Schoell+3

=J. D. Salinger=

"J. D. Salinger," in //Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II//, edited by Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman, Gale, 1978, pp. 434-44. [In the essay below, French surveys Salinger's career.] The entire body of writing by which Jerome David Salinger wishes to be known is contained in four small books—one novel and thirteen short stories. All of these were published in the eleven-and-a-half years between January 1948 and June 1959; and all but the novel and two of the stories originally appeared in the //New Yorker// magazine. Yet despite this limited body of work, Salinger remained for at least a dozen years, from 1951 to 1963, the most popular American fiction writer with serious high-school and college students, as well as many adults alienated by the stultifying conformity of the Eisenhower years; and his few publications elicited an enormous body of criticism. Few writers have developed such a major reputation for such a small body of work, largely from a single magazine noted for its rigid formulae and chic appeal to the highly educated, upper middle class (especially since Salinger's fiction is notable for its unwavering attack on the life-style of the highly educated, urban, upper middle class). Only Salinger's last few published stories were notable for their controversial, anti-narrative structures; the novel and other stories are exemplary of the brisk, ironic "//New Yorker// style," used by other writers such as John O'Hara and John Cheever; but all Salinger's work is remarkable for his command of the brisk, nervous, defensive speech of young, upper-middle-class Manhattanites. His work is a unique phenomenon, important as the voice of a "silent generation" in revolt against a "phony world" and in search of mystical escapes from a deteriorating society rather than "causes" promising political revolution or reform. Salinger was born and grew up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, the son of a prosperous Jewish importer and his Scotch-Irish wife. In one of the few interviews he has granted, he said that his own childhood was much like that of the boy Holden Caulfield **in** his novel //The **Catcher** in the **Rye** //, though Salinger had only one sister. Like Holden, he was restless in fashionable prep schools, and he was finally sent to Valley Forge Military Academy, a model for Pencey Prep in his novel. Here and at nearby Ursinus College, which he attended briefly, he worked for literary magazines and wrote movie reviews. Subsequently a class in short story writing at Columbia University under Whit Burnett, founder-editor of the influential //Story Magazine//, in which many mid-century fiction writers were first published, led to his own earliest commercial publications in this magazine. He quickly graduated to the well-paying "slick" magazines of the period—//Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan//, and, at last, the //New Yorker//. To the first five of these and some other publications, Salinger contributed between 1941 and 1948 twenty stories that he has since 1954 refused to allow to be republished. (There does exist a pirated edition of them: //The Complete Uncollected Stories of J. D. Salinger//, 2 vols. [1974].) Most of these are very short, highly colloquial, sentimental, yet heavily ironic tales in the manner made popular by O. Henry. Many of them are the very popular "short, short stories" with a surprise ending that could be printed on a single page, although one, "The Inverted Forest," is a novelette of considerable complexity with an ambiguous ending. Several of these stories are about draftees in the army during World War II and reflect Salinger's own service between 1942 and 1945 in the Army Signal Corps and the Counter-Intelligence Corps. After the war, Salinger published in the //New Yorker// a short story, "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," subsequently revised for inclusion **in** //The **Catcher** in the **Rye** //; the work by which he wishes to be known began, however, with his second contribution to the magazine, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," an enormously popular story about the suicide of Seymour Glass, who first appears in this story. Salinger perhaps wishes his early stories hidden away because they are apprentice work; he may be embarrassed by their slickness. A few are interesting because they introduce an earlier conception of Holden Caulfield as a rebellious young soldier who is killed in World War II; but only "The Inverted Forest" really adds anything to Salinger's stature. This is the story of a writer who "can't stand any kind of inventiveness" and his pathetic difficulties in dealing with doting and exploitative women—mother, patron, wife, and mistress. Salinger never again so specifically allegorizes the view that the artist has no obligations to society as in this caustic story of a sorely-pressed individual who withdraws from a meretricious world to live entirely within "the inverted forest" of his own imagination—an outlook that Salinger rejects in his later stories. Only some early chapters of //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // and the short story "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" among his collected works picture people without spiritual moorings in a plastic, materialistic world. The major reason for Salinger's rejecting these early stories is that they do not reflect the Hindu-Buddhist influences that begin to color his work in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which Salinger begins to depict escape from the "phony" world as not defeat, but triumph for the sensitive individual. His work thereafter can most rewardingly be perceived as colloquial, contemporary American versions of the //ko-ans// (cryptic object lessons) of the Zen Buddhist tradition. By narrowing attention, then, to