by Ben Metcalf
The killer-log conceit he would dismiss as a Romantic silliness: “The cure for that sort of thing is Ruskin. Ruskin’s really something. You should try Ruskin.” (SON: I like Ruskin fine. I just think the fun in it all may have eluded him. FATHER: Well, I doubt you’d get anywhere with Ruskin there. Ruskin always thought the problem through. SON: By half, maybe. Bathetic fallacy is more what I say. Wasn’t he the one afraid of pubic hair? FATHER: Well— SON: You know, we ought to have employed a playwright here, if we couldn’t afford the librettist. Sophocles? O’Neill? Synge? FATHER: Well, Ruskin tended to wrestle with his subject. You should probably give Ruskin a try.)
The killer-God idea he would counter with a grunt, or a sniff, or a grunt-sniff, so as to demonstrate by this gesture how ontologically brave he was (and I will allow that he did die bravely: it was only his living that could have done with more panache), which would leave us here with but his “genuine” motivations to sift through, and his by now burnt-up rendition of the erstwhile sun-faded facts, and his eventual homing back in on, as the one worthy topic of talk between us (correct!), not the meanness I had meant when I implied that he both had and had not wished to see us killed by those wedges out in the yard but rather the meantness I had meant when I implied that neither one of us had necessarily meant to mean either.
Meanness, you see, came so easily to the earthly him that I would be shocked if his expirant too did not consider it almost a trivial subject, like breathing might be to those who have never known trouble breathing. (Deep inhale …) Meantness, on the other hand, or lung, gave him regular hiccups, and was a constant bellows to his own Romantic sillinesses, which blew across my childhood as delectably as did all those smelly little zephyrs bearing with them the news, if never quite the word, that a too-proud manse to the east of us (FATHER: Wasn’t Zephyrus the west wind?), or else a too-ashamed shack nearer by, had the night before been consumed innard-outward by flame (and how unlike what will happen to humans!) on account of its having been occupied by “morons” with no idea how “properly” to “tend” a stove, which attitude presented even when the cause of the fire was clearly electrical (as our novice noses could readily detect and his, a guilded wirer’s, surely must have), and which attitude could not then help but alarm us, given that our father had for years played the stooge to his too-well-tended Franklin (inventor of wood heaters and fire departments alike, the bastard), and had stuffed it so full of tar-drunk pine, and lead-painted boards, and anything else that would hotly and unsafely burn, as to send God knows what future incendiaries up the chimney to clutch at its innards like gargoyles and await their inevitable crack at revanche.
The worst of these Romantic sillinesses (my father’s, I mean, or mean mostly) was a confused New Critic’s conviction that whereas a log might be no more than a log, and a wedge might be no more than a wedge, and a childhood might be no more than a childhood, the same could not be said of “log” and “wedge” and “childhood” and “might” and “be” and “no” and “more” and “than” and “a,” which totems he refused to accept for what they plainly were: descriptive (and therefore only proximate, and therefore ever maddening) occurrences that by eye and ear, or by ear and fingertip (thinking now of the blind), or by eye alone (thinking ever of the deaf), took a measurable, material form while fairly flaunting their refusal to make manifest those allegedly more “real” things, or imagined relationships between said “real” things, they were shaped millennia ago to represent, yes, but then were prophesied (Who did this? Why?) one day, impossibly, to become.
No, my faithless father (or was he, in this context, being oddly faithful?), unwilling to wait for the needless miracle that would make any scribble or scream of his as “real” as what he had physically done unto the trees, or by his backswings done unto us, sought to mortgage every word he encountered out into the future until it both was, in a legal sense (Romantic approach, early American variant), and was not quite yet, in a logical sense (reasonable approach, late American compromise), half tantamount to its referent not just in these dumb gists but, extrapolating one small step further here, its Tweedledee at least in a fatuous third, by which “log” is universally understood as indicating/becoming, and therefore, what the hey, already being, something more powerful than the mere smudged stand-in for, or even the sharp-breathed reminder of, what corporeal log awaited us at the edge of the corporeal forest, the corporeal snake or spider beneath that log no match, if you think on it enough (or too little), for what venom awaited all of humanity beneath or because of the non-non-noncorporeal word.
Which is only to say that my father held all words, and certainly all words of ours, which seemed real enough to us (and were!), to be capable of a great and ghostly treason if not tackled and pinned down against their connotations by the proper authorities, which by droit du seigneur always meant him, whose own denotations were then left free to roam the countryside bare-assed until they stumbled upon, or transformed themselves into (who can say how this happens?), such gross apparitions as even he could not conscionably have believed in:
… it seems to me not implausible to suggest that Seymour’s enjoyment of foot-trampling is sexual and that his attack on Charlotte is motivated by sexual aggression. Admittedly, this is a suggestion that few Seymour fans, Buddy among them, would care to make …
this shy golem followed, a paragraph later, by the frumious paradox of
I hope, however, that it has not yet become an axiom of Salinger criticism that the author’s intentions may not be separated from the beliefs of his characters.
