Writing with the dick

Back in 2008, when Christos Tsiolkas published his fourth novel The Slap, he achieved a result that every novelist hopes for. He tapped into something universal. For a while there, everybody seemed to be talking about the same book. You felt left out if you hadn’t read it. It was like Fifty Shades of Grey, except it was good.

Mind you, the book had a few rough edges stylistically. But at the structural level it had a tact that Australian novels don’t always possess. Tsiolkas didn’t cudgel you with his moral views. He withheld his judgment, thus encouraging you to exercise yours. To discuss the book was therefore to argue about it, sometimes ferociously. How annoying was little Hugo? How much of a pig was Harry? In 2011, when the ABC aired its excellent TV adaptation, the arguments started all over again. 

When Tsiolkas’s fifth novel, Barracuda, comes out this November, curiosity about its author is bound to intensify ... [read more]

Love and Squalor

Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, September 28-19, 2013

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,” said Oscar Wilde, “and that is not being talked about.” It would be an unusual writer who didn’t find that paradox amusingly true. J. D. Salinger, who was an unusual man all round, wouldn’t have found it funny at all. For him, nothing was worse than being talked about. 

After the success of The Catcher in the Rye, his first and only novel, Salinger turned himself into the most famous recluse in the world. Holed up in his cabin in Cornish, New Hampshire, he issued a trickle of increasingly sterile short stories. Finally he fell silent altogether. When he died in 2010, at the age of 91, he hadn’t published a word in forty-five years. 

As long as he remained alive, Salinger made things notoriously hard for would-be biographers. Since his death, the floodgates have opened. In 2010 came Kenneth Slawenski’s rather amateurish J. D. Salinger: A Life Raised High. In early September we had the vigorously hyped documentary film Salinger, directed by Shane Salerno. 

And now we have the biography of the same name, co-authored by Salerno and David Shields, and billed as “the official book of the acclaimed documentary film.” What the word "acclaimed" is doing there is a mystery: when the film was released, it didn't receive much acclaim at all. Indeed it was reviewed like the plague – and quite rightly, too. Given the quality and fate of the film, the tagline of the tie-in book begins to sound a bit ominous. You fear the arrival of a 700-page turkey.    

But the book is far better than you might expect – as long as you don’t expect it to be a literary biography in the classic sense. It is an oral biography, more or less, although it draws on written sources as well as original interviews. Occasionally the authors provide a bit of context or commentary. Otherwise their book is a vivid collage of third-party opinions and recollections, with plenty of pictures sprinkled around to complete the scrapbooky effect. 

There are moments when the absence of an authoritative and discriminating central voice gets you down. Also, infuriatingly, there is no index. But in other respects you can’t fault the authors’ diligence. If you want all the available facts about Salinger, including the icky ones, this biography is a big and raucous one-stop shop. 

We open with a scene right of Saving Private Ryan. The year is 1944; Salinger, aged 25, is storming Utah Beach on D-Day. Back home in New York, he has already acquired a reputation for his clever short stories. Now, drafted into the US army, he is headed for some of the most horrific engagements of the war. After Normandy he will see action in the Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Finally he will be present at the liberation of Dachau, where the survivors can scarcely be told apart from the corpses.     

One of the book’s main arguments is that Salinger’s hair-raising war experiences account for most or perhaps even all of his later eccentricities. It’s hard to dismiss this thesis. The smell of burning flesh, he once told his daughter, never leaves the nostrils. While still in Germany he suffered a nervous breakdown. He committed himself to a civilian hospital to avoid a psychiatric discharge. 

Back in New York, as restored to health as he was ever going to be, Salinger completed a novel whose early chapters he had lugged with him around Europe. Entitled The Catcher in the Rye, the book was published in 1951. Its 16-year-old narrator and star was Holden Caulfield, whose slangy, profane, and unforgettable voice made young people feel that Salinger could read their minds. 

