By the same token, his conflation of perfection of character and perfection of work is, I think, a fallacy where it concerns the arts proper. It seems to me that some very badly behaved, morally bankrupt, nasty, egotistical people have created some very beautiful art. And some very good people may wish to bring the velvet Elvises they’ve painted and the Hummel figurines they’ve collected as precious gifts for the baby Jesus. “I have reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.”3
Something else happens when he conflates aesthetics and theology. The nature of the work my father creates is transformed—not necessarily qualitatively from bad to good or from better to worse; but rather, the entire category, the structure, the type of thing created is transformed. His work, by the time we get to Seymour: An Introduction and “Hapworth,” is no longer secular fiction but hagiography.4 This is a genre not concerned with time and place, character development, conflict and resolution. Hagiography, given its lack of tension, its lack of earthly focus, and context, is not meant to communicate to nonbelievers. They are excluded from the fraternity. Witness his direct address to the elect, the true believers, at the beginning of Seymour, who are offered a bouquet of early-blooming parentheses (((()))).
You may say fine, what’s the harm, it makes him happy; you don’t have to read the book if you don’t want to. On one level, this is certainly true. What someone chooses to write about, in a free country anyway, is his or her own business. However, any time you exclude certain groups from value, there are consequences. It has been important to me to look carefully at who is excluded, whether it’s in religion or any other field. Who gets to play? Who is not allowed on the team? I have concluded that were I not disbarred already by virtue of awakening and growing up, I’d still resign my membership in my father’s club.
I don’t believe in a path to purity that involves joining an exclusive club that rejects certain “undesirable” elements or groups of people from membership. I have also concluded that I do not believe in my own father’s, as well as many of the Church Fathers’, attempt to find a solution to suffering through a rejection or renunciation of physical life, the body, and the earth. One cannot spend any time looking at the history of the world’s religions and not witness, time and again, that when you exclude or denigrate the body and value only the soul, the lady vanishes. The ancient cult-sacrifice of virgins and firstborn children, whose purity and blood were supposed to please and appease the gods, thought to be humanely and mercifully replaced by a ritual offering of a lamb or the Lamb of God himself, sneaks in the back door.
My father’s special blend of “Christianized” Eastern mysticism (not necessarily Eastern mysticism itself nor Christianity nor Zen nor Hinduism nor Buddhism) provides a justification—really a deification—of the sacrifice of the ten-year-old child’s emotional life and physical development, to save the adult who is overwhelmed by his own. Behind every good, enlightened man, Christ figure, Teddy, or Seymour in my father’s writing, there’s a damnation or a demonization of womanhood and a sacrifice of childhood.
The strains of religion that value man and envision woman as temptress and the handmaiden of the snake, that value the spirit and envision the body as a sack of blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta, inevitably, I think, contribute to a world out of balance. Let it pass through the web of the dream catcher into thin air.
I also do not wish to pass on to my son his grandfather’s attempt to avoid suffering by joining the great cosmic club of unbeing. This solution to the problem of his beloved Dostoyevski’s “hell on earth”—a mental and emotional disintegration from the suffering of being unable to love—is one that I believe should be labeled with a skull and crossbones. For my father, you can’t live with others and sustain a kind of balance between merging and separation here on earth, and suffer, therefore, a living hell: merge with the dead.
We first see this solution to life’s pain by embracing death in two of the Nine Stories, “Teddy” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and then again in Seymour’s last words, thus far anyway, from camp in “Hapworth.” We are introduced to both Teddy on the day of his death and Seymour (in “Bananafish”) on the day he committed suicide. At the end of the short story, Teddy submits, Christ-like, and walks to meet his death in the pool: “Into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Seymour blows his brains out, although we don’t know how my father will ultimately present this act, since he hasn’t yet published what happens between Seymour’s childhood in “Hapworth,” the “Introduction” of a young man, and his death in “Bananafish.” Yet, there are good indications that Seymour’s death, like Teddy’s, will be sanctified.
Seymour and Teddy, as well as a “great percentage of the Glass siblings,” we are told, “have a fairly terrible capacity for experiencing pain that does not always properly belong to them.” We are supposed to believe, as their author does, that these characters are saintly sufferers, Christ figures or bodhisattvas, who redeem the suffering of those of us who, like Franny and Buddy, remain, as yet, on earth.
Frankly, I do not see it that way; it is the women I’d like to see elevated and their stories passed down to the next generation. The ones who suffer, it seems to me, are the denigrated Magdalenes he leaves at the foot of the cross, the Echos who waste away, the girls and women who are excluded from the mystical club of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, i.e., J.D., Buddy, and Seymour. It is the Marys and the Magdalenes who are left to suffer the consequences of the “saint’s” sacrifice. It is Teddy’s unenlightened sister who has to pay for being the vehicle of his saintly suicide, who is left to weep and mourn. It is Seymour’s wife who wakes up to spraying brains and widowhood. It is Mattie and Phoebe who are not allowed to live beyond age ten and who, like Sister Irma, sacrifice their sexuality to the Father.
