The periodical obituary highlights just got a more, shall we say, cerebral Xerox of the past summer’s Farrah Fawcett/Michael Jackson double-whammy. Last week, two fêted writers passed away within the same 24-hour period. Both men were accomplished, massively influential American authors. Both fought bravely against fascism as Allied fighters in WWII. And, perhaps most importantly, both lives were fundamentally altered following the wartime carnage and disillusionment, leaving an unmistakable mark in their respective bodies of written work to come.
On Wed. Jan. 27, leftist historian and noted anti-war activist Howard Zinn succumbed to a fatal heart attack at the age of 87. Zinn will undoubtedly be most remembered for his heavily researched nonfiction bestseller A People’s History of the United States, which, like much of his other work, attempts to explain the skirted truths and hidden agendas of American expansionism and power. From the darker side of our Founding Fathers to the Molly Maguires, the book reads like a history textbook written by a go-for-broke edit board of Mother Jones.
His affinity for working class heroes and addressing social injustice made him not only a darling of the Civil Rights movement anti-war protests of the Vietnam era, but also a fiery feminist in his own right. As he wrote in A People’s History:
“It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.”
At his best, he seemed to combine the better elements of Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Adam Hochschild, propelled by an appetite for radical rallying cries. At his worst, his idealism (not to mention his refusal to vehemently dismiss the 9/11 Truth movement) could make someone like Dennis Prager look good. After the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the two of them debated the moral necessity of war on Prager’s radio program, you can hear Zinn stumbling on his own logic and principles as the conversation turns to the unmentionable crimes of totalitarian regimes.
It’s useless to speculate on whether or not Zinn’s often ill-advised campaigns against American foreign involvement will, in the long run, outlive or outshine something like William F. Buckley’s foolish but articulate defenses of McCarthyism. Until the future lays out its full-scale of ironies and truths, a controversial figure such as Howard Zinn will remain, like other activist voices on the left and right who came before him, a necessary figure of the public intellectual sphere of the latter half of the 20th century.
And to shift attention to the second death of Jan. 27, it should by now be known to all that J. D. Salinger recently passed away of similar natural causes in his New Hampshire estate at the age of 91, concluding his life in the same reclusion that characterized his personal life.
But what to say of such a complex individual who had an immeasurable effect and influence on the world of literature and artistic expression?
For starters, whenever asked what superpower I desire, I’ve always replied by saying it would be a toss-up between vision that would automatically inform me if a girl was single, or being able to craft a chapter like J. D. Salinger.
With The Catcher in the Rye under his belt, J. D. Salinger will, for better or worse, be at least partially remembered as the man who gave the word “phony” a whole new dimension. If he had only done that, his body of work would still hold a special place in my heart. And with his indispensable exploration of disaffected youth, scarred family, and casual rebellion, he was everything a fiction writer ever want to admire.
In his achingly beautiful 1959 novella Seymour: An Introduction, Salinger could very well have been writing his own obituary:
“I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”
“For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world—not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things—work out rather beautifully.”
I’m uncertain of whether or not Zinn and Salinger ever met. In fact, I doubt they would have even enjoyed each other’s company. One man spent most of his professional life writing fiction while avoiding any form of media coverage, and the other dedicated his life to sharply and publicly objecting to state-sponsored violence and class oppression.
But both men exited this world in exactly the same way they influenced it: without apology.
