James Wood writes in How Fiction Works of the “distinction to be made between novelists... who are rich in 'negative capability,' who seem unself-consciously to create galleries of various people who are nothing like them, and those writers either less interested in, or perhaps less naturally gifted at this faculty, but who nevertheless have a great deal of interest in the self...”
J.D. Salinger was the latter kind of writer. Holden Caulfield and the Glass siblings speak with Salinger's own voice, as snarky, well-to-do Manhattanites – which does not prevent readers from widely different backgrounds experiencing an intense communion with them.
The young Salinger was a prolific writer of short stories – many of which, at his own insistence, remained uncollected in book form. Some reportedly have even been ripped out of library copies of the magazines they appeared in. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a notable early influence, as were Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, and William Saroyan.
Salinger's first story featuring a character named Holden Caulfield had the telling title “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.” Written in 1941, it was scheduled for publication by the New Yorker later that year. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. According to Paul Alexander's Salinger: A Biography “the editors of the New Yorker did not feel it was appropriate to publish – so soon after Pearl Harbor – a story about a neurotic teenage boy whose 'slight rebellion' is prompted by the fact that he has become disenchanted with the life he leads as the son in a wealthy family in New York.”
The New Yorker did not publish the story until 1946. By then Salinger had taken part, as a counterintelligence officer, in the Normandy landings, the liberation of Paris, and the battles of the Hürtgen Forest and the Bulge. He'd seen the liberation of a concentration camp, experienced a mental breakdown, and was now studying eastern religions in Greenwich Village. His classic story “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,” contrasts his state of mind in England in 1944 with the condition he was in by 1945 in Germany. In the story he shows all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a syndrome which may help explain some of his later aberrations.
The first Holden Caulfield story to appear in print was "I'm Crazy" in 1945. Both “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” and I'm Crazy contain passages which eventually made it into The Catcher in the Rye
Published in 1951, the book made Salinger's reputation. What makes the book is Holden's voice – he is the stranger who barges into your dorm room, ranting affably about everything that's on his mind, and quickly becomes your friend.
“I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.”
Holden is the archetype of the sixteen-year-old male. Moody and maladroit, distrustful of anyone who doesn't share his own aesthetic preferences, Holden contradicts himself constantly in a tone of unassuming outrage. Salinger captured the vernacular of the teenagers of the time, then still in the process of becoming a sought-after marketing niche. The Catcher in the Rye still sells a quarter million copies every year.
Subsequently Salinger mostly wrote about the seven Glass siblings. The eldest is the suicidal Seymour, around whom Salinger sought to construct a cult of personality. Zooey and Franny are the youngest. You love the Glasses or you hate them. Panning Salinger in the National Review in 1961, Joan Didion wrote, “I rather imagine that Salinger readers secretly wish that they could write letters to Franny and Zooey...”
Although she meant this as a criticism, she hit on one of Salinger's key strengths. There are certain fictional characters – not necessarily the most well-rounded or best-drawn or intrinsically sympathetic characters – who readers relate to obsessively. Just as there are people who want to study at Oxford because of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, there are people who want to go to East Coast prep schools because of Holden Caulfield. Franny and Zooey was first urged on me long ago by a friend who claimed – although I could see no points of resemblance at all – that she had always desired to be Franny.
Part of the explanation is that Salinger's characters tend, like Sebastian Flyte, to be at an age where they are not yet socially formed. Snobby, spiritual, and usually doomed, the common denominator of such characters is their failure to find a rite of passage leading out of adolescence – a problem millions can identify with, retrospectively or otherwise.
The conversational immediacy of Salinger's writing makes it easy to bond with his characters. This is Franny speaking –
“I know this much, is all. If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're suppose to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.”
Such dialog reminds us pleasurably of intense undergraduate conversations. Salinger's characters care about truth and beauty. He's always contrasting the idiocy of adult life with the wisdom of youth. In a 1963 interview, Saul Bellow harshly accused Salinger of making up “a Rousseauian critique of society which comes from the vatic judgment of the immature,” but if so, the times were ripe for such a critique.
Salinger also benefited from the rising popularity of East Asian religious traditions. His prose sometimes reads like New Yorker house style that's been infused with Zen. Attacks on Salinger from the 1950s and 1960s often conflate his style with that of the New Yorker generally, and as late as the story “Seymour – an Introduction” he was capable of a parenthesis like this.
“I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.”
The surprising thing about these lines is that they could about as easily have been written by S. J. Perelman or E. B. White, James Thurber or Peter de Vries. But in Salinger's case these notes of rueful insider complacency go hand in hand with a belief in writing as a quest for enlightenment. Holden's inquiry as to where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter might easily be the topic of a “Talk of the Town” feature, yet in Salinger's hands it becomes unobtrusively koan-like.
