THE SALINGER RIDDLE
November 1, 2014 — “You wish the
author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up
on the phone whenever you felt like it,” says Holden Caulfield of books that
“really knock [him] out.” This is one of the most quoted lines from one of the
most famous American novels of the 20th century, The Catcher in the Rye, which has sold well over
65 million copies worldwide. With their enthusiastic assumption that the novel
you love was written by a lovable person—that art and life are
continuous—Holden’s words point to the promise of intimacy that is often said
to result from the unique bond Salinger establishes with his readers. “I’d ask
him if he’ll be our catcher, our catcher in the rye,” replied a
suburban Boston high school kid in the ’90s when asked why she wanted to
go with some classmates to find Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire.
A similar impulse inspires Thomas Beller to take a “pilgrimage,”
documented in J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, to visit places where
Salinger lived and soak up the “positive energy.” Standing in the Park Avenue
apartment where Salinger spent his childhood, Beller remarks that Salinger’s
fans are convinced that his “voice”—its “real presence and meaning”—is
“directed, in some way, at them. This is part of the Salinger genius—even when
his audience became, at least for a while, enormous, the work spoke directly to
each individual.”
After 63 years Holden’s words have become poignant, and hauntingly
ironic. Everyone knows that Salinger was a notorious recluse, renouncing public
life in 1953. But we have also discovered he was a misanthrope, and would have
quickly hung up had a reader called to speak with the creator of Holden
Caulfield. Now that the private side of his withdrawal has come to light, the
array of eccentricities and bad behaviors found there has come to dominate our
attention. Initiating the shift were two memoirs in 1999 and 2000: the first by
a former lover, Joyce Maynard, and the second by his daughter, Margaret. Each
depicted an often cruel and distant man. In their wake came several
biographies, the most recent of which is 2013’s oral biography Salinger, a nastily inflected
version of these earlier laments, by David Shields and Shane Salerno
(accessorized by a television documentary produced by Salerno). Unremittingly
snide and censorious, they seem to have appropriated the pain that these two
women suffered through direct experience.
From these accumulated grievances a portrait of Salinger in New
Hampshire emerges: except to a handful of old army buddies and editors of the New Yorker, the writer was grumpy and
self-absorbed, a hypocrite and misogynist. He was obsessed with purity,
preaching detachment and spiritual fastidiousness while chasing women often
less than half his age, blind to the destruction inflicted on his family by his
own egomania and selfishness.
He insisted on spending most of his time writing in a small cabin in the
woods, literally detached from his family, often ignoring them. He reserved his
loyalty and love for the fictional Glass family. Yet more perverse was his
refusal to publish after 1965, dedicating those labors to posterity and locking
his manuscripts in a vault. More Glass stories and a war novel are among the
works evidently slated for publication, perhaps starting in 2015.
After such knowledge what forgiveness? One might reach for consolation
in a line from Auden’s elegy to Henry James: “There are many whose works / Are
in better taste than their lives.” Auden’s implied distinction acknowledges how
misplaced the reader’s yearning, even assumption, is, that Salinger the private
person is at one with his characters, who are full of tenderness, love, and
solicitude for each other. “Whatever he may be, he is not going to be your
catcher in real life. Get what you can from his writings, his stories,” warns
his daughter, Margaret. But our need to ignore the distinction and see art and
life as coextensive testifies to the powerful spell of Salinger’s imagination.
Salinger, in sum, presents a fascinating, complicated, even bizarre
American cultural conundrum: despite a half century of silence he still arouses
passions, be they loyal (Beller), sorrowful (Joyce Maynard and Margaret
Salinger), hateful (Shields and Salerno), or violent (both John Hinckley and
Mark David Chapman loved The Catcher in the Rye, a point to which we will
return). And all the while his first novel stirs new generations of
adolescents, drawn by Holden’s mix of sweetness and obscenity, by this lost boy
and intrepid romantic who also possesses a “built-in, shock-proof crap
detector,” to borrow a phrase from Hemingway, a warm admirer. Yet Salinger’s
fiction after Catcher seems virtually invisible by
comparison: Franny and Zooey, Raise High the
Roofbeam, Carpenters, Seymour: An
Introduction, and “Hapworth
16, 1924,” his last publication.
