New Voices Under Ninety

Dear Henry, I only get two channels on the black and white tv I have in Northampton–a rustic PBS outfit perpetually crying for funds to cover its competitive salaries (rather than the programming, which they would have you believe) and a Springfield, MA, UHF station. I don’t view much tv unless it looks like I ought to get an update on the weather–which means that I’ve already smelled hail, and want to confirm it–but occasionally I switch it on, and the other night the latter channel presented a stone abomination: the Prism Awards. Did you see this? Saved "addicts" from the entertainment biz (Kelsey Grammer, etc.) came on tv and cried and gave awards to shows which were most in line with AA "addiction" theory (the heinous, capitulatory "smoking is bad" episode of Sex and the City won a special award). The recently famous junkie idiot from Three Dog Night, or possibly Chicago, wearing ill-advised leather pants and a sympathy-eliciting terminal Freddie Mercury kinda look, came on and sang a tuneless dud comeback song about, apparently, the importance of "knowing yourself" (fucking Socrates never pulled that one off, don’t think Kelsey Grammer’s managed it just because he talks like, well, I do, and stopped doing all the blow he could get his hands on), and also how people put him down because of his devotion to social justice and so forth. The Prism Awards might as well have been titled "I Never Could Handle My Liquor–with your host, Mr. Crybaby." A goddamned man controls his narcotics habit simply by never paying for any, and his drinking by running periodically out of money.

Here at the Gramercy I have been watching–nothing. The clicker is not working and no one knows anything about it. Unable to surf the universe from bed (there is no point to crossing the air-conditioned room only to find yourself at a television with nothing on it, though with a clicker the vibe is different) I have been forced to go out into what people keep telling me is the Greatest City on the Face of the Fucking Earth, merely, I think, because (apart from all the women you definitely need to have sex with–theoretical La Badarian walks the streets thinking Yes, that one, and that one, Yes, Yes, only occasionally arriving at a No)–there is always a guy–the same guy?–pushing a gig-bagged bass on a darling little wheel. That’s what Manhattan means. That guy, that instrument, that enigmatic crosstown intent. I’m sure it’s the same guy, always, and that he’s being shot for a 1960s-style credit sequence. Perhaps that is a film. Of course it is. I will write it. Where is the man going? He is going home early, having broken a string at his lesson, to catch his wife fucking someone. Then he will move to the Catskills and meet…a Chinese woman with security issues? And then he goes on the lam. You see how a real writer works, Henry. We make everything up.

Lunches are keeping me pretty busy. The other day I was at Cafe Loup (the "p" is silent, Henry, for future reference), quickly ordering two shots at the bar while my host, an earnest young editor possibly lunching his first author, was outside taking a call on his cell. I went in to take a leak. Your colleague Greg, possessor of the lit desk at the Aristo which properly belongs to me (as do all jobs, all the coke, all women, the bit of food left on your plate), came into the bathroom and slapped me on the back crying Claude! Thinking that it was one of Mei’s brothers (because Greg had food in his mouth and could not pronounce "l"), or someone to whom I really owe money, I, hearing "Crawde!," spun around, seized him by the adam’s apple and screwed it to the left as if I were a two-year-old trying to get into a locked bathroom with Mommy. It is far from the first time that one man, much less an Aristocrat editor, has fallen to his knees, gagging, in front of another one in the bathroom at Cafe Loup, so the Mexican who opened the door in hopeless pursuit of a quiet dump ended up beating an urbane retreat, muttering Pardon, before it could be laughingly explained to him that this was an editorial meeting–and not a particularly unusual one, either. Upon learning that the man I’d corkscrewed to the floor was an assignment-capable editor, I obviously helped him to his feet and dusted him off. Coughing, he said he had been thinking about me (they never are, but this is why it’s worth showing your face in town once in a while), and would FedEx to the Gramercy a book for me to review. "Two bucks a word," he said, staggering back out to his adulterous lunch. (Later, he was kind enough to mention that I "looked good" and have "lost weight," etc., dreadful lies, but if you have nearly torn out a man’s adam apple at Cafe Loup under the coke-crazed impression that he is a Chinaman with a baseball bat, he tends to be civil to you afterwards).

The "editorial lunch," Henry, was inconclusive. As for the book, it arrived in hideous MSS at the Gramercy that afternoon. Oh my God.

You know Tom Beller, obviously. Contract at The New Yorker awhile back? No one knew why? Website called Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood? Well, Beller’s latest project–getting 14 writers to "respond" to the work of the JD Salinger–just leafed through on the La Badarian bed, is an attempt to remove JD Salinger from his area of operations as an inconvenience, as if The Catcher in the Rye were the Cherokee Nation. You see, Henry, it’s damned hard to write Salingeresque stuff and all while Salinger is still lurking around Manhattan and stuff, and it’s still sort of Mr. Salinger’s Neighborhood around here, no matter what you try to call it on the web, so in an attempt to create a post-Salinger climate, in which someone might start saying "Belleresque" without giggling, Beller and some other bozo have assembled the usual New Voices Under Ninety and presented a collection titled DIE ALREADY AND LET ME HAVE A CAREER, YOU URINE-DRINKING FUCK. No, it’s actually titled With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the work of JD Salinger.

For some reason whenever Beller says "writer" I get the heebie-jeebies: I don’t think he really knows what one is. I think he thinks writers mainly ride bicycles and have floating hair and edit collections which are actually defensive laagers of talent constructed around a lame contribution by young Tom Beller.

