Hocking Me a Chinik

"Autumn Rhythm" by Jackson Pollock (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A Hearn Fund, l957)

Some people with artistic aspirations get things ass backwards. They believe the racquet makes the player or the bottle makes the wine. Their as if attitude towards existence can lead to the existential crisis in which one wakes up one day as if they were drowning, unable to stay afloat and feeling as if their whole life were a sham, their self-conception like that of Humpty Dumpty, in short feeling as if they inhabited a false self. Norman Mailer famously stabbed his second wife Adele Morales and there are writers who think that maybe if they stabbed their wives they will magically attain fame—forgetting of course that Mailer had earned plaudits for his work in spite of the stabbing, just like the appreciation of the work of V.S. Naipaul came in spite of the brutal and sadistic treatment of his mistress that was documented in Patrick French’s biography ("Misogyny, mistresses sadism: why Noble prize winning author VS Naipaul is at the center of the most vicious literary war of the decade," Daily Mail, 1/30/09. Those who might choose to be recluses should be reminded that Salinger moved up to Cornish, New Hampshire, eschewing the New York literary world after he was famous—and not before he'd published anything. Yes Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, yes Mark Rothko committed suicide, but the self-destruction came in the wake of careers in which they were enormously productive. Just getting drunk all the time does not lead to creativity. Post hoc does not necessarily mean propter hoc. One thing does not necessarily come from the other, even though it may be marginally associated with it and that's not to discountenance the subliminally important role the Orphic impulse whereby destruction leads to creation (Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to talk about capitalist innovation) may play in creativity. So before you stab your wife, or run off to hide in a cave or drop some acid, you might be best advised to write your great novels or paint your magnum oeuvre. Then leave it for posterity to decide whether or not you're were having an out of body experience.

It's a Wise Child

Just before the Fourth of July weekend, the Times ran a short piece about Grigory Perelman. Grigory, otherwise known as Grisha, is the mathematics wiz— though wiz does little justice to his level of abstract genius—who proved the Poincaré conjecture, which “hypothesizes that any three-dimensional space without holes is essentially a sphere” (“A Math Problem Solver Declines a $1 Million Dollar Prize,” NYT, 7/1/10). The story was tucked away at the bottom of a page in the middle of the paper, and went on to describe how Perelman had turned down the million-dollar prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, MA. Perelman had previously turned down one of math’s most coveted awards, the Fields Medal, which if you remember makes a brief appearance in Good Will Hunting. The Times went on to describe the whole fiasco around the Fields Medal: how Perelman presented his proof in 2003, and how “after a brief barnstorming tour in the United States, during which he refused interviews, Dr. Perelman returned to Russia, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces.” Apparently it was too much for Perelman who, the Times reported, moved in with his mother and left his position at the Steklov Mathematical Institute. Well, what is there to say? All of this is somehow reminiscent of that famous clan of prodigies, the Glass family, whose tragic members have their brief day in the sun on a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child.” (Naturally, The Royal Tenenbaums owe their existence to the Glasses.)  Of course, the ultimate reclusive genius is J.D. Salinger, who left New York literary society to live a reclusive existence in Cornish, New Hampshire, just as his Russian counterpart would walk out of the spotlight, off the stage of life, many years later. 

De Daumier-Smith's Long Blue Period

Jerry Fletcher, the character played by Mel Gibson in Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory (l997), fills his Greenwich Village apartment with copies of Catcher in the Rye. Of course, the twist lies in the fact that Fletcher, who was modeled to some extent on Mark David Chapman—John Lennon’s killer, who carried a copy of Catcher at the time of the killing and later said the book would explain his actions—is indeed the victim of a conspiracy involving the kind of mind control reminiscent of another classic, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962). (Could the youthful Frank Sinatra, who starred opposite Angela Landsbury in that film, have played Holden Caulfield in the movie version of Catcher that will never be?)

    

Though Jerry Fletcher may have turned out not to be truly paranoid, paranoia is certainly part of the epitaph of the author he adored. In a way, Fletcher is a perfect metaphor for J.D Salinger’s enormous following. Fletcher has been damaged by events he no longer remembers, and so he is striking out blindly, manufacturing explanations for a world that makes no sense to him. Yet he finds solace in a literary character. The problems affecting Fletcher are far greater than anything that Holden Caulfield faced, but the same cannot be said about Caulfield’s creator, who might have been, for all his brilliance, one of the great miser’s of all time.

   

Authors copyright their inner lives. However, Salinger behaved as if someone was trying to steal his, slapping a “Top Secret” label on his creatiive life and ceasing to publish at all after 1965. If writing is ultimately about giving, and not just the kind of narcissism that led Salinger to spend the last 45 years of his life writing only for himself, then Salinger didn’t have a philanthropic bone in his body. “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is one of the Nine Stories Salinger published in 1953.  Speaking of Daumier, the nineteenth-century French caricaturist might have been the perfect artist to capture this egregious instance of creative hoarding.