Composting Down: SOLVE FOR X: ESSAYS, by Arthur Saltzman (Part 5 of 5)

And yet, the line that stings the most from Solve for X is from an essay called “Because I Said So,” which is a meditation on arrogance. In this essay, Saltzman writes, “And how about the one about the writer who creates a fan page for himself on the Web, complete with prospective dust jacket photos (judiciously lit and artfully posed) even before he gets a book contract?”

A blog is hardly a fan page, I realize, but a sudden rush of guilt surged through me when I read this line. It was as if he reached through space and time and smacked me hard across the cheek with one of his meaty palms. Am I cheating? Am I ungrateful? Would I be so critical if he were able to respond? Most of all, would he approve, and why, after all these years, do I yearn for his approval anyway?

I wonder sometimes how much his influence prevented me from more vigorously pursuing a teaching career myself. For the longest time, that was the idea: undergrad, grad, PhD, then teach. Like Saltzman, like my own dad. The company line says that abandoning the PhD had more to do with my own father than it had to do with Dr. Saltzman. I am an American, after all. I’m supposed to surpass my father, not become him. And plenty of evidence exists that I have been trying to do just that ever since I parted with the path that he chose for me. Before he retired, my dad was a theater director. I write plays. It doesn’t take Freud to figure that one out.

But it wasn’t my own father whose voice I couldn’t get out of my head when I was in front of the class, teaching a syllabus that looked suspiciously like Dr. Saltzman’s Contemporary American Fiction course from years ago. My class was called “Recent Popular Fiction,” but that only because the department believed more people would enroll in “Recent Popular” than “Contemporary American.” But don’t let that fool you. It was the same class. I was just the substitute.

I insisted on circling up the desks. I listened impatiently, tapped my foot, took over after the freshmen had floundered long enough. If a discussion wasn’t going in such a way that I could work in one of his decades-old insights, I would steer it so it would. I even dressed like him: khakis and a blue button-down shirt, loafers. On more than one occasion, I’d contort my mouth like he did, point demonstratively to the page with an albeit less-fleshy finger but with my hand nonetheless cocked in the same way that he cocked his: the wrist farther away from the body than the finger with which I/he was pointing.

I’d be in the middle of class, in the middle of a lecture that was at least half not my own—at least—and I’d think, Who am I? Whose voice is this? Am I teaching or acting? And if I’m acting, who am I acting for? For whom are you babysitting?

I never felt like this space was truly mine.

I did not keep my one o’clock. I told my manager I wasn’t feeling well, rescheduled the meeting, and left for the day. “You don’t have a job,” Saltzman was fond of saying. “The job has you.” I’ve used that line several times myself. I’ve claimed it as my own.

I was working in Lower Manhattan at the time, on the 22^nd floor of a building directly across the street from Ground Zero. Vendors were selling glossy photos of 9/11, the planes flaming brilliantly into the buildings that once provided shade where I now stood. I headed south on Church Street, past a deli that had good pastrami. Saltzman had often complained about the lack of a decent deli in Joplin. A deli and jazz. “I mean a real deli,” the kid from Chicago would say. “You know?”

I passed the teenagers, newly dismissed from school, their daily lessons vaporized by the ether of hormones. I continued south. Walked and walked and walked until I could walk no farther. New York Harbor. The southernmost tip of the island. Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. I wanted to name Jonah “Ellis.” Leu preferred “Jonah.” Staten Island Ferry. Jersey.

The irony is not lost on me. Toiling away on my own lyrical essay. Using him as my raw material. Some might even say disparaging the dead. I don’t think so, but I see the point. I’m the least reliable person to answer that one.

I sat down on a bench. I had a book in my hand. I didn’t remember picking it up. Always carrying a book with me. It’s a habit I developed years and years ago, back when I was an undergraduate at Missouri Southern.

*****

I’ve stayed in touch with a number of my professors from those undergraduate days. My advisor throughout those years has remained a good friend. He visited the city last year with his wife and daughter. We had lunch in our neighborhood. I was in his class when his daughter was born. She started college last year.

Dr. Denniston, the Shakespeare professor who played the role better than Olivier played Hamlet, he recently friended me on Facebook. I don’t know if that’s a win for Facebook or a loss for Shakespeare.

Leu and I stayed in better contact with Joy’s ex-husband than we did with Joy, not out of any sense of taking sides, but that’s just the way life broke. He’s in Pennsylvania now. We almost went to Jeremy’s bar mitzvah but backed out at the last minute. Jonah was due soon, and we were watching our money. Not the best reason, I know. We made vague plans to meet with Jeremy again when he and his dad came to the city for the U.S. Open, but that, too, never developed. Jeremy’s dad is remarried now with a young son of his own named Jonah. We knew but had forgotten. We agreed that it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. Sometimes I think of him and his new life and Joy and hers. I wonder if she thinks it was worth it. I know that’s unfair, but I do.

We last heard from Joy when Leuinda was pregnant with Jonah. She responded in the comments section of a blog we had started. There was an ultrasound photo of Jonah at 12 weeks. “Well, this is beautiful, obviously,” she had written.