"At some point," writes Beller, "you have to kill Daddy. Or Love him. Or both." He nakedly admits of Salinger, "there are so many of the man’s virtuous [sic] that I aspire to in my own writing–the way he sets the scene, his faith in the importance of the small details of human interactions, his enthusiasm for using New York City as a stage-set…" Oh, fuck yourself, and get to your dissatisfactions: only through vatermord can the writer get on with business. Yet Salinger is a special case: After 50 years of trustfund hacks trying to write privilege-novels there is still only one Manhattan privilege-novel which happens to be a work of art, and that happens, continually, to be Catcher in the Rye, and there is no room in Manhattan, or U.S. letters, for your piece of shit about the kid based on yourself.

There are some good things in this collection, Henry: Walter Kirn’s essay "Goodbye Holden Caulfield…" is a useful essay, so destructive to the conceit of the book that Beller had to put it up front and get the damage over with, and establishes that what you get, when you ask people to write about JD Salinger, are (viz., With Love and Squalor) "self-centered memories," and this book has them, along with the attempts to run Salinger out of literature on a rail so that Manhattan is safe for Bozo the MFA Clown, in profusion. JD Salinger? Why that reminds me of the year my cat died/nobody fucking understood me/I got the job writing about teenagers. On and on. Emma Forrest notes, to at least one grateful reader (though one hates to see the Bellerian banners advance), that JD Salinger simply isn’t all that good. She also, remarking, "I don’t think that people who are phony are necessarily a bad thing," gets toward–are you with me, Henry?–the essence of Salinger’s popularity. I, Claude La Badarian, will take over and make her point.

The Catcher in the Rye’s trick, the secret of its eternal popularity, is that Salinger shows teenagers a glass in which they are the only authentic people in the world–the only people who have thought, felt, dreamed, etc.–when in fact they, teenagers, are frauds of the first water, who know fucking shit about anything, and won’t know shit about anything for another 10 years, and ought to be kicked in the ass and given some yard work and a copy of Montaigne. It is not unlikely that Salinger concealed himself in New Hampshire because his mind snapped–as it should have–after he realized his masterpiece about "phonies" was the phoniest, most pathetic thing in the universe. Imagine if your worst, most psychotic, adolescent mistake became a world masterpiece. (That’s where you get your urine drinkers, Henry, right there.)

What sort of mistake? Why, try realizing that you were publicly beating off over the Northeast WASP lifestyle when you were actually, come to think of it, a Jew. "If you were to try and come up with a parody of a Salinger name," writes Beller, referring to an at-some-point-Salinger-involved reporter for the Times, "you probably couldn’t do better than ‘Lacey Fosburgh.’" Nice. Then Beller falls into a hole. "[T]here is something about Salinger that lends itself very well to WASP fantasies." Well, Tom Beller, it may "lend itself" because the book is a WASP fucking fantasy, which is why the mortified author of it is up in the Granite State quaffing his own urine and watching Pro Wrestling and wondering if the men in the toaster will let him go to the Post Office today. "I wonder if J.D. belongs," writes Beller, "to a sub-phylum of WASP-loving Jewish writers and I’m not talking about the Rothian shiksa goddess. It’s a love that transmutes itself, in which the writer himself becomes, somehow, an emblematic Brooks Brothers man." Christ, Tom! Think! Think! It comes during writing, for writers, the thinking thing. The word is not "emblematic." The word is "false." Salinger’s masterpiece of alienation is actually (despite Salinger’s attempt to make his Glass family Jewish-Catholic deracinee: add some money and you’ve got a WASP good enough for government work–don’t you? don’t you? No, not even if you used two Catholics, mate, ask Joe Kennedy) a masterpiece of wistful longing for assimilation. Holden may be fucked up, but on the bright side he’s got kickass luggage and is drinking underage in Manhattan, so you tell me Catcher in the Rye is a masterpiece, rather than an autonomy-fantasy and spank-book for the future Social Climbers of America and every bit as disgusting and subliterary as a massmarket paperback about powerful, sexy women written for powerless masturbating housewives, or a Tom Clancy book for fat closet cases with no military experience who like to shoot guns and hang around with sailors. That’s not literature, giving psychos the reflection of themselves that they need. What you have to give the people, in what we call "literature," is what they don’t know they want, because no one’s ever fucking said it before, capisce?

Broadway Books had arranged (in further "celebration" of the 50th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye) a "point of sale" package. You could also buy posters, and–I’m not kidding about this–a reproduction of Holden Caulfield’s hat. Broadway dropped the ball. A smart businessman (like Claude La Badarian) would not only reproduce those hats but instantly generate a line of Ignatius J. Reilly deerstalkers and hot-dog cart smocks, and the wearers could maybe fight it out this fall, like Mods and Rockers. As for the attempted eviction of Salinger from his own domain, literary real estate, like the real stuff, belongs to the person who can keep it, and Salinger’s not giving up a scrap of ground anytime soon to anyone else’s teenager-greasing spank-book. Whenever it snows in Manhattan and puts you in that red hunting cap state of mind–or "Salinger weather," if you prefer–Holden Caulfield gets out of whatever coffin you try to put him in and goes abroad–immortal in his fraudulence–fucking up, and making permanently gratuitous, permanently ridiculous, your novel about New York City, and yourself. The point being, all