Yet Another Salinger Postmortem
Martin RocheAs a reader, my interests go places that my adolescent self would have found “boring” (that all-encompassing word). As a teenager, the focus of my reading was almost exclusively JD Salinger. I was a defensive, fearful, mistrustful, dogmatic and sheltered young man from an idyllic little town, so it makes sense. Though still fearful and defensive, I’m more broad-minded. When I was in an English graduate program, I regarded Salinger the way one comes to disregard a younger self - as embarrassingly naive. Dragons live forever, not so little boys. Like Puff, Salinger stopped being magical.
His Glass family, which appears in so many of his stories, is annoyingly neurotic: Buddy is agoraphobic, Waker is a monk, Franny is paralyzed by prayer, while Zooey is only able to keep a foot in reality with his ironic work as a soap opera actor on TV. One senses that a dinner date with one of Glasses would be spent with your dinner partner muttering to himself while he scans the room for an exit.
I recently re-read Catcher in the Rye and feel the same diluted pleasure. There are so many other texts that a young people could find more worthwhile. Why not read Song of Solomon or Rule of the Bone, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or Invisible Man if you’re interested in stories of people reaching their awakenings? Catcher is a snapshot in time – of the 1950’s New York City. Its narrator is a child of privilege whose awakenings are pedestrian to most children today. Its arcane slang is evidence of how Catcher’s once-touted relevance has vanished.
But I reconsider a little, too. People overestimate the capacity of adolescents to analyze an unselfconscious mind, and this is the challenge that Holden Caulfield puts before the reader. Holden is intelligent, but he says and does things about which he has little awareness (the narration is a session with Holden’s analyst in a mental facility). We attribute to modern adolescents a higher level of self-awareness because they are immersed in a commercial culture that uses a materialistic self-consciousness, but by no means does this make young people any more reflective or empathetic than their predecessors.
Since the reader is his therapist, Holden gives young readers an opportunity to observe the world’s enduring innocence amid its corruptions. At its best, then, Catcher is a mental exercise requiring you to interpret a suffering person’s unselfconscious cries for help. This skill should be standard for adults, but for adolescents this is still in development. (Even standardized testing across the country often finds adolescents lacking in the skill of being able to make key inferences in reading!)
I still enjoy Salinger’s Nine Stories anthology for its ability to capture the voice of its characters. Though his people may sound like precious New Yorkers in the land before color television, Salinger still gives us a model for how to get to the life of a character by hearing how she talks. Take this famous example from “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” as two former schoolmates - Mary Jane and Eloise - sit and drink away an afternoon in 1950’s suburbia, reflecting on the past:
“Oh, I’m dying to see her,” Mary Jane said [about Eloise’s little daughter]. “Oh, God! Look what I did. I’m terribly sorry, El.”
“Leave it. Leave it,” said Eloise. “I hate this damn rug anyway. I’ll get you another.”
As many critics point out, Salinger uses italics the way his characters sometimes drink. But his italics were a blueprint for this budding writer (still budding, I’m afraid) in how to develop character and storyline through dialogue.
And what of Mary Jane and Eloise? Eloise has lost interest in both the spilled drink and the rewards of a Connecticut suburb. She is getting drunk and thinking about what could have been. Her old lover, Walter Glass, was killed in the Pacific during the War, yet the reader can’t help but wonder if Eloise’s daughter is really Walter’s and not her husband’s. The little girl does eventually appear, and she displays a fragile precocity that is suspiciously Glass-like.
And what of the Glass family? I re-read Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Franny and Zooey (the latter I carried around like the Bible as a kid) and can’t ignore the self-indulgence of the Glasses. Their guiding light – the eldest child, Seymour Glass – blew his head off in front of his sleeping wife in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” One suspects he did so because he couldn't live in the real world as a grown-up genius savant. Practically geniuses themselves, his brothers and sisters are lost. What happened?
Who knows? I always looked at Salinger’s own escape and Seymour’s as comparable, but to be honest, Seymour’s is a lot more interesting. Every indication from his self-imposed exile was that JD Salinger was mostly a creepy, bullying, unpleasant manipulative old man. He regarded publishing as an “invasion of my privacy,” which seems perverse for a writer to say. Perhaps he did the world a service by disappearing from it.
