In lieu of a grossly indulgent stacks of newly acquired books – yes, yet again! Has it really been over a month since I bought a book? – here are a few interesting articles that caught my eye during the week, in between continuing frustrations with library school administration, starting back at school for the year, work, and glittering literary events. The picture to the left is Ernest Hemingway kicking a can and I’m posting it because it is Ernest Hemingway kicking a can.
The Book Depository‘s announcement of the winners of their recent bookmark design competition could having me placing several orders in the hopes of receiving one. I’d be hoping for Myles Egan’s effort “Bob was so stuck into his book he didn’t realize he was in SPACE”. Well, I think we’ve all been there Bob.
From The Guardian we have a look at literature’s most mind-blowing drugs. Following a failed attempt to read Burroughs The Naked Lunch, Darragh McManus considers a number of fictional drugs. I believe there was also a heavily fictionalized version of adrenochrome in Hunter S. Thompson‘s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, though existing as a pigment, it’s extraction and effects as a psychotropic drug were in the novel highly exaggerated. Any particularly lethal literary concoction that you’d be interested in dabbling in?
The Guardian also revealed Britain’s top 250 most borrowed books in their library system in 2009, in both raw data and again with a bit of analysis. Popular fiction wins out over non-fiction in the libraries. I wonder if there is similar evidence for Australian libraries available anywhere online.
The posthumous discussion of J.D. Salinger‘s work continues, with Michael Greenberg of the New York Review of Books blog looking at conformity and authenticity in Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye. I think Greenberg, without even explicitly stating it, taps into why Salinger speaks so much to young people – his characters feel like they are outsiders while appearing to the world as insiders.
And finally, I really love this piece on the discovery of a 19th century plantation ledger which may have inspired William Faulkner‘s Yoknapatawpha novels. It’s always the most unlikely sources that serve as inspiration, and it is encouraging that that was true of Faulkner as well. (And I also really love the badass photo of Faulkner with a pipe on the article.)
The next week on Start Narrative Here is devoted to the life and work of Carson McCullers, February 19th marks the 93rd anniversary of her birth and while I do like my original idea of cooking up some ‘Spuds Carson’ as outlined in Illumination & Night Glare (and let’s face it, I might do it anyway), a week long celebration of her writing is probably a lot easier to share with you. There will be some poetry, some love letters, some reviews, and as always a lot of McCullers love.
My, these Saturday Soiree‘s come along ever so quickly. This past week I’ve been reading Salinger‘s For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories as my public transport book, so another Salinger story is the feature of this week’s Soiree, and I’ve chosen the quietly affecting “For Esmé with Love and Squalor.” In “For Esmé” an enlisted soldier and aspiring writer reminisces about a young girl he met in London during the war.
Following a training session and awaiting reassignment, the soldier takes a walk around the rainy town and happens upon a small church where a children’s choir is practicing. Sitting in on the practice, the soldier takes notice of a young female singer who appears to be bored but has a very sweet singing voice. Out in the rain again, the soldier avoids the recreation center where his fellow soldiers are spending time, and retires to an empty civilian tearoom. The young girl, her younger brother and their governess come into the tearoom out of the rain; the verbose and precocious young girl strikes up a conversation with the soldier.
‘I thought Americans despised tea,’ she said.
It wasn’t the observation of a smart aleck but that of a truth-lover or a statistics-lover. I replied that some of us never drank anything but tea. I asked her if she’d care to join me.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps for just a fraction of a moment.’
Esmé and the soldier discuss his reasons for being in town, her encounters with Americans, his personal life and her relationship with her deceased father whose watch she wears despite being too big for her tiny wrist. Esmé’s younger brother Charles eventually joins them, becoming Esmé’s topic of conversation and occasionally interjecting. Upon learning that the soldier is an aspiring writer Esmé asks him to write her a story, something about squalor which she loves reading about. The story then moves into what the soldier calls “the squalid, or moving, part of the story”, thinly disguised as Staff-Sergeant X, the soldier is quartered in a house in Bavaria after the Allies victory in the war, whose mind and psyche have been damaged by his war experiences.
He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.
After a brief discussion with his companion, Clay, about Clay’s girlfriend who is studying psychology and has offered her diagnosis on X’s mental breakdown. Left alone again X discovers a parcel which has been readdressed to him three times. Esmé has sent him her fathers watch, and a short note telling him how much she enjoyed their time together that afternoon beforehand. Charles adds his own note as well, which made me laugh out loud:
Charles, whom I am teaching to read and write and whom I am finding an extremely intelligent novice, wishes to add a few words. Please write as soon as you have the time and inclination.
HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO LOVE AND KISSES CHALES
Thematically, it is very similar to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish“; a shellshocked soldier is touched, inspired, affected by the innocence of a child; the contrast between what he has seen in action and the unaffected innocence of the child almost becomes too much to bear. Unlike “Bananafish”, “For Esme” ends on a more positive note, with the soldier inspired by Esmé positivity and he finally senses the possibility of recovery. Though the watch has been damaged in transit, for the soldier it is a symbol of hope, of faith, and of the goodness that humans are, against all odds, capable.
