Salinger and Holden

Word has gone out that J. D. Salinger is dead at 91. The story was broken by his agent, Harold Ober Associates, whose job since the early sixties has been to cash checks and discourage biographers; Salinger has published nothing in recent years. One pictures his house filled with boxes of stories he disliked as soon as he'd written them, unless he burned them to warm the house in the New Hampshire winters.

His Cornish neighbors protected him as carefully as his agents did. Is it the business of an author to be a public personality? Catcher in the Rye inspired teenage rebels and at least one assassin, but was Holden Caulfield a self-portrait? Salinger attracted disciples, most of them young. One of them wrote a memoir about her creepy adolescent relationship with the famous novelist. It was a bestseller; but which of them was creepier?

Salinger was once a rebellious teen, but he also also put on a clean shirt and worked as a recreation director on a cruise ship, mustering a phony bonhomie for the prosperous vacationers. He wrote a story about a kid named Holden Caulfield, which was scheduled to run in the New Yorker when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, suddenly making his story too trivial to publish.

He joined the army, and landed in Normandy on D-Day. He met Hemingway in Paris, and spent Christmas 1944 fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He celebrated his 26th birthday in deep snow, under enemy fire. Then he came home and wrote "the novel" and nothing was the same for him again. He became, in a way, the Roger Maris of American letters. It's all he needed to be. J. D. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Mark Twain

On this day in 1865, Mark Twain made his first impression on the reading public with the publication of "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press. He was 29. The story was retitled "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and became the title story of his first book in 1867.

Twain was a Midwesterner transplanted to the California gold fields writing for a New York audience, but there was something universal, or at least All-American, in his colloquial humor and his mixture of high and low life. People felt they knew his characters; the lowlifes put on airs and the toffs were phonies, and only the reader and the author were wise.

Twain appears ten times in A Book of Ages. When he was 21 he was training to be a riverboat pilot. (An education as rigorous as becoming an airline pilot today, a process he describes in his book Life on the Mississippi). At age 27 he set aside Samuel Clemens and began writing under the famous pen name. He didn't write his masterpiece until he was 49.

At 60 he was a famous novelist––and bankrupt. To recoup his losses he embarked on a world lecture tour. He met Gandhi and Sigmund Freud, visited Rome and the Taj Mahal. He had dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. He owned a grand house in Connecticut. But his finances were always tenuous. Success was a fragile thing. This realization fed his cynicism and made him the greatest American writer of his time.

The Satirist's Satirist

Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903. He was the second son of a prominent London publisher whom he cordially loathed. It was a childhood of mutual disappointment. In true English lower-upper-middle-class fashion Evelyn worked very hard at appearing not to try or to care and unsurprisingly failed at everything. He scorned everything valued by the society he grew up in while secretly coveting it all. He was sent down from Oxford after two years, considered becoming an illustrator, learned fancy cabinet-making, failed as a schoolteacher, attended parties with the Bright Young Things of the time. When he was 24 he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. He turned back after being stung by a jellyfish.

At age 26, on a madcap impulse, he married the daughter of a Lord. She was also named Evelyn, and they became known as She Evelyn and He Evelyn, a matched set of semi-androgynous wits. He was 27 when they divorced. It was a cruel blow to his ego, but by this time he'd become a bestselling novelist, turning his disappointments into fiction.

His style is one of joyful malice, but reading about his life it's hard to tell whether he or the world was guilty of the first cruelty. Was he unloved or unlovable? Judging by his letters and books he seems thoroughly misanthropic, but he was much loved and had many friends. He climbed into the fashionable Country House set he admired but dressed and behaved in an aggressively unfashionable manner, which outraged everyone––but amused them privately. His most successful novel was probably his worst, a soppy, sentimental hymn to a rapidly declining aristocracy. His best novels are his earliest, funniest, bitterest ones, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop. Evelyn Waugh appears six times in A Book of Ages, and could have appeared a half dozen more.

It's worth noting that he passed his gifts along to his children. One son, Auberon, became an even more cynical, amusing, pitiless scold than his father.

George Sand and Frederic Chopin

In October 1836, Frederic Chopin met George Sand at a party at the Paris apartment of Franz Liszt’s mistress. Chopin was 26, Sand was 32. She was assertive and self-possessed and he took an instant dislike to her. In spite of this they became one of the most famous couples in the history of art and literature. He played the piano and coughed a lot. She wrote sensational novels and wore men's clothes. Having seen the film Impromptu I can't help picturing Hugh Grant and Judy Davis. Grant is prettier, but Davis is more interesting. Together and separately, Chopin and Sand appear seven times in A Book of Ages.