By 1961, the book was selling a quarter of a million copies a year. (Its total sales now number 65 million.) The novel's success turned Salinger into an icon, which was the last thing he wanted to be. He hadn’t even wanted his photograph to appear on the book’s back cover. Suddenly, however, he found himself hurled into America’s turbulent and frightening mainstream – the moronic inferno, as Saul Bellow called it.   

Two years after Catcher’s publication, Salinger began his retreat from society. Fulfilling a wish of Holden Caulfield’s, he bought his cabin in the woods. Then he built a large fence around it. He began to shun worldly things. He kept writing, but stopped publishing his manuscripts. Although unwell, he became averse to using any form of medicine that was known to work. He embraced Buddhism, macrobiotics, Scientology, homeopathy, Christian Science, and ultimately Vedanta Hinduism. He drank his own urine in a bid to purify himself. 

Salinger couldn’t have been clearer about his wish to be left alone. But many a busybody, loner, and scoop-seeker construed his silence as a come-on, a tease. They fondly imagined that he might be pleased to see them, even if he wanted to see nobody else. So they camped at the bottom of his driveway. They staked out the post office where he collected his mail. They staged bogus car crashes outside his house and lay down on the road, having smeared themselves with fake blood.  

If Salinger wasn’t paranoid to start with, such encounters must have helped him get that way. By the end of his life he could be more than a bit crabby. His former nanny recalls dropping by his cabin to collect J. D.'s annual Red Cross donation. Salinger was waiting on the porch with his gun. He threatened to shoot at the ground if she came a step closer. 

Millions of sane readers, of course, read and loved Salinger’s novel without interpreting it as an invitation to hassle him, or to do something even worse. But it can’t be denied that the book has always been a magnet for ratbags. The biggest ratbag of all was Mark Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon. Chapman managed to convince himself Lennon was a “phony”, of the kind so lavishly despised by Holden Caulfield. Chapman took a copy of the novel to the crime scene. After the shooting, as Lennon lay dying, Chapman sat down and read the book silently – and no doubt with strenuously writhing lips – until the police came. John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan, was another of the novel’s more unhinged devotees.   

Shields and Salerno devote an unforgivably large chunk of their biography to Chapman, Hinckley, and other assorted freaks and nutbags who claim to have taken their homicidal cues from Salinger’s novel. Tastelessly, the authors assert that such psychopathic readers evince a “frighteningly clairvoyant” understanding of the “blood-soaked violence buried” in the text. They’d have been better off remembering Lichtenberg’s dictum that a book is a mirror: if an ape peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. 

Salinger came to regret having written Catcher, or at least having published it. But by the time he did, it was too late. His efforts to make himself unfamous only made him more famous, until he was better known for his silence than his work. The authors quote a writer who, happening to find himself in Salinger’s neighbourhood, considered swinging by for a chat. Somebody asked him why. Was he a big fan? “No, but he’s J. D. Salinger.” There it is in a nutshell. The man was famous for not wanting to be famous. So why not drop in on him?  

Reading this new book, or indeed any biography of Salinger, you sometimes feel like an intruder yourself. Salinger made an explicit decision to stop being a public man. So how much do we deserve to know about him? Everything? Nothing? Just the early things? Among their other scoops, Shields and Salerno reveal that Salinger had only one testicle. Are we entitled to know that? 

Previous and better books about Salinger have incorporated such questions into their fabric. Ian Hamilton’s In Search of J. D. Salinger, published in 1988, was starved of facts, partly because Salinger sued to prevent Hamilton from using his unpublished letters. But Hamilton, making the best of things, turned his book into a self-searching meditation on the ethical questions raised by Salinger’s case. Information-wise his book is now obsolete. But it was written with a degree of tact and discernment that no subsequent biography has yet been able to match.     

In this new book what you mainly have is a babble of unfiltered voices – some of them tactful and discerning, some of them not. Before long you hear your own voice in the mix, asking questions the authors don’t try to answer, and throwing in more than the odd yelp of profane dissent.   

