EDITORESS: What about them? Once again, doesn't Salinger himself confess his efforts at immortalizing Seymour fail miserably to raise the hagiography of his suicided sibling "to the level of being a halfway decent short story!"149
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: Well you certainly can't make the same objection to those philosophical fine print proclivities exhibited by the magnificent Marquis in his monumental novel, Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu— or, even more to the point—those of Stanislaw Witkiewicz in Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability!
EDITORESS: All right, sister—that does it! What the hell is going on here? Are you, or are you not, an average American housewife who has somehow managed to "worm" her way into my introduction to this book under the pretense of being "THE CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER?"
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: Yes-
EDITORESS: Ah ha!
Intro Part 11 Return to Index
Footnotes
149 I'm paraphrasing
here. What Salinger actually says is: "But on this occasion I'm anything
but a shortstory writer where by brother is concerned. What I am, I think,
is a thesaurus of undetached prefatory remarks about him. I believe I essentially
remain what I've almost always been a narrator, but one with extremely pressing
personal needs. I want to introduce, I want to describe, I want to distribute
mementos, amulets, I want to break out my wallet and pass around snapshots,
I want to follow my nose. In this mood, I don't dare go anywhere near the
shortstory form. It eats up fat little undetached writers like me whole."
[Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction,
Bantam Books edition, p.107]
And, since the CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED
READER has already raised the dreaded "Salinger specter," the author and
I have agreed we might as well take novelistic advantage of her impertinence
to answer any questions the rest of you may be harboring about: (a) Whether
Morons Awake! is in reality that Magnum Opus for which the world has
been waiting more than 30 years to emerge from Salinger's New Hampshire hideaway
or, if that isn't the case; (b) How could a 70yearold exdiplomat (to an
exceedingly insignificant country), religious crackpot, dyedinthewool misogynist,
neofascist windbag, pseudoscholar, philosophical fruitcake, sexual psychopath,
Foreplaymeister and rankest of novelistic amateurs manage to do what J. D.
Salinger (or any of the planet's other Great White Literary Hopes, including
Gore Vidal, Gunther Grass, Pauline Reage, John Updike, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
Norman Mailer, and Jorge Luis Borges) has failed so miserably to do, namely:
Write the book that will not only reverse the decline of Western Civilization
but turn America into a sociocultural
utopia?
Concerning (a): Admittedly, as the
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER insinuates, there are several superficial
stylistic (and perhaps substantive) similarities —some critics will
doubtlessly describe them as indistinguishable—between Morons
Awake! and those two most precocious offspring of Salinger's diminutive
but oh! so potent fictional canon—The Catcher In The Rye and
Seymour, an Introduction. On this point, unlike the fuzziness of his
"photographic" memory concerning Borges' pedagogical influence on him, the
author asserts no claim of amnesia. He is, he says, "persuaded beyond the
shadow of any conceivable doubt that, prior to writing my own Great American
Novel, like the vast majority of my compatriots, I accepted Salinger's Catcher
as being the definitive fictional statement about just how
f**kedup our
200year loveaffair with the Blissfulness of Ignorance (also known as:
Whothehellareyoutolecturemeonhowtoexercisemyright asagoddamAmericanto
pursuemygoddamhappiness anygoddamwayIwant topursuethegoddamthingism)
had become by the middle of the 20thcentury without bothering to read a single
one of its 214 pages."
"As a result of the CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED
READER'S—can someone please explain to me what this Housewife From Hell
is doing in the (completely unauthorized) introduction to my
novel?—prodding," the author further informs me, he rectified the
aforementioned oversight by "reading and rereading every blessed word Salinger
has (so far) published." [To be fair it must be noted that at the tender
age of 21 the author was exiled to Moronia as our ambassador and spent the
next 50 years of his life there in what amounted to an almost perfect
geopolitical and sociocultural vacuum—a circumstance which helps to
explain his unfamiliarity with the postWWII trends in American literature.]
In point of fact we were discussing this matter on the phone not 5 minutes
ago, at which time he faxed me the following statement concerning whatever
role Salinger may have (unconsciously, from the author's point of view) played
in the paternity of Morons Awake!.
