The write stuff
Taki
Is the opening sentence of a book, especially a novel, the most consequential, or is it just dressing for the feast to come? I’d say the former judging from A Tale of Two Cities, Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and my favourite, The Death of Manolete, by Barnaby Conrad. ‘In August, 1947, in Linares, Spain, a multimillionaire and a bull killed each other and plunged a nation into mourning.’ But here’s one that’s bound to be the greatest of them all, Tan Lines, to be published by St Martin’s Press on 8 July: ‘There are 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris, and this son of a bitch couldn’t find any of them.’ Nabokov, eat your heart out. The intellectual behemoth who wrote these immortal opening words is one J.J. Salem, perhaps unknown among the literati, but a giant to countless lonely onanists whose bedside tables are festooned with his works. My God, the culture is improving by the minute. This is old hat, but did you know that The Catcher in the Rye was turned down by Harcourt Brace, the publishing house that solicited it, because editors thought the writing show-offy and were unsure whether Holden was a nutcase or not.
Mind you, don’t confuse J.J. Salem with J.D. Salinger, although, education being what it is nowadays, I wouldn’t be surprised if some did. Little, Brown finally took a chance on Catcher and it was published in July 1951, and has sold more than 65 million copies so far. If I had to choose one book that I would have given my soul to have written it would have to be Catcher. I have yet to meet a kid who did not respond to it, starting with my own. The greatest compliment I ever received was when I was introduced to the headmaster of Blair Academy by an older boy — a friend of my family who later committed suicide — as Holden Caulfield. All the young recognise themselves in Holden’s character because Holden knew what they know, which is that most successful people are phonies and success itself is a sham. Oh, yes, and there’s something else. Holden sounds like a teenager but doesn’t think like one. His thought process is that of an adult, masked by adolescent talk. Holden will be 57 years old this summer, and is getting stronger by the minute. And if any of you are getting tired of him, there’s always J.J. Salem.
American college professors have always insisted that Moby-Dick was the greatest single work produced by an American author in the 19th century. Perhaps, but Melville never did the trick for me. I always understood it to be an adventure story with a metaphysical soul. It is both humorous and serious, reflecting American tendencies to achieve material success, and their preoccupation with what’s good and what’s evil. The work exposes exploitation, greed and brutality, but also heroism and fair play. In other words, like all great books, MobyDick has to be understood in its complexities. Still, I would have preferred a hundred times to have written Tender Is the Night, or The Great Gatsby.
Every time there’s a heat wave in New York and I go by the Plaza Hotel I think of Daisy and her careless rich friends trying to have fun in the city, while out on the island a mechanic is about to get sucked into a maelstrom and murder an innocent man. Or whenever I sail by the Hotel du Cap, which is often, although I won’t set foot in it because of disgusting new rich slobs from the old Soviet Union, I think of poor Dick Diver, destroyed by his wife’s money and his own sybaritic nature, and wish I had written the book. Although publishers have reversed the first two chapters of Tender I liked it the way I first read it, in study hall under my desk. ‘I fell in love today. . . ’ says Rosemary to her mother, and she means with Dick Diver, a married man. I read it in 1952, aged 15, having just returned from the French Riviera where I had gone with my parents. A master caught me reading instead of doing my maths, and demanded to see ‘the dirty book’. ‘Keep reading it,’ he told me, and to hell with maths.
I actually went and gave a reading from my book Princes, Playboys and High-Class Tarts back in 1983, in Los Angeles, in the same bookstore where Fitzgerald had asked for one of his books and the salesman told him they were out of print. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Poor old Scott never bothered to answer. Last but not least by far we have Papa. The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast are my two bibles. Of all the films made from his short stories and novels, Hemingway said, ‘The only two I could sit through were The Killers and To Have and Have Not — I guess Ava Gardner and Lauren Bacall had a lot to do with it.’ Alas, he also said, ‘A book you talk about is a book you don’t write.’ Better yet, ‘When a man has the ability to write and the desire to write, no critic can damage his work if it is good, or save it if it is bad.’ So there you have it. If I was given the choice of having written Catcher, Gatsby, Tender, Sun and Feast or to have been Napoleon or even Alexander, I’d choose the former, but one thing is for sure. I would rather not have existed than have written the book to be published next 8 July by St Martin’s.
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