seymour Glass tries to convince her anxious mother that Seymour, tormented by his war experiences, is getting better. Then the reader joins Seymour on the beach where he is entertaining a little girl with stories about a make-believe fish. Glass returns to his Miami Beach hotel room, takes a look at his napping wife and blows his brains out with a service revolver. Salinger was rubbing something very nasty in the face of America, a war-weary country that didn’t want to think about its brave veterans eating a gun after they’ve covertly ogled little girls on the beach. America was on the make, with flag and Jesus and easy credit on hand to sanctify the ascent and quell the primal doubts of modern existence. Salinger wrote in an authentic voice, deeply troubled yet unyielding in its alienation from American life and fatal disappointment with the world at large.

Catcher in the Rye was Salinger’s moment of truth for that voice. His short stories had bought him enormous goodwill and standing in the publishing world. He had become a staple at The New Yorker. Now he could truly reveal himself, the arrested adolescent who went to war and came home with yet another set of mental handcuffs, a troubled kid who nonetheless found a way to bear witness to the prison life of his mind in edgy prose spiced with profanities. Holden Caulfield was raging against the hypocrisies of his time. And American youth were all ears. They were mad as hell and didn’t want to take it anymore. Fuck the squares and the Russians and the bomb and apple pie. Shields and Salerno do a lovely job of piecing together how the book barely managed to make it to the presses as publisher after publisher balked at Salinger’s aggrieved prep-school dropout. When Catcher came out, the response was sensational. In less than five years, the book was being banned by schools all over the country. What Salinger had started with Bananafish, he finished with Catcher.

And then Salinger escaped New York to Cornish, New Hampshire. Years passed, then decades. While Salinger tried to capture his beloved Glass family under glass, the world tried to capture the elusive Salinger. Where had he gone? Why? Hefner went away to live out the fantasy he sold on the newsstands. Salinger went away to escape the collective fantasy of the successful author, a fantasy that shadowed his writing and weighed heavily on his compromised mind. By removing himself, he hoped, the work was left to speak for him.

But is that really true? As the book moves into its final third, Shields and Salerno provide ample evidence that Salinger was a rabid protector not just of his privacy but also his mythos. Just as Hefner fights to keep his mid-century image frozen in the public mind, so did Salinger. Holden must not grow up. He must not be seen dealing with the awful drudgery of adulthood. He must not be an old man toiling on idiosyncratic oddities. Salinger duked it out with a would-be biographer all the way to Supreme Court and emerged victorious. He took on his own daughter who wanted to air the soiled family laundry. He played footsie with publishers, big and small. And he continued to cultivate young female pen pals.

Old hard-ons die hard. No biography of Salinger would be complete with an appearance by Joyce Maynard, the ambitious literary ingenue who moved in with JD as the Summer of Love was falling apart. Here Shields and Salerno allow Maynard to give a full account of her romance, if you can call it that, with Salinger. We might have heard it all before but never in such a rich context. Looking at pictures of teenage Joyce, you can just imagine what she did for Salinger, eternally on the make for a new and improved Oona. In Bananafish, Salinger shamelessly advertised his addiction to innocence, female innocence, the kind of innocence that didn’t wear a baby doll nightie or get pregnant. And ultimately that is what caused Salinger to send Maynard packing – the realization that her innocence was not only fleeting but in flight, it could cause him the grief of more fatherhood. She wasn’t a real person; she was a place to indulge his delusions. At least Hef invited his ladies into a heated jacuzzi to get the same kicks. The Maynard saga ends with the lamentable Joyce driving up to New Hampshire, looking for closure. By then she had been dining out on her liaison with Salinger for decades. She gets what she came for with a fuselade of expletives and a door slammed in her face.

This is not a standard celebrity biography written by some Fleet Street hack eager to bring his subject down a peg or two. Nor is it a hagiography looking to give us a buffed-up JD Salinger who heroically fought to keep his literary quest pure and unsullied by the machinations and madness of fame. It is a cunningly ramshackle collection of all the source material one expects from a biography lashed together in chronological order but with no singular authorial voice. The authors don’t serve you drinks in a boat; you’re swimming in their water but the current is copacetic. Shields is an old hand at this sort of thing. In works like Reality Manifesto, he outlined a galvanic form of creative non-fiction where the reader and the writer have to do real work on the page, the former providing the potential for a meaningful collage, the latter putting it together, just barely.

Why Salinger now? The authors intimate that posthumous goodies from the Salinger vault are about to be released. No doubt this will excite some in the literary community while others will yawn. Salinger, after all, never fulfilled his promise. To use a term that he liked to use on others, he didn’t really measure up. Neither committed to the Jewish heritage of his father or the Roman Catholic heritage of his mother, Salinger lacked a compelling bassline to his writing unlike Roth, Bellow or Hemingway who all played deep and aggressive notes of an actual ethnic or moral heritage. Perhaps that’s why Alexander Portnoy is far more compelling than Holden Caulfield. Portnoy doesn’t whine that he’s misunderstood; he jacks off on the subway to show he plays by his own rules.

That said, time has proven that Salinger was probably wise to disappear. Fame is a game that has become unbelievably coarse and cruel. If not fame, people will gladly settle for infamy. Just ask Mark David Chapman. Nobody escapes from it, old or young, talented or talentless, the once proud star or the forever pathetic nobody. TMZ has a seemingly bottomless pit of cretinous young paparazzi eager to earn their bones confronting celebrities with inane barbed questions mixed with ingratiating urban patter.

Salinger also is a reminder that at one time America was a society that read, that knew the names of authors and cared deeply about their work. Literary fame was the result of actual accomplishment. Today, middling authors lay their lives bare on social media platforms for fans, setting an ugly standard that better authors feel obligated to oblige. Aren’t the books enough? In the end, perhaps not even the books were enough for Salinger. But they kept him alive long after he pulled the trigger on Seymour Glass, the man he probably was.

—Timothy Dugdale

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Timothy Dugdale is a professional copywriter and brand manager. He writes literary fiction and composes electronic music under the pseudonym Stirling Noh. Visit him at: http://noh.atomicquill.com