the novel and thirteen chosen stories, this whole body of work can be seen—like such other American classics as Whitman's //Leaves of Grass// and Thomas Wolfe's Eugene Gant/George Webber novel-cycle—as parts of a single statement, the theme of which is announced in the climactic moment in the last of these stories as Buddy Glass explains his older brother Seymour's suicide: "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." Salinger's epic of the journey of the human spirit through the illusions of the material world to the transcendent spiritual Oneness beyond, which might be called "The Caulfield/Glass Saga," begins, chronologically, with a still controversial, description of Seymour Glass's activities on the day of his suicide amidst the unparalleled vulgarities of Miami Beach, Florida, and ends with his disciple-brother's explanation of this action and of the unique importance of the "artist-seer." The rambling, seemingly structureless "Seymour: An Introduction" that still bothers plot-oriented readers can most satisfactorily be appreciated as Buddy Glass's petition for the sainthood of his brother by some unworldly body of right-thinking people. Seymour is indeed "a fool"—not only in the eyes of conventional, money-grubbing people, but in his own because of his romantic susceptibilities—but he does create and inspire beauty, and he does end this mortal life rather than compromise his integrity. Using Buddy's pronouncement to make a division, a distinction can be made among Salinger's works between the stories of those who refuse to betray their sacred consciences and those who do compromise reluctantly in order to fulfill what they regard as their obligations in a conscienceless world. On the one side may be placed "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," "Teddy," "Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: An Introduction." On the other there are "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," "The Laughing Man," "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" and //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** //. In the middle—and in the middle of Salinger's career—is the smallest body of what has generally proved his most admired works, "Down at the Dinghy," "For Esme—With Love and Squalor," and //Franny and Zooey//—souvenirs of a fleeting time when Salinger apparently hoped that those not "seers" themselves might learn enough from these mentors to survive in "the waste land" without becoming contaminated. As far as the published record goes, this saga began with some trial sketches for //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** //, "I'm Crazy" and "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Comparison between the latter and the final version of Holden Caulfield's disastrous date with Sally Hayes provides the only available opportunity for studying the development in Salinger's writing. Although it has often been observed—even by Salinger himself—that there are autobiographical elements in the novel, they are finally not so important as the fact that //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // is a story of an urban American middle-class boy who at the adolescent crisis of his life—the point at which in a communally ordered society he would undergo traditional rites of initiation into manhood—chooses, on his own and unguided, an adulterated life in the "real" world rather than an escape from it. Holden is aware of the options, because his younger brother Allie, who wrote Emily Dickinson's poems on his baseball mitt, has escaped (though through disease not choice), and his older brother, an artist but no seer, has prostituted himself to Hollywood. When Holden fears that he may "disappear" himself, he prays to his personal saint Allie to preserve him. Holden persists in living because, despite his frustrations in the "phony" world, he still has a naive sense of mission: in the famous passage that gives the novel its title he tells his little sister Phoebe, "I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of **rye** and all.... And I'm standing by on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." Holden learns that his dream can never be realized. Watching his little sister ride the carousel in Central Park and grab for the golden ring, he observes, "The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall but it's bad if you say anything to them." Even before acquiescing in his inability to arrest the life cycle and hold youth forever innocent, Holden has suffered another disillusionment. He has dreamed of escaping the city and going West where he could build "a little cabin somewhere ... and live there for the rest of my life ... near the woods, but not right //in// them, because I'd want it as sunny as hell all the time." (This description uncannily foreshadows exactly the kind of place in which Salinger has himself lived for twenty years now, not in the West, but in New England.) After he finds obscenities scratched, however, even on the walls of Phoebe's elementary school, he sadly concedes, "You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any." Rather than being driven out of this world by such disenchantments, Holden assures readers that he did go home after he felt "so damn happy ... the way old Phoebe kept going around and around" while the carousel played "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." He has made this choice after Phoebe pleads to run away with him; he must forego his own escape to do what he can for her. After this he begins "missing everybody," even those who have hurt him. He is a self-made martyr; but martyrdom in the "waste land" society means continuing to live, not accepting death. Holden chooses to live in a decadent society in order to help others live as they wish to live rather than to withdraw in order to preserve his own scruples or force his own brand of salvation