He published “Bananafish” in 1948 - three years before the eventual publication of Catcher – and spent the rest of his career documenting how the Glasses try to understand Seymour’s suicide. They, like us, take the evidence in, yet the closer they (and we) get, the further from the truth they seem. Salinger’s last published story in 1965 is an entire letter written by Seymour as a child from summer camp. To me, it is rambling, incoherent and dull – so dull that it provokes the reader to give up the search.
Here, I guess, is where Salinger is offering a mental exercise suitable for adult life. Such mysteries are beyond the realm of understanding. They are evidence of a suffering that is a part of human life. In their obituary, Rolling Stone suggested that as a traumatized intelligence officer from World War II, JD Salinger funneled his own demons into a picture of realistic adolescent angst. It was an innovative postwar way to comprehend the incomprehensible. Conversely, all of the intelligence in the world cannot help the Glasses to put the pieces together, to understand themselves, and see why one of their own killed himself. Granted, William Faulkner does all this infinitely better with the Sutpens of Yoknapatawpha County, but to a curious young reader, Seymour’s act was a window into a world beyond Holden’s – into the realm of the inexplicable. It primed me for bigger stuff.
As a boy, I imagined what the world after Salinger’s passing would be like, sort of the way I always wondered what George Lucas would come with next. Will all his secrets be revealed? Now I feel as though some good things should be left in the mystery. Salinger's work still has a capacity to provoke the reader to contemplate the world at large without having to become a part of his own strange and unpleasant world. Which is how he wanted it, anyway, I guess.
Reader Comments (5)
I must admit that I have not read anything of Salinger's beyond Catcher in the Rye. I remember that when I read it in high school, I hated it. I remember thinking Holden Caulfield was the most deliberate character ever. Oh, how he got on my nerves. I hated that my friends loved it. I resented that they were into Kurt Cobain and Jane's Addiction and everything else that seemed to me to be so obviously defiant. Mind you, at the time I was in a ridiculous country music phase, not realizing that this was deliberate too.
Now I am so less judgemental about Catcher. After reading it as an adult, I can see it for what it is. It now seems almost beautiful in its ability to capture the angst that we all went through. Holden is so much more tolerable to me now that I am around his like everday. In some ways it is good not to completely let go of that angst. Willie Nelson still gets to me, just not in the same way he did when I was sixteen.
I have had similiar experiences with Catcher. When I read it in high school, I thought it was a radical book that challenged authority with a first person stream of conciousness technique and an underworld of New York City that I was enamoured to be around. I understood his frustration and his willigness and unwillingness to be in a society. He wants to be ahero in society and fears his mediocrity.
I still have and read Nine stories and believe it has a much more theater feel in its structure. It reminded me of A long Day Journey into Night, which is one of my favorite pieces. I am still intrigued with a main character who is off tilter because their unique perspective allows me to gain from teh experience. It allows me to disassociate from the character and gain a broader reading. It allows me to look at other characters to find myself. Salinger did not write about normal people, much like Woody Allen doesn't, and for that I feel I have gained from Salinger's work.
On the other hand, you make an excellent point that this book is far from our literary best. We give it to high school kids because it is easy to read and teenager subject perspective. I am often surprised at how many similiar topics they can relate to, as I did as a child. There are better written books, though I do not know Rule of the Bone (I will get it), and Salinger has been celebrated too much as you have said for abandoning his public writing. It is always a writer's choice, but I think his best work would be ahead if he continued to write through the years, like the egnimatic Glass family.
I am ambivelent to Salinger, but I am also indebted to him because Catcher did make me what to explore more modern writers, though Lord of the Flies still was my favorite book in high school. Wait. I forgot the Hobbit. Thanks for teh great post and the links are good. I will be there for sometime today.