What a lovely notion, I declare, this apartheid of “author” from “character,” and “intention” from “belief,” and “Salinger” from “criticism,” and “axiom” from “hope,” were words what my father suspected them of being and so ever demanded they be. But words are not demons, not yet, any more than they are seraphim. They are words, and thus wholly earthen vessels, and their morality (for all our faith in that particular vessel) will not alter with what company as they keep. Or are denied: I myself would wish it otherwise, would prefer that I could mean here rather than shuffle words around so that they but appear to mean, would be delighted if words could be arranged so as to be meanness rather than crudely describe and parody the stuff, for I am mean indeed. My father’s actions, by wire and wanting word, made perfect sure of that.
Such was not my intention
J. D. Salinger died yesterday, up the country. Or was it the month before, downtown? Such was not my intention, nor even, initially, my belief. Had I but known this character still sucked air I would have butchered him 14 pages ago, so as to sync his death more poignantly with that of his coughing critic and unwitting, if unoriginal, creator.
My father mostly copped to having created me, though I doubt it ever occurred to him that he had also created, in the shadowy yet no less phenomenal realm of language (if only by accident, and if only for a secondary son), the character J. D. Salinger, so that I might reflect upon that, his creation of the character J. D. Salinger, in conjunction with his more problematic creation of me, and wonder, with the longer-dead but newer-wrote character Wm. Styron (whom my father always called a fraud), which one of us, if he had to, would he choose?
His was, I admit, a weak me (a worthwhile child would not have resorted to the Styron cliché), but was his Salinger not a touch too urbane to be viable here? He knew, I suppose, this Salinger, how to situate a young girl on a piano bench to smile and peck and flirt, and how to kneel her rival down on a beach towel to conversate and beg for a swim and be told a filthy story, but could he know how teenage boys not enrolled in fancy prep schools were sent out sullenly into southern yards to palm and fling frozen dog turds past the barbed-wire fences, so that they might trudge, these boys, around or through said turds toward a pile of impassable logs their father had decreed be fetched without vehicular assistance, since even a big Dodge truck’s axle might be broken by ruts along the way?
We went in for Dickens at those t
imes, not Salinger (nor Styron, nor Hardy, nor even the oddest Brontë, though we had plenty call to), and counted ourselves artful whenever our father went missing for an hour or two or three, and we could drive his cheap little sedan back across the field, and fill her trunk and passenger seats with what wood as we were expected to bear up bodily that day, betting rightly that he would think to inspect only the truck’s tires and chassis for dog shit upon his too-energetic return. He would accuse us, of course, of having made use of the big Dodge anyway, which I swear we never once did, but I will barter this injustice of his for a happier one of our own: that on many occasions we accomplished his country work, and till his death he never knew about it, with that machine of his best suited to town.
My father is mostly gone now, with all his machinery, and good riddance. To the machinery, I mean, more so than the man, though some will say that by the very shabbiness of this disclaimer I aim to have it both ways here (they have my support, both the “some” and the “ways”), which must therefore constitute an intellectual cowardice on my part (support withdrawn), if not an ethical failure (injunction filed), and might even be considered a crime by and against our literature (charges brought), the local variant of this product recognizing but a single meaning meant per square utterance (judgment handed down), so as not to breach the implicit contract between potentially abusive producer and unfairly overtaxed consumer (firing squad convened).
I see no need for false civility here. Fathers write, and sons read, and sons then write, and fathers then die before they can read what their sons have written against them. It is a pity, pure, but unavoidable. My personal dead father, whose pearls alone I ever wanted to pore over this imitation coral made, chose instead at his drowning to try (try again?) Faulkner’s Light in August, as opposed to the thinner and more buoyant As I Lay Dying, which joke all his read-up children made in their turn as they watched him get no further than a fur piece into September before it was finally asked, by simple human decency, that they feed him enough morphine to ensure that the first few pages of the first work would wash up at least sensibly against the last few pages of the last.
(All these Bills.)
With my own thumb I administered the crucial dose, or will swear that I did, though the hospice nurse claimed later (Sharon? Karen? Charon?), when I asked her about any legal exposure here, that we had stayed within all acceptable bounds, and that she had seen forty-pound “babies,” riddled and forsook, take more dope in a day than our father had in a week and still suffer on, which explanation I accepted as a practical, if also a subversive (and therefore a perfectly American), lie, which lie then led me almost to love her, whose one great contribution to our cause (leaving aside all those catheter-bag lectures, and those seminars on ultimate (or was it penultimate?) bowel movements, and that advice on how to grind Ativan tablets down into a liquefiable powder, which tutelage I did not anyway require) had been to conduct us toward the truth that the only way around a death scored in ancestral screams and whimpers was to target and kill, without remorse, the slated and much-gossiped-about performer.
