Complain if you want but you are bound to do this by me or I will cut you out of this forum, I swear to God I will:
share what Salinger meant to you, that first teen day you cracked open your dad's dog-eared copy of TCITR or had to write 2 pp about a short story "of your choosing" in Jr. High. Oh, and if you did it already? Copy and paste it. That's your homework. I'll follow suit.
ps, don't elaborate. Please...greatness isn't the point, just, in the true spirit, nothing...not genuine. There's a word for it---
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High school, half-awake to life, Catcher in the Rye. -->Oh. I didn't know that people wrote books that were real.
ReplyDeleteCollege vacation, home sick with mono, Franny & Zooey/9 Stories/Raise HIgh -->_______________________. (He already knows.)
No, this:
ReplyDeleteSenior year in college, the semester I flunk out. I'm studying by myself late at night at this doughnut shop in Walla Walla. This long-haired homeless man comes in and sits down at a booth and stares straight ahead, doesn't get a doughnut. I wonder if he might be Jesus. Then the room is charged with significance and I'm overcome with loneliness and I don't want to leave this ugly doughnut shop just in case he is.
That's why.
I read Catcher in the Rye in high school and thought it was absolute shit, every pretentious, sodden word. I sneered at all my classmates who took it so heavily to heart and carried copies around in their back pockets like the walking fucking wounded. I skipped the week in my Modern American Lit class in college that was going to be about Salinger, bullshitted the paper, and aced it.
ReplyDeleteAnd then about six or seven years ago, I picked up Franny and Zooey, gasped and cried for three days, and then went and scooped up everything else he'd ever written, devouring the lot in a matter of days. Except for Catcher. I still haven't reread that. I might never reread it. I hope I never do, anyway. I'd like to leave that one where it stands right now. A few paces off, looking down at its feet. It was too much. And what if now it's not enough? Let's not find out.
It all makes sense now, of course, my high school reaction, but the explanation isn't for you. It's only for me. And for him.
Admittedly, I was not going to do this exercise. Part rebellion, part discomfort. Silly.
ReplyDeleteHere is my abridged version:
My first Salinger book was Franny and Zooey. I still say the Jesus prayer. When I was in college I read Raise High...Seymour and 9 Stories on one Sat. When I was done I went to bed and cried until I fell a sleep. I was too old when I read CITR. I didn't get to have any of the finally-something-that-speaks-to-me response but I get it. I envy the teenagers that did, those feelings are so rare.
Thank you, Jerome David Salinger, even if all of this would embarrass the hell out of you or make you wonder, if only briefly, why we don't have something better to do.
Sincerely.
Chapman killed Lennon when I was 8. Maybe I knew of the existence of CITR before 8, maybe not. The only prior connection I could suggest is that I was an avid reader of the Preppy Handbook as a kid, memorizing alleged quirks of people sort of like my folks. Oh Muffy. Maybe it was listed there, alongside A Separate Peace. Of course it was on all adult shelves, its cover giving no hints.
ReplyDeleteI ended up attending my favorite boarding school as described in The Preppy Hdbk...so how's that for the power of books?
From the look of him, the only things Chapman was catching in his rye were hamburgers and naps. And it's not like Lennon was phony, right? Lennon was a dick, but perhaps the greatest dick ever, the dick we'd all be if we could. But not a phony. Hm.
A year later, Hinckley cited CITR after the Reagan attempt. That, at least, seems more logical.
The subsequent chatter about the book and those who killed in its name must have influenced my sense of the media-shapes-behavior argument, which is at once compelling and dehumanizing: the evidence is clear, but many of us cling to the idea that we have the ability to discern between art and the impulses it inspires.
Like it or not, America's collective fear of art grew like mad during the early Eighties.
Yeah, I haven't said much about JDS. What's to say? He was the bogeyman. How can one say anything about a New England ghost?
I can imagine that his hidey-hole impulses were galvanized by Chapman, Hinckley, et. al. That's too bad, I guess. But as you know, I'm about the art, not the artist.
Still...a tale of teen alienation feeds murderous rage? Holden was hardly Everyman...
sigh. I don't have the strength to go further down that path. Who cares.
And this whole thing is ridiculous, thanks Sara for pointing that out. Embarrassing but necessary, as all wakes are.
All I know is that at 14, I was in love with the fact that near the center of the canon was lodged a splinter of raw, sloppy, American sadness. And at its center was a character more like me than in any other story I'd read. More like you, too. Like someone we knew.
I do not think this is ridiculous, not at all.
ReplyDeleteI think I preferred Lord of the Flies and A Separate Peace over CITR. If I recall correctly, my favorite episode in CITR was the Natural History museum part. (My dad's classmates at Roeliff Jansen High School called him Holden Caulfield. They also micknamed him "gritty". He was the valedictorian, I believe. Many of his classmates died in the Nam and others went on to do quite well.)
ReplyDeleteI loved those two too. But they were clasically informed. They lacked vigor.
ReplyDