[2 articles]
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010): An appreciation
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/sali-f02.shtml
By James Brookfield
2 February 2010
American author J.D. Salinger, best known for his 1951 classic The
Catcher in the Rye, died Wednesday, January 27. He was 91.
The Catcher in the Rye proved highly popular among several
generations of post-war youth, not only in the US, but around the
world. Audiences, especially but by no means exclusively young
people, greatly appreciated its narrative of adolescent contempt for
the hypocrisy of official society. Even his critics had to concede
that Salinger's talent for capturing dialogue was brilliant. His
admirers would refer to it as being on par with that of Mark Twain.
The novel's plot is well known. The narrator, Holden Caulfield, is
being expelled from Pencey Prep, an exclusive East Coast school, just
prior to the Christmas break. Following encounters with classmates
and an instructor, Holden makes his way back to Manhattan, staying at
a hotel so as to avoid the inevitable confrontation with his parents
for at least a few days. His misadventures in the city conclude with
a visit to a sympathetic former teacher, which ends unhappily for
Holden. In response to his 10-year-old sister's outpouring of
tenderness and affection, Holden decides to return to his parents
rather than run away.
Holden's is a genuinely original voice in American literature. He
scorns the superficial ethics dispensed to young people. Above all,
he cannot abide those he deems "phony"i.e., the guardians of
official morality who are banal, duplicitous, inhumane, even cruel.
The "phonies" in the storyschool officials, wealthy alumni, certain
parentsfunction as a proxy for much of the adult world.
One example is the namesake of the dormitory in which Holden lives.
Mr. Ossenburger "made a pot of dough in the undertaking business
after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking
parlors all over the country that you could get members of your
family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old
Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in
the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our
wing after him."
Holden and classmates are subjected to a pep talk by the benefactor,
who, predictably enough, holds himself up as a model of religious
pietysomeone who talks constantly to God and Jesus. Holden imagines
prayers full of requests "to send him a few more stiffs."
A more profound example is the following: "One of the biggest reasons
I left Elkton Hills [one of his former schools] was because I was
surrounded by phonies…. For instance, they had this headmaster, Mr.
Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life.… On
Sundays, for instance, old Haas went around shaking hands with
everybody's parents when they drove up to school. He'd be charming as
hell and all. Except if some boy had little old funny-looking
parents.… I mean if a boy's mother was sort of fat or corny-looking
or something, and if somebody's father was one of those guys that
wear those suits with very big shoulders and corny black-and-white
shoes, then old Haas would just shake hands with them and give them a
phony smile and then he'd go talk, for maybe a half an hour, with
somebody else's parents. I can't stand that stuff."
The dialogue was polarizing, especially in 1951, under conditions of
the Cold War and the ideological offensive against politically
rebellious and subversive ideas in American public life. Both
Wikipedia and an obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted that The
Catcher in the Rye was one of the most taught as well as one of the
most banned books in the US. Its censors were aghast at the book's
derision of official morality and its liberal (though hardly
excessive) use of profanity.
The book-banners aside, official opinion at the time of Salinger's
death seems to be shifting toward a fairly hostile view. Time
magazine was dismissive: "Salinger was an author whose large
reputation pivots on very little," it wrote.
This marks a decided reversal in its literary assessment. In 1961, in
a cover story, it wrote of Catcher's hero, "Like Huck, speaking the
superbly authentic dialect of his age and his place, Holden is a
runaway from respectability, the possessor of a fierce sense of
justice, the arbiter of his own morality." And of the author himself,
it said: "Salinger, like a lonely child inventing brothers and
sisters, has drawn most of his characters out of his own rare imagination."
The New York Times was fairly disparaging in its obituary, writing:
"The novel's allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden's
preoccupations now seem a bit dated…." This idea is elaborated in a
piece written by the same author, Charles McGrath, for the Times just
before Salinger's 90th birthday last year: "In general what has dated
most in Mr. Salinger's writing is not the prosemuch of the dialogue,
in the stories especially and in the second half of Franny and Zooey,
[a later work] still seems brilliant and freshbut the ideas. Mr.
Salinger's fixation on the difference between 'phoniness,' as Holden
Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, '50s
feeling about it. It's no longer news, and probably never was."
The Times argument is emerging as something of a consensus: Holden
Caulfield is not terribly relevant to the contemporary world. This
reviewer takes objection to that verdict. The character is a creation
of a particular time and place that helped shape his author. His
significance, however, endures.
One suspects that those who question Holden's relevance are seeking
to justify and legitimize modern-day hypocrisy and cynicism. In other
words, they are defending the outlook and lifestyles of the "phonies"
that Caulfield so despised. After all, publications like Time and the
New York Times have done no small amount of work in building up one
of the biggest latter-day "phonies"the one who is to be found
presently in the Oval Office.
