It was J.D. Salinger who taught me how to write. Not the man, but a person who seemed perfectly real to me—Salinger’s startling gift to literature, these people, their human vitality—Seymour, the oldest of the Glass children. Buddy, his brother, reads aloud, as it were, the letter that comprises Seymour, An Introduction. Seymour, the prodigy, the crumb, has shot himself at the end of an earlier story—and why on earth he married someone like Muriel, and why on earth he had to do it in front of her, and as she slept*—but Buddy quotes at length from Seymour on the subject of writing. And, bewildered ex-student that I was, I eventually learned that Seymour’s ideas were pretty much all I needed. Especially the central, pointed question that Seymour firmly instructed Buddy to ask himself as a writer, ask himself as he wote: “Are all your stars out.”
And I knew, setting out in the dark, scared to death of the subject matter that had gripped me, I knew that this was, in a world of advice for writers, the one thing I could trust—and apply. It meant, Nothing chicken-hearted here. It meant, Go for it no matter whether the result be, as Seymour might put it, terrific. Which is far more upsetting than failure, and needs but seldom receives encouragement. It meant, Go for it in a way that pleases you, so deeply there will be fireworks. Write like you own it. Write, in other words, the thing you most want to read.
So I did, the first story I ever wrote that meant anything, and dutifully sent it off to Wendy Lesser, not because I could imagine anyone wanting to read the book I wanted most to write—I couldn’t, and wrote entirely for myself, a leap into the sheer empty space of desire that was as exhilarating as anything I shall ever do—but because Wendy lived and published Threepenny Review in a town not far away. And damned if she didn’t print the thing, and damned if it didn’t win mention as one of the Hundred Best Stories in Best American Short Stories that year.
Give me a story that just makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason … Please don’t let me say anything else. I think tonight that anything you say to a writer after you beg him to let his stars come out is just literary advice. I’m positive tonight that all ‘good’ literary advice is just Louis Bouilhet and Max Du Camup wishing Madame Bovary on Flaubert. All right, so between the two of them, with their exquisite taste, they got him to write a masterpiece. They killed his chances of ever writing his heart out. He died like a celebrity, which was the one thing he wasn’t. His letters are unbearable to read. They’re so much better than they should be. They read waste, waste, waste. They break my heart.
Seymour the bossy bears down even harder
… 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. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working oil if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions. “Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?”
Later, in the locked stacks of a college library, I found a chapbook of Salinger’s uncollected stories, an education unto themselves. I saw he could write badly—and that he could turn a phrase of dialog on a dime.
The end of Go See Eddie, The Kansas Review VII, December 1940:
“Phil?” she said. “Listen. My brother Bobby was just here. And do you know why? Because that adorable little Vassar-faced wife of yours told him about you and I. Yes! Listen, Phil. Listen to me. I don’t like it. I don’t care if you had anything to do with it or not. I don’t like it. I don’t care. No, I can’t. I have a previous engagement. I can’t tonight either. You can call me tomorrow. I’m very upset about all this. I said you can call me tomorrow, Phil. No. I said no. Phil. Goodbye.”
She set down the receiver, crossed her legs, and bit thoughtfully at the cuticle of her thumb. Then she turned and yelled loudly: “Elsie!”
Elsie moused into the room.
“Take away Mr. Bobby’s tray.”
When Elsie was out of the room, Helen dialed again.
“Hanson?” she said. “This is me. Us. We. You dog.”
* I find it dismaying, that scene of Seymour shooting himself “in the temple” (I bet that’s supposed to be a clue.) (Not that writers do these things consciously, damn it) as Muriel lies asleep on the other twin bed in their honeymoon suite. Our first, instinctual reaction is shocked sorrow … but for Seymour, it’s over, whereas what he has done to Muriel has injured the life of a living person. Jesus, Seymour, could you not have done it anywhere else. I cannot think of anything more aggressive, short of pointing the gun at her, first.
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Seymour has been tugging at my heart since I heard the news that Salinger had died…just tugging gently but ineludibly, the way he’s done since I first read “Catcher” and went on to read as much as I could find. The tug says, Read again.
This is a beautiful post. Yours stars were out.
I’ve read a zillion encomiums about Salinger since he died; I like yours the best, because it’s so personal, the way his writing was personal.
When I read Salinger in the late 50′s and early 60′s, I still had aspirations to be a writer, but did not have the courage to follow his magnificent dingaling go-for-it advice.
I remember being so damned hypnotized by Salinger’s voice, so absurdly identified with it, that I actually had the temerity to think: I can do this, I can write like this.
That was long before I realized that genius is not an effortless fountain inside us that simply gushes forth wonderful stuff. I think the incidence of genius is pretty small in the human race, and the rare birds–like Salinger–who qualify, all work really really hard, creating a lot of ho-hum things before they get to the good stuff. Even Mozart–contrary to popular mythology–worked his butt off to learn the craft of music and composing, and wrote a fair amount of yawners before he hit his stride. I’m sure this is true of Salinger, too. It has to be.
Seymour’s suicide is dismaying, as you say, as are all suicides by violent means. Although shooting oneself in the temple with a revolver is penny ante compared to what Hemingway actually did.
I wonder, as many people have in the past week, if Salinger left behind some fabulous body of writing, in that weird pillbox where he spent most of his last 45 years. But unlike Kafka, who trusted his editor to follow his request to burn his unpublished writing, I don’t think Salinger trusted anyone in that way. He may have written a lot and then destroyed it as he went along. But wouldn’t it be great if he left behind 5 or 6 novels and a bunch of short stories? I wonder, though, if even he could write well in complete isolation from the world of publishing, criticism, etc. Likely we’ll never know.