"While my reading of Salinger appears to confirm the CONFUSED
AND/OR PERPLEXED READER'S 'copycat' allegations I couldn't be happier to
find myself convicted of a 'crime' committed by so many of my distinguished
predecessors! Quoting (without bothering to seek his permission) Thornton
Wilder's guilty plea to a charge of pilfering from, among others, Moliere
and James Joyce: 'I only steal from the very best writers—and they don't
seem to miss or begrudge what I take from them.' The argument has even been
advanced by some scholars that 'plagiarism is not only the sincerest form
of flattery but the sine qua non of true artistic
greatness!'
"Which isn't at all surprising since,
as I see it., the history of art—and of literature in particular—is
a more or less unbroken chain of intellectual piracy whose larcenous links
stretch all the way from Picasso's Les Demoiselles d' Avignon back
to the cave painters of Altamira, and from Joyce's Ulysses to Homer's
Odyssey? In my own case, therefore, I take no personal pride in the
fact that fate just happened to choose me as the man to write the happy ending
for a story that, since it began with that most auspicious of all first
sentences—'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth'—has
become sadder and sadder. No. As the transcript of my Mt. Olympus Conversation
with that Most Supreme of Beings Himself proves: I was anything but
eager to accept the mantle of greatness He persistently placed around my
shoul—"
At that point I was forced to interrupt him because he was
starting to deal with question (b) before having completely answered question
(a). To which he responded by stating: "For the obvious reasons I was
just about to demonstrate with my answer to question (b) before I was prevented
from doing so; Salinger couldn't possibly have authored Morons Awake!.
As for what the nature of that 'Magnum Opus' he's been secretly working
on for the past 30plus years might turn out to be we can, I think, only speculate
along the following lines:
"As one who has just spent 5 hellish years
'novelizing' the authentic martyrdom of an actual Messiah (while strictlyspeaking
Klutz's brains weren't blown out because of his 'antiMoronic' convictions
his 'accidental assassination' is not without redemptive significance in
this era when no citizen of Moronia or America is safe from random acts of
mindless violence) naturally I would be more than just a little curious to
see how the great J. D. Salinger handles his fictionalized version of a similar
'story.' "Although, I must hasten to add, while at first glance Seymour Glass
and Jack Klutz might appear to be cut from the same hagiographic cloth the
differences between them couldn't be more profound. Not the least of these
being, of course, the considerable gap separating their intellectual endowments.
If we can believe Buddy Glass, his older brother 'was a child prodigy whose
IQ was comfortably within the pure genius range.' Whereas, being a typical
Moron, Klutz entered this world with a mental capacity approximating that
of a Neanderthal, an 'educated' chimpanzee—or, at the very most, an
average American highschool graduate. And, beside their congenital
disparities, could any sociocultural environments be more dissimilar
than those in which these two wunderkinder grew to manhood?
"On the one hand we have Seymour Glass
being nurtured by a pair of doting parents whose SemiticGaelic gene pool
was ideally conducive for hatching a (one room) schoolfull of Jewish&Irish
intellectual small fry in 'an old but categorically not unfashionable apartment
in Manhattan's East70s that, with the subsequent arrival of Buddy, Boo Boo,
Waker, Walt, Zooey and Franny would become filled to overflowing with the
Edenlike bliss of a 'multiple love story'—all of whose participants
were members of the (primordial) Glass family. [I wonder: Can it simply be
the Edenesque nature of Salinger's own early upbringing that explains Buddy's
'incestuous' ruminations and the problems Seymour, Franny and—most
notably—Holden have accepting their 'midchildhood' expulsion into a
world not only populated for the most part by 'goddam morons' but drowning
in 'the worst possible kind of phoniness, superficiality and outright
charlatanism?']
"On the other hand we have poor Jack F.
Klutz whose paternal ancestry, if we accept his mother's oath that he was
not conceived out of wedlock —or immaculately—consists of a
depressingly long line (literally, since in ancient Gibberish 'klutz' was
the insult hurled by Moronic women at their menfolk as they marched themselves
off to fight—and invariably die—in yet another of Moronia's hopelessly
lost causes as cannonfodder, human boobytraps, ditch- and gravediggers, decoys,
human minesweepers, latrinecommandos, fishbait (naut.), allpurpose dogsbodies,
galleyslaves, kitchen police, Führerbunker flunkies, kamikazes,
point men, bodybaggers, bilge rats (naut.) and human Geiger
counters.
