This was all part of his postmodern bent that I sensed but couldn’t articulate at the time and was thus unable to identify as part of my attraction to him: Whereas other professors snootily guarded their dissertation-ordained portion of the Western Canon (caps theirs), Dr. Saltzman welcomed all comers: Henry IV, or should I say 1HenryIV, The Canterbury Tales, “A&P,” I Spy, “Peanuts,” The Sound and the Fury, To the Lighthouse, and whatever WGN showed after the latest Cubs loss—these were all equal, or at least they were all equal insofar as their ability to provide raw material was the same. And that, for him, is what it all was: Raw material for his own writing.
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| Dr. Saltzman before eating his dinner while standing up? |
He confesses as much in “Why I Don’t Write Best Sellers,” an essay that I knew I knew before I read a single word because he riffed on the theme often enough in class. In class, he would say, “Faulkner tried to write a potboiler, and he ended up writing Sanctuary,” a point that was lost on me because, not having read Sanctuary, I didn’t know if it was good or bad. (For the record, I have since read it, and I still don’t know.) In the essay, Saltzman refreshingly discusses the relatively recent shift in the English classroom away from primary texts and in favor of this ephemeral thing called “theory.” He’s kinder about the matter than John Goodman’s character is in David Simon’s Treme, who laments that all English majors want to do anymore is study themselves, but there is, nonetheless, an undeniable sense of loss in Saltzman’s ruminations. He notes that 25 years ago “not all of us freshly minted Ph.D.’s had as yet been outplaced by theorists, nor had we as yet detected their smoke on the horizon. We persisted in believing that there were still jobs available for honest sentences to do and, a savagely constricted job market to the contrary, that there remained tenurable occupation for their makers….Some of us even dared to imagine that our own language, as though enriched by context, occasionally lived up to the level set by the language that set us analyzing.”
The “us” in that last sentence should not be overlooked.
In some ways, the movement away from the deep read that characterized his previous work was the best thing that could have happened to him, for, as he knew—and as those humbled professors at the cocktail party knew—he could hold his own with the Lukacses and the Bakhtins and the Foucaults if he wanted to. He just didn’t want to. And, as he writes, even if he did want to, “I knew myself to be recidivist at the core. While the ostensibly reformed alcoholic keeps a flask beneath his mattress and gin-filed aspirin bottles tucked back in his sock drawer, I would secretly imbibe from a stash of smoothly intoxicating sentences. I might rinse with Ricouer or gnash Derrida like anise seeds to cover my breath. But by my wistful expression and my wobble, you’d know what contraband I’d been sneaking.”
As of this writing, Solve for X is number 2,746,682 on Amazon’s list of bestselling books.
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| I still don't know if this is any good. The cover, however, I'm pretty sure about. |
After graduation, I helped start a readers group that included former and current students and a few select members of the faculty. Dr. Saltzman was one such member. We would give each other assignments—find a piece of prose that feels especially poetic or a passage from a 19th century novel of which you are especially fond—and we’d meet in restaurants or at people’s houses or at bookstores and snack and drink and talk about literature with a capital “L,” which I still believed in at the time, but mostly for me anyway it was a way to continue the classroom experience after the diploma was in hand. I don’t know how much I actually liked college and how much I just clung to it because I didn’t know what else to do.
Saltzman was a gracious member of the group. He and Joy were an open secret by that point. She was part of the group too, and I liked seeing the two of them interact as partners rather than as colleagues. They would arrive and leave together, pay for their part of the tab with one bill. At the end of the night, he would help her into her coat. One time, we were leaving Books-a-Million after one of our meetings. Books-a-Million is a discount, warehouse-type bookstore in Joplin that includes a Starbucks rip-off inside and always smacked of For All Bible to me, but maybe that just comes with the territory. In any case, it was Leu, me, Dr. Saltzman, and Joy. We were walking to our cars. I said, “Have a good night, Dr. Saltzman.” He said, “Kirby, you’ve graduated. We’re not in class anymore. You don’t have to call me ‘Doctor.’ ‘Professor’ will do just fine.”
*****
Is it heretical to say that somewhere in the 2,700,000’s is probably where Solve for X belongs? After all, Amazon’s list of bestsellers measures a readership that can hardly be described as discerning. Four of the top 10 bestselling books help their readers either gain money or lose weight, and the top spot is occupied by a story about a boy who travels to heaven and returns to share what he has learned. Yes, he travels to that heaven. As the book’s summary says, “[T]he disarmingly simple message is heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and be ready, there is a coming last battle.”
I imagine Dr. Saltzman’s reaction to someone who tried to pit his work against these chart-toppers would be something along the same lines as what the guitarist for REM said when a reporter compared his band’s waning sales with those of Britney Spears, who, at the time, was looking down at the rest of the pop world from her perch, panties be damned: “Whatever she has, we don’t,” the guitarist quipped.
Come on, I can hear Saltzman pleading, don’t put me in the same ring with that. It’s not even a fair fight. In “Bestsellers,” he aligns himself with Borges, who claimed that he wrote “perhaps for a few personal friends.” Saltzman notes, “I’m with him, grudgingly, in that it ends up being primarily a few friends who read and do not begrudge me my writing.”
Of course, he’s right. To set him opposite Amazon’s hardest hitters rigs the fight. There’s no way he can compete with such accomplished authors as Barbara Streisand and Sammy Hagar, both of whom are currently in the Top 20.
His bigger problem is that I’m not even completely sure that I like Solve for X, and I probably qualify as one of his “few friends who read and do not begrudge [him his] writing.” The truth is that I find it uneven at best. A few choice essays elevate the majority of the work that is otherwise self-indulgent or, most unforgivable of all, boring.
His bigger problem is that I’m not even completely sure that I like Solve for X, and I probably qualify as one of his “few friends who read and do not begrudge [him his] writing.” The truth is that I find it uneven at best. A few choice essays elevate the majority of the work that is otherwise self-indulgent or, most unforgivable of all, boring.
One of the great temptations of evaluating a life so prematurely interrupted is that you want to predict where it would have gone from there—like calculating end-of-year totals based on a player’s performance at the All-Start break—and Dr. Saltzman wasn’t even at the break, not in his new career yet, anyway. He was, let’s call it, a third of the way in, another seven to ten books easily ahead, maybe even more. He had received some recognition, some awards. Another book followed, so clearly he had some reserves. If he had continued at this trajectory, how high would he have gone? I want to project a life in which he sustains himself through his writing. I want him to leave behind the students who weren’t deserving of him anyway. I want to grant him a retirement party in which he is himself the first one to leave. “Smell you later,” he says, as the door clangs shut. He does not look back.
But I can’t. How far would he have gone? The answer, at best: Not very.
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