Sunday
*
And I know you like your boys to take their medicine
From the bowl with a silver spoon
Who run away with the dish and scale the fish by the silvery light of the moon
Who were taught from the womb to believe till the tomb
That as far as their bleeding eyes see
Is a pleasure pen, meant for them, builded and rent for them
Not for the likes of me
Not for the like of you and me
And for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
And I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
I thought I had found my golden September in the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin
Oh but the green-eyed harpy of the salt land
She takes into hers my hand
She says, "Boy I know you're lying
Oh but then, so am I,"
And to this I said "Oh well."
Well put me in a cage full of lions, I learned to speak lion
In fact I know the language well
I picked it up while I was versing myself in the languages they speak in hell
That night, the silence gave birth to a baby
They took it away to her silent dismay
And they raised it to be a lady
Now she can't keep her mouth shut
And for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
And I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
I thought I had found my golden September in the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin
Augie March
They jogged past, fit as fiddles, astonishing good looking some of them, and he walked past them. Nineteen years before, well, 19 years and almost 9 months before, his son had been conceived, in one of those flashing moments when he knew she was pregnant. She was the third woman in rapid succession, the only one who went through it. They had two children under two before they barely knew each other. I've always wanted to have children, he had expressed out loud, there on that balcony overlooking Woolloomoolloo, with views to the Opera House and the Bridge. Shortly thereafter there had been a miscarriage. Shortly after that he moved. And shortly after that came the next pregnancy. It all happened very fast. He had been a reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald and all had been fine with the world.
A young, good looking partner. The world turning on its axis. The sound of the sea out the window, the boxes of his old life inappropriate in the new surrounds. A milk crate? Well, those were the days. Later he would come home to find half his clothes had been thrown out. They were daggy, she said dismissively, perhaps truthfully. The waves crashed and young fit friends seemed to bounce in and out. Now everything had ended, everything, his life as a reporter, with both of the children off in boarding situations his life as a single father, everything. And so he walked up and down the beach every day, and half the world jogged by. They were in a different realm, in a different stage of life.
How he envied them some days; and when he first came there, after that darkest of dark molasses evil period, would pace up and down the beach staring bitterly, angrily, sadly, blankly at the sand. They say God is in the places in between; perhaps. He wouldn't know. But the waves crashed and his eyes lifted. And after a few months the thought came crashing in: Life Is Magnificent, Every Day Is Glorious. Where did that come from? How could it be? He sat in his alcove and smoked an inappropriate cigarette, and could see the dolphins splashing out to sea, the lovers canoodling on the rocks below. Or depending on the hour young men with their shirts off doing their Eastern inspired exercises.
Yesterday he saw a group of businessmen at about 7am. They had obviously been up all night drinking and decided to go for a skinny dip. Their unattractive bodies, by local standards, shivering in the shock of the sea. They were laughing hysterically as one of them stood on the sand with his togs still on. Not going to join them? He asked, grinning because everything was so fabulous and the day so wonderful and the beach just looked absolutely beautiful; every where he looked another tableau. It's public! The man declared rather superfluously. People are looking! Have fun, he grinned back again; barely braking his stride, because there was more that was beautiful to be embraced, the view from the point, the water splashing on his feet.
He had been spending 12 hours or more at work and now he was free. He tried to give them a cuddle but they were too big now. And it was all such perfect timing. But he couldn't help but feel sad, at everything, everything. The farewell came and went and was really nice. None of the hierarchy came, of course. These were the masters he had been enslaved to all these years, invisible. Names and legends and stories, all things In the passing days and the passing years, his once garrulous nature wrecked by tragedy, his own vulnerability leading to attack. Never again. But who can know now. He was prepared to change everything; to walk into a new role; to become a different person. How grounded was that? Not very.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/most-popular/2010/01/30/jd-salinger-had-15-new-novels-hidden-in-safe-115875-22005281/
Locked behind the thick steel door of a safe, inside an isolated house in a remote wood, lie what could be some of the greatest works of literature ever written.
Yet the words that fill every page have never been read by anyone except the reclusive genius who wrote them.
And now, at least 15 unpublished novels by JD Salinger, the American author of The Catcher in the Rye who died this week aged 91, could well be destroyed.
Fans of the author, one of the 20th century’s most influential writers, have longed for more since his last published work, a story in a magazine back in 1965.
But while his most famous work sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, Salinger retreated from society, giving his last interview in 1980, and was rarely seen in public.
However, he never stopped writing. For 40 years, alone inside a concrete bunker in his rural New Hampshire home, he is said to have furiously bashed away at his typewriter.
But he didn’t allow anyone to see his latest works – locking the precious manuscripts away as soon as they were finished.
Tributes to the legendary author poured in yesterday after his son, actor Matt Salinger, released a short statement that his father had died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday night.