The living Jesus of Nazareth was, we’re told, celibate. The real-life person who was to become the Buddha was married and produced several children before his enlightenment. He renounces them, as Jesus does his mother and father, and goes off to seek God and become the salvation of humanity. On whose back? Who else is sacrificing, probably starving, while he’s out sitting under a tree wasting away to nothing in a holy fast? As Lahiri Mahasaya’s wife said to him, feeling “forlorn and neglected” (before she came to realize his divine nature and confesses that what she said was a “sin committed against my guru-husband”), “You spend all your time with the disciples. What about your responsibilities for your wife and children? I regret that you do not interest yourself in providing . . . for the family.”
The model of marriage that flows from deifying some humans, making them figures of worship, yogi Lahiri Mahasaya and his disciple wife for example, is not one I wish to pass down the feather to my sleeping child. I think that when you set your work up as a mission that somehow exempts you, puts you above any other duty or earthly obligation, there is a grave danger. Or as Euripides said (I know, there is a special place in purgatory for people who dare to begin a sentence “Or as Euripides said”! But he really did hit the nail squarely on the head), “Slight not what is near through aiming at what is far.” Or as others have said, charity begins at home. What are you doing that is so much more important than taking care of your kids and family? I’ve been in several boarding schools full of children whose parents were doing important things. Some of the worst abdicators of responsibility to family are those in the “helping” professions, the clergy, doctors, to say nothing of the more stereotypically identified narcissists such as some fast-track businesspeople and artists. To whom are you truly irreplaceable? Your public? Your boss? Your shareholders? Your clients? God can’t run the universe without you on duty full-time? One can provide the physical necessities in spades and still have neglected to provide your partner and your children and those who love you with what they needed: you.
I THOUGHT ABOUT THE LAST real conversation I had with my father, when he said to me, “Christ, you’re sounding just like every other woman in my life, my sister, my ex-wives. They all ac
cuse me of neglecting them. . . . I can be accused of a certain detachment, that’s all. Never neglect.”
What I’ve come to believe in looking at my own life, and at those of the other women in his life, is that, yes, he can be accused of a certain detachment. He is detached about your pain, but God knows he takes his own pain more seriously than cancer. When people say that they are committed to living the life they preach—in my father’s case, that there would be no separation between the quest for enlightenment and his art—it is fair game to hold them accountable for preaching one thing and behaving in another way altogether. My father’s espousal of a doctrine of detachment and renunciation has a strong strain of “Methinks the man doth protest too much.” There is nothing remotely detached about my father’s behavior toward his own pain, in his hemorrhages about anything personal being known about him. There is nothing remotely detached about his passionate defense of any felt infringement on his privacy or on the sanctity of his words and work. If it is all maya, all an illusion, why the continual shpilkes (fits, touchiness, as in sitting on pins and needles) in his own life? The Buddha appears in many “aspects,” many forms: the seated Buddha, the starving Buddha, the lotus Buddha; but never have I seen a statue or depiction of der Schlaganfall (apoplectic-fit) Buddha! It finally dawned on me that my father, for all his protestations and lectures and writing about detachment, is a very, very needy man.
I think it is this aspect of his work, the intense, borderline neediness of a cliff walker, that resonates so deeply with the members of his public who used to mystify me so. People at airline ticket counters, for example, when they see my name and ask if I’m “any relation,” time and again have given me the feeling that they were not talking about a writer, but a savior. Just touch the hem of his garment and be healed. Even today, more than forty years since The Catcher in the Rye was published, I read in the Boston Globe newspaper of some local suburban high school kids who, after reading The Catcher in class, convinced their teacher to drive a few of them up to Cornish to try to find J. D. Salinger. They were unsuccessful. The journalist who caught wind of the story asked one of the girls what she would have done had she been successful, what question did she have for Salinger. She giggled nervously but finally said, “I’d ask him if he’ll be our catcher, our catcher in the rye.”
Whatever he may be, he is not going to be your catcher in real life. Get what you can from his writing, his stories, but the author himself will not appear out of nowhere to catch those kids if they get too close to that crazy cliff.
AFTER OUR SON WAS BORN, my husband and I went to visit Aunt Doris. I told her what Daddy had said about “all the women” in his life, his ex-wives, his sister, and now me. How we’d all unjustly, according to him, accused him of neglect. What did she think?