"And the female (Bimbeaux) half of Klutz's
pedigree represents an even sorrier state of chromosonal affairs with its
even longer line of 'serving wenches,' 'chorusgirls,' 'concubines,' 'bathing
beauties,' 'streetwalkers,' 'campfollowers,' 'public stenographers,'
'pornostarlets,' 'centerfolds,' 'callgirls,' 'masseuses,' 'ecdysiasts,'
'mudwrestlers,' 'indentured servants,' 'dimeadancers,' 'parlormaids' and
all those other semantic figleafs for female sexual exploitation Moronia's
worldfamous 'beautifulbutbrainless blondes' have been forced to pursue throughout
their pathetic excuse for a nation's 5,000year history as a sacrificial pawn
in the geopolitical chess games played by its imperialminded
neighbors.
"Worse still, Klutz spent the formative
years of his early childhood in a Moronville neighborhood whose Dickensian
squalor couldn't possibly have been further removed from the supersophisticated
metropolitan milieu of Seymour Glass' mid70s Manhattan apartment. Like most
Morons, until the onset of puberty, Jack lived a life Huck Finn and the Artful
Dodger would have envied for its untrammeled freedom from adult supervision.
7 days a week for 52 weeks a year, from dawn to (well past) dusk bands of
Moronic 'urchins'—as they are locally, and not entirely unlovingly,
known—can be seen (and heard!) roaming the streets of Moronville like
those sacred cows and monkeys are permitted to do in some Hindu
societies—with results that are no less destructive, not to mention
unhygienic. During the summer months along certain stretches of the Main
Stream (Moronia's 'Mississippi') they can be observed skinnydipping,
waterfighting, rafting and utilizing its verdant and caveriddled banks for
playing (their typically Moronic 'horsebeforethe cart' versions of) Indians
& Cowboys, Robbers & Cops, Huns & Romans, Infidels & Crusaders,
Jews & Nazis and the everpopular Lowbrows & Highbrows. Despite their
unsophistication— and immunity from prosecution as juveniles—the
Urchins exhibit a cunning characteristic of adult Morons by prudently repressing
their most antisocial instincts until after the sun sets. So it is that while
they wearily wend their way shack- or hovelward for a wellearned supper of
boiled, baked and/or fried turnips, they manage to leave behind a nightly
trail of desolation not unlike that left by a tornado, or the havoc wrought
by those marauding hordes of yesteryear who routinely raped* and pillaged
a path through Moronia enroute to conquering some 'greener geopolitical
grass.
These nocturnal 'shenanigans' generally consist of defecating
on—or otherwise befouling—Moronia's proudest National Monuments,
to wit: the Equestrian Statue of King Ambrose
XIX149s1 (the 'Egghead' ); the War Widow's Weeping Wall;War Widow's
Weeping Wall, on which are listed the names of every
Moron149s2 who died to preserve Moronia's independence since the 1872 Battle
of Knucklehead Ridge; the ruins of Moronville's Royal Art
Museum149s3 & Library Ruins;Royal Art Museum & Library; the T-34 tank;T-34
tank perched atop a 50-meter-tall steel pylon erected by the Soviets to
memorialize their WWII 'Liberation Of Moronia From Hitler's Fascist Clutches
And The Capitalistic Tyranny Of Ambrosian Feudalism,' and last (but certainly
not least to me during my 50year ambassadorship!); the Liberty Bell replica
hanging (pubsignlike) over the entrance of the United States Embassy to signify
the Special Relationship existing between America and Moronia since General
Ignatz Cloots saved our revolutionary bacon at Valley Forge by teaching the
secrets of winter turnipculture to what remained of George Washington's starving
Continental army. "Added to the mayhem they inflict on such obvious symbols
of 'social injustice,' Moronia's urchins somehow find the time and energy
to improvise random acts of (only marginally more mindless) vandalism against
'targets of opportunity' that typically include: cripples, stray pets,
gravestones, manhole covers, drunks, frogs, senior citizens ('Old Fogies'),
harlots, street lights, birds, tramps,
tourists,149s4 fire alarms and/or hydrants, insects, shrubs, public lava—"
AT THAT
POINT I had no choice but to cut the author off
in midlitany and remind him that: "What began several pages ago, Dear Heart,
as a simple footnote dealing with the CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER'S
manifestly misguided claims concerning your 'plagiarization' of J. D. Salinger
is now in danger of assuming the counterproductive proportions of an insult
that is being protested too much." To which he responded with one of those
eruptions of rampant masculinity that have punctuated our working relationship
so frequently I've come to regard them with no more "maidenly" alarm (or
amazement) than I would the (more or less) regularly scheduled geothermal
ejaculations of "Old Faithful."