Naked Lunch

William Burroughs published his seminal work in October 1959, in Paris, where novels of this sort were usually published. Then to be smuggled back into England and the U.S. in the suitcases of graduates of the Sorbonne, and young women who had gone to France to "be finished." I have a feeling, though, that the last of the Beat novelists would have blushed at some of the passages in Updike and Roth. Despite looking as if he'd slept the previous night in a seedy hotel, Burroughs was an heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune. He was 45 when he published Naked Lunch. He traveled everywhere with a notebook in which he recorded the things he was doing, reading and thinking in separate columns. In 1994, when he was 80, he did a TV commercial for Nike. Burroughs appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Patriotic Gore

Gore Vidal first enjoyed the public gaze at age three when he became the first child to fly across the United States in a plane. He's enjoyed attention ever since. A preening, arrogant, articulate, intelligent, entertaining scold. A critic of almost everything Americans do or say or think, but a defender of our rights to be as stupid as we are, which makes him the most valuable kind of American: a troublesome patriot. I like Barbara Ehrenreich's line: "Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots." He and H. L. Mencken serve as bookends to the American sensibility, one left-wing, the other right, both discontented and contemptuous.

Gore Vidal was born on this day in 1925 in, of all places, West Point, New York. His mother was an actress and New York socialite. His father, a former West Point All-American quarterback, was the academy's first aeronautics instructor when Gore was born, and went on to direct FDR's bureau of air commerce in the Department of Commerce. Which is how the toddler wound up in a plane at such a tender age. At age 11 Gore was flying his own airplane in a Pathé newsreel. He fought in World War II and wrote a novel about it. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (provocative title) was daring enough to suggest that homosexuals were as normal as anybody else, which caused the New York Times to ban reviews of his next five novels. He was 22. He wrote the script for Ben Hur, became friends with Tennessee Williams and the Paul Newmans. In 1960 he ran for Congress––and lost. His most celebrated moment may have been his televised scuffle with William F. Buckley Jr. during ABC's coverage of the the 1968 Democratic Convention.

In the 1970s Vidal said this: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." Thus proving he could be very right and very wrong in one paragraph, but always provocative and intelligent. In spite of everything, he always considered himself a conservative. If conservative means preserving what works, for instance a functioning and fair-minded government to serve public needs, then he probably is one, and so am I. Gore Vidal appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Heart of Darkness

On September 6, 1890, Joseph Conrad took command of a small steamship traveling down the Congo River from Stanley Falls to Leopoldville. He was 32. Twelve years later, the experience formed the germ of his novel Heart Of Darkness.

Saul Bellow and Leon Trotsky

In August, 1944, Saul Bellow was in Mexico City. On the morning of the 20th he had an appointment with Leon Trotsky, but the communist leader was murdered before the two could meet. Bellow was 25 and hadn't become a conservative libertarian yet.

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in America on this day in 1958, three years after its publication in France. The author was 59. The novel is about the relationship between a besotted older man and a young girl. It quickly went to the top of the bestseller list. The book’s success paid for the Nabokovs' move to Switzerland, where the author lived out his life on the top floor of a luxury hotel. Nabokov appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Hemingway's Cojones

On August 11, 1937, Ernest Hemingway tore open his shirt showing his hairy chest to Max Eastman and shouted “What do you mean accusing me of impotence?” Then he wrestled Eastman to the floor. Hemingway was 38, Eastman was 44. Both were practitioners of what is known as "muscular prose." The event took place in a publisher's office. Hemingway appears 16 times in A Book of Ages.

Hard Boiled

Today is the birthday of hard boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler. He was born in Chicago in 1888, but he moved to England as a boy and spent most of his childhood there. He went to the exclusive Dulwich College, where he was a couple of years behind a kid named Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

Chandler spent most of his working life as an oil executive in Los Angeles. In his mid-forties he found himself out of a job, and he turned to writing stories for the pulp magazines. Atmospheric thrillers about smart aleck tough guys suspended midway between the underworld and an often corrupt police department. He was 51 when he published his first novel.

The Big Sleep was narrated by a world-weary but stubbornly romantic detective named Philip Marlowe, who had a knack for annoying people with guns, and described his mishaps in colorful similes. Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in the film version. Chandler also collaborated with film director Billy Wilder on a script of the James M. Cain novel Double Indemnity. It was the first product in an entirely new artform called "film noir." He wrote another screenplay from a Patricia Highsmith novel for director Alfred Hitchcock, titled Strangers on a Train.