Great lunch
Much like aprilmae, and I imagine most readers, I have little experience with Salinger outside of Catcher. And for me, I am quite happy with that. I too could never endear myself to anything about the novel. Whether it be its style, character, dialogue, or setting, it never resonated with me on any level. It annoyed me when so many of my friends felt a connection to Holden, and it annoys me still when they claim it is the best book they ever read. The truth is for most of them, it's the only book they ever read, which annoys me further. I know this whining may sound similar to Holden's and I apologize. But I simply can't fathom the novel's significance.
Beyond its exposure of a once fringe of teenage society that have deep psychological problems despite all of their incredible luxuries, I see no other profound impact of the story. I look at today's unholy exploitation of teenagers in the popmedia and the never barrage of consumer solicitation of the teen age group and can't help but wonder if Catcher had any influence on this. I imagine a study would prove that the novel is one of, if not the most popular stories amongst teenagers. It wouldn't be shocking to me if the post-modern response to this reality was to market everything towards the Holden Caulfields of society. Drown their perceived depression in as much worthless junk as humanly possible.
However, your essay does an excellent job of giving credit to the author and his stories, while at the same time exposing many of his personal and literary flaws. Your blend of personal trials with the writer and his writing make for a wonderful constructive criticism. Reading this is making me consider giving Salinger another chance through some of his other stories. So thank you, I guess.
Thanks for covering this topic. I think you did Salinger justice especially with your contrasting perspectives of an adolescent reader of his work to an adult looking back. We can debate the value of Catcher in high school curricula all day, but in the end I think most kids still like it simply because it's so starkly different from some of the other typical "great novels" of American Lit. Furthermore, Salinger's situation is now a piece of our culture to which kids should be exposed; the reclusive author spurning his celebrity only to become even more an object of fascination, especially to adolescents.
Although, I do agree with your point about how it is perverse for a writer to see publication as "an invasion of privacy." I can't say whether he was bullying or unpleasant, but I think at least Salinger had a cockiness about him that doesn't sit well with most fans; as if the world wasn't good enough or appreciative enough of his talent. It comes out in this letter in which he claims Holden is "unactable" http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/12/holden-caulfield-is-unactable.html
Of course, maybe my attitude toward Salinger's reclusion is just a product of the story I've been told about him by English teachers and movies. I guess somewhere inside of all of us there is an adolescent who wishes to do something great with his life and then say to the world "F- you, that's all your getting." But as an adult, I just can't imagine actually doing it.
A question was posed to me recently that relates well to this topic: What makes a book a classic? The best I could come up with was just broad consensus, the idea that if enough people believe a work merits the title of classic, then it probably is one. Catcher, even if the anti-Salinger backlash takes permanent hold, may well be the classic novel of 20th century American literature. It is almost certainly the most ubiquitous- how many other full-length novels that have never been made into films have a protagonist with the name recognition of Holden Caulfield?
Full disclosure- I was one of the high schoolers who liked Catcher a lot, and Franny and Zooey (which I liked even more) and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters were on the pretty short list of books that I read in high school that weren't required. These books fit in well with the semi-rebellious attitude that I felt in high school, which in retrospect was more "chip on my shoulder" then "angry young man", but still. Salinger, Rage Against the Machine, Smashing "the world is a vampire" Pumpkins- I was a sucker for a lot of that stuff (though, thankfully, I never owned any Che Guevara t-shirts). Salinger almost certainly would have considered me a phony, though I was an authentic fan.
So is Catcher a classic? It is one of the few books that I have reread several times, and predictably I’ve gone from finding Holden Caulfied relatable to finding him pathetic. How well someone can relate to Caulfied is a perfectly good litmus test of a person’s emotional maturity, and therein lays its value. With all of our entertainment sources and educational programs so segmented, there are few shared experiences left in America. Salinger pretty much did what no writer I can think of since has done- he wrote a book that continues to provoke heated, even intellectual, discussion almost sixty years after its publication. People love this book, or they hate it. High schools require this book, or they ban it.
I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to the question of what make a classic- ubiquity alone can’t be enough- but any one of us could hold a discussion with almost any teenager walking out of Hot Topic or wherever and talk about Catcher in the Rye, even without access to Sparknotes. To me, that defines what it means to be classic.