She said that if I’d asked her the same question three years ago, before she had her heart attack, she would have given me a very different answer. Up until then, she said, “I thought he was perfect. Sonny demands that, you know. He can’t take any criticism. I’m just sorry I’ll be dead and won’t see that book he’s been working on all these years. Not publishing all these years. What a crazy business. It’s because he can’t stand any criticism. He sure doles it out, though. I love him, my brother and I were the best of friends growing up, you know, but I have to admit that he’s a bastard. What can I say? I was all alone when I had my heart attack and he’s been useless to me. Visited two, maybe three times. Hardly a phone call. When I had my heart attack, I was sick and alone. That’s a terrible thing to be, sick and alone. But anything that interferes with him, with his work, is dismissed.”
She made a gesture with her arm of sweeping everything away, of dismissal, and paused.
“He takes any opportunity to dig the knife in,” she said, turning an imaginary knife in the air between us. “Do you know what he said, the first thing he asked me, when he called after my heart attack? ‘You’ve gotten so fat lately, did the doctors tell you to lose weight?’ I confronted him. I told him he always criticizes.”
I broke in and asked, “Was Granny critical of him?”
“Oh, no!” Aunt Doris said, surprised at the suggestion. “He was perfect, he could do no wrong in her eyes.”
The perfect artist’s eyes. “The whole ambulance load of pain,” of the “true artists,” according to his credo, comes straight from the eyes. “Isn’t he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred conscience.” You may see, as in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” a pile of orthopedic appliances mystically turn into a dazzling vision of twice-blessed flowers, but it still smells like a load of bedpans to me.
IF MY FATHER is to be judged on his own terms, with the moral yardstick by which he measures himself either about his duty in life, or his daily duty, he can meet his maker with his head held high. As Seymour writes to Buddy:
Do you know what I was smiling at [when they registered together for the draft]? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. . . . Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. . . . I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions.
(Seymour, p. 160)
My father has, indeed, spent his life busy writing his heart out. I am not convinced, however, that the way of life he upholds is a well-balanced model of doing one’s duty, nor a way to a sustainable peace. Maybe he is wrong, maybe he is right. And maybe he is right and using it wrongly. What I do know is that this philosophy or religion or attitude served to justify his living life exactly as he wished, others be damned. To get in the way of his work for any reason whatsoever is not just a nuisance or an inconvenience; it is committing an act of sacrilege. Do not stand in the path of a holy quest; move aside or perish. Right or wrong, it fits his narcissistic bent to a T, sanctifying even the most extreme narcissism. It’s a tricky business, though: one man’s narcissist is another man’s saint. As Zooey said, “Treasure’s treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are.”
I feel the same way about my father’s way of life as Zooey did about Franny’s following The Way of a Pilgrim. Zooey said to her:
No matter what I say, I sound as though I’m undermining your Jesus Prayer. And I’m not, God damn it. All I am is against why and how and where you’re using it. I’d like to be convinced—I’d love to be convinced—that you’re not using it as a substitute for doing what ever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty . . .
(Zooey, p. 169)
Once again, I found Rabbi Fine’s guidance to be invaluable in picking one’s way through this minefield of a question—as he put it, “How do I know if what I’m doing is good and right?” The rabbi was asked if there were any theological criteria he uses to evaluate the ways of life espoused by “the new religions.” He answered:
Yes, certainly, there are criteria. I’ll speak Jewishly. Judaism says there are basically three criteria. . . . First, you have to ask, Am I hurting anybody? Second, Am I adding to what is here? Although there is an intuitive experience in Judaism that is private, personal, and indescribable, you should be able to speak about it in a rational way. Not the experience, but the effect of that experience. Third, Is a positive action modality present in my life? Can I see that I am a better husband, that I’m not as angry,
I’m more compassionate, more caring? Those are very powerful value statements. The Jews have ways of serving God which include all kinds of improved interrelationships and interactions. If the quality of life improves after a religious experience, then something true has happened. That includes the affirmation of family and community values. . . . Glaring problems exist in most groups. Nothing is really happening except in the member’s “own little world.” They’re not really doing anything. Ask them why.
I, too, had to give up living in my own little dream world to “ask them why.” Nevertheless, in giving up the dream of a perfect Daddy, some of my memories of happy times with my father returned. These are real, and they belong to me. I can, now, take them out and savor them whenever I want to. I don’t have to wait for his return from ethereal realms. Similarly, in giving up my pursuit of the heavenly Daddy, the nightmare of the hellish Daddy began to give up its pursuit of me. I am able to see a talented man who, like the rest of us, is neither all good nor all bad. As the Wizard said to Dorothy, I’m not a very bad man, in fact I’m a rather good one, I’m just a very bad wizard.
What I found that is mine to keep and precious is a sense of admiration for my parents’ attempt to create a sort of Eden in the rye, a perfect world. I have also found pleasure in the ways in which they succeeded. There is great beauty in the pursuit of a dream even though, in practice, it often becomes a nightmare.5
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 49