God Bless the New Friends

I've felt weirdly sad over the last few days and was about to offer some new droopy tale or other here today - until saw this post that my new friend and fellow blogger Brian Moloney wrote, saying how he's been writing for exactly a year now and mentioning me in the course of his remarks.

He also quoted an excerpt from Salinger's Franny and Zooey that brought back everything I so earnestly hoped and dreamed that I might do with my life, even back in junior high. It's what came to me when I finally stopped obsessing about how funny-looking I was with my chapped lips and my too-short bangs.

You can read his whole post here but I'll just say it begin by describing how a year ago now he was wondering if he really could go on puttin’ it out there every day when he came upon my name somewhere.  He says he wrote me on a day when he was ‘on the verge of chucking the whole thing' - and it seems I wrote back, promising that I for one would read him every day and that the two of us would be go on to be friends forever.

“And surprisingly, nearly a year later, we are well on our way to being just that: forever friends,” he says.

"Even though I have never met her -  you know, because of the restraining order,” he adds in his jokey way.

“I have never mentioned her or thanked her before on this thing but I thought this was a good time to do it," he goes on. "I won’t go into a lot of details but the truth is—if it weren’t for this lady with the odd Boston accent, I probably wouldn’t have made it to a month...let alone a year.” (Nice man! And he's right too: I do have an odd Boston accent, as people keep telling me when they come across that little video I once made.)

He says we're different because I'm more forthcoming about myself in what I write but still: we have in common the fact that “as difficult as it can be on any given day to put something worthwhile down on a page, we do it for the fat lady sitting on the porch swatting flies.”

That’s the Salinger reference, which I think means we do it out of some mystical blend of faith and general Agapic love, the kind we all hope to learn to give in our lives.

He recommends we all go to the last few pages of Franny and Zooey to see what he's talking about.  And then we should go to the first page and read the whole thing, something he says we should have done long ago.

I did read the book long ago and was completely knocked out by its message - before I forgot about it for almost 50 years.

It just goes to show you that old theory about life is true: You really can't see yourself. Emily Dickinson knew this. “The Mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly,” is how she put it. You  can’t know what effect you have in the world. It takes some kindly watching Other to do that for you.

The Seller in the Rye

When I heard about Salinger’s death the first person I thought of was Joyce Maynard who left Yale during her freshman year and went to live with him. Because he asked her to. Because he wrote her a bunch of letters after he saw that famous essay she did for the New York Times Magazine "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" and became infatuated. He was 53 at the time and with his raw-grain diet I imagine he looked like a haggard old guy in baggy pants. She looked like a ten-year-old who hadn’t eaten in a month as you can see here. The love match lasted just eight months before he sent her packing under cruel circumstances but 30 years later she sold the tale in book form. She had already sold another book that got made into a movie with Nicole Kidman; and last year she sold a third one. Now she sells herself, meaning her experience and her personality, by offering hopeful would-be writers a week in her company in the tropical venue she keep for this purpose. All this I learned about on her website.I, meanwhile, seem never to have gotten the hang of all this selling. Sixteen years ago when I began to think I’d like to pull together a collection of short pieces, I pitched the idea to a couple dozen publishers and received as many rejections. Then instead of trying to figure out what these people DID want and  giving it to them I formed my own imprint and made the book myself. A few years later I did it again with another book. Then I figured out how to get on TV and radio and did about 60 shows which in case you didn’t know nobody pays you for. Then I made two more books, audio books, using a back bedroom empty at the time. I gave 200 copies of Vacationing in My Driveway to our deployed soldiers overseas, 100 copies of I Thought He Was a Speed Bump to a public middle school in Brooklyn and another hundred of both to some places around here and still I have almost 2,000 books in the cellar. My mate of many years said the other day, “Why don’t we just throw them away, T?”  It stabbed me in my heart to hear it– which shows there’s some kind of lesson in here somewhere though I'm darned if I know what it is.