Thus the strangest feature of Salinger’s current standing is the void
where his literary reputation should be. Casebooks on Catcher proliferate but there
is precious little beyond that. Of the two major scholarly journals of American
literature, American Literary History and American
Literature, one has yet
to publish a single article on him and the other has published only two in 60
years.
Filling the critical gap are the assassins, so suggest Beller and
Shields. “By exiling everyone else he left himself with the crazy people,”
remarks Beller. According to Shields we should understand the crazies as
offering powerful readings of Salinger: “The Catcher in the Rye reemerges in the
1980s, misinterpreted as an assassination manual … The assassinations
and attempted assassinations are not a coincidence; they constitute
frighteningly clairvoyant readings of Catcher—the assassins intuiting
the underlying postwar anger and violence in the book.” Absurd as the remark
is, at least it reminds us of the oddities that mark Salinger’s current
critical standing. With the assassins in jail, ominously named fan sites like “Dead Caulfields” solemnly tend the sacred
flame.
The result is that Salinger’s literary achievement is scandalously
underappreciated, his considerable intellectual distinction smothered by
clichés: the Glasses as drowning in cuteness, sainthood, and hothouse
self-regard. (Janet Malcolm’s persuasive 2001 dissent, “Justice to J. D.
Salinger,” is an exception to the rule.)1 By the
early ’60s, the die was cast—in 1961, Irving Howe called him “the priest
of an underground cult.” The next year, Mary McCarthy accused him of depicting
the Glass family as a “closed circuit” of narcissism. Whether an in-group or
“cult,” the point was to mark off a fanatical readership of “well-scrubbed”
apolitical rich kids, too self-involved to rebel or conquer, merely “bright,
‘cool,’ estranged.”2
This critique from the left doubtless helped to sink Salinger’s
reputation among academics in succeeding decades. More interested in literary
sociology, Howe largely overlooked Salinger as a novelist of ideas.
Those ideas are embedded in the exuberant conversational fencing of his
hyper-reflective, self-mocking characters as they interrogate the possibility
of spiritual life for the urban intellectual in a secular world. Because
Salinger’s inquiry centers on the mystic, unbalanced Seymour Glass, the most
“profuse verbalizer” in a family stocked with them, Salinger bids farewell to
the tightly disciplined short story form and improvises a more capacious model.
He practiced an art of renunciation, both at the biographical level, where he
was guided by the otherworldly Eastern teachings that also preoccupy his
characters, and, most tellingly, in the aesthetic sense, where he made
renunciation a compositional resource. He did so by abandoning the reigning
laconic template (perfected by Hemingway) for a reflexive and discursive style.
Before concluding with a bit more about this formal achievement, I will
survey the carnage of Salinger’s reputation. “Carnage” is not inappropriate. He
served three years on or near the front lines in some of the deadliest
campaigns of the Second World War. Rising from private to staff sergeant in the
12th Infantry Regiment, Salinger was part of the D-Day landing at Utah Beach,
fought in the Battle of the Bulge and the horrific debacle of the Hurtgen
Forest. In winter combat he survived in foxholes filled with icy water, and in
the spring of 1945 he was among the first to “liberate” Dachau and other Nazi
death camps, later remarking to his daughter: “You never really get the smell
of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.” In
July ’45 he spent time in a hospital in Nuremburg, exhausted and, he said,
“despondent.” Upon being honorably discharged, Salinger had never missed a day
of service.
He became a husband, father, lover—charming, brilliant, and handsome—but
also harsh, and impossible to please or live with. Psychically scarred by his
ordeal, he never truly left the battlefield, according to his daughter: “For
the entire time I lived with my father I saw no going back, no discernible
return from soldier to civilian.” The war “was the point of reference that
defined everything else in relation to it.” And she adds: “There is a quality,
among those who have suffered, of not taking things for granted the way the
rest of us do. As long as I’ve known him, my father has never taken being warm
and dry and not being shot at for granted.”
