Salinger+Then+and+Now+Kaitlyn+harkins


 * "Salinger Then and Now"**
 * Critic:** Terry Teachout **Source:** //Commentary,// Vol. 84, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 61-4. **Criticism about:** J. D. Salinger (1919-), **also known as:** J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, Jerome David Salinger

[(essay date September 1987) //In the following essay, Teachout provides an unflattering reevaluation of Salinger's fiction, literary career, and critical reception in the wake of Salinger's lawsuit against biographer Ian Hamilton.//] Even though he has published nothing since 1965, the books of J. D. Salinger remain popular. **//The Catcher in the Rye//** alone still sells some 250,000 copies worldwide each year. It has been a long time, however, since anyone worth listening to thought Salinger a first-rate writer, long enough that most of us have forgotten just how seriously he used to be taken by some of our best critics. ("Have you been reading Salinger's stories about the Irish-Jewish Glass family in the //New Yorker?//" Edmund Wilson wrote to John Dos Passos in 1957. "I think they are very remarkable, quite unlike anything else.") So it was against a background of comparative critical neglect that the case of //J. D. Salinger// v. //Random House Inc and Ian Hamilton// made the newspapers last summer, putting J. D. Salinger back in the lime-light for the first time in years. The occasion was the scheduled publication of a book about Salinger by Ian Hamilton, an English critic best known in this country for his biography of Robert Lowell. Advance interest in Hamilton's book was surprisingly high. Not that anyone really expected him to come up with anything much in the gossip department. Such biographical fodder as exists had already been quite thoroughly chewed over by the Salinger cultists. But the prospect of an intelligent biography of the creator of Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass was encouraging enough. Galleys of the book were sent out, a publication date of August 29 was announced, and reviewers went to work. The title of Hamilton's book, //J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life,// suggests the considerable diffidence with which the biographer had approached his task. "Since 1965," he wrote in an introductory note, "J. D. Salinger has chosen to withhold his work from the public domain--thus, it seems to me, effectively forbidding biographical intrusion." Having settled on this stiffish line, Hamilton hewed resolutely to it, passing up the chance to rummage through Salinger's garbage in favor of a reasonably careful interim examination of the public record, eked out with a few interviews here and there. It seemed more than likely that the ferociously and famously reclusive Salinger would be irked by even so modest an attempt at getting beneath the shiny surface of his enigmatic career, but the general assumption was that he would simply have to tough it out. A few weeks before the official publication date, Random House sent every recipient of the galleys of //J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life// a form letter announcing that publication of the book had been postponed pending the resolution of a dispute with Salinger's counsel. Critics were warned not to publish until the case was settled. Salinger had clearly decided to try to suppress the book, and, as it turned out, Ian Hamilton himself had placed in Salinger's hands a weapon which in the end proved lethal. The original version of //J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life// contained material drawn from seventy letters written by Salinger that had made their way over the years into the archives of various university libraries and which Hamilton had hunted down and copied for use in his book. A smart copyright lawyer had obviously gone over the manuscript carefully, for direct quotations from these letters were generally either kept very brief or shunned in favor of paraphrase. This material, while interesting enough, was hardly earth-shattering in its implications, but Salinger sued anyway, charging that Hamilton had made unfair use of his correspondence. In an effort to mollify Salinger and his lawyers, Random House produced a second version which trimmed back the letters even further. But Salinger was so eager to prevent the book from seeing print that he actually came to New York in October to give a deposition, an unprecedented action for a man whose reputation for eremitism has long made Greta Garbo look like a party hound. Salinger lost his suit in November but won on appeal in January. Though Random House is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, the damage has already been done. Scheduled and rescheduled and finally announced for this year's Christmas season. //J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life// now floats uneasily in what is likely to prove a permanent limbo. Barring an unexpected reversal, Ian Hamilton is out one book and a couple of dozen reviewers have unusable manuscripts on their hands. The only winners may be those lucky individuals who hung on to their galleys of the book, which are already soaring in value. There are any number of possible interpretations of J. D. Salinger's suit, just as any number of salacious Salinger stories regularly make the rounds in New York. The suit was a publicity stunt. A sincere gesture by a genuine recluse. A purely professional action designed to protect Salinger's legal interests. A desperate measure by a man who for obscure reasons of his own does not want his work interpreted or his life recounted. This last explanation has a pleasingly solid ring to it. For Salinger is more than just a recluse: he is a critic-hater of long standing. "Against interpretation" might well serve as the motto on his coat of arms. And Ian Hamilton's book, for all its inadequacies, provided more than enough raw biographical ammunition for critics, sympathetic and hostile, to undertake a detailed examination of what made J. D. Salinger run. Not that such an examination has been rendered impossible by Salinger's suit. The pertinent facts after all were in circulation long before Ian Hamilton appeared on the scene, and they remain readily available to anyone within striking distance of a reasonably good library. Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919. His father, a well-to-do New York importer of ham and cheese, was Jewish, his mother Irish. (This sentence alone contains sufficient material for a two-volume psychobiography.) Raised on the Upper West Side, Salinger moved with his family to an apartment in the East 90's in 1932 and was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania two years later. The senior Salinger apparently expected his son to follow him into the ham and cheese business, but Jerome had other plans. After an abortive stay at Ursinus College, a Protestant liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania, he returned to New York and began his career in earnest by enrolling in a night-school course in short-story writing taught at Columbia University by Whit Burnett, the editor of //Story// magazine. Salinger's work first saw print in 1940 when Burnett published one of his class assignments. Within a few years he was regularly placing stories in "slick" magazines like //Collier's// and the //Saturday Evening Post.// These early efforts are a frankly commercial reshuffling of the trashiest aspects of William Saroyan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Salinger, who knew them for what they were, refused to collect them in later years. Drafted in 1942, Salinger served in the Counter-Intelligence Corps as an interrogator, going ashore at Normandy on June 6, 1944 with the Fourth Division, taking part in the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge, and writing stories for the slicks in his spare time. He returned to the United States in 1946, deeply shaken by his combat experience and by an unsuccessful postwar marriage to a French girl named Sylvia. Three of Salinger's stories, **"A Perfect Day for Bananafish,"** **"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,"** and **"Just Before the War with the Eskimos,"** were bought by the //New Yorker// in 1948. These stories, unlike their fluent but undistinguished predecessors, were quickly and widely recognized as something special. **"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut"** was bought by Hollywood. The publisher Robert Giroux offered to bring out a collection. But the real excitement came in 1951 when Little, Brown published Salinger's first book, a novel about a confused prep-school student that turned a moderately successful magazine writer into one of the gaudiest literary success stories of the postwar era. we have a fresh voice. One can actually hear it speaking. ... Read five pages; you are inside Holden's mind, almost as incapable of escaping from it as Holden himself. The portrait is complete and convincing. That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper, and the imagination.
 * Nationality:** American
 * //The Catcher in the Rye,//** the story of a teen-ager named Holden Caulfield who flunks out of "Pencey Prep" and embarks on a solitary Christmas visit to New York, was immediately--and correctly--hailed as a tour de force of characterization. Clifton Fadiman, writing about **//The Catcher in the Rye//** for the Book-of-the-Month Club, was no more than just when he said that in Salinger.

But it was Ernest Jones, Freud's pupil and biographer, who inadvertently captured the essence of the book in his sourly disapproving review for the //Nation.// Finding the novel "predictable and boring," Jones grumbled that Holden Caulfield was nothing more than an embodiment of "what every sixteen-year-old since Rousseau has felt." This is of course the point: Holden's alienation is universal. Nearly every unhappy adolescent who reads **//The Catcher in the Rye//** finds in it a comprehensive statement of his emotional plight, and the book will no doubt remain popular as long as there are still teen-agers around to read it. To reread **//Catcher//** after the age of, say, twenty-five is to be freshly struck by the eerie precision with which Salinger evokes the sensation of adolescent //Angst.// Far more striking, though, is the sheer airlessness of his portrayal, the lack of any detachment from the dreary particulars of Holden's condition. The New York of 1951, widely reported by other witnesses to have been a moderately interesting place, exists in **//Catcher//** solely as a vague backdrop for the narrator's neuroses. And the metronomic alternation of //phony// and //goddam// and //crumby// in Salinger's first person //récit// is equally oppressive. Henry James could have chosen any random paragraph from **//Catcher//** as supporting evidence when he explained why he chose to tell //What Maisie Knew// in the voice of a fully adult consciousness: Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary. ... Maisie's terms accordingly play their part--since her simpler conclusions quite depend on them; but our own commentary constantly attends and amplifies.