"Jesus H. Christ," he began, "who the hell are you to call
someone else's
exegeticalG kettle black! This goddam socalled 'brief introduction' of
yours is beginning to look more and more like not only a very long tale you
are pinning to the front end of my shaggy dog story but one by which you
are hoping to wag it in the bloody bargain!"
"I concede, mon cherie, that my modest plans for getting
the reader's feet wet before she finds herself plunging headlong into the
ever deepening waters of your oceanic intellect may have gone slightly askew,
but—"
"Don't hand me that moncheriesweettalkingcastrationalcrap,
you cabalisticpenenviousballbustingbitch!"
"—but, mein literaturischführer—and it's
a very big but indeed: Since nobody's being forced into reading what
I've plainly advertised to be nothing more auspicious than 'The Introductory
Remarks' of a lowly editoress—as you're so fond of replying to my critiques
on your fine print extravagance —'No goddam harm, no goddam foul.'
Besides which, aren't you at least the tiniest bit flattered by my
(albeit) lame attempts at emulating your neobaroque modus operandi?"
"You can't seriously think I would—"
"Attempts—let me hasten to add—whose very ineptitude
should enhance the average housewife's respect for the way you so
immaculately conceived and brought forth from that Godlike brow of yours
a bestselling novel whose earthshaking (and worldsaving!) ramifications are
nothing less than Biblical!"
"Enough of this a**kissing, humb*gg**y and editorial bulls**t!
In the words of our CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: 'Would you mind getting
to whatever the g*dd*m point is you've been trying (and failing so f**king
miserably) to make?'"
"Not at all, my FoulmouthedKnightinShiningArmor! Leaving aside
the fact you have yet to even begin addressing question
(b)149s5 I cut you off so rudely just now because—and please
forgive me if I'm mistaken, Dreamboat, but—every bone in this editoress'
body of mine told me you were on the verge of spilling those beans about
what happened to you-know-who on a certain midsummer's night in a particular
Haunted House—about which the reader must, of course, be kept
completely149s6 in the dark until she's willing, able and, above all, ready to
appreciate that supersublime state of expectational catharsis represented
by the E-, O- and Fwords in the quintessential fullness of their psychosexual,
sociocultural, sadomasochistic, EpistemoOntological and factofictitious
frontality."
"All right. For the sake of argument let's suppose I might
have been consider discuss our trade secrets in a conversation as public
as the one we are now having."
"Couldn't that problem be solved by simply deleting
the most readersensitive portions of this conversation—a course of action
not entirely unlike the one you just outlined? Besides which: What the hell's
so goddam apocalyptic about spilling a few—"
"Believe me, Dreamboat, the rule about doing that
at a time like this is absolutely unbreakable."
"If I choose to do so—as I fully intend
doing!—it wouldn't be the first of your 'unbreakable rules' I've
broken!"
"You can certainly say that again-"
"God knows; had I taken your advice from Day One there would
be precious little difference between what remained of my masterpiece and
all that nonliterary claptrap you take so much pride in having helped publish
in the name of 'underwriting' your One Woman National Endowment for the
Humanities' quest to discover America's next Great Novelist."
"Once again I admit it did take me a little more time than
it probably should have to recognize—and then to accept (without any
of my usual editorial reservations)—the truly transcendental nature
of your artistic liberties—"
"As I remember it you took a helluva lot more than a little
time to grasp that fundamental fact!"
"Perhaps I did, my Sweet. But the rule we're discussing now
is so sacrosanct even the most
iconoclasticG of bestselling novelists have bowed their rebellious heads obediently
before its exalted shrine."
"But we are not discussing just any bestselling novel!
And I am not just any goddamned novelist!"
"Of course you aren't, Liebchen! I didn't mean to
im—"
"After all we've been through you still can't get it through
that tightlyscrewedon head of yours that my authorship of Morons Awake!
was divinely ordained!"
"As was my discovery of you!" I answered, mustering every
ounce of pathos I could squeeze into my trembling voice without totally
emasculating him—or worse yet, arouse his scorn for what I knew he would
describe as "the alltoo typically goddam female way you have for displaying
those ruffled editorial feathers of yours! "Not to mention," I therefore
hastened to add, "the thankless role I subsequently played in helping shape
that massive (and utterly formless) manuscript you deposited on my desk into
a book that was both publishable and readable!"