Typical of his book’s search-and-destroy mentality, Shields strips the
compassion from Margaret Salinger’s remark, comparing her father’s creation of
the Glass family to “pulling an immense blanket over himself: from now on he
will keep himself warm by the heat of this impossibly idealized, suicidal,
genius alternative family. This will become his mission: to disappear into the
Glasses.” The shivering Salinger, declares Shields, had PTSD, a diagnosis
plausibly made by earlier biographers. Less plausible is the artistic disaster
that Shields insists followed
Catcher: “Suffering from PTSD, and searching for meaning
and God, he made religion his art.” Salinger “was no longer a novelist per se,”
instead “writing ‘wisdom literature’—metaphysical uplift … ‘translation’ and
popularization” became his task. The verdict is ringing and simple: “The war
broke him as a man and made him a great artist; religion offered him postwar
spiritual solace and killed his art.”
This leaves one wondering: just when was Salinger great?
Presumably, only in Catcher; the rest is just a means of cheering himself up.
With his typical portentous certitude, Shields concludes the book: “He came to
revile the world, so he disappeared into Vedanta. The pain was severe and
profound, and he couldn’t fully face it or alleviate it. Desperate for cures,
he destroyed himself: withdrawal, silence, inward collapse. The wounds undid
him, and he went under.” If only Salinger had been more balanced and sane in
his life and art, is the incessant moralizing undertow; so eager are Shields
and Salerno to correct their wayward subject that the latter praises “Franny”
for having “the balance about right: 80 percent story and character, 20 percent
religion and lecture.”
To this jaw-dropping account of aesthetic creation by the numbers it is
hard to know how to respond. Yet, as Adam Gopnik pointed out in the New
Yorker, despite its
tone-deafness to art and its procrustean arraignment of the subject, Salinger is not worthless. “If
you want to grasp why silence is so appealing to artists whose audience has
grown too loud … if you want to understand why the young J. D. Salinger fled
New York publishing, fanatic readers, eager biographers, disingenuous
interpreters, character assassination in the guise of ‘scholarship,’ and the
literary world generally, you need only open this book.”3
Perhaps the basic problem that afflicts Salinger is being blissfully,
blindly, at cross-purposes. On the one hand it is committed to the literal, the
historical record—when Salinger’s war experiences are described we get more
than enough pictures of heaps of piled-up naked corpses from the death
camps—and on the other hand impatient with the merely literal. All must be
grist for the insatiable thesis. Shields even turns Salinger’s Sunday ritual,
in old age, of attending a Vermont church supper to have a roast beef dinner,
arriving early and sitting alone with his wife, into a ploy, yet one more
expression of the man’s inveterate hypocrisy: “They went to the suppers, but
Salinger kept himself closed off at them. Approach. Avoid. Attract attention.
Spurn it.”
The determination not to be taken in by appearances is a Puritan and
Platonic habit of mind, and it wreaks havoc with the enterprise of biography.
No wonder Shields’s zeal for allegory transforms Hinckley and Chapman into
literary critics. Even on this point, Shields is not quite coherent: as noted
above, he says that Catcher was “misinterpreted” as a manual for killing
even as he dubs the assassinations “clairvoyant readings.” Like coherence, the
literal is a casualty of allegory: assassinations become “readings,” characters
become their creator—doomed Seymour is Salinger—and war
atrocities somehow become portable. “In Cornish, Salinger surrounded himself
with the dense, tall evergreens, the cold, dark winters, and the isolating
terrain of Hurtgen, but now from a commanding position.” No pain, no disaster,
no church supper, is off-limits. Most deliriously vulgar: “The bullet that
entered Seymour’s brain in 1949 [when Seymour Glass shoots himself at the end
of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”] kept travelling through American history,
all the way to John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and beyond. Catcheris so saturated with war
damage that sociopaths can see it, as if with X-ray glasses.”
This comic-book rendition of history aside, the real mystery regarding
Salinger and the war is the relative absence of physical violence
in his work. Seymour’s death is an anomaly. Holden does express homicidal
fantasies toward various people he dislikes, but he also says of the habits of
those he loves, “That kills me,” which is hardly a death wish. Seymour’s
siblings, especially Buddy and Zooey, do messily and angrily grieve over
Seymour, and the Glasses mock professors, psychiatrists, and other
know-it-alls, but their ridicule is far from the desire “to maim or kill all
his critics” that Shields claims is ubiquitous.