To be sure, there are other ways to write about children, and Mark Twain made use of most of them in //Huckleberry Finn,// a book to which **//Catcher//** bears a distinct resemblance. But Salinger's angry tale of imperfect self-discovery contains nothing remotely like the great passage in //Huckleberry Finn// when Huck takes his first uncertain step toward adulthood and responsibility ("All right, then, I'll go to hell") by deciding to help Jim escape from slavery. Faced with a dilemma roughly comparable to that of Huck, Holden Caulfield decides instead that "If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half of the 'Fuck you' signs in the world" and promptly throws any question of responsibility overboard by having a nervous breakdown. It is clear that Salinger means for us to see Holden's breakdown as being in some undefined way desirable. But what can he be getting at? Are we to conclude merely that adulthood itself is "crumby," a consummation devoutly to be avoided? Or is the rejection implicit in Holden's breakdown more extensive in its significance? The world of **//Catcher//** is a pretty lousy place on the whole. All of Holden's teachers are fools or hypocrites or homosexuals. (Nothing dates this novel quite so much as Salinger's unhesitating equation of homosexuality with phoniness.) All of his friends are variously disagreeable. His brother is a Hollywood sellout. Only Phoebe, his kid sister, is pure. Genuine misanthropy seldom wears well, and it is the adolescent misanthropy of Holden which is likely to strike adults as the least attractive quality of **//The Catcher in the Rye,//** the part that grates the most on rereading. If nothing else, one comes away from **//Catcher//** convinced that Holden Caulfield will grow up to be as disaffected and miserable an adult as he was a teen-ager. But such criticisms come easily enough thirty years and three more Salinger books after the fact. "//Gatsby// for kids," a friend of mine remarked when I mentioned that I was rereading **//The Catcher in the Rye.//** So fliply revealing a dismissal was simply not possible in 1951. The first readers of **//Catcher//** saw only Salinger's freshness and technical mastery, and responded with unfeigned enthusiasm. The skepticism would come later, as critics began to suspect that Holden Caulfield was not so much a tour de force of Salinger's imagination as a brilliant but cripplingly narrow exercise in something very much like straight **autobiography**. Salinger's literary antecedents are more clearly displayed in **//Nine Stories,//** which appeared two years after **//The Catcher in the Rye.//** The easy effects of first-person narrative are for the most part abandoned here in favor of an agreeably personal fusion of the relaxed, confiding tone of F. Scott Fitzgerald with the precisely observed social detail of John O'Hara. ("She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.") But the strongest influence on the author of **//Nine Stories//** is an institutional one. For these stories constitute a stylistic epitome of what has come to be known as "the //New Yorker// formula," an individualized but nonetheless recognizable extension of the familiar idiom out of Chekhov by O'Hara which has shaped the fictional approach of countless American short-story writers in the years since Harold Ross founded the //New Yorker// in 1925. Critics were reluctant to praise **//Nine Stories//** without elaborate qualifications, and it is probably the //New Yorker// influence that is responsible for the mixed feelings these stories still evoke in even the most sympathetic reader. One sometimes feels that the Salinger of **//Nine Stories,//** like the Puccini of //Tosca,// is just a little too good to be true. The prepossessing interest in children and adolescents, that seemed merely an idiosyncrasy of characterization in **//Catcher//** emerges more clearly as a recurring theme in these stories, most of which feature small children in emotionally prominent roles of a distinctly unsettling kind. At the end of **//The Catcher in the Rye,//** Holden Caulfield rejects the struggle for maturity as an unsatisfactory alternative to the purity and authenticity of childhood. The reader of **//Nine Stories,//** encountering a whole series of variations on this theme, naturally begins to suspect that Salinger's own values are closely related to those of his own characters. One incident from this period, recounted in detail by Hamilton but already familiar to Salinger buffs, is particularly revealing. Salinger moved to Cornish, a small New Hampshire town, in 1953. Shortly after his arrival, he made friends with a group of local high-school students who frequented a Cornish coffee shop, entertaining them regularly at his home. This idyll came to an abrupt halt when one of Salinger's young friends asked if she could interview him for the weekly high-school page of the local newspaper. Her article was subsequently run as a front-page scoop. Salinger, who apparently felt betrayed by the prominence the paper gave this interview, promptly cut himself off from his adolescent friends, erecting a man-high wooden fence around his Cornish home and retreating into the bizarre secretiveness which has characterized his behavior ever since. At about the same time, Salinger met a nineteen-year-old Radcliffe student named Claire Douglas. Claire married a Harvard Business School graduate in 1954, but the marriage lasted only a few months, and when it was over she moved in with Salinger in Cornish. They were married in 1955, a month after the publication in the //New Yorker// of **"Franny,"** an event which marked the beginning of Salinger's fateful literary obsession with the Glass family. Various members of the Glass family, a snotty clan of child prodigies with a pronounced interest in Eastern spiritualism, turn up here and there in Salinger's earlier stories. (Seymour Glass, the family poet and guru-in-residence, commits suicide in **"A Perfect Day for Bananafish."**) But the five stories Salinger published in the //New Yorker// between 1955 and 1965 deal exclusively with the Glasses. These stories, two of which are collected in **//Franny and Zooey//** and two in **//Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters//** (one remains uncollected), have since been subjected to a degree of critical scrutiny that has infuriated Salinger. He dedicated his last book, **//Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,//** as follows: If there is an amateur reader still left in the world--or anybody who just reads and runs--I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

There is an unintended touch of irony in this paean to the hasty reader. For while **"Franny"** is fully up to the standards of the best pieces in **//Nine Stories,//** the other four stories are marred by a peculiarly odious kind of narcissism. With each succeeding story Salinger retreats still further from the autonomous third-person point of view of **//Nine Stories//** in favor of lengthy and smotheringly mannered narratives in which the confiding tone he undoubtedly picked up from //The Great Gatsby// is exaggerated well past the point of distraction. ("The facts at hand presumably speak for themselves, but a trifle more vulgarly, I suspect, than facts even usually do.") What is going on here? Once again, Salinger provides a clue, this time in the embarrassing jacket copy he wrote for **//Franny and Zooey://** It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog. ... I work like greased lighting, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.