on others. //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // is a genuine initiation tale, even though it is only the candidate undergoing the ordeal who is conscious of what his final decision means; the real evidence of the decadence of his world is that the initiators who impose the ordeals upon him are too much wrapped up in themselves even to understand the meaning of their actions. The collected //Nine Stories//, by way of contrast, ultimately climaxes in not the acceptance but the transcendence of this world. Although the stories involve different characters, they may also be read collectively as the dramatization of a progressive action, so that they exemplify what Forest Ingram calls a "short-story cycle": "a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader's successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts." The links between the stories in this cycle, however, do not result in the kind of narrative progression based on physical growth that we find in James Joyce's //Dubliners//, John Steinbeck's //The Red Pony//, or Dylan Thomas's //Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog//, but rather a progression based upon spiritual enlightenment, something like the believer experiences in the Christian ritual of the Stations of the Cross or, more appropriately, the stages that the neophyte passes through in his apprehension of Zen. What is represented through this group of stories that were published—and apparently written—in the order of their presentation is the purification of the ego by the passage of the soul through an intensifying series of the torments of the hell of this mortal world to the ego-free state in which one has at last achieved total unity with the infinite so that the individual life-form no longer matters—the one has been absorbed into //the// One. Humayun Mirza has provided the clue that has long been needed to make possible a fully coherent experience of this story-cycle in his perception that, despite the meaning of Seymour Glass's example and teachings to his sibling/disciples, Seymour is—from the Hindu view—a false guru (teacher), because he has not been able to transcend the temptations of mortal flesh. He is like the person that Teddy McArdle (title character of the final one of the nine stories) was in his previous incarnation. This person "fell from Grace before final illumination" when he met a lady and "sort of stopped meditating." Teddy in his final incarnation, Mirza demonstrates, is a true guru. The story-cycle thus moves from the portrayal of the dichotomized saint-in-spirit/satyr-in-the-flesh who must destroy himself to liberate his tortured conscience/consciousness to the portrayal of a person whose unified mind/body is ready for the final illumination that will result in his disappearance from the material world through no action of his own, since he has become too etherealized to persist in it. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is thus misread as a moral tale, a satirical attack on our bourgeois culture, or a study of alienation. It is rather what John Steinbeck might call a "non-teleological" work, a story of what //happens// to the partially illuminated person torn between the lustings of his instincts and the dictates of his conscience. The important thing is that this story //starts// rather than ends the cycle. Seymour is actually not too advanced for his society, but too primitive for it. He has the purity of vision of an Old Testament prophet without the sacred purification of Jesus or Buddha. He is even less sophisticated than Holden Caulfield; he is not able to adjust to his society, but neither can he transcend it without violence. The successive stories through "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," then, represent the successive stages in the adjustment to this society that Seymour cannot make, though the central characters also progressively lose their purity of vision, the innocence that Wordsworth in "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" describes the child as bringing with him as he enters this world "trailing clouds of glory." The next story in the cycle, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," offers in a few pages the most clearly contrasting views of the "nice" and "phony" worlds that we find anywhere in Salinger's writing. Eloise, the principal character, has glimpses of the sacred world in which Seymour Glass yearns to live, but she is too mired in the phony world of Connecticut to free herself; she can only break out finally in the Wordworthian cry, "I was a nice girl ... wasn't I?" She is in much the same state that Holden Caulfield appears to be at the end of //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** //, although Holden has "grown up" enough to resemble more closely the sentimental Ginnie Maddox of the third story of the cycle, "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," who has become enough at home in the "phony world" to be able to make the generous gestures that elude the still embittered Eloise. "The Laughing Man" presents a central figure another step removed from Seymour's neurotic perfectionism, another step closer to being able to make practical gestures to comfort others even in the midst of his own despair. When this "Chief" terrifies his young listeners/acolytes by letting the legendary laughing man of his seemingly endless episodic tale tear off his poppy-petal mask and die, he seems to be spitefully taking out his rage at a frustrated love affair on his helpless charges; but, paradoxically, his action is in their best interests, for the immediate pain of disillusionment is better than prolonged existence in a fantasy world that the Chief now knows must some day be dispelled painfully. But he is not yet a master of reconciliation; his technique is crude and abrupt. The master is Boo-Boo Tannenbaum, one of Seymour Glass's