"Please! A truce for Christ's sake!" he pleaded.
"Have I ever failed in the past to respect your white flags
with a charity that was anything less than Lincolnesque?"
"Well then, woman, what are you waiting for? Out with it! What
in God's name is this most inviolate of all your unbreakable novelwriting
rules? The 'suspense' is driving me quite mad!"
"You know perfectly well what it is. And, even if you didn't,
I'm not about to excise this part of the telephonic 'tet-a-tet' we're
having from the transcript of it I presume you're planning to make for
your Introductory Remarks?" [Whether we like it or not, ladies, the
author was—as he so frequently turned out to be—dead right. And,
after wracking my brain for several minutes to find some more artful way
out of the corner into which I'd been painted, in the end I was, as you can
see, obliged to take his "levelheaded" (but ethically flawed)
advice.149s7 ]
"I can't believe you
*********
***
****** merely to
***
******* **
********
************ me!"
he said.
"That's because *****
******
************
and I
*********
didn't!" I said
"************
and
************
the goddam
************
if you
************
!" he replied.
"In any event, the
********* housewife
must never be permitted to
************
,
******
—or to even
************
herself," I responded.
"Especially to
************
herself! As an expert in the Art of Foreplay I couldn't agree with you more
on that most pregnant of preclimactic points!"
"Speaking of which, the author of a
bestselling novel must never, never, never
************
his reader until she is ready to
********."
"Not even if she
******* her
********?"
"Certainly not! The
****** rule applies
most particularly in the event she is
******
into her
************
!"
"************
zz z
************-"
"************
!!!!"
"************
************
goddam
************
and
************
directly to question (b)?"
"**
*****, darling,
** ***
****
************
might be a ******
idea if you did just that."
WHEREUPON THE AUTHOR DID INDEED answer question (b). But, as usual, he did so with such a "wealth" of facts, figures, fine points, details, minutiae, arcane arguments, footnotes and digressionary devices (including, believe it or not, another of his infernal appendices!) that, in order to save time,149s8 I've taken the liberty of organizing it into the following abbreviated—and (somewhat ) more coherent—form:
AN OUTLINE
OF THE MAJOR POINTS MADE BY THE AUTHOR IN HIS ANSWER TO QUESTION (b)
I. ONLY SOMEONE WITH THE AUTHOR'S ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE OF MORONIA'S HISTORY, PEOPLE AND CULTURE (OR LACK THEREOF) COULD HOPE TO ESTABLISH THE CREDIBILITY NEEDED FOR CONVINCING THE AVERAGE AMERICAN HOUSE WIFE SUCH A MICROSTATE ACTUALLY OCCUPIES A LEGITIMATE PLACE—NO MATTER HOW MINISCULE—ON THE MAP OF EUROPE.
A. What more convincing proof could their possibly be of the author's unique qualifications in this regard than his 16 volume History of the Morons?B. Or, for that matter, his having practiced the Art of Foreplay on the entire female population of Moronia (more than once!) during the 50 years he spent "laboriously perfecting his amatory techniques on these most difficult of all women to gratify?"
C. In addition to which, during his halfcentury tenure as the American ambassador, he was privy not only to the innermost machinations of Moronia's sociopolitical ethos; but to those of the individual Moronic psyche as well.D. Most significantly, however: Had it not been for the author's "intimate acquaintanceship"149s9 with Jedgar Ballbraker, Chief of Moronia's FIB the truth about the Klutz Affair would doubtlessly have remained buried forever in the bureaucratic bowels of the FIB's supersecret "Evidence Vault."
II. GIVEN THE ELABORATE SECURITY PRECAUTIONS DEVISED BY THE INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY "TO PREVENT THE LID BEING BLOWN OFF THE KLUTZ AFFAIR," DOING JUST THAT DEMANDED NOT ONLY A MAN WITH A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY149s10 BUT ONE WHO WAS ALSO THOROUGHLY SCHOOLED IN THE THEORY & PRACTICE OF MODERN ESPIONAGE.
A. The author's bona fides as a Cold Warrior with total recall who survived more than 4 decades of East/West intrigue and counterintrigue need no further embellishing.149s11B. On the other hand we have the serious questions raised about the reliability of Salinger's memory by that selfincriminating sentence appearing in "Seymour, an Introduction."149s12
1. As for the precise nature of Salinger's clandestine literary activities, like so many other frustrated (and aging) Catcher- and Glass Sagajunkies we can only shrug our shoulders and/or scratch our heads.
