Reading Salinger
The New Yorker has made the 13 stories they published by Salinger available to everyone. Here, to revisit, is Janet Malcolm's 2001 defense of the post-Catcher Salinger. And here is that horrifying article from a few months ago about how the kids can't even read him. Also, here are two more immediate reactions to his life and death.
The first is from Alex Balk:
I've spent the last twenty years or so being embarrassed about J. D. Salinger. His thoughts are so clichéd! The language is so dated! There is nothing he has written that would seem insightful to anyone but a searching, frustrated teenager! Thinking about that in light of his passing, it's fairly obvious that those reactions are all part of having read and loved almost everything Salinger wrote when I was a searching, frustrated teacher. The embarrassment I feel when I think about J. D. Salinger is actually the embarrassment I feel when I think about that kid who loved those books and felt like they finally helped him to understand a world that seemed so unfair and incomprehensible. I don't know whether or not that makes Salinger a Great Writer In The Canon, but if someone has so much of an impact on you at a tender age that you've essentially incorporated the reading of his work with that specific moment of your life I think it's probably fair to say that he was at least a great writer. I wouldn't go back and read those books any sooner than I'd go back to that point in my life, but, on reflection, yes, that writer was pretty great.
The second is much shorter, but equally profound.
The Kirstie Alley Salinger obit should become the new 'RickRoll'.
Somewhere in my increasingly useless brain is a little nugget about Kirstie Alley living by Salinger at one point.
But maybe I'm confusing this with Katharine Hepburn and Cynthia McFadden.
Eh, honestly, I preferred Shelley Long's Salinger obit.
Don't even.
Never trust a retired English teacher. "The kids don't get it the way they used to!" is like "the kids are humping more than they used to!" I've taught it five times now: it still reaches the kids who aren't humping anything.
http://books.google.com/books?id=C8lF4iqAgRQC&pg=RA2-PA578&lpg=RA2-PA578&dq=spooning+forking+nabokov&source=bl&ots=SPUP29SnQY&sig=b3eyDId-_HJ48XhSmf6-6ZXS08s&hl=en&ei=YuRhS_XBEJOYtgeF7a3YDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=spooning%20forking%20nabokov&f=false
Quote at center of page.
Thanks for that.
Obvs. See Balk's appreciation above.
That lies at the nexus of META and PROFOUND and I am terrified.
Wait… Scientologists believe in heaven?
The only books of Salinger's that I never finished is "Catcher in the Rye." At fourteen I already knew it was a cliche to be a teenager getting life-changed by that book.
My aunt pointed me towards "Franny and Zooey," however, and after that it was game over for my Salinger resistance. To this day I'm still looking for an excuse to write "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters" in lipstick on somebody's mirror. Him dying is a pretty good excuse!
Want to go drop some orange peels off the Staten Island Ferry with me?
My favorite professor in college compared Nietzsche to the Doors, saying that both appealed hugely to teenage boys, but people always grew up and out of them. I guess Salinger maybe belongs in that club? But there's something to capturing a certain mindset, the way people (just boys? or girls, too?) think at a certain time in life, so that it resonates universally for people at that time of life, that's very great. Long live the lizard kings.
Maybe people outgrow Salinger.
I don't think they outgrow Holden Caulfield.
girls, too
Regarding the NY Times article: It hasn't been THAT long since I was reading Catcher in the Rye in high school. (Less than ten years, anyway. Just barely.) And I remember everyone in my class loving and relating to the book. And for a while after that, Holden Caulfield was definitely the Platonic ideal of boyfriends for all the sensitive bookish girls, myself included.
To be fair, Mr. Balk, he did invent many of those cliches, cliches though they may be*.
*(this may be an overstatement)
I had an aunt who ran a small farm. She named her two prize hogs "Franny" and "Zooey." She was appalled I did not find this hilarious. I was eight at the time, and had no idea the book even existed, but my aunt wasn't hearing it.
She also served steaks on paper plates. That never failed to induce hysterical laughter.
What is it with aunts and Franny and Zooey? My aunt claimed Zooey Glass was the ideal man.
Man, much as I loved Salinger in general and Catcher in the Rye in particular as a teenager, I have to say that nothing particularly wrong about what those sneering teens in the NYT article have to say about them. I totally expected their objections to be along the lines of "WHERE ARE THE SPARKLY VAMPIRES?" but, yeah, "I can’t really feel bad for this rich kid with a weekend free in New York City", ouch.