Horror novelist Stephen King said it felt like “an eccentric, short-tempered, but often fascinating uncle had passed away”.
But it is the fate of the author’s secret cache which is causing the most interest – and distress – to fans.
While there was speculation Salinger wanted the books to be published after his death, others have hinted he may have ordered that they should all be destroyed.
Whatever happens, this last chapter in Salinger’s fascinating life is likely to throw up far more questions than answers.
Almost nothing is known about the author’s life since he retreated into self-imposed seclusion in 1953, in the tiny village of Cornish, New Hampshire.
In his last interview, for a high school newspaper in 1980, he said: “I love to write and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/01/30/salingers_solitude_their_source_of_pride/
Salinger’s solitude, their source of pride
A little town fondly recalls one very quiet neighbor
By Bryan Marquard
Globe Staff / January 30, 2010
The tall, angular writer with his recognizable shock of white hair could be seen over the years striding through downtown Hanover, some 14 miles north, where he would duck into the Dartmouth Bookstore on Main Street. On an overcast day, passersby might spot him in the Windsor Diner, across the Connecticut River in Vermont, his profile defined by lights inside as he sat in a window booth overlooking Route 5.
He was such a regular at the fund-raising roast beef suppers at First Congregational Church in nearby Hartland, Vt., that when his health failed and he became too frail to attend, his wife drove over to pick up a take-out order from the basement fellowship hall.
“I think maybe he looked like a recluse to the media, but he talked to people, you know,’’ Merilynn Bourne, chairwoman of the Cornish Board of Selectmen, said in town offices yesterday. “If you knew who he was, you’d see him here and there. You’d see him in the grocery store; you’d see him in the post office.’’
“We didn’t use the word recluse; he just kept to himself,’’ said Keith Jones, a selectman. “In my eyes, he wasn’t famous. He was just my neighbor.’’
The writer John Updike once praised Salinger’s short stories for the “Zen quality they have.’’ Salinger himself might have appreciated how the best approach to spotting him had the paradox of a Zen koan. If you did not go looking for him, he was there. If you did, he was not.
When reporters and fans of “The Catcher in the Rye’’ asked for directions to Salinger’s house, “sometimes we’d send them on a little goose chase,’’ said Mike Ackerman, proprietor of the Cornish General Store.
“Nobody would give him up,’’ Jones said.
With protection like that, Salinger lived relatively undisturbed in a largely rural area where many treasure privacy and where the distance between houses is often measured in several wooded acres, rather than lawns. Cornish is part of the Upper Valley, a region straddling the Connecticut River that forms the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. The area’s most urban communities endure only brief traffic jams at rush hour; the smallest have a flashing yellow light at crossroads.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/American-writer-JD-Salinger-leaves-a-rich-legacy/articleshow/5521915.cms
JD Salinger’s reclusiveness was as famous as his slim output of books. But the walls he built to protect himself— and his art—cannot take away from JD Salinger, American Writer
the world his words that remain deeply etched in the American conscience. Why did Salinger disappear from the American literary landscape, a landscape he himself made more beautiful with his own elegant and, at times, comic brush strokes.
His stories, most of which talk about the emotional wounds of the young, changed, post-war, the American model of short fiction. If Hemingway made American writing more virile, Salinger lent it a soft and comic touch. With his great ear for American street argot and a comic timing better than a stand-up comedian’s, Salinger influenced and shaped his successors more than any writer would ever do. They got excited as hell thinking (The Catcher in the Rye) about it as probably he would have written.
John Updike, who was to follow him into the New Yorker, said: “Salinger opened my eyes as to how you can weave fiction out of a set of events that seem almost unconnected, or very lightly connected.” Salinger’s is a constant presence in all Updike’s books. The vernacular in the Rabbits, the humour in Couples, the comic element in The Witches of Eastwick would not be possible without The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s only novel, a rite of passage for millions of teenagers across the world.
Updike—unlike Salinger—was a tremendously prolific writer, compulsively playful with language. He left American letters richer by many masterpeices of short and long fiction. All of them have the ‘lightly connected’ touch that Updike found so enriching in Salinger
“A man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled, and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word,” Richard Yates said. Yates’s Revolutionary Road came in the early 60s, around the same time that Salinger decided to brick himself up in Cornish, New Hampshire, on a 90-acre ranch. Yates’s book deals with the deeply wounded emotions of a suburban couple and is vastly different in pitch and tone from any of Salinger’s fictions.
But the polished beauty and controlled brevity of Yates’s language comes directly from Salinger. Compare: The whole slow, dry agony of this place would be cut away from his life like a tumour from his brain (Revolutionary Road). Now Salinger from The Catcher: He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in a series, must all go out even if one bulb was defective. Two different sentences, two different meanings, two different moods.
But the sharp control, the strong belief in conciseness is there in both sentences.