Another week passes, and no new books. I am, surprisingly, still being so responsible! Standing outside of bookstores, looking longingly through the windows, but otherwise well behaved. The purse remains safely in my handbag.
And don’t even get me started on the reason I’m trying to save my dollars – my Library Services course. I am suffering from the most frustrating and stressful enrolment based angst ever. How hard is it to reply to a.) an email (admittedly, more than one email) or b.) a phone call? Semester starts, oh only tomorrow, and while all my on-campus subjects are, or at least seem to be, organized, my one remaining subject spot remains blank no matter how hard I try to get in contact with the powers that be. Their system is so unprofessional and disorganized. I like to be prepared weeks if not MONTHS in advance, none of this last minute stuff. Argh.
As someone who went through a stage of reading The Catcher in the Rye at least once a year, the news of J.D. Salinger‘s death this week made me pause and reflect on the special place that he held in my reading life for such a long time. I know that you have to be of a particular disposition to connect with Holden Caulfield, but it is a bond that once forged seems to be unbreakable. I think for many people it is the first book that lets them know, in the words of Mr. Antolini, that:
Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
And hearing that can be such a powerful thing when you’re a teenager, it’s just too easy to dismiss (or forget?) the urgency of that emotion when we’re all old, jaded and desperately trying to shed anything that remains of our adolescence.
I was planning to continue with Jay McInerney with another Alison Poole short story, but with the death of J.D. Salinger this week – a round up of the various tributes was published by the Guardian – I felt that it was a good time to look back at some of his shorter fiction. This week I’ll be reading the first of the Glass Family stories “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from the short story collection Nine Stories, usually published outside the U.S. as For Esmé with Love and Squalor and Other Stories.
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” follows two separate dialogues, presumably occurring at roughly the same time. The first is a telephone conversation between Muriel and her mother. The dialogue is mostly banal, Muriel is on holiday in Florida with her husband Seymour, who her mother has some misgivings about. There is constant mention of some “funny business with the trees” that concerns Muriel’s mother, especially when she discovers that Seymour drove down to Florida. Muriel asks her mother about a book that Seymour sent her from Germany:
‘No. Only he asked me about it, when we were driving down. He wanted to know if I’d read it.’
‘It was in German!’
‘Yes, dear. That doesn’t make any difference,’ said the girl, crossing her legs. ‘ He said that the poems happen to be written by the only great poet of the century. He said I should’ve bought a translation or something. Or learned the language, if you please.’
‘Awful. Awful. It’s sad, actually, is what it is. Your father said last night—’
Muriel’s mother further reveals that Seymour has been seeing a psychiatrist and has recently been discharged from an Army hospital. The psychiatrist has told Muriel’s father that “Seymour may completely lose control of himself.” The emphasis in italics in their dialogue really allows their voices to sound out, you can perfectly hear the stress they place on particular syllables. After briefly discussing a dinner with the local psychiatrist, Muriel and her mother move on to more important matters, such as the state of Muriel’s blue coat and the season’s clothing styles. Meanwhile, young Sybil Carpenter is talking with her mother as she slops sun-tan oil on her skin. Sybil keeps asking “Did you see more glass?”, driving her mother crazy. Sybil runs down to the beach and reaches Seymour Glass in an out of the way part of the beach. They strike up a conversation, suggesting familiarity.
‘The lady?’ The young man brushed some sand out of his thin hair. ‘That’s hard to say, Sybil. She may be in any one of a thousand places. At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink. Or making dolls for poor children in her room.’ Lying prone now, he made two fists, set one on top of the other, and rested his chin on the top one. ‘Ask me something else, Sybil,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine bathing suit you have on. if there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit.’
Sybil stared at him, then looked down at her protruding stomach. ‘This is a yellow,’ she said. ‘This is a yellow.’
Seymour’s ease of communicating with Sybil reminds me of Holden’s relationship with his younger sister Phoebe in The Catcher in the Rye. Children are easy to talk to for these characters because they don’t hide behind any illusions, that barrier that we’re forced to set up to protect us against the world hasn’t been put up yet. Innocence. Seymour engages Sybil in a hunt for the elusive bananafish, and tells her the story of the tragic life they lead swimming into holes filled with bananas. They stuff themselves so full with ripe banana flesh that they can’t swim out of the hole again, and so they die of banana fever in the hole. Again, doesn’t this suggest innocence and innocence lost? Once we gorge ourselves on all that adulthood has to offer, we can’t get out of it and reach that purer state of childhood naivety again. Here the story takes on a severe shift. After an altercation in the elevator with a woman he thinks is looking at his feet, Seymour returns to his hotel room.
Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic. He released the magazine, looked at it, then reinserted it. he cocked the piece. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple.
It’s a powerful story, deceptively simple and with a macabre humour simmering below the surface. Vale Jerome David Salinger, goddamn could you write a story.
J.D. Salinger, January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010