Also, that Hapworth 16 image reminds me of a day I spent in the downtown public library as a teenager in the pre-Internet early '90s, making copies from microfiche of all of Salinger's unanthologized magazine stories to bind them into an anthology as a gift for my first girlfriend, who was Salinger-mad. Ah, youth!
I first encountered Salinger's "Catcher" as an impressionable 13-year-old living near Lexington, Ky. Naturally, it had an enormous influence on me; so much so that after finishing it I left school, took a bus to New York and immediately upon arrival hired a prostitute.
After a brief stay in a hospital, I returned to Kentucky where I ran across another work that was also highly influential in my development, William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." This one was much trickier to sort out, though. I mean, "Catcher" was pretty straightforward. Get on the bus. Go to NY. Awkwardly hire prostitute, etc. etc. The way I saw it, with "Flies" there were two main obstacles: First, how could I get my classmates to board a flight that would mysteriously crash on an isolated island off the coast of Mauritius, killing all the adults, and leaving most of us kids alive? Second, who would play the part of Simon? I won't bore you with the details, but let's just say Mauritius is as much a state of mind as a place, and you can pretty much call anyone Simon.
Next up, and this is where things started to get weird, "Of Human Bondage," by Somerset Maugham. Very influential. Still have the club foot from that one.
Curious to see how you handle "The Metamorphasis".
I'll put it on the list. As it stands, finished "Bartleby the Scrivner" in 2007 and have been here on Wall Street ever since. A little hungry.
“Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “In general, they do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying to change it.”
The "rich kid vacation in NYC" critique is spot on, but some of the rest of the NYT article makes me feel like I've lost a war.
Incidentally, I'm with Balk on this one. I can't bring myself to read The Catcher in the Rye ever again, but when I was 15 I read it roughly four times in a row. That book was my exact coordinates. For that, I'll value it and Salinger forever.
This whole Salinger death thing is creeping me out, because just yesterday I spent an inordinate amount of time (like 30 minutes) talking about Salinger's mystique (hiding, dating young women, etc.) to a class of teen writers who haven't read him at all (FYI, we were looking at "Bananafish" and its use of dialogue).
This is creepy because:
a) I am not a Salinger fan, really. I like "Bananafish" but agree that his writing now seems horribly outdated;
b) I hadn't thought or talked about Salinger in probably a decade before pulling this story out on a whim;
c) I would never normally spend 30 minutes ruminating on an author I barely enjoy with a room full of kids who barely care. I was compelled by something.
My conclusion, therefore (the creepiest part…oooOOOooohhh):
I killed JD Salinger. With my gust of insincere interest. It floated over to New Hampshire and knocked his 91-year-old ass down.
Coincidentally, I thought he might be dead already. We talked about that, too. YESTERDAY. So fucking weird.
This passage kills me every time:
"We studied the Egyptians from November 4th to December 2nd," he said. "You chose to write about them for the optional essay question. Would you care to hear what you had to say?"
"No, sir, not very much," I said.
He read it anyway, though. You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
"The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere."
I had to sit there and listen to that crap. It certainly was a dirty trick.
They tell me the reason I hated Salinger is because I read Catcher too late. I picked it up at 16 or 17 because a few friends were going on and on about how great it was, as part of the typical pre-graduation nostalgic self-pity trip. I found Holden repugnant and solipsistic and generally hated every page. Inasmuch as I identified with the character, I recognized my worst impulses in him.
So in a way, my rejection of the character was still a formative experience! I spent years in the suburbs, and a lot of the shittiness of that culture is personified in Holden, so it brought my attention to a lot of personality disorders I wanted nothing to do with. So, thanks for that, Salinger.
I still think your book was a piece of crap, though.
That book did nothing for me. Peers and teachers alike wouldn't accept it. They looked at me funny, as if I had said something that made no grammatical sense. A couple of them flat out told me I was wrong, I had merely misread my own reaction, and in fact it had profoundly affected me. But I found it contrived and the dialogue was jarringly dated. I think it's probably too late to go back and re-read it now.
"What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished 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."
Salinger is in the canon for a reason: Catcher in the Rye is a literary triumph. Articulating such a unique and indelible voice (and maintaining it for the length of a novel) is damn good writing. Full stop.
The uncollected short stories of J.D. Salinger, collected. All of them, not just stuff from The New Yorker:
http://www.deadcaulfields.com/UncollectedList.html
This is great….thanks!