Sadly, Salinger had the same problem Seymour is diagnosed with in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” – a “perfection complex.” An early short story of his was made into a bad movie, so he refused to allow anything else he wrote to be made into a movie. Because one of his books was given a garish cover, he insisted on designing all the rest of his covers himself.
Eventually the imperfections of the publishing industry led to him refusing to publish at all.
Zooey tells Franny,
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's"
The refusal to compromise is, of course, itself a youthful characteristic, and some have theorized that the traumas of Salinger's time in wartime France and Germany arrested his emotional development.
In any case, for forty-five years Salinger avoided his fans and lived as a shut-in, in his home in New Hampshire. In 1986, he was asked in a court case what he'd been working on and replied, “Just a work of fiction. That's all. That's the only description I can really give it... It's almost impossible to define. I work with characters, and as they develop, I just go on from there.”
In 1996, Salinger came close to releasing his 1965 New Yorker story “Hepworth 16, 1924” featuring a seven-year-old Seymour, as a small-press book obtainable through Amazon. But he abandoned this project after Michiko Katukani published an article calling the Glass stories solpisistic, rarefied, and self-enclosed.
Sticking it out as a hermit for as long as Salinger did is an unparalleled achievement, at least in Western literary history – perhaps one could find a comparable case if one went back to the Sung Dynasty.
At the time of his death, there are whole genres – the young adult book, the memoir, the voice-driven short story – where his influence remains strong. And now there's the hope of finding out what he was working on for all those years.
Reportedly there are manuscripts hidden in safes. Perhaps one of these is the great Zen American novel.
And if it turns out there are no manuscripts, that could be kind of Zen too.
Comments
Thanks for this, James. I have to say: the standard criticism of JDS -- that he's a case of arrested development, puerile, symptomatic of an adolescent-obsessed culture, etc -- fails to take into account the dearth of authentic options for adulthood. There were even fewer in the 50s than there are now. "Adulthood" necessarily meant being emotionally locked down and ossified, much more so than being an adolescent. It often involved tranquilizers or alcohol. I'll take "puerile" any day if it gives me the option of investigating my own values and living up to them the way I see fit.
A great take, and there's lots here I didn't know. And what a fascinating and sound idea it is to trace that vernacular voice style of current first-person fiction and memoir back to him. I haven't read him for years, but what got me when I did was his realness. That catcher in the rye, trying to save children from falling into the sea of knowledge and ecstasy and every other terrible and wonderful aspect of adulthood: what a pure and agonizing and (almost) universal impulse, articulated once and for all by J.D. Salinger.
If J.D. Salinger is right in his claim that “there’s a marvellous peace in not being published”(1) it looks like much peace lies in waiting for me. Some readers find my writing a little too subjective or should I say introspective. Like Henry David Thoreau I seem to be more interested in the natural history of my thought than of the bird life, the flora and fauna that I find here in Tasmania, in the Antipodes, the last stop on the way to Antarctica if you take the western-Pacific-rim route.
I read recently that Thoreau took twelve years to identify a particular bird. I found that fact comforting. I understand, for I have the devil of a time remembering the names of the birds, the plants and the multitude of insects that cross my path and my horizon from month to month. But what I lack, what interest is deficient with respect to the various forms of plant and animal life Downunder in the Antipodes, I make up for in my study of the varied humanities and social sciences. In the three decades of my teaching career I acquired, if I acquired nothing else, a passion for certain learnings, certain fields of study. My study, the place where I read and write, is littered, I like to think ordered, by files on: philosophy, psychology, media studies, ancient and medieval history, modern history, literature, poetry, religion, inter alia. I move from one field to another from day to day and week to week and I can not imagine ever running out of gas, of enthusiasm, interest. Thus, I occupy my time. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) J.D. Salinger in "A Review of the Book ' The 627 Best Things Anyone Ever Said About Writing,'" Deborah Brodie in BookPage, 1997.
Like Samuel Johnson’s dictionary published over 250 years ago, my memoir of 2600 pages is an ambitious work. But whether it will influence future generations as Johnson’s work did, I can only hope. Johnson wrote, among other reasons, to escape the pain of life. I wrote, too, for many reasons among which was to escape society’s endless chatter because I seemed to have run out of social synergy to keep up the chatter beyond a modicum of it every month. Some may see my insensible and sensible exit from the social domain into solitude during the years 1999 to 2005, the last years of my middle age, an exit from the extensive social activity that had characterized my life from 1949 to 1999, as an “inability to make the social adjustment expected of mature members of society.”