There is more to the novel than the contrast of duplicity and
authenticity, as important as that theme is. One cannot easily bring
to mind another popular work of post-war fiction with so many scenes
that remain imprinted on the reader's mind for decades after last
reading the novel: Holden's recollection of holding a girl's hand in
a movie, his anxiety that his boorish roommate may have assaulted a
young woman, his encounter with a prostitute whom he pays but does
not sleep with, and, above all, the scenes with his sister Phoebe
that reveal a real closeness (reinforced, one imagines, by the shared
tragedy of their brother's childhood death from leukemia). The
lasting impact of such scenes is bound up with the fact that Holden
is an intriguing character with a wide range of emotions on display;
it does not take the reader long to discover a vulnerableeven
despondentside to his generally defiant posture.
Echoes of the novel's story line and sensitivities are evident in
some of the more interesting later works of popular American fiction
and film, such as Ordinary People, Dead Poet's Society, and The Squid
and the Whale.
A recurrent theme in the novel is the vulnerability of children and
the cruelty inflicted on young people. The following passages are
memorable in this regard:
"[In the forensics class]…there was this one boy, Richard Kinsella.
He didn't stick to the point too much, and [the other students] were
always yelling 'Digression!' at him. It was terrible, because in the
first place, he was a very nervous guyI mean he was a very nervous
guyand his lips were always shaking whenever it was his time to make
a speech, and you could hardly hear him if you were sitting way in
the back of the room. When his lips sort of quit shaking a little
bit, though, I liked his speeches better than anybody else's."
Another episode recounted in the novel is the death of a student, a
"skinny little weak-looking guy, with wrists about as big as
pencils," who commits suicide after being harassed by classmates. Of
the punishment that the group had meted out to the victim beforehand,
Holden says only that "I won't even tell you what they did to
himit's too repulsive…."
The precarious condition of young people at the hands of adults is
also suggested near the end of the book when Holden visits his former
teacher, Mr. Antolini, at the latter's home. Antolini, probably the
most sympathetic adult in the book, allows Holden to stay the night
and listens with some sympathy to his recollections. Antolini can't
do without dispensing some advice, though it seems less hypocritical
than what Holden has been accustomed to getting (if somewhat
superficial nonetheless). Holden then falls asleep only to find the
teacher running his fingers through the boy's hair, an experience he
finds so startling and inappropriate that he gives a pretext to leave
the apartment immediately.
A longtime friend of Salinger, Lillian Ross, wrote in the New Yorker
last week, "He loved children with no holds barred.... After watching
his son, Matthew, playing one day, he said, 'If your child
likeslovesyou, the very love he bears you tears your heart out
about once a day or once every other day.' He said, 'I started
writing and making up characters in the first place because nothing
or not much away from the typewriter was reaching my heart at all.' "
Children figure prominently in Salinger's Nine Stories, published as
a collection in 1953, though comprising stories that were published
as early as 1948. Traumatized World War II veterans find genuine
interactions with children, as contrasted with their callous and
insensitive treatment by their contemporaries, in both A Perfect Day
for Bananafish and For Esméwith Love and Squalor. In another story,
Down at the Dinghy, a precocious boy is brought to tears after
hearing the family's maid refer to his father using an anti-Semitic slur.
Like two of the protagonists just mentioned, Salinger was a veteran
of traumatizing experiences in the war. He was drafted into the army
in 1943 and saw considerable combat, including at Utah Beach in the
June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy by Allied forces and in the Battle
of the Bulge. According to the biography written by his daughter
Margaret in 2000a work that, while not free of controversy, is, one
hopes, accurate hereSalinger said of the trauma of wartime, "You
never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose
entirely, no matter how long you live." He is also said to have
received treatment for "battle fatigue," the euphemism of the day for
the psychological and emotional damage inflicted on soldiers.
The popular success of The Catcher in the Rye brought with it the
possibility of stardom and celebrity, a prospect that horrified its
author. In an attempt to escape it, Salinger moved in 1953 from
Manhattan to Cornish, New Hampshire, a small town known a
half-century earlier as an artist's colony. The publication of an
interview he gave to students in a local newspaper apparently upset
him. He may also have been affected by critical comments by
contemporary authors. As years passed, he became increasingly
reclusive, speaking and corresponding only with close friends and family.
Of what Salinger hoped to avoid, Lillian Ross wrote: "The trouble
with all of us, he believed, is that when we were young we never knew
anybody who could or would tell us any of the penalties of making it
in the world on the usual terms: 'I don't mean just the pretty
obvious penalties, I mean the ones that are just about unnoticeable
and that do really lasting damage, the kind the world doesn't even
think of as damage.' " He told Ross that he didn't want to become
"vain" or "puffed up."
Salinger put a related idea in to the mouth of Holden Caulfield, who
tells Phoebe that he doesn't want to be a lawyer, even one of the
better ones, because "[e]ven if you did go around saving guys' lives
and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted
to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really
wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on
the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was
over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies?
How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn't."
