Absolute Gentleman

I’ve been huge into biographies lately. I read one on F. Scott Fitzgerald last summer, and I picked up one on John Steinbeck after writing to a Steinbeck preservation society to ask for the one they tend to endorse. I got a quick reply from a volunteer who waxed critical of a particular one I should definitely avoid. So I picked up the other one, but honestly, none of them are earth-shattering. I like them informative and focused, but I suppose the limits of the genre take away much of the literary artistry that I look for in a lot of what I read now. I have to be careful, though, because I’m trying to avoid using biography to drive the literary discussions I facilitate in my high school classes. When I started teaching – even during the first ten years of my teaching career – I leaned on the lives of the authors almost exclusively. Just like the genre of the biography or the historical text, analyzing literature through the pages of an author’s life is too myopic and it hinders organic discussion by shoving the “why” right down their throats.

Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger started my fascination. I was particularly interested because of my lifelong love of The Catcher in the Rye and that Salinger’s life has been a reclusive one. How could anyone really penetrate well enough to give me anything of substance? After I read this book I learned that Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, wrote an autobiography that explored her childhood. I was going to pick it up until the day I took my family on an excursion away from the normal route home from my wife’s mother’s house and into the driveway of J.D. Salinger.

As I mentioned before, I had no intention of going to his house that day. I think the whole idea of autographs and hallowed ground is ridiculous. I didn’t used to think so. I visited Seattle in 1994 with a friend in search of Eddie Vedder, and I visited Bruce Lee’s gravesite. His son Brandon had just been killed during the filming of “The Crow” and his site was fresh, with a temporary stone in place while the permanent one was being engraved. He was buried next to his father, so my friend and I thought it cool to have our pictures taken standing next to the headstone of Bruce Lee. It was decidedly uncool, like most things I did fifteen years ago.

The Connecticut River separates Vermont and New Hampshire and runs along Interstate 91. The key to finding Salinger’s house was finding Windsor, Vermont a beautiful little town that served as the summer retreat of the great, Maxwell Perkins, editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe (This is where the rash stuff was about Tom Wolfe, author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I removed it. See the comments for the gist of what I wrote. This is the nice thing about blogs, I suppose: being able to retract an irresponsible statement.)

Alexander did the rest. As I drove, my wife read aloud:

“I turned left coming off the covered bridge from Windsor and drove down the main road that wound along the river. On my right I passed a side road which, a sign informed me, led to Saint-Gaudens Historical Site.”

“You’re going to fast,” I said to my wife, “I just came off the bridge.”

“OK, OK,” she said.

“Soon, I passed a green history marker commemorating the old Cornish Colony. The marker stood near the Blow-Me-Down Mill, a three-story stone structure with wood siding. Past the mill, at the Chase Cemetery, a small graveyard surrounded by a white picket fence, I turned right onto a narrow asphalt road. Next I drove just over a mile, passing a three-story slat-shingled mansion and then two huge red barns built among green sloping hills, until I turned right at a small abandoned guard house.”

We were a little confused because of the “small abandoned guard house.” It’s like a little toll booth, and we were expecting something bigger. We saw a house with a porch and I was like, “Well, that could be a guard house, ’cause you can sit on the porch with a shotgun and guard stuff…Like farmers do, or like the farmers do on television.”

“You are a dumbass,” my wife said.

“Going up the asphalt road, I passed Austin Farms. Just beyond the farms, the asphalt road turned into a dirt road, which then ran under a long heavy canopy created by rows of tall green trees growing on either side of the road. In time, to my left I saw a red house that appeared to be a converted barn. Next, continuing up the road, I topped a hill, which was bordered by spacious pastures – pastures, I later learned, that belonged to J.D. Salinger. Driving up the road, I stopped at an old dilapidated barn.”

This is the part I love to recall in my mind, yet, I’m not ever able to tell it well because two things were happening simultaneously, my wife was reading and my eyes were doing what Alexander said he was doing. It was really quite magical, I assure you.

“Finally, I looked up through the trees on the hill in front of me and I saw it – Salinger’s house.”

Out of all the things to be amazed and wondrous about, I was obsessed with his mailbox. Look at the size of this monster. Not only must he get a lot of mail, but he must want a lot of mail, too. I was tempted to find a Kinko’s or something to print out the manuscript I had on my laptop and put it in his mailbox with a note. I wanted to write any kind of note to him.

“I’ll go knock on his door if you want,” my wife said.

“You’re just going to go up there and knock on his door.”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“No, you’re not,” I said. For her to go up and knock on his door, I would have had to been knocked out, like B.A. Baracus before getting on an airplane, and then she would have had to tell me the whole thing afterward.

So she didn’t knock on his door, and I didn’t leave him a note.

I read somewhere that you had to be a woman, or a teenage girl, for him to respond, and you needed to send a picture. I also read that he can sniff a fanatic from a mile away, that all his close friends call him Jerry and not “J.D.” or “Mister Salinger.” They really do. I swear they do.

Two houses, two reconnaissance missions, presumably two scenes of misery, one trip. Maybe the answer to everything that is eating me alive has been lying right next to me in our gritty, sandy bed for the last ten years – that all along it’s been Jennet who has kept me alive and breathing by suffering all of my impulses and broodings.

Jennet, please look at me closely. I’m not going to kill myself. I promise.