But the book’s weakness is also its strength. It piles up all the available data about Salinger, good and bad, and lets you draw your own conclusions. Sometimes this isn’t easy. What are we to make, for instance, of Salinger’s pronounced interest in young girls? You can’t miss this motif in his fiction: in stories like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” or “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor,” damaged war veterans encounter little girls who function as symbols of purity and innocence. 

In Salinger’s private life, the theme is more unmissable still. He was, the authors rightly say, “obsessed with girls at the edge of their bloom.” At the age of thirty, he became interested in a fourteen year-old named Jean Miller. 

Miller, who goes on the record here for the first time, reveals that Salinger courted her in an almost naively old-fashioned way. He told her parents he was going to marry her. As she got older she came to his house and slept beside him, but he didn’t touch her. Nothing inappropriate happened – apart, of course, from the whole thing. 

In the end it was Jean herself, at the age of eighteen, who took things up a notch by kissing Salinger in a taxi. A few weeks later they had sex, once. Salinger ditched her the next day. He wanted nothing more to do with her.  

Why? In any Salinger biography, there is always a voice missing: Salinger’s own. So we have to be ready to tolerate ambiguity. In this case the mystery is solved, perhaps, if we accept the authors’ contention that Salinger’s emotional growth hit a wall during his late teens. Maybe he was a case of arrested development: “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school,” as Norman Mailer called him. Maybe his later life can be read as a protracted adolescent sulk: he slammed the door of his bedroom at the age of eighteen, and he never came out. 

It should be conceded, though, that as Salinger aged, he acquired a taste for older women: not older than himself, mind you, but older than fourteen. At the age of 68 he developed a thing for the Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg, who was then aged 26. A fan of trash TV, Salinger would pursue his favourite actresses by letter and telephone, using his standard pick-up line. “I’m J. D. Salinger and I wrote The Catcher in the Rye.” It didn’t work on Oxenberg, but it was well worth a try. 

Somebody complains, late in the present book, that Salinger did things that “an actual recluse or mystic” wouldn’t do. But if J. D. Salinger wasn’t a true recluse, then who was? Howard Hughes, the twentieth century’s other great shut-in, was an even more committed womanizer than Salinger. Nobody, it seems, can do without human contact altogether. Until very late in his life, Salinger made regular appearances at the local church’s weekly $12 roast beef dinners. But his third wife – who was forty years his junior – would always come along with him, and would repel any townsperson who dared to try approaching him. 

Nor, it turns out, was Salinger religiously opposed to the concept of publication. He just didn’t want to be around when it happened. Shields and Salerno, saving their juiciest scoop for last, reveal that Salinger completed five major works after withdrawing from society, including a war novel, a religious manual, and a Holden Caulfield prequel. He left instructions for these to be published between 2015 and 2020.   

Will they be any good? Only the most spirited of optimists would expect them to be up there with The Catcher in the Rye. Even before he quit the literary scene, Salinger's work was already getting pretty hard to love. The last story he published during his lifetime was the widely panned “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which appeared in 1965. Its narrator was the verbose seven-year-old Seymour Glass, boy genius, pain in the neck, and vocal champion –as it happened – of the very religion that Salinger was currently practicing himself. The fiction had become, as Shields and Salerno trenchantly say, a “wisdom delivery system.” Surely it would be idle to hope that his later work rose above that level, instead of sinking deeper beneath it.   

“He was rich, famous, and sought after: the American dream," the authors write. "And he walked away from it.” No doubt he walked away from it too far, until his renunciation began to seem a bit American too – a bit overdone, even a bit grotesque. But artists, even retired ones, test our assumptions. Salinger’s story should make us wonder if the dream itself, especially the part about fame, isn’t a bit grotesque to begin with.   