Such was the way literary critic Warren French described J.D. Salinger’s withdrawal from public life back in the 1960s. Still others, among the few who would concern themselves at all with my raison d’etre for writing as I myself do, might find my insistence on personal privacy difficult to understand; I experience a certain estrangement which inevitably results from withdrawal; the sympathy and empathy of others are sometimes experienced in smaller apportionments than once they were. Still others may hypothesize that I possess a hyperactive cortex or that I have achieved the same privacy, peace and quiet that they too want in life but, for various reasons, have been unable to attain.
There are several dozen people in my life now at the age of 65 whom I interact with physically, in person, but this interaction is rarely in excess of about three hours maximum at any one time and most of the interaction with any one person is for less than one hour. I rarely use the phone unless I am taking messages for my more socially connected and involved wife. I use emails extensively for the vast majority of people in my life who don’t enjoy the advantages of propinquity in relation to where I live in northern Tasmania, the island state of Australia.
We all have to work out our modus operandi and modus vivendi. Salinger worked out his for the last half of his life, say 45 to 90. And it was quintessentially a solitary one. I, too, have freed myself, as I say, from most of that endless chat which for forty to fifty years, and with other factors of wear and tear, wore down the sinews of my soul and strained my nerves or, more likely, the chemicals, in my brain, making me desire a life above syllables and sounds if not words and letters, a life in which much is merged into nothingness before the Revelation of a splendour the threads of Whose gold caught my eye and my ear over fifty years ago.
Unlike Salinger whose social and publishing history ceased at the height of his career, I now publish extensively on the internet in the evening of my life. I have never achieved the heights of literary prominence neither Salinger’s heights nor anyone else’s—and I probably never will. In the last nine years I have published several million words on the internet. I engage in an extensive correspondence with the wider world via the internet, emails and letters. I have a more limited social involvement as I have indicated above, not as limited as Salinger’s became, but certainly more limited than I had in the years of my life up to the age of 55 when I took an early retirement. My quiet withdrawal is somewhat like the pattern of withdrawal and return Toynbee writes about in his A Study of History. It is a conscious intellectual and spiritual stance based on sober critical reflection and attention.
It is a withdrawal partly based on a fatigue, as I said above, with the social domain; it is partly based on the great religious event in my time--the growing influence of the prophetic figure of Baha’u’llah, an influence which is the most remarkable development of contemporary religious history--and my personal need to translate this development into some personal intellectual and creative response, a different response than the one that occupied me in varying degrees in the half century to the year 2000 and that engaged my life’s energies as a student, a teacher, a husband, a parent and as a member of community.
The psychic event that has given rise to this new, this literary, response in the latter years of my middle age and the early years of my late adulthood had developed sensibly and insensibly over decades. My watchful muse wanted to seize the fleeting opportunities of the hour and gain access to my mind and what seemed like divine or perhaps just obsessive promptings. Such promptings, divine or otherwise, have always been difficult to define and assess. They were promptings that occurred more extensively at first in my fifties, promptings to what had been my usually inhibited and fatigued, literary and mental state, occupied as it had been for so long with so many of life’s other demands and activities. But during the 1990s, as I began to psychologically wind-down from many of these activities, I experienced a release of energy, perhaps a ripeness of intellect, that was new and very refreshing. But this release of energy required of me a new form, a new modus operandi and vivendi in which to work.
I have felt capable of apprehending no more than a fragment of the mental wealth that has poured into my lap as a result of the energies that have been progressively released in these last twenty years. Perhaps these energies have been created as a result of pouring over many questions in the long years of generativity that Erik Erikson says characterize middle adulthood, the years 35 to 55 or 65. Erikson says these are the years in which the ego development outcome is generativity. If generativity is not achieved the ego stagnates in self-absorption. The basic strengths of this second-to-last stage of life are productivity and care.
The last stage in Erikson’s model of psycho-social development is late adulthood, the years from 55 or 65 to death, the years I have just entered. The ego development outcome is integrity. If this is not achieved the ego despairs. The basic strength of this stage is wisdom says Erikson. Erikson felt that much of life before the age of 40 is preparing for the middle adulthood stage(40-55/60) and the last stage is recovering from the middle stage. Perhaps that is because as older adults we can often look back on our lives with happiness and are content, feeling fulfilled with a deep sense that life has meaning and we've made a contribution to life, a feeling Erikson calls integrity. Our strength comes from a wisdom that the world is very large and we now have a detached concern for the whole of life, accepting death as the completion of life.
On the other hand, some adults may reach this stage and despair at their experiences and perceived failures. They may fear death as they struggle to find a purpose to their lives, wondering "Was the trip worth it?" Alternatively, they may feel they have all the answers, a feeling not unlike going back to their adolescence. This results in the experience of a strong dogmatism that only their view has been correct. The significant relationship is with all of mankind, "my-kind," says Erikson. It is interesting to reflect on J.D. Salinger using Erikson’s model of psycho-social development and I leave this further reflection to readers here.
(1600 words)
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