The last sentence is worth a closer look. For Buddy Glass, Salinger's "alter- ego," is an Irish-Jewish short-story writer without a college degree who shuns publicity and who once wrote a story about the suicide of his saintly brother Seymour. His major literary vice is cleverness. He does not know how to talk to people he does not love. And he is unable to talk to those who do not love him. One possible solution to this dilemma comes to mind at once: Buddy can always talk to himself. This is what actually happens in the long monologue, **"Seymour: An Introduction,"** a love song that J. D. Salinger croons to Buddy Glass, his acknowledged self-portrait. As Salinger steadily decreases the distance between himself and his fictional creations, the narcissistic aspect of his work becomes increasingly distasteful, and Salinger's own "cleverness" in ascribing it to an "alter-ego and collaborator" does not diminish in any way the precision of the indictment. The more one knows about Salinger, in fact, the more he begins to sound very much like a clever but shallow diarist, and it is hard not to feel that this has a great deal to do with his extreme hostility to critics and biographers. Salinger's solipsism reached a climax of sorts in **"Hapworth 16, 1924,"** a still uncollected story published in the //New Yorker// in 1965. Indeed, all of Salinger's most exasperating preoccupations achieve apotheosis in this dreadful work, cast in the form of a letter from summer camp written by the seven-year-old Seymour Glass. Not surprisingly, Salinger has published nothing since **"Hapworth 16, 1924,"** though longstanding rumors that he continues to write were confirmed by Salinger himself last October in the deposition he gave in //Salinger v. Random House and Ian Hamilton.// Asked what he had been working on since 1965, he replied, "Just a work of fiction. That's all. That's the only description I can really give it." J. D. Salinger was written off by the majority of American critics after the publication of **"Hapworth 16, 1924."** But timing is all in matters of popular culture. Salinger's //second// career, in which he emerged enshrined as a cult figure of the Age of Aquarius, was just hitting its stride in 1965, and he would become far more influential in this latter capacity than he ever was as a novelist or short-story writer. V. S. Pritchett once described //The Way of All Flesh// as "one of the time bombs of literature." J. D. Salinger's books have had an equally potent and similarly delayed effect on American culture. The influence of **//Catcher//** could be seen as early as the mid-50's, at the height of the first teen-age revolution, when James Dean and Elvis Presley and Jack Kerouac were on the mind of every right-thinking American teen. And the earliest children of the baby boom responded with equal fervor a few years later to Salinger's seductive invitation to join what Mary McCarthy has aptly called "the world of insiders." Salinger became their very own author, a hip guru whose Zen-flavored gospel of youthful authenticity and neurotic rebellion was presumably unintelligible to the unfeeling adult world. All demographic accidents have unforeseen consequences, and one of the most unlikely cultural outcomes of the baby boom has been the survival of Holden Caulfield into the age of Ronald Reagan. That Salinger's work would have an enduring appeal for the baby boomers was predictable. He is, after all, their Glenn Miller. His books, like Mrs. Glass's "consecrated chicken soup," are a kind of literary comfort food for bruised veterans of the Big Chill. But it is even more significant that some of the baby boomers who read Salinger as teen-agers are now teaching him as adults. For years one of the most widely banned authors in America, J. D. Salinger has now become one of the most widely taught. **//The Catcher in the Rye//** and **//Nine Stories,//** with their appealing subject matter, pat ambiguities, and lazy symbolism, are classroom naturals. No self-respecting parent would dare object (in public, anyway) to the mildly vulgar language that once kept Salinger's books as far away from American classrooms as //Lady Chatterley's Lover.// In a better-ordered universe, it may be, such parents would storm the nearest school-board office, baseball bats in hand, to protest having Holden Caulfield's vision of the world forced into the minds of their children. But life is rarely so orderly, and so it looks as if Holden and his nasty friends are here to stay.
 * Source:** Terry Teachout, "Salinger Then and Now," in //Commentary,// Vol. 84, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 61-4.
 * Source Database:** Contemporary Literary Criticism