two sisters. In "Down at the Dinghy," her son Lionel has cruelly had his illusions shattered at an even earlier age than the Chief's charges in "The Laughing Man." (Just what ails Lionel remains obscure; the story focuses on Boo-Boo's techniques.) Tactfully and with utmost patience rather than even well-intended harshness, Boo-Boo ends her son's attempt to withdraw from an intolerable adult world by making him accept its imperfect realities. The master of reconciliation, the maker of as much happiness as we can ever know in the "phony world," is that proper young British girl who lends her name to the title of a great modern epithalamion, "For Esme—With Love and Squalor." Esme is able to readjust not just a young relative, but a grown man who much resembles Seymour Glass. When Sergeant X, as this character is mysteriously identified, is in Germany on the verge of a nervous breakdown after observing incredibly squalid examples of the behavior of both Hitler's Nazi minions and his boorish American fellows-in-arms, he regains his "faculties" as he receives Esme's gift of her father's wristwatch with the crystal broken and the news that she is teaching her affectionate little brother to read and write. Esme's spontaneous generosity is as much communion as we can expect to experience in this hellish life; but it is important to contemplate the nature of her gift—a //time//piece with the transparent crystal smashed. The attempted gift of time, like the unequivocal gift of letters to her little brother, shows that Esme, for all her radiance, is completely of this linear world. Her joys are family and marriage; she has no perception of the timeless realm of Teddy McArdle. The temporal equilibrium that Esme achieves cannot endure. This is just what happens in the plunge from the ecstatic highs of "For Esme" into the depths of Salinger's darkest, most cynical story, "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," in which a naive young man desperate for success is driven to lie about his wife's behavior to the very senior member of his law firm who is in fact cuckolding him. His spiritual death is signaled by his recognition that the wife's eyes are not actually as he had fancied "green," emblematic of youth and vitality, but "like goddam //sea// shells." No single recent story better illustrates the line from T. S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion," "What is kept must be adulterated." Many modern short-story cycles might have ended here, as James Joyce's //Dubliners// does, for example, with the completion of a movement from life-in-death to death-in-life. "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" reaches the lowest pit of modern urban hell; there is no exit from here except into the extinguishing darkness of Samuel Beckett's //Endgame//—or upward by a surge of spirit into an entirely other world. One of Salinger's least comprehended stories, the genuinely mystical "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," makes this leap, and in so doing most conspicuously calls attention to the architectonics of //Nine Stories//. De Daumier-Smith is the first, actually the only character in Salinger's work to experience—before the reader's eyes (Teddy's illumination has preceded our acquaintance with him)—a "liminal moment," an illumination on the threshold between the sensible and supersensible. This vain artist from a decadent background has become a teacher in a correspondence-course art school and begins to try to manage his students' lives, especially that of a talented but unself-conscious nun. He lives above an orthopedic appliances shop; gazing in its window, he recognizes that "no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully" he might learn to live, he "would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans.... " One day, however, as he makes a friendly gesture to an attendant in the window, "Suddenly ... the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of [his] nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second." He is blinded, and when his sight returns the girl is gone, "leaving behind her a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers." He goes home and notes in his diary, "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everybody is a nun." Scarcely another scene in literature makes so explicit the "dazzling" experience that Buddy Glass attributes to the "artist-seer." For De Daumier-Smith, however, this is only a transient experience; he returns to the great American sport of girl-watching. He is not ready to make the final, permanent move into the enamel world that Teddy does in the last story in the collection. "Teddy" is Salinger's one story whose reception he has commented upon through the medium of Buddy Glass. In "Seymour: An Introduction," Buddy, who has spoken of what are unmistakably other of Salinger's earlier stories as his own, mentions "an exceptionally Haunting, Memorable, unpleasantly controversial, and thoroughly unsuccessful short story about a `gifted' little boy aboard a transatlantic liner." The story has indeed proved controversial, for critics still quarrel over whether Teddy at the end jumps into an empty swimming pool or is pushed in by his spiteful little sister. Salinger has never explained why the story was "unsuccessful," but it is probably largely because readers failed to comprehend that Teddy was but a passive agent in his fate. The clue to the conclusion is his suggestion to his parents at the beginning of the story that "after I get out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances." When an inquisitive schoolteacher asks Teddy if he has any emotions, the boy replies, "If I do, I don't remember when I ever used them.... I don't see what they're //good// for." He has become detached from both the feelings of frustration that most of Salinger's other characters feel and even the feelings of joy