I had thought to fire him sooner
I had thought to fire him sooner, this diva, though out of conscience or convention I demurred. When he sent a southern paw into my formerly northern yap over an infraction I and the law had already agreed to forget, and split the right side of my lip against its resident incisor, which ensured that my smile would forever be altered, and I would never make a decent noise out of my trumpet again, I might have done more than simply grab and throw him to the floor, and kick his legs out from under him when he tried to rise up, and lean over his huffing fat, and promise that I would carve my hatred into his face as he had just done mine if he did not apologize at once for the shredded embouchure (which term he did not fully comprehend) and the blood spilt down the front of my shirt (which term he fully did), whereupon, ass-anchored and winded against the wainscoting, he started in with the legalese, and professed that it was not yet “permitted” in “the Commonwealth of Virginia” for “a child to lay hands upon a parent,” and that he was therefore “well within” his “rights” to have me “committed to the courts,” which I urged him then to go ahead and do, since I was curious to know how even a Goochland judge might rule, after an athletic young A-maker such as myself had taken the stand, on the matter of which one of us warranted a beating and which one of us more properly belonged in jail.
Understanding that it was not the punch there but only the legalese that had made me want to ponder patricide, my reader should know that I first encountered this fey impulse several years earlier, when our father abruptly installed, at his wife’s wet coercion, four units of baseboard heating along the house’s front rooms, which by chance included mine, these units finally activated one gray and unprecipitate Christmas Eve so as to coincide almost magically with the arrival of my mother’s pinched parents (and a schizophrenic scion), bearing with them their boxed-up booze, and their bottled-up resentments, and an open conviction that no daughter of theirs should have dared to mate with so feral a creature as our father plainly was, which conviction, and which resentments, and which booze, made for costly eruptions in the kitchen, and an appetite for vindication at the dinner table, and a wino knife fight that began well before grace and stretched out entertainingly into the hours and days before us, the one seeming rule here being that no thrust by an adult in this fray should ever be so overt as to allow a feral half-child to pick up on it, though of course that was always the goal (“My God! They barely use forks!”), since for whom else was all this intended, the swipes and the accusals and the barbs, if not for those same little half-innocent half-jurists who would scramble up out of their half-beds on the half-bless’d Morn to discover a trail of comic books (we could not be trusted, after all, truly to read) leading down each step toward a father’s poached and hastily hung fir (the haste there being about as necessary as was the poaching), beneath which awaited them what mall-bought toys and sweaters as the sotted in their number thought fit bribes for a silence on the matter of who, exactly, hated whom in this nativity set; and why, and to what end (the Advent-calendar chocolate all eaten), their mother would weep inconsolably as her parents’ town car sped away (hard-driven by the schizophrene); and how, and at what price, her children would ignore both tire and tear to return to a board game upstairs, robed as they were for once in an atmosphere of comfort and joy, until at last they looked up to see a father’s huge and hairy arm snake around the doorjamb to turn the thermostat on the wall above them back to zero, where by rights they knew it belonged, but why now? Why just then?
I might have sunk him for that, or for a thousand and one other slights, but in the moment, or those, I refrained, hoping I might eventually be gifted the chance to vouch him a hero in this report and not its abject suzerain. I made no direct move against him when he raised me up out of a smelly bag the night before a failed chemistry exam (or was it English?) to top off an already wood-drunk dragon whose sleepy burps would never reach the frigid corner where I myself lay dying, nor did I anywise plot to kill him on that parentless, pointless snow day when his misguided firstborn, bored and possibly as crazed as I was by the work and isolation imposed upon us by a stupidly clever (or was it a cleverly stupid?) sire, wondered aloud, this future chemist of the language, what the result would be if he let some drops of his urine fall upon a stovetop he had seen make dancing and ephemeral beads out of our spit, which assay my sister and I begged him please to abort but could stay neither his curiosity nor his pee, whose instant, acrid stench upon the creature’s hunched back (so much worse than my ejaculate had smelled!) drove us deep into the yard, nauseated and quickly ashiver, to stare at one another with a wild surmise over the scale of this calamity, which hours’ worth of running back into the house, in shifts based on birth order (our breath held at first, then taken), to throw open a window and make it safely out to gag in the snow again (or else to toss heavy panfuls of gyroscoping water onto a devil we had never
imagined had the means to do so pungent an evil unto us), could not dispel, nor could it prevent (given the surety of meltdown) our dragon from proclaiming, come dinnertime, that his lair was “too fucking cold” and that someone (staring directly down at me) royally stank.
Yet was this ogre-king, teched and repatriated by the Cold War countryside, with its Potemkin charms and samizdat horrors, at all the same as the young czarevitch who had once traded sleep and sobriety to write, during a foiled escape to town (1965–1976: hunted by the land, ratted out by the in-laws), that Salinger’s lovely “Hapworth 16, 1924,” while not my father’s ostensible subject in 1972, any more than it is mine today, seemed
intended to be a demonstration of Seymour’s genius and an indication that Seymour is fully versed in oriental religion and remembers well his former states of existence …
and was there really, if the answer is no, any harm in killing such a one?
What, then, will it win your occidental son to save him?
Past performances
I myself can recall but a few past performances, bleeding too easily into that singular sentence of childhood I try (partly) and fail (completely) to reconstruct (unfaithfully) here. Yet I suppose it at least conceivable that my unborn-again father, soon enough to present as mortuary smoke, might more accurately have remembered, and based his decisions about our future former selves upon, some several.
