On living, dying and the James Salter bandwagon.
I jumped on the James Salter bandwagon about a month ago. James
Salter has been one of the best American fiction writers for nearly 60
years, but he is garnering attention now due to the fact that he just
released a new novel, All That Is, and because, at 87, he is
reaching that stage of his life where media outlets and lovers of
literature heap on their long overdue appreciation.
And
I’m not better than anybody else, because I have slept on Salter as
well. He’s known as the “writer’s writer” and I would say that is an
accurate term if it really meant anything (just like saying Louis CK is a
“comic’s comic” doesn’t truly mean anything). Salter’s prose, to me, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, if she had the restraint and masculinity
of Hemingway. Again, that doesn’t really mean anything— because every
now and then he’ll turn a phrase that is straight out of Thomas Wolfe or
even Joyce—those are just the terms I find myself using to describe
Salter’s writing.
I just finished reading Light Years, which is considered Salter’s greatest work. Light Years
is one of the best books I have ever read and might now be my fourth or
fifth favorite novel of all-time. It is a work of art that is so
beautiful and so true that at some points it actually hurt me to read
it. I would read it on the subway and slightly chuckle as Salter’s
narrator—a godlike entity not all that far off from a Tolstoyan
narrator—made sweeping, accurate statements about a specific type of
human behavior; and then moments later I would feel all the energy drain
from my body as he described a father’s feelings for his daughter so
well, that I, nowhere close to being a father, could completely
understand—and could imagine my father thinking the same things as he
watched my sister grow, I could see the heartbreak and pride of my
sister’s very existence through my own father’s eyes. This is what the
best kind of literature should do, and I’d feel drained because
I’d think that I would never be capable of rendering anything as
beautiful and true. However, I’d compose myself and, full of resolve
again, make note of what a good writer does, vowing to do my best to
achieve the same effect in my own work.
Light Years
is basically the story of an upper middle class husband and wife (named
Viri and Nedra) who know the finer things in life. Who have two
beautiful daughters (Franca and Danny) and a beloved dog with pointed
ears named Hadji. They wear oat colored sweaters and camel skirts and
buy a pony and have picnics in the Hamptons. They have friends named
Arnaud and Eve and Robert Chaptelle. They grow apart, have affairs with
people named Jivan and Kaya. New York decays but they never abuse each
other. They get divorced, think about death and the loss of youth and
then they die. Years pass; at one point, a whole, particular month of
August passes in one, beautiful paragraph that completely caught me off
guard. Again, it is an amazing novel—simple and complex and beautifully
written, a novel that leaves you pondering how you fit into your own
life and into the experience of life as a human being.
What does this have to do with Mad Men?
After watching “A Tale of Two Cities” in the wake of reading Salter’s
novel, I can’t help but think of the two sagas as some kind of
bedfellows. We have watched Don grow, regress, attempt to change and
then continue to regress as a character over nearly ten years. He has
felt estranged from his children and yet also shown an endearing amount
of compassion and tenderness for his daughter. We have seen him as a
serial adulterer and also a vulnerable, desperate lover. We’ve seen him
through divorce, through the depths of the deepest and most depressing
alcoholism. And we’ve watched him build himself up again, remarry and
now distance himself from his own wife. All the while, the world around
him is changing—things are becoming more complex; a certain era or way
of thinking about life is dying and another one is rising. We may or may
not see him die in this narrative, but we know he is going to.
And,
basically, we can say the same thing about all of these characters.
Peggy and Joan’s interaction on this week’s episode was just another
rich chapter in their history together. Peggy and Joan have been foils
since the series’ outset. They harbor certain resentments towards each
other, but also a certain amount of admiration as well. They are both
competitive and both think that their way of being a woman is more right
than the other’s. But they have known each other, and no matter if
Peggy disagrees with the way Joan conducted herself with Avon, she
wasn’t going to let her simply get railroaded by Pete and Ted. And yet,
will Joan ever truly get the respect she wants? Will Peggy ever find
that thing to satisfy her? Have someone to understand her besides Don?
Her private heart must still harbor some love for Ted, right?
It’s
the same for Roger Sterling. Even though he espouses some helpful
advice when he tells Don that through his therapist he’s learned that
all life is about is understanding who you are so that you can then love
yourself. Yet, we just watched last week as he failed to take his own
duties as father and grandfather seriously (though his daughter to
overreact just a bit). Roger’s decision to understand himself in order
to love who he is makes sense, but he never truly grows. He’s still
going to be the same man that takes joy in making "short" jokes to Danny
Siegel's face; but if that’s who he accepts himself as, then that’s fine. It’s
probably too late for him to change in life.
The last
image of the episode is Pete Campbell smoking Stan’s joint in slow
motion after having his tantrum against Joan snuffed out. Pete sees the
world in the office changing, just as the characters (and we the viewer)
see the entire outside world changing. The Chicago riots just
exemplified the growing divide in America between generations—just as
Ginsberg’s protests towards Jim Cutler exemplify the simmering divide in
the office between the partners; as well as the generations within
those walls. As Pete said last week, “there’s nothing else [he] can do,”
so now he is going to smoke pot and most likely just try to get along.
Though, I don’t expect him to change that much either.
Finally, as always, there is Don. Don smoked hash and saw himself face-down in the pool, before waking up to find that he was face-down
in the pool, and nearly drowning. Don is in another marriage that is
falling apart, while his ex-wife is in a marriage that seems to be
stabilizing and growing stronger as each year passes by. During Don’s
hash trip, we can see that some part of him loves Megan and that some
part of him would like to have a child with her, but he just isn’t
capable of that kind of patience or attention any longer. And perhaps,
as we’ve learned, he never was. As one character says to another in Light Years:
“You
think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has
it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find. It’s like a tree. It takes a
long time to grow. It has roots very deep, and those roots stretch out a
long way, farther than you know. You can’t cut it, just like that.”
Except,
all Don does and has ever done is cut things. He changes identities,
changes lovers, changes the name and make-up of his firm. He does it all
“just like that.”
I’m not a good television critic. I only watch Mad Men
and enjoy every episode for what it can teach me. I wish I were better
at analyzing its technical elements or the faults in its scripts or
direction. All I know is that we are going to continue watching these
characters proceed closer to death. Again, as Salter writes of a
character in Light Years:
“She had entered a new
era. All that belonged to the old had to be buried, put away. The image
of Arnaud with his thickly bandaged eye, the deep bruises, the slow
speech like a record player losing speed—these injuries seemed like
omens to her. They marked the first fears of her life, of the
malevolence which was part of its fluid, which had no explanation, no
cure. She wanted to sell the house. Something was happening on every
side of her existence, she began to see it in the streets, it was like
the darkness, she was suddenly aware of it, when it comes, it comes
everywhere.”
That is where we are in the Mad Men
universe. There are 16 episodes left in the entire series. No matter if
each week is good or bad, we have entered some serious territory—a
place that veers from beautiful and true to chaotic from week to week.
I’m perfectly fine with a show like that, as I continue to figure out
how to better experience my own life.
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