Clive James's Dante

The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri, translated by Clive James

Those of us who can’t read Dante in the original know, or ought to know, that we are missing one of literature’s main events. The calibre of Dante’s fans, and the extravagance of their admiration, put the matter beyond doubt. Edmund Wilson called him the greatest poet of all time. T.S. Eliot put him up there with Shakespeare. Michelangelo put him next to God.

There has never been a definitive English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it seems safe to say there never will be. The translation that excels on some levels is bound to fall short on others; so much goes on in Dante’s Italian that the English language simply isn’t up to catching all of it at once. You don’t even need to speak Italian to grasp this. You only need to know how the language sounds. Listen to this line, which clinches the fifth canto of the Inferno ... [read more]

Kafka on the Couch

Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedlander

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, August 3-4, 2014

Reading about Franz Kafka’s life can make you wish, fervently, that you were reading one of his stories instead. His life was shot through with angst, self-torture and frustration. So was his fiction – but the fiction had an artistry that balanced out the despair. The fiction had humour, narrative verve, wicked moments of invention. The life mainly seems to have been a grim exercise in psychic agony. 

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883. His father was – as Kafka saw it – a tyrant and a philistine. Kafka lived in his shadow, all too literally: he didn’t move out of his parents’ home until the untender age of 31. He worked as a lawyer in an insurance office, and hated the way his bureaucratic day-job encroached on his writing time. His romantic life was a nightmare of inertia. Engaged three times to two different women, he could never force himself up to the plate. He was a neurotic, a hypochondriac, an insomniac. He lived, as he said in his Diaries, “on the verge of insanity.” 

When Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, only a handful of the works we now know him for had been published. He left orders for the rest of his writings to be destroyed, preferably unread. Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, disobeyed that edict. If he hadn’t, the world would have missed out on the Diaries, the letters, more than half the stories, and all three of Kafka’s novels: The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika.  

Kafka is the most readable of great writers; he has a knack for getting you in from the first sentence. At the start of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa wakes up “transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” It sounds like the opening of a folk tale; but by the end of the first page we’re in a world that nobody but Kafka could have created. It is a world in which nightmarish situations are described in low-temperature, matter-of-fact prose: the fantastic is blended uncannily with the mundane. Samsa, right after discovering that he has turned into a giant bug, starts thinking about how much he dislikes his job. Then he decides to roll over and get a bit more sleep.  

In a way, Kafka’s fiction is perfectly able to speak for itself. But below their lucid surfaces, his stories are crammed with psychological mysteries. Why do characters like Samsa accept their grotesque fates with such weird docility? Do they feel, obscurely, that they had it coming? If so, why? 

Saul Friedländer has written a slender but dense biographical essay examining the sense of shame and guilt in Kafka’s fiction, and looking for its sources in his private life. Friedländer is diligent, but in the end his book makes you wonder if the quest to demystify Kafka’s life isn’t inherently doomed. The deeper you plunge into the man’s psyche, the murkier things get. It’s like Loch Ness down there. 

Friedländer spends most of his time seeking elucidation in Kafka’s Diaries and letters. These are more copious than his fictional writings, and you might expect them to be more candid about his private affairs. In a way they are. Then again, Kafka could be maddeningly imprecise about the nature of his neuroses. “I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty,” he wrote in the Letters to Milena. But dirty in what sense? Kafka doesn’t specify. Maybe he didn’t really know. If he baffles us, part of the reason may be that he baffled even himself. 

Still, a few things can be said with confidence. Kafka undoubtedly had some hang-ups about sex. In the fiction, as Friedländer rightly says, “Kafka’s representation of women is grimacing at best.” Moreover, his reluctance to get married went well beyond a healthy, red-blooded fear of commitment. He seems to have feared sex itself – at least with any woman he respected. 

Was he homosexual, then? Well, not exclusively, and not even mainly. “Throughout the years,” Friedländer says, “Kafka hinted at erotic feelings for a few male friends.” But he also made liberal use of female prostitutes, kept a stash of cutting-edge heterosexual porn, and habitually flirted with women he was in no danger of having to get emotionally close to.   