Raymond Chandler appears three times in A Book of Ages. My favorite anecdote is about his first meeting with fellow crime novelist Dashiell Hammett at a Black Mask dinner in 1936. Hammett, who was six years younger than Chandler, had written his last novel four years earlier; Chandler's first novel wouldn't be written for another three years. Similar novelists, different career arcs.

Papa's Birthday

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He learned to fish when he was 3. At age 12 his mother told him her dream was for him to become a concert cellist. At 18 he was serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, and was wounded saving the life of an Italian soldier. While in hospital he fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, but she wouldn't marry him. At age 22 he moved to Paris, and a year later he ran with the bulls at the Feast of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain.

It is hard to think of a manly, romantic, heroic, enviable thing that Hemingway didn't do a century earlier (and then write about for large sums of money.) Which is why his life remains a touchstone or a benchmark for our own. He is the reason most of the celebrated watering holes around the world are celebrated by anyone. Men still like to dress like him, grin like him. Tough guys talk like him, even in Paris. When we behave like fools we are doing it in imitation. Hemingway is why literary men feel the need to be amateur boxers. American novelists are still working in his shadow, even though his short stories are arguably his best form. An eighth grader turning in an essay shorter than the requisite 800 words can explain, plausibly, that Hemingway would have written it in fewer than 250.

Hemingway appears 16 times in A Book of Ages.

Our Man in Havana

In July 1941, Graham Greene became a spy. He was given the number 59200, the same number he later gave to Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman and spy in his 1958 satire Our Man In Havana. He was 36 years-old. Greene appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

Death of the Maiden

Jane Austen died, unmarried and mostly unknown, in the early hours of July 18, 1817, and a few days later was buried in Winchester Cathedral. She'd published four novels; two others would be published within the year: all anonymously, although her obituary in The Gentlemen’s Quarterly mentioned the titles. She was 41. Austen appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Boeing, Boeing

On this day in 1916, William Boeing and George Westervelt formed a company which they called Pacific Aero Products. A year later it became the Boeing Airplane Company.

In 1960, 22 year-old Thomas Pynchon moved to Seattle and got a job writing technical documents about the Bomarc guided missile system that Boeing was manufacturing at the time. When not writing about surface to air missiles in the breezy, upbeat style of the corporate news service, Pynchon was also working on a novel (V) that featured a defense an aerospace behemoth called Yoyodyne, founded by a World War II veteran named Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz. Early jobs provide rich material for novelists: obtuse superiors, bizarre systems, nonsensical rules, insane co-workers, and objectives that make the young hero complicit in crimes against humanity.

Thomas Pynchon appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Running with the Bulls at Pamplona

On July 6th, 1923, Ernest Hemingway ran with the bulls for the first time at the Feast of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. He was 23. Hemingway appears 16 times in A Book of Ages.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Today is the birthday of the most influential novelist America has ever produced. Never mind J. D. Salinger and John Updike. Hemingway persuaded Americans to write shorter sentences, but Twitter would have done that eventually. Melville's novel didn't result in a ban on whaling. No, the most influential novelist in American history was a mother of seven from Cincinnati.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14th, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher. In 1852 she published Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was 40 years-old. The book went on to sell over a million copies. It was the first American novel to do so. It sold 10,000 copies in the first week, an astonishing thing considering there were no superstores then, no Amazon. In place of the author tour of radio stations and television talk shows, though, there were abolitionist lectures and meetings all across the North, where Uncle Tom's Cabin was talked about and quoted. It supplied the mythic underpinnings to the moral outrage that led to the American Civil War. A decade later, in 1862, there was the famous meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln, when Lincoln said "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!" It was true.

Harriet Beecher Stowe appears on page 154 in A Book of Ages.

Washington Irving, Jesse James, Graham Greene

Washington Irving, America's first literary celebrity, was born on this day in 1783. He was also the godfather of the New York Knicks. He was 37 when he published Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He appears on page 137 of A Book of Ages.

Bank robber Jesse James was murdered on this day in 1882, which was either a bloody shame or served him right, depending which legends you believe. He was hanging up a picture at the time. Mr. James appears in A Book of Ages at ages 15, 29 and 34. He is often confused with Billy the Kid. Also, occasionally, with Henry James; the two were not related.

Graham Greene died on this day in 1991. Novelist, Catholic, spy, adulterer. He never won the Nobel Prize for literature, but would probably have had conflicted feelings about it if he had; he did about everything else. He appears at ages 15, 20, 29, 35, 36, 42 and 86 in A Book of Ages. A life filled with ironic anecdotes.