What claustrophobe, I ask you, would have shown so cramped a mercy as he did when it was finally uncovered that his sons floated close to their bedding of a frigid night, and emptied themselves (shyly at first, though later in more expressive torrents) against what breach had formed, almost conveniently, between the upper and lower sashes of a chattering window in their chamber, so as to cause (or by these efforts contribute to) a frozen yellow seepage that began well within the confines of the capsule itself and proceeded, seeking gravity and some semblance of atmosphere, down the outer face of the bottom pane and along a sloping sheet of metal miles below (or was it inches? we could not tell), at whose far end it terminated, on your colder orbits anyway, in a stalactite depending from, and drawing special attention to, a stopped if formerly earthbound gutter?
What claustrophobe, or besides that what agoraphobe (what flasher, i.e., what slinker? what promoter of his children? what tucker away of them? what facilitator, by word, of their passage through this void? what destroyer, by wire, of any hope they may have had not to fear its wide expanse?), mindful that our little rock-candy formulation might be spotted easily from the road below and denounced for the shamelessness of its artistry, with perhaps some few points tacked on for the veracity of the statement being made (or was it the statement that would call down the censure, on account of a gaucherie, with some ground given grudgingly on the more delicate matter of form? one could never be sure), would not then have whaled on his sons for such an offense, and held them in suspicion ever after, and laid upon them a penance more severe than the quiet moonlight removal, by stick and stove-boiled water, of what sculpture their penises had planned out (on the theme of mortality and immediate need), and by a personal warmth carved into, across a rusted stretch of porchtop their father would in time demand rent from his sight and appraisal altogether?
There persists a desire
If he was a claustrophobe, then, I cannot show it to my satisfaction, nor I expect to anyone else’s, since the replays here will tend to confuse. His one recorded text, entitled “The Suicide of Salinger’s Seymour Glass,” and afforded four whole pages in the aforementioned Studies in Short Fiction (summer 1972; Newberry College; Newberry, South Carolina), strikes me as a little like that: it counts itself bold where it has been only careful; it holds itself safe on innovation’s bag where it has been called out paragraphs ago, by contact with any number of missed opportunities, such as when my father came up short in this inning yet awarded himself a remarkable run:
All that is left to explain is the cause of Seymour’s suicide, and that explanation, I believe, is evident. The nearly conscious desires expressed in his bananafish story and in his erotic pretense with the girl are made fully conscious to him by Sybil’s innocent responses to his story and to the kiss on her foot. The only solution for Buddy’s saint is suicide.
The first sentence there is a perfunctory swing whose back half is convinced that it has reached base easily, I suppose on an error. The next is so steeped in a dead Viennese’s weak tea, or deprived of his cocaine, as to be judged no better than an understimulated attempt to steal second. (That high-school hop from “nearly conscious” to “fully conscious,” and of course the tossing off of “erotic pretense” and “kiss on her foot,” could not help but stay even the swiftest runner.) (So why do I pursue this? Under whose aegis? Chasing what result? My father did not follow, nor that I know of know the first thing about, baseball, and so the fun that it is by far the least claustrophobic of our national sports can earn me next to nothing here, whereas his already established interest in basketball, America’s purer pastime and a much more intimate undertaking, might at a minimum allow me to ask how closely he ever observed that game’s playing, and how consciously he ever considered its less crickety metaphor to hug our more crickety predicament. Perhaps I should have gone instead, as he surely would have, with a literary analogy, or a theft: Would not the time-honored, or — forged (or is it really only the imitated?), Odyssey have gone better in this spot? Better even than the more Iliadic to-and-fro of basketball? Or of that girded and chaotic scrum we call football, which I never once watched him watch? Would it not have smacked the ear sounder, this round and salty sea tale, than ever could the squared-off, corn-syrup argument of baseball?) That last sentence there is your classic bunt: well executed, I agree, but not subtle enough to promote a player already thrown out at first all the way to third, let alone to bring him triumphantly (or was it really only vengefully?) home.
There persists a desire in children, however damaged (the children or the desire), for their parents to be, in some inevitable way, right. I cannot with much probity pooh-pooh that hope, having once been a child myself, nor can I overlook now, out of childish sentiment, the blur in its pus-speckled mirror: that there persists in adults a desire, however damaged (the desire or the adults), for their children to be, in some inevitable way, wrong. My own close shave with American parents has led me to conclude that these images might be interchangeable, insofar as they come up against (if from different angles, and at different times) the same impassable barrier across what still (faint flashes!) exists of my moral-aesthetic continuum. I too find it repulsive to blame a parent in and by our literature for any crime perpetrated against a young and defenseless (or was it really only a memorable?) me, but I find it equally repulsive to pardon a parent in and by that same literature, comprising as it can but impressions of thoughts about memories of thoughts about memories of events I may not have remembered all that well to begin with, or thought about with any great clarity since.
With that baseball foolery, for example (let’s play two!), I was probably only groping at, or toward, as I completed the loop metaphorically but left metaphysical matters caught in a rundown between second and third, untrustworthy thoughts about untrustworthy remembrances of untrustworthy objects being hurled at my unmetaphorical (at the time) and (at the same time) unmetaphysical head like nature’s outré chin music. That is, my father would, on occasion, fell a tree whose chunks were not so easily split as were pine’s into pieces small enough for the stove’s little strike zone to admit, which decision would see us out swinging exhaustedly in the yard for hours on end, using his maul to drive iron wedges into the petrified wood until it spread open like a schoolgirl beneath the bleachers at the bottom of the seventh (“Which wedge did it? Really? I thought sure you’d put that in the wrong crack”), or else seized up and blew one of these intrusions past our iced and idiot skulls at an audible velocity, in what I took at the time to be a willful attempt by God, or by the log, but surely not by our own manager, to brain us.