The plot gets thicker, and more troubling, when Friedländer quotes a handful of rather icky diary entries that have only recently come to light. In one of them Kafka describes – with way too much relish – taking a “little girl” on his lap. Other entries make it clear that he also had a thing for young boys, although there is no evidence suggesting he ever acted on it. Friedländer chides Max Brod for “systematically” suppressing such material from early editions of the Diaries. But surely that was the least Brod could do, after he’d flouted Kafka’s express instructions to torch his archives in their entirety. (A tip for aspiring literary immortals: if you really want your diaries or letters to be destroyed, destroy them yourself.)

Friedländer is an historian by trade, and the best parts of his book deal with the hard facts of Kafka’s social milieu. In Prague in the 1920s, anti-Semitism was on the rise. Kafka was ambivalent about his Judaism to start with. Courtesy of anti-Semitic “theorists” and hooligans, his burden of irrational guilt grew. When anti-Jewish riots broke out in1920, he wrote to Milena about “the unsavoury shame of living under constant protection.” (Kafka didn’t live to see the rise of Hitler, but all three of his sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.) 

Friedländer is on less solid ground when he speculates, with the aid of Freudian theory, about the contents of Kafka’s unconscious mind. Sometimes he is on no ground at all. Writing about Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” he proposes that Kafka may have named its protagonist “Georg” without ever noticing, at a conscious level, that Georg was also the name of his younger brother, who had died in infancy. When your theory leads you to suggest something as absurd as that, it’s time to wonder if the theory isn’t a bit absurd itself. Kafka himself, by the way, had a low opinion of psychoanalysis: he called it “a helpless error.”

Friedländer’s Freudian reading of Kafka’s gloriously strange “A Country Doctor” is slightly better – at least here there is some half-compelling evidence to go on. In the story, a horrifying “rose-red” wound mysteriously appears in the side of the doctor’s young patient. Friedländer argues that this represents a vagina, and a pretty scary one at that. “Kafka’s sexuality is once more barely hidden.” Then Friedländer alerts us to “the sluggish stride of the horses (like old men – after coitus).” 

Right – and after a lot of other things, too. Freudians believe, as an arbitrary article of faith, that once you have reached the sexual explanation of something you have reached the correct one. But that is no reason for the rest of us to believe it. Indeed, the rest of us are entitled to wonder if reducing a story like “A Country Doctor” to any single interpretation, sexual or otherwise, is useful or desirable at all. Rational explication always seems to diminish, rather than deepen, our understanding of Kafka’s lurid nightmares.     

Kafka’s declared aim, as a writer of fiction, was to “raise the world into the pure, the true, the immutable.” To put it another way, he tried to transcend his own peculiar psychological problems by universalising them. And he didn’t just try: he succeeded. He converted his private sufferings into stories and symbols we can all respond to. 

Friedländer doesn’t stress that point enough. Kafka’s stories are not just about Kafka. They are about the rest of us too. We all feel oppressed, at least some of the time; we’ve all had jobs we hate, fears we can’t quite explain. So stories like “The Metamorphosis” resonate with us: at a gut level we can identify with poor old reviled Gregor Samsa, shamefully confined to his bedroom, waving his little legs helplessly in the air. You can’t blame scholars for wanting to analyse this resonance. But in doing so they tend to de-universalise Kafka’s art. They lead us back to the heap of private psychic wreckage that Kafka spent his whole writing life transforming into something more numinous. 

“Very early on,” Friedländer says, “Kafka must have felt that he was different from most of those who surrounded him.” He was, but he also wasn’t. If he was entirely different from the rest of us, we wouldn’t find his mental atmosphere so chillingly familiar. He was like we would be if we were even weirder. “He is like a naked man among multitudes who are dressed,” his friend Milena wrote. The poor guy had his issues, all right. There was nobody else quite like him. If we say this in reference to his private life, we have to say it with a measure of pity. But when we say it about his work, we mean it as the highest possible compliment.