On Salinger

I was talking to my Mom the other day. J. D. Salinger came up. Usually, she enjoys Verlyn Klinkenborg's little nature pieces in the NY TImes. But she couldn't quite buy the reverence he gave up for Salinger's retreat to 90 acres in New Hampshire. It sounds a little egotistical, don't it, in some way? The way the Press can be, well, maybe you can't totally blame him. There is something dictatorial about the vanishing act.

It seems to me a writer is about observing truths, revealing the way people really are, the way life is. Perhaps a writer is speaking for some early form of human being, the real guts and blood animal with a soul, remembering the creature before modern stuff got shoveled in on top of him and his affairs. It's a writer's job then to come into conflict with general society, and maybe it's worth doing this personally. The person must have these conflicts, these gaps, or claim a real emotion that gets ignored in the vanity and egos of daily lives. These conflicts will occur in a way reminiscent of the Buddhist's 'proper profession, proper thinking, proper relationships, etc.' They will occur where we love the opposite sex, where we try to find a suitable job that hopefully brings in a fair compensation, where we try to maintain our health. It seems there's often someone telling us, 'no, if you really want to get what you want, you have to do this first, or you're not getting any.' Literally.

It's a crude instrument, conflict, and it causes pain. But without the disagreement or the contrary nature, the writer's being is watered down a bit. The things to say have less ambition to be worth noting. The writer, it seems, must rise above that which he suffers in the name of penning truth, and maybe too rise above the question of 'well, who picked you to bring us the TRUTH, aren't you being a bit of an egotist yourself?'

Holden Caulfield is someone who has conflicts. J.D. Salinger retreated, as if to hide his strange ways of conducting a personal life, that seems to have some cruelty to it, though maybe we wouldn't really know. How will that retreat have effect what he can write about? Roth stays with us, to bring us the dirty bastard a fellow really is, and just what an awful thing it is to have testosterone running around in your veins. And that strikes one as honest science, if he hasn't managed his own weird retreat unavailable to the rest of us.

One wonders, perhaps The Catcher in the Rye caught on as a kind of over-sensitivity, that initially seems admirable, but which masks a habit of seeing fault in others and not mainly one's own self. In so doing, putting blame elsewhere, one is never admitting the facts of their own faults and failures. (Maybe an accurate picture to draw of the adolescent mind, after all.) It was a good book for a certain age in America, one of domination. One grew up, in a youthful way, and then went on to a profession, in so doing claiming a right to the fine salary and the nice automobile, the house, the family, the right sort of American life, feeling perfectly justified in everything one does. And so, like his main character, Salinger could retreat into the comforts of his profession, no longer really facing the potential for his own personal failures.

Some writers, it seems, do face being failures and prolonged adolescence, in order to keep discovering, not sitting on laurels. Like a Dostoevsky, a prodigal Tolstoy, a Twain, a Kerouac, and probably, Shakespeare along with all the imprisoned gallants of his age. You fail, and then you drag your sorry behind to a writing desk you can't even probably afford, to discover a kind of beauty, maybe something ringing spiritual, of love.

Who knows... Maybe this was exactly Salinger was up to. Good for him. He kept writing.



Postscript:

After mulling it over for a few days, one cannot feel but a bit disrespectful of the dead to be in any way dismissive of Salinger. A good writer is someone naked and sensitive enough before the Cosmos to feel the pull of the various influences upon the world, the things that cause everything from ice ages to political upheavals, to shifts in consciousness, to wars, to economic highs and lows, but mainly the attitude of the human being. Lincoln achieved his excellence of prose through calling correctly the forces pulling on the people of a nation, as he does so well in the Second Inaugural, understanding that there are offenses that come into the world, that there is a division, that a struggle comes to the world. There's a certain sense of determinism, perhaps, that a rational thinker might take exception to, but who's to say, ultimately? Is it sun spots that cause wars? Well, no one can doubt that things move around up there, that the Earth wobbles in its rotations around the sun...

So a writer, a Salinger, through intuition and his own 'science' comes up with a character, a way of thought, a way of being, and it might well indeed be proper to think of the creation, a Caulfield, for instance, as a kind of oracle of a certain time and a certain place. Who got New York in the '40s better than Salinger, Gopnik points out astutely.

May the dead rest in peace, their time having come and gone, not without leaving something behind to think over.