that Esme induces and that De Daumier-Smith discovers. Teddy is no longer a part of this neurotic world, so that he is ready to depart from it—but his departure is no tragedy. Rather, since he has attained spiritual truth, his is a divine comedy. If he did not resist "dematerialization," however, neither would he—free of emotions—have taken any action of the kind that Seymour Glass did to destroy himself. //Nine Stories// thus carries us through a series of emblematic tableaux of human spiritual evolution—from an opening portrait of a seer whose spiritual insight has completely outstripped his physical discipline, through the stages as one loses internal vision to gain external control of his body and emotions and then is projected suddenly into a spiritual development that provides momentary insights of timelessness, until one is absorbed altogether into the infinite. These stories should not be read, however, as models for behavior, but as what James Joyce called "epiphanies" of manifestations of behavior at typical stages in the human fall from glory and reascension back into it. //Franny and Zooey// marks a movement beyond the creation of this static portrait gallery, perhaps even a presumptuous one. In the first of these two linked stories, Seymour Glass's youngest sibling Franny has grown—like Holden Caulfield—impatient and disgusted with the meretriciousness of life in the success-seeking world and yearns to move toward spiritual purification by repeating the "Jesus Prayer" continually. She succeeds only in driving herself into a nervous breakdown. In the sequel, her brother Zooey attempts to enlighten her by making her see that she is reacting against the egotism she despises with what is only another form of egotism: "You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is de//tach//ment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch." She has been protesting the "unskilled laughter" of the audience; but Zooey, in his summoning up of a grotesque "Fat Lady," who is actually "Christ himself," tells her that depressing as the audience's reaction may be, it's none of her business: "An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and //on his own terms//, not anyone else's." Zooey thus does advocate living humbly in this world, as Holden Caulfield had apparently determined to do; and by masquerading as Seymour during a phone call to Franny, he apparently succeeds in tranquilizing her into this acceptance, too. Actually one of the last two stories collected, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" had originally appeared between the separate publications of "Franny" and "Zooey," but it belongs with the final story, "Seymour: An Introduction," as part of Salinger's evocation through the medium of Buddy Glass of the artist whose only concern indeed is "to shoot for some kind of perfection," //on his own terms//. That Salinger's vision of Seymour had changed from 1948 to 1959 is suggested by Buddy's observation in "Seymour: An Introduction" that the "Seymour" of the earlier story "was not Seymour at all but, oddly, someone with a striking resemblance to—alley oop, I'm afraid—myself." Coupled with the comments about the unsuccessfulness of "Teddy," this concession—following Salinger's own successful withdrawal from the "phony world" of //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** //—suggests that Salinger had begun to have a much more favorable impression of Seymour than when he wrote "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Since Teddy's emotionless purity seemed beyond readers' comprehensions, they might identify more closely with a spiritually superior person who shares their own fleshly frailties. In "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," Buddy begins by saying of Seymour that, since his death, "I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead," and in "Seymour: An Introduction," he goes on to say, "We have had only three or four very nearly non-expendable poets, and I think Seymour will eventually stand with those few." The curious form of the latter story, in which Buddy seeks to form an alliance with the reader against "the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists..." also suggests that these later Glass stories are attempts to convert readers through an embryonic saint's legend. (Buddy describes Seymour as "the only person I've habitually consorted with ... who more frequently than not tallied with the classical conception, as I saw it, of a //mukta//, a ringding enlightened man, a God-knower.") The detachment of //Nine Stories// has been supplanted by a skillfully manipulated conversion technique. As a result, perhaps, of his own successful retreat from the world, Salinger had achieved a kind of peace that made him feel that the artist did have something more //timely// to do than point to Teddy McArdle's merger with the infinite as the culmination of man's incarnations. He may have changed his mind again, if one can trust the limited evidence of his most recent uncollected story, "Hapworth 16, 1924," which consists mostly of a letter that Seymour writes home from summer camp at the age of seven. This letter testifies to the prodigious learning that would make Seymour the star of a 1930s children's quiz program, but it evidences also a prodigious sexuality that reinforces the early picture in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" of the failed guru. If Salinger has swung back to a heightened appreciation of the timeless, egoless state achieved by Teddy McArdle, he has not chosen to let us know. In the one interview that he has granted in recent years (in a telephone call to San Francisco, primarily to protest the unauthorized publishing of his early stories in a collected edition), he reported that he was still writing furiously, but that he views publication as a "terrible invasion" of his privacy. He chooses to live