2. All things considered, however, even the most fanatical Salingerite would concede that: As the archetypal New Yorker shortstoryist he was, is and always will be: temperamentallyspeaking old J. D. could never bring himself within a tenfootpole's length of writing any book that might be "hailed" as "the Great Moronic149s13 Novel."
C. Alternatively, the record is indisputably clear149s14 that: Since throughout the period 1940-1990 he was the American ambassador to Moronia, the author was uniquely qualified to chronicle the earthshaking, historymaking and civilizationsaving events which transpired in that seemingly most Godforsaken of all the world's diplomatic, social and cultural corners.
III. UNLESS J. D. SALINGER WAS IN TWO PLACES AT THE SAME TIME DURING THE PAST 30 YEARS HE COULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN Morons Awake!
A. Despite the lack of hard evidence, from what little we do know of Salinger's whereabouts it's reasonable to assume that, true to his word,149s15 he has remained happily—if not deliriously—isolated from the world in his Cornish, New Hampshire hermitage since 1952.
IV. CONCLUSION. FOR THE REASONS ADVANCED HERETOFORE, THE CORRECT ANSWER TO "QUESTION (B)" IS: THE BOOK THAT WILL REVERSE THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION AND TURN AMERICA INTO A SOCIOCULTURAL UTOPIA COULD ONLY BE WRITTEN BY A 70YEAROLD EXDIPLOMAT (TO AN EXCEEDINGLY INSIGNIFICANT COUNTRY), RELIGIOUS CRACKPOT, DYEDINTHEWOOL MISOGYNIST, PHILOSOPHICAL FRUITCAKE, NEOFASCIST WINDBAG, PSEUDO SCHOLAR, SEXUAL PSYCHOPATH, FOREPLAYMEISTER & RANKEST KIND OF NOVELISTIC AMATEUR.149s16
Intro Part 11 Return to Index
Subfootnotes
149s1 Who, in 1892, signed the Royal Edict making a minimum of two years' formal education compulsory for all pubescent Morons.
149s2 As of 1994 there was a Grand Total of 13 such "heroes."
149s3 It was sacked and burned during the antiHighbrow riots of 1848.
149s4 Except for Americans, of course.
149s5 For those who may have forgotten question (b) it reads as follows:" How could a 70yearold exdiplomat (to an exceedingly insignificant country), religious crackpot, dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, neofascist windbag, pseudoscholar, philosophical fruitcake, sexual psychopath, Foreplaymeister and rankest kind of novelistic amateur manage to do what J. D. Salinger (or any of the planet's other Great White Literary Hopes, including Gore Vidal, Gunther Grass, Pauline Reage, John Updike, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Norman Mailer, and Jorge Luis Borges) has failed so miserably to do, namely; write the one book that will not only reverse the decline of Western Civilization but turn the United States of America into a sociocultural utopia?
149s6 Or as much as any novelist humanly can.
149s7 Since the issue has been raised, dear reader, let me try to compensate for the author's less than ethical conduct by providing those of you whose own "female feathers" have been rufßed as a result of being so rudely excluded from reading the 'juiciest' morsels of the following dialogue with at least a discreet hint or two about that "unbreakable rule" the author and I were discussing on a basis which, for your own welfare (and certain artistic reasons), must, alas, remain strictly confidential. Before doing so, however, I feel obligated to issue these words of warning: While by now many of you have no doubt been sufficiently schooled in such things to unravel the "unbreakable rule" mystery—you should only proceed beyond this point if you are also capable of coping with what could be the profoundly dire psychological consequences of your newly acquired perspicacity!G
Well then, now that you've been duly cautioned,
let us proceed. In professional publishing house (and some academic) parlance
the Unbreakable Rule For Writing A Bestselling Novel is known variously as:
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT; THE CARDINAL PRINCIPLE; THE PRECEPT OF PRECEPTS; THE
LAW ABOVE ALL OTHER LAWS; THE SECRET OF SUCCESS; THE GOLDEN APHORISM; THE
SINE QUA NON and, most specifically for our purposes-The
S************ FACTOR.