Salinger's later workswhich merit separate considerationfocused on
the Glass familyseven highly interesting children of two
vaudevillians, the eldest of whom takes his own life in the first of
the Nine Stories. The later fiction included Franny and Zooey (1961)
and a compilation published in 1963, Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. The most recent publication
of the series, a novella titled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the
New Yorker in June 1965, though Salinger apparently continued writing
after that time.
According to the obituary published in the Guardian: "Ten years ago,
it was revealed that Salinger had a secret cache of about 15 novels
which had never been published. In his last interview, in 1980, he
said that he wrote only for himself."
He may have said this, but the reader suspects that he felt
otherwise. At any rate, the publication of other stories in the
series would be widely welcomed.
--
Major works by J.D. Salinger
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
• Nine Stories (1953)
• Franny and Zooey (1961)
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
• Hapworth 16, 1924 (1965)
--------
Salinger: "Recluse" with an ugly history of women
http://salon.com/books/feature/2010/02/08/jd_salinger_and_the_women/index.html
How we've all found a convenient way of avoiding the truth about his
troubled past
By Mikki Halpin
Feb 8, 2010
In all of the many heartfelt (and deserved) eulogies about author
J.D. Salinger, who died last week at 91, one word appears over and
over. It is, of course, "recluse." The headline on the Los Angeles
Times blog post about his death read, "J.D. Salinger, reclusive
author of 'The Catcher in the Rye,' dies at 91." New York magazine
called him "the world's most celebrated literary recluse," and the
New York Times said that the author had "lived in seclusion for more
than 50 years."
I find these portraits of Salinger as a noble loner curious. They
certainly aren't accurate. There is ample evidence that he did not
lead a solitary life apart from the rest of humanity. Salinger was
married three times, and had numerous other long- and short-term
romantic engagements. He seduced Joyce Maynard after seeing her on a
magazine cover. He dated actress Elaine Joyce during the 1980s while
she was appearing on such shows as "Fantasy Island," "Magnum, PI,"
"Simon and Simon" and "Murder, She Wrote." He had three
grandchildren. He went into New York for dinner with friends. He was
apparently active in his community, greeting clerks at the store,
attending church suppers and town meetings, and shopping at Price
Chopper. He spent a lot of time with his lawyers. And this is just
the stuff we know about. One wonders if Emily Dickinson, that other
famous literary recluse, now sees how much she could have gotten away
with and still maintained her recluse cred.
Continue Reading
It's not hard to see why the idea of J.D. Salinger as an asocial
genius appeals. Living in a world of tabloid television and gossip
Web sites, it is comforting to think of a higher intellect who has
rejected it all. Verlyn Klinkenborg's New York Times editorial
celebrated this romantic ideal: "There was a purity in Mr. Salinger's
separation from the world, whatever its motives, whatever his
character. His half-century of solitude and silence was a creative
act in itself, requiring extraordinary force of will." Insisting on
Salinger's reclusiveness has given us an antihero nearly as
influential as Salinger's greatest creation, Holden Caulfield.
But I think there is another, more insidious reason that the literary
establishment is so invested in the fictional, reclusive Salinger. It
is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of
Salinger's personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory
truths about one of America's most revered authors. Both Joyce
Maynard and Salinger's daughter Margaret were vilified for violating
the great man's privacy when they wrote about their own experiences
with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with
women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might
bring to readings of Salinger's work (not to mention the women's
right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books as
exploitative, attention-seeking stunts. When Maynard decided to sell
some of the letters Salinger had written her -- letters that
confirmed her story of their affair -- the response was even more
bitter. A typical reaction was that of author Cynthia Ozick, who
wrote that Maynard "has never been a real artist and has no real
substance and has attached herself to the real artists in order to
suck out his celebrity." This sort of backlash is not exclusive to
Salinger -- when Pablo Picasso's former wives and lovers began to
expose him as a physically and emotionally abusive man, they were
subject to similar criticisms.
As feminists have long known, the personal is political, and women
who tell unpleasant truths rarely find a receptive audience. Anyone
who got into an argument about Roman Polanski this past year knows
how desperately fans can cling to their icons, despite clear evidence
of wrongdoing. Acknowledging the experiences of Margaret Salinger or
Joyce Maynard would mean deviating from the Salinger myth. To shut
such conversations down, we're told to be rational and to "separate
the art from the artist." But those insisting on this separation
aren't rejecting biographical details as part of how we understand
works of art, they are merely insisting we use their narrative, in
order to reach their conclusions.
Continuing to believe in the mythically reclusive Salinger and
disallowing the presence of the women in his life doesn't do anyone
any good. We need to be able to appreciate art in all of its
complicated contexts. Artists -- both men and women -- have personal
lives, and they are often messy. Picasso painted compelling portraits
of women he had abused. Roman Polanski assaulted a young woman and
made taut, thoughtful films. J.D. Salinger went to church suppers and
hooked up with actresses. I hope that in the wake of J.D. Salinger's
death, his real story can now be told. Let's leave the fiction on the shelf.
.
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