epershand

People in the Bay Area:

My friend Deb Cohler is doing a reading from her book Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth Century Britain at A Different Light Bookstore on Monday, September 27.

I am basically wetting myself in anticipation. Does anyone want to join me?

(Fear not, I will have dried myself off by then.)

So, there's this moment in Alan Bennet's The Habit of Art where Humphrey Carpenter tells Auden that all of his fans are secretly waiting for him to die, so that they can wrap up his life neatly and tidily--THAT was WH Auden.

Last night I had the thought--Wait, if JD Salinger's dead, does that mean I am finally going to be able to get a copy of Hapworth?.

I really loved Salinger's books. I think part of it was that I aspired to the world his characters hated even while they moved in it with an established ease. Holden hated his world, but he was still snobby about women's waltzing skills. Zoe Glass was obsessed with an obscure book, but she still criticized Sarah Lawrence girls.

Mostly it was the conversational quality of the prose, the way it felt like I was having a conversation with his characters the way I'd never had before. I never really got all that excited about the philosophy Salinger espoused, but I just wanted to read more of those words, the way you want to keep engaging a dynamic person no matter what they're saying.

It's the same thing that kept me on the doorstep of a concerned Christian for an hour once when I was canvassing against Prop 8. We found almost no point of agreement, but I was satisfied to hear him talking, expressing exactly what his concerns were and why he disagreed with me. I almost never agreed with Salinger either, but I always wanted to hear more from him. I spent one January digging through issues of the New Yorker from the fifties in search of his stories. I read his daughter's tell-all biography.

JD Salinger emerged from hiding last year to sue the author of Fifty Years After for writing a derivative work, proving once again that we'll never agree on anything. But it was still good to see him emerge from his retreat in Connecticut.

I've been waiting for Salinger to die for years, because I've known that it's the only way his fans would get access to the contents of his file cabinets full of unpublished short stories. Which makes me worse, I think, than the sort of fan that Carpenter describes, who just want a pat ending for his heros. I've spent the last decade thinking of this man as someone who was actively preventing me from reading everything I wanted to read, and that is a dark, unpleasant way to think about the authors one loves.

This feels so much less satisfying than I thought it would. Good bye, J.D.