And, before you leap to any conclusions—nothing
should be inferred from the length of those red redaction stars! But,
for the sake of avoiding what could turn into a wild goose chase, the following
words can be eliminated from this little guessing game of ours: Sex, Sleaze,
Symbolism, Simpleton, Sagacity, Sugarcoating, Schadenfreude (sadistic pleasure),
Saccharine, Salome, Sphinx, Saprophytic, Somnambulistic, Spice, Satanic,
Satyriasis, Scandal, Stallion, Serpentine, Screw (as in "s
* * * w you!")
Symphonic, Scandinavian, Seduction, Screed, Sapphic, Seminal, Scam, Sociopathic,
Spinster, Shellgame, S *
* t, Sophistry, Subjugation, Strumpet, Slime, Sucker
(as in "there's one born every minute"), Salacious, Swizzle, Squaw, Slide
(as in "down a slippery slope"), Snafße, Socio-cultural (all hyphenated
words can be ruled out), Soporific, Snooze, Souffle, Semitic, Sperm, Spunk,
Stupor, Smut, Superficiality, Splendacious, and Swindle.
Beyond that, I'm afraid, all I can tell you is this: The word
you are looking for describes that somewhat masochistic state of mind into
which a woman occasionally allows herself to be seduced by the smoothtalking
of a tall, dark (probably Jewish) & handsome stranger. Or when she turns
to the first page of a book about which she has been repeatedly admonished
that: "By reading it from cover to cover the average housewife runs the very
real risk of undergoing a metamorphosis no less traumatic (and irreversible)
than that described by Franz Kafka in his cautionary tale about the social
consequences of overcultivating one's intellect."
As for those "beans" I stopped the author from prematurely spilling;
trust me, dear reader: In the fullness of time you will learn everything
(and/or perhaps more than) you want and need to learn about "what happened
to [that] you-know-who on a certain midsummer's night in a particular Haunted
House." Since there seems to be no point in beating around the bush, the
name of that rule is
************."
149s8 Incredible as it must seem, dear reader, we are still mired in that footnote which began several pages ago with—"EDITORESS: What about them? Once again, doesn't Salinger himself confess his efforts at immortalizing Seymour fail miserably to raise the hagiography of his suicided sibling 'to the level of being a halfway decent short story!'"
149s9 To his credit (and my not unpleasant surprise!) the author went into considerable detail regarding his "disgusting" relationship with Ballbraker—that notorious Orgiemeister, transsexual, crossdresser, pornofreak, sadomasochist and Moronia's selfproclaimed "Guardian of Domestic Tranquillity and Protector of Moronia's Faith in the Bliss of Ignorance." A "love/HATE affair" he was (he claims) ordered to cultivate by the State Department "for the most compelling of America's national security reasons." And indeed, the information obtained from Jedgar Ballbraker through this "perverted sexual charade" played a significant role in the Free World's winning of the Cold War.
149s10 According to the author: Even if it had been possible for him to escape from Moronia with some physical evidence concerning the Klutz Affair, had he been caught with it redhanded any hopes for saving his skin (and that of Western Civilization via his putatived writing of Morons Awake!) by "playing dumb" would have ended with a "notsoneat bullet hole in the back of his skull."
149s11 Although it should be mentioned that, throughout the period 1945-1990, Moronville occupied the geographic and, even more importantly, the diplomatic, "dead center" of the cloak&dagger drama which played itself out at that single "soft spot" (the border between Moronia and Country 'C') in the Iron Curtain where the spies of both sides could (for reasons they deemed mutually advantageous) travel freely between their respective "Evil Empires."
149s12 The one stating: "If I'm called upon merely to describe Seymour, any Seymour, I get a vividtype picture, all right, but in it he appears before me simultaneously at the ages of, approximately, eight, eighteen and twentyeight, with a full head of hair and getting very bald, wearing summer camper's redstriped shorts and wearing a creased suntan shirt with buck-sergeant stripes, sitting in padmasana and sitting in the balcony at the R.K.O. 86th Street." [emphasis added by Salinger—J. P.] Admittedly; isolating those two (and a half) italicized words in a story containing over 35,000 of them could seem like nitpicking. But while Buddy Glass' only slightly less than perfect memory is adequate for introducing a sandlot savior like his older brother, Seymour, it falls woefully short of the absolute infallibility needed for heralding the arrival on the world scene of an authentic Major League Massiah such as the late, great Jack F. Klutz. "Not that," the author is quick to add, "my rather 'brutal' analysis implies any criticism of Salinger—or any other Great American Novelist for that matter. As a Born Again Klutzian —and a first time novelist myself—I've nothing but the most profound admiration for anyone who can rise to what is such a heroic occasion."