I say that was the last we heard from her, but the truth is that Joy and I exchanged several emails over the past month in regards to this essay. I invited her look at any early draft. I figured I owed her that much anyway. She’s been exceedingly supportive, even about the things that I thought might strike a nerve. She’s torn between filling in some of the gaps and letting them stand. For example, she knows the true identities of “EMS” and “WHG.” My guesses were wrong, though when she revealed them to me my first thought was “Of course.” I’ve probably got plenty of other things wrong too, but correct matters less to me than accurate. My favorite of her notes is “if there’s some way for you to include his great 3-pt. shot in there….?” Sure, Joy. I can do that.

"WHG"

I last heard from Dr. Saltzman directly in July 2005. By that time, I had abandoned the PhD for an MFA in Playwriting, a move that, for better or worse, no longer had me wondering whose voice was in my head when I was in front of the class. The writing program was a grueling one, and I read very little for pleasure during those two years. After graduation, I was starved for fiction, ravenous for novels, and even hungrier to share what I had been reading with someone, so I dropped him a line. The email was called “Message from an Old Student and Friend.” It begins, “Hello, Dr. Saltzman. Kirby Fields calling, here. I'm sure this message feels as if it is coming from out of nowhere, and I suppose it is, but you have been on my mind.” From there I catch him up on what I had been reading and where it had taken me. Jonathans begetting Jonathans: Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer. I then say, “Anyway, the point of this fairly rambling (and name-dropping) e-mail is that your Contemporary American Fiction class set me on this course over 10 years ago. I do believe I bend in this direction anyway, but you were certainly a profound influence. I guess the point, finally, is that the course lasted a semester, but what you inspired has lasted a lifetime.” I again express my admiration for Objects and Empathy before inquiring if anything new is on the horizon and wishing him well.

Twenty-four hours later, he responded:

“Great to hear from you, Kirby, and I'm glad to hear that English 350 continues to percolate up into your consciousness (or is it compost down?). You may be interested to hear that I’m teaching a course entirely devoted to DeLillo this coming fall for our recently established Senior Seminar. As for my own reading list of late, I've read some British fare—The Line of Beauty, Money, and Saturday—and I’m currently in the midst of Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall. Some American things I've enjoyed recently include O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying, Norman’s The Bird Artist, and Wigins’s Evidence of Things Unseen. Always on the lookout for teachable, classworthy texts, which means I get to write every purchase off.

“Best of all, and relevant to your kind interest, my new collection of essays, entitled Nearer, should be out by the end of the summer from Parlor Press, so you and literally tens of others can check for it on line in a month or so. I have two other collections currently being seriously considered (read: looked at skeptically when they get around
to it), so the writing career is going full throttle, or as full throttle as a Honda Civic gets, at any rate.

“Keep in touch, Kirby. Hope all goes well both on and off the page.

“Best always,

“Art”

*****

I don’t know that we have come to terms yet with how to reconcile death and the digital age. Or at least I know that I haven’t, anyway. Sure, I’ve stumbled upon the odd Facebook memorial page—and they can be rather odd—but, thankfully, those whom I’ve lost haven’t had much of a cyberlife. Grandma and Grandpa had a rotary phone. What will happen when the generations that live more and more online pass, yet their status updates, their likes, and their blogs live on? I don’t know about a whole new layer of grief—Kubler-Ross won’t need a rewrite—but I do know that those of us who are left behind might want to prepare ourselves for reminders that appear as unbidden as a pop-up window.

Dr. Saltzman did not have a Facebook page, though one now exists in his memory. He did not post videos on YouTube from his book signings at the local Hasting’s. He never tweeted, though I would love to have seen what he could have done with 140 characters. He did, however, have a personalized page on Amazon.com. There’s a bio, a picture that serves as the author photo from his books, taken by the same man who photographed our wedding, by the way. The text is pretty standard fare: “I am a Professor of English at Missouri Southern State University and the author of ten books of literary nonfiction and contemporary literary criticism….”

What follows, however, is anything but standard and is more revealing about the man than any quote or photograph or link that masquerades as true insight nowadays. What follows is a Wishlist, some 40 items long, of books that Dr. Saltzman added between January 2005 and December 2007. He died in January 2008. Presumably, the list is for people who would like to buy him a gift or, perhaps, he used it as a reading version of a Netflix queue for himself. Whatever the purpose of the list, I counted it a legitimate find, the top of something below the surface that held the promise of so much more. Looking it over, I felt a little invasive, but not so much that I didn’t pore over all 40 titles.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, is on there. Leuinda has that one. I bought it for her after our most recent trip to Glacier National Park in an effort to help her forget that she is surrounded by concrete. A book by Jonathan Lethem, the title of which I don’t recognize. The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster, available at the time, used, for one penny. And then there’s a slew of stuff I would never have heard of otherwise, which couldn’t have been more appropriate: Like You’d Understand, Anyway: Stories, by Jim Shepard; Curves and Angles: Poems, by Brad Leithauser; Cheap Follies: the Pleasure of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little; and this, which sounds like I’m making it up but I swear I’m not, I swear: 1001 Books to Read before You Die.

I feel his loss most acutely when I read a new release that I know he would have enjoyed. Part of me feels guilty, because I know he would have gotten more out of it than I do. He would have found ways in, forged connections, discovered the means to make something new.

And that, for me, is the hardest part: all of those books that remain unread.

Currently #2,195,375 on Amazon.com. He's making a move.