This has been a rough year for me where losing favorite writers is concerned, which is not to say that I knew any of them personally, but as any devoted reader knows, it's easy to feel attached to a writer after awhile simply by repeated close readings of his work. The pain of these losses is worse, however, when these deaths are ignored by the press, or overshadowed by the death of someone even more famous at around the same time, and whom the press considers more important and more interesting to cover.
So, first came Louis Auchincloss on January 26, 2010. Although he is a novelist, I have read only his short stories, which are well-crafted works of art and genius. His stories remind me of Woody Allen's New York movies in setting and the social class of his characters, and the loneliness and disillusionment epitomized by the stories and novels of Richard Yates. I confess to having discovered Auchincloss in an ignominious way: on a car trip to USF to do some holistic scoring for the state some years ago, I stopped as I often did at the Goodwill store in Brandon, FL just outside Tampa where I picked up a hardcover, still plastic slip-covered, of "The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss" that had been withdrawn from the Tampa-Hillsborough County Library. I began reading the stories that very night in my hotel room, transfixed. Since then I've seen many of these hardcovers at booksales and thrift stores, so I guess they were remaindered from stores and pulled from library circulation in other places too. Well, in fairness to the Times, it did run a nice obituary about Auchincloss, but that seemed to be the end of it. Unless I missed it, one of those laurel-wreathed "Appreciations" at the bottom of the editorial page was not written about him, nor did I see articles in the arts section as sometimes appear following the death of a writer.
Say, like--J. D. Salinger, also who died on January 27, 2010, the day after Auchincloss. You can see where this is going. Everybody knows Salinger and has read "Catcher" as it is abbreviatedly called now, and practically everyone has read "Franny and Zoey" (when my son was about 2, we met a set of twins at the park one day, named Franny and Zoey--these are probably not the only ones, nor Seymours for that matter) and "Seymour, An Introduction," "Nine Stories," and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter." And he'd been a recluse and so on, so the press went absolutely nuts over him, giving Auchincloss, who might have on a slow news day possibly reached the attention of a few readers not familar with his work, no chance at all.
The same thing happened with poor Howard Zinn who YES also died on January 27, 2010. Unlike with Auchincloss, though, who did get a nice obit with a picture and lots of detailed biography from the Times, I frantically searched the papers for days for Zinn's obituary. Finally, I phoned the NYT, and the woman who took my call said that the obit had been published in the Metro section, not the front section. "The METRO section?" I howled. Her reason was that he was born in New York. Yes, I said, but he spent his life in and around Cambridge, MA and was a national and international figure. He wasn't only a local. Well, she directed me to the online article, but it wasn't the same and I was very angry about this because I knew that it was all because the paper was in an absolute froth over Salinger and simply could not be bothered with poor old leftist Howard Zinn, despite a few mentions later, which did not make up in any way for the dearth of attention right after his death.
Which leaves us this week with Harvey Pekar. He died on July 12, 2010, and George Steinbrenner the next day, the 13th. Pekar got some press because he'd been on TV before ("Letterman") and had a movie made about him, and of course was a writer of comics, much more accessible to people than the the sometimes 40- page long stories of a writer like Auchincloss. But even Pekar lacked a fighting chance despite these factors against a sports figure like Steinbrenner. It doesn't matter what someone writes in America; sports will trump writing every time. I'm sure that Steinbrenner was important, but it just seems that Pekar's death is being overshadowed by Steinbrenner's, thereby preventing people from properly mourning, remembering, and perhaps even discovering him (beyond the movie, that is).
Another writer this year (April 25, 2010) whose death really stung was that of Alan Sillitoe, the UK's quintessential angry young man whose story of a borstal boy "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" captured a political mood and a social restlessness as well as any literary work ever has. No larger death overshadowed his, and he was recognized in the Times with a nice obituary, but beyond that, I carried the sadness alone. And that's been the hardest part of all of this, in a way. To go to work, at a job where people supposedly are well read, and hear not a peep from anyone about Sillitoe, or Auchincloss, or Zinn. There's no sense of community to commiserate with or reminisce with either about these authors. There's nothing more depressing than telling someone you care about that one of your favorite writers died that day and hearing in response, "Who? Never heard of him."
So silently I recall the ways that these writers have spoken to me, and the nights I've spent reading their work, and the fact that their books are in easy reach, not in a far off room, and that I can put my hands on them right away, and that they are writers whose work I have not only read, but re-read, as I do now, after each death. I neatly scissor out each obituary, even (sigh) Salinger's, fold it up, and tuck it into the pages of one of that author's magnificent books, so that at least I will remember, even if no one else in my Delray world will.
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