Created for the cover of Time magazine, Robert Vickrey’s 1961 portrait of Salinger
Looking further afield than this depressed and depressing land right now, I have two German friends who live in Austria. Regularly, the three of us get together over a long video call. We call it the MUP Show after the first letter of each of our first names. On the occasion when my friends are in dense Italian countryside, where a late writer father of one of them used to live, the video call is made bucolic by its backdrop of neat stone walls, a flash of trees, and talk of shy wolves.
We like to be there for each other. Yes, this is as friends but also as fellow filmmakers. They are formidable people with many skillsets, having filmed wildlife in Africa, performed Brecht in Germany, studied Sami peoples in northern Norway, plus recently worked in Ukraine. We actually met in the poetic wilds of Scotland, where they were researching an exciting wilding project. We nearly died together—with four others—when the people-buggy we were driven in suddenly over-accelerated and smashed through a lifesavingly narrow gap into an open field—not so far, as it happened, from the grave of a troubled ancestor of mine, the Wolf of Badenoch, who was no shy wolf, I can tell you.
We were remembering at the weekend during our latest video call walking back from the above accident, the three of us already onto the next thing—which happened to be two small birds in the sky attacking a bird of prey that was showing a little too much interest in their nests. That’s another thing. Everything with my friends feels alive, the periphery is extensive, each situation runs on sensitivity—sensitivity not as weakness but as the place where all the best information is.
The artist had a French curator of sorts pop round to see her latest work last week. It always feels strange for her when an outsider enters. Modesty always prevails with the artist. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The work is always much more than good but the strain each time of people coming round is obvious. Since Covid, the artist has become used to working in a vacuum but I have to remind her how brilliant she really is. She purchased fresh tape, the plan being to attach at least eight out of fourteen new works to the walls. Some older framed pieces were placed against two other walls. These took months to create during mostly 14-hour days. When not abroad, I would witness their progress every day. They became like living, breathing entities. People who dismiss art dismiss oxygen.
I managed to take a few moments out from last week in between hospital visits and interviews to re-read part of a book about JD Salinger. Isn’t it strange how this American literary giant still captivates so many of us over here in Blighty? The book in question was In Search of JD Salinger by Ian Hamilton. Since it was written, there have been upsetting stories about Salinger and young girls—‘also visible in the work, if you look,’ according to Joyce Maynard, who bemoaned the demonization of women such as her who speak out. Of interest to me was the book’s sleuth-like quality in the face of what we know now. That said, I did not enjoy Hamilton forcing Salinger out of his hideaway to challenge him anyway. This notion of Salinger having betrayed his readers by withdrawing from the world also always rankled me. As Salinger himself said: ‘I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.’
With its personalized theme, the book reminded me of Jay Parini’s Borges and Me in which the American writer revisits St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland and ends up with Jorg Luis Borges in his charge before taking him on a road trip across Scotland. It asks why we attach ourselves so readily to mystique in our writers. For what it is worth, I find myself in life drawn to those with mystery and not just in literature. Helen of Troy, the so-called ‘girl of 1,000 ships’, was an early fascination for me at school with her obvious inscrutableness. Or maybe I just need writers to be set apart from the main frame not just because I like the company of outsiders but because theirs may very well be the only true perspective.
When I spoke to my two German friends at the weekend, only one was in Austria, while the other was in Italy. At one point we discussed the loss of identity which can take place among people exiled from a country when their country is at war. It must be hellish to feel so untethered, we all agreed, while perhaps I was even feeling frustrations of my own. We began discussing one conflict in particular—about which I was giving an update. This is an armed struggle we have been interpreting together for nearly a year now, and to which I have directed sufficient energies to have met with many of its senior players in person—key figures scrabbling about in quiet desperation, as their now long-distance homes continue to be looted, mortars keep pocking neighborhoods, makeshift cemeteries ceaselessly sprout up, and much, much worse.
We all pitied anyone who wants to bring peace to their country and cannot. Theirs must be a life of such frustration. I remember one particular Afghan group in Peshawar during the early Eighties just like this. I saw it within a frustrated Bedouin group in the foothills of Gulf War One. I noticed it with Bosnians during the Balkan War forced to flee into not always friendly Croatian territory. None of these people want to leave their countries. Some are running from certain death. Sadly, they become so far removed from their origin story sometimes that they attend a death spiral of conferences instead, producing endless immaculate documents, none of which bring any of them any closer to peace.
At the end of our intense video call, we did the only thing left to do. We showered our screens with an explosion of silly emojis.