isolated in New Hampshire, perhaps sustained by his view of the solitary splendor of neighboring Mount Ascutney. Salinger was little known when //The **Catcher** **in** the **Rye** // was published; and the novel was not outstandingly acclaimed by reviewers, most of them sounding variations on Ernest Jones's theme that, although the novel was "a case history of all of us," it was "predictable and boring." Its reputation grew slowly by word of mouth, especially among college students and teachers; but little serious attention was paid to Salinger until after the publication of //Nine Stories// and "Franny." In 1956 and 1957 the first serious essays by respected scholars—Edgar M. Branch, Arthur Heiserman, James E. Miller, Jr., and Charles Kaplan—appeared, linking the novel to traditional quest myths and particularly to Mark Twain's //Adventures of Huckleberry Finn//. For the next six years, the flood of articles rose constantly, until George Steiner denounced "The Salinger Industry" for promoting Salinger to greatness for his competent rendering of "the semi-literate maunderings of the adolescent mind." There were other skeptics: John W. Aldridge included an influential misreading of // **Catcher** // in //In Search of Heresy//; Leslie Fiedler said that Salinger and Jack Kerouac echoed not "the tragic //Huckleberry Finn//, but the sentimental book with which it is intertwined"; Frank Kermode supposed that Holden's attitudes pleased academics who shared these views that they could not openly express; Mary McCarthy belittled Salinger's obsessive affection for his own creations. Many of Salinger's defenders, like Dan Wakefield and Christopher Parker, were sentimental and childishly hysterical; but a body of solid work began to appear with Donald Costello's study of Salinger's language, Carl Strauch's structural analysis of // **Catcher** //, and William Wiegand's sound analyses of the relationship of Salinger's art to modern Western philosophy. A landmark was Ihab Hassan's choice of Salinger as one of the four principal postwar fictionists in the pioneering study of the period, //Radical Innocence// (1961). The peak came in 1962-1963, which saw the publication of six collections of essays about Salinger and the first book-length monograph about his work. This formidable array proved a turning point, however, coinciding, as it accidentally did, with the publication of what remains so far the last of his own books. Gradually at first, then dramatically, after 1963, new critical studies tapered off, while sales of the works themselves slowed. Because of his lack of interest in political reforms and the passivity and escapism of his leading characters, Salinger did not appeal to young readers during the activist years of the late 1960s and early 1970s as he had earlier to members of the "silent generation" that identified with Holden Caulfield. It appears that what stands as the finest appreciation of this novelist by a distinguished American scholar, James E. Miller, Jr.'s pamphlet, //J. D. Salinger// (1965), might remain the last word on the man who possessed the singular ability to embody fictionally the alienated sensibility of the youth of a decade. Miller concludes that Salinger deserves "a place in the first rank, and even, perhaps, the preeminent position" in post-World War II American fiction. Since then, however, there has been a rediscovery of Salinger as a writer of unique importance on different grounds. Although lately arrived critics continue to rush into print with the news that Salinger is a spokesman for America's alienated adolescents, and although some mention of the influence of Asian thought upon his writings may be found in even early criticisms, only with the elementary explanations that Bernice and Sanford Goldstein began to publish in 1966 have the influences of Zen Buddhism on Salinger's work been illustrated in detail. The first full accountings of the considerable extent of his use of oriental thought from a variety of sources appear in Humayun Mirza's dissertation and John Antush's book. The best recent essays about Salinger are by new enthusiasts such as Robert Coles and Ernest Ranly, who stress both the way in which a growing interest in Asian thought in the West has led readers back through "a passage to India" to Salinger and the way in which his colloquial embodiments of these ancient speculations have subconsciously implanted them into the minds of sensitive young Americans appalled by the increasing "phoniness" of their own materialistic culture. Now that the early clamor over his works (including some censorious attacks upon its improprieties) has subsided, there seems little argument that Salinger, especially **in** //The **Catcher** in the **Rye** //, "Franny," and the more worldly of the //Nine Stories//, is unchallenged for having embedded in the amber of art the "bugs" of the depressingly paranoid McCarthy/Eisenhower years. But there is also growing evidence that his works are not just static museum pieces—like those that Holden Caulfield admires. Interest in oriental philosophies has been growing rapidly in America in recent years as we have achieved insights into their universality. Increasingly Salinger is winning recognition and acclaim as a writer thoroughly steeped in the manners and mannerisms of his own culture, who has deeply enough absorbed this traditional wisdom from the East to be able to use it artfully in shaping legends that enable readers to appreciate through familiar icons the meaning of esoteric doctrines. Like the Phoenix of Eastern mythology, Salinger has risen from the ashes of his own //timely// reputation to assume what may prove a timeless one.
 * Table of Contents:**[|Essay]

Source Citation:
French, Warren. "J. D. Salinger." //DISCovering Authors//. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. //Student Resource Center - Bronze//. Gale. North Penn High School. 4 Feb. 2008 .