Today marks the end of January which brought with it a good dose of the bleak mid-winter with enough snow, wind and cold to make anyone question the notion of global warming. The month also, in a dizzying eight-day period, marked the end of life of four very influential writers. If this starts to sound like a well-reasoned academic analysis of four authors and their works, you will have to look elsewhere. The influence I refer to is the influence that these writers had on me as I made my way to adulthood.
I have always been a voracious reader, driven by a desire, or perhaps a need, to learn more about life as it unfolded before me. For reasons that won't be touched on here, I was largely left to myself to plumb the mysteries and pursue a measure of truth about the world into which I was born as I struggled to understand the opportunities which would allow me to aspire to greater things.
As I entered my teen years in the late fifties, I learned that one of the books that seemed to be on every thinking-person's reading list was the Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. I read the book several times in an effort to unlock the wisdom that, I reasoned, must clearly be the basis of the book's popularity. I had a sense that I should have been entertained by Holden Caulfield's great adventure in New York City, a place I had never been but seemed to have a bottomless capacity for adult-level evil. But I had a hard time understanding that he would turn his back on what seemed to be a rich comfortable life of learning at his prep school. I wasn't exactly sure what a prep school was, but it sure sounded different than my public junior high school. So the net result was a sense that I had failed to unlock the wisdom of Salinger's book. Perhaps the real lesson to be learned was that there was a lot for me to learn. At this point in my life, I had yet to learn the way to appreciate the author as a separate entity from the book itself. Of course Salinger's reclusiveness was a factor. I wonder how many others on hearing of his passing on January 27th at age 92 didn't privately marvel that he had survived all this time.
When Love Story exploded on the scene in 1970, both as a novel and in film, I was a young husband and father, a year out of college, and in the beginning stages of a business career. This was the tail end of the post-war era. And while there were student demonstrations in places like Cambridge and Boston Common, primarily against the Viet Nam War, observers would also note the beginnings of social changes that would rock our culture to its core. But that was to come a few years later, after Watergate when fashions began to dictate long hair sideburns and wide wide neckties, even on normally buttoned-down business types, as the youthful madness of the sixties spread to engulf a wide swath of the entire culture. But, for a brief moment before that there was Love Story in which Oliver Barrett IV, a Harvard student with all the cultural and economic support he could have, lays it all on the line for the love of Jennifer Cavalleri, a beautiful, brainy Cliffie but who also was a product of gritty Cranston Rhode Island. To add a small dimension of adventure to the manor-born Barrett, author Segal cast him as a varsity hockey player, scrappy enough to take his licks in the Ivy League rinks. I glommed onto the fact that this character and I shared the love of the same game. In fact, my school teams and I had practiced at the Harvard rink. When the movie came out, kids would go down to the theatres and check out the exiting audience to see how many had been crying. Having read the book, I knew what to expect, but watching Ryan O'Neal say good bye to a dying Ali McGraw made sure that I was among those who gave the kids something to laugh at. On January 17th, Eric Segal died at the age of 72 in London. I was never able to forget Love Story but I was able to forgive him for allowing Al Gore to claim a shred of reflected notoriety.
While he wrote some 60 books, both fiction and non-fiction, it was Louis Auchincloss's beautiful descriptive stories of the old New York aristocracy that I found irresistible as it spoke to a way of life that may well be gone for all time. He wrote of wealthy urbane men who peopled the white-shoe law firms. He was a white-shoe lawyer himself spending the latter part of his career caring for the personal trusts and estates of many who resembled the characters in his stories. He was a maestro with the language who could capture just the right mood with his deft choice of words that seldom needed an expletive to make it clear. As New York Society has been subsumed by hedge fund cowboys and corporate raiders, the body of American literature will miss his writing skills which are receding in the face of emails and tweets. Louis Auchincloss died on January 26th at age 92.
If Auchincloss wrote about the cream of society, Robert Parker went to the other extreme and wrote mostly about the dregs. While his prolific output included books about a small town police chief with a drinking problem and even a few westerns, he is probably best known for his hard-boiled crime novels featuring Spencer the private investigator. An ex cop, and ex boxer and all around tough guy, Spenser, with his sidekick Hawk would pursue their quest to solve the mysteries that regularly came their way. Parker tried hard to capture the raw underworld of Boston and in doing so, he created a number of colorful, if a little one-dimensional characters. And while this may not have had the ring of authenticity as does Dennis LaHane, his dialogue was something to behold. Spencer was so good at having the perfect comeback remark, it sometimes consisted of just a thin smile. Academics seemed to have a field day pointing out the shortcomings of his writing, and I often felt that a little too much Cambridge Lefty found its way into the mouth of a guy who could be a perfect Neanderthal, but I read every Parker novel I could get my hands on, usually without putting it down. Robert Parker died on January 19th at age 77.
A grateful reader wishes that all four men rest in Peace as their words, thankfully, live on.
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