Arriving after Salinger and providing merciful contrast, Beller’s
book is lucky in its timing. The Escape Artist presents a fan’s
notes; its tone is casual and low-key. An admired novelist, Beller here tries
his hand at an impressionistic biography/memoir reminiscent of Geoff Dyer’s
treatment of D. H. Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage. A native New Yorker, like
Salinger, Beller has a sense of kinship with his subject, which he explores by
retracing some of Salinger’s boyhood haunts. Yet these nostalgic excursions are
less interesting than the new angles Beller finds. He is enlightening on the
subtle work of Salinger’s unsung New Yorker editor Gus Lobrano and on the Time magazine 1961 cover
story on Salinger. Beller finds seeds of the media’s later obsession in the Time article, which begins
with a report of Cornish neighbors finding unbearable his “keeping to himself.”
These neighbors, notes Beller, “had to scale a fence and trespass on his
property while he was away. He hadn’t invited them into his home and his life,
so they were forced to break in … Their actions personify Time’s neurotic relationship
with Salinger. It would be a template for years to come.”
“What goaded Time,” Beller acutely observes, was the “vexing feeling
that there was something there that couldn’t be explained,” the search for a
“hidden riddle” also captivated Salinger’s readers. Would that Beller had
engaged that riddle at greater length. Instead, he tends to raise rather than
pursue questions, and the result is that The Escape Artist is less consequential
than it might have been.
Like Shields, but less sweepingly, Beller disapproves of “the role of
Zen Buddhism” in Salinger’s life and work. He is disappointed on reading
Salinger’s recently released letters to his spiritual guide Swami Nikhilananda:
“Absent are the absurd, bizarre digressions and impersonations” that enliven
his other letters. Ironically, this epistolary constriction precisely inverts Zen’s
actual aesthetic effect on Salinger’s fiction. The Glass stories after
“Bananafish” are distinguished by openness and digression, since their
animating formal and emotional premise is that Seymour’s “character lends
itself to no legitimate sort of narrative compactness,” as writer and narrator
Buddy Glass tells us at the start of Seymour: An Introduction. Neither are Buddy’s
feelings “compact”—he is grieving and unsettled but also “ecstatically happy,”
by which he means he is in tune with the Zen edict abolishing closure and
hierarchy for access to the divine of this world. Salinger turns this openness
into Buddy’s compositional principle of digression and deferral, qualities that
also characterize his own ambivalence about finishing a portrait of Seymour.
Writing inside this Zen indifference to all goals save the abolition of desire,
Salinger brings us into the mind of a character in the act of
struggling—comically and earnestly—toward the “pure consciousness” of satori, a
realm of enlightenment immune to contingency.
All this is so much nonsense to David Shields, who calls Salinger’s art
“perfect” in the sense of “airless” and “claustrophobic,” leaving the “reader
no room to breathe,” and who neatly parcels out “Salinger’s best tendencies
(his devotion to literary art)” and his “worst tendencies (toward recusal,
toward isolation, renunciation, purity).” This misses the spiritual bridge
Salinger built between art and renunciation. Buddhism didn’t kill his work; it
helped him abandon the rigidity of the Hemingway / New Yorker aesthetic. The manic
dissonant monologue Seymour is a working-through of grief that
anticipates the choice made by Zen adept Roland Barthes (in The Neutral) “to live according to
nuance.”4 This alertness to the
delicate and fragile imbues Salinger’s novel with the wayward energy of
improvisatory immediacy. His voice still leaps off the page, which, after all,
is what counts.
Ross Posnock teaches American
literature from the mid-nineteenth century to now at Columbia University. His
books include Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of
the Modern Intellectual (1998) and Philip Roth's
Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (2006); he also
edited The Cambridge
Companion to Ralph Ellison (2005).Renunciation:
Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Artists, and Philosophers will be published by
Harvard University Press at the end of 2015.
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