149s13 This
notwithstanding what some Salinger scholars have recently described
as "his singularly suspicious overusage of the epithet 'moron' in The
Catcher In The Rye." As a general rule, Holden Caulfield's habit of calling
all his antagonists "morons" can be put under the heading of what
was normal preppy parlance for the postWWII period—which the following
examples illustrate: "I'm a moron." [p.14]; "I told him he didn't even care
if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn't
care was because he was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called
him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron." [p.44]; "You
don't even know if her first name is Jane or Jean, ya goddam moron!" [p.45];
"Get your dirty stinking moron knees off my chest...You're a dirty stupid
sonuvabitch of a moron," I told him. 'That's just the trouble with all you
morons. You never want to discuss anything.' That's the way you can always
tell a moron. They never want to discuss anything intelligent." [p.52]; "I
didn't know then that the goddam hotel was full of perverts and morons."
[p.61]; "...they started giggling like morons...they were three real
morons."[p.70]; "She was really a moron." [p.71]; "They were exactly the
same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't
funny."[p.84]; "'You're a dirty moron,' I said. 'You're a stupid chiseling
moron...'"[p.103]
If there is an "exception" to the rule
of notallthatmalicious schoolboy putdowns it would be, arguably, that
rather poignant moment when—on page 52—Holden delivers his embittered
"Farewell Address" to Pencey Prep in these decidedly nonWashingtonian
terms: "I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back,
the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, 'Sleep
tight, ya morons!'" [Italics added by me—J. P.] No doubt
there will be those DLitt. candidates who seize upon this flimsiest of threads
and weave it into the "tapestry" of a thesis depicting Holden
Caulfield—reincarnated as Jack F. Klutz—returning to the scholastic
scene of his defamatory crimes and atoning for them with the combination
cri de coeur and Call To Revolutionary Arms: "Morons Awake!"
The question becomes, I suppose, just how much profundity can
one read into that (deceptively?) simple phrase—"Sleep tight, ya
morons!"—? Is it within the realm of possibility Salinger intend it
to be the precursor for his eventual sequel to The Catcher In The
Rye? But even if we put the most messianic spin on Holden's picture of
himself as a CatcherOfChildrenWhoAreAboutToFallOffACliff it 's difficult
to translate such a juvenile fantasy into the stuff from which a truly monumental
figure like Jack F. Klutz is made. No. If someone is going to save 250 million
Americans from sleepwalking their collective way over the edge of a sociocultural
cliff it will take more than a pimplefaced dreamer like Holden Caulfield
(or Seymour Glass) to do it!
149s14 Except to the State Department and every other agency of the United States Government involved in the global conspiracy to prevent the publication of Morons Awake! and/or destroy/assassinate its author's credibility/character—if not the author himself!
149s15 Quoted in a Time Magazine (15 September 1961) article, Salinger says he needs this isolation to keep his creativity intact; that he must not be interrupted "during [his] working years." And while he is seldom, if ever, seen "chewing the fat" with the local teenagers in Nap's Lunch or "researching" at the nearby Dartmouth library—as he was on a somewhat regular (for him) basis 20 years ago—the Cornish Municipal archives indicate he still holds the "official" title of Town Hargreave; and as such is, at least technically, responsible for "rounding up any and all of the township's stray pigs." For a man who prides himself on his "sense of civic responsibility" it's unlikely Salinger would abandon such a vital post without the decency of tendering a formal resignation.
149s16 This (you will be happy to learn) ends the Main footnote which began God knows how many pages ago!
Glossary
exegesis noun [NL, fr. Gk exegesis, fr. exegeisthai to explain, interpret, fr. ex- + hegeisthai to lead ¦ more at SEEK](1619) : EXPOSITION, EXPLANATION; esp : an explanation or critical interpretation of a text
iconoclast noun [ML iconoclastes, fr. MGk eikonoklastes, lit., image destroyer, fr. Gk eikono- + klan to break ¦ more at CLAST](1641) 1 : one who destroys religious images or opposes their veneration 2 : one who attacks settled beliefs or institutions ¦ iconoclastic adj
perspicacious adj [L perspicac-, perspicax, fr. perspicere](1640) : of acute mental vision or discernment : KEEN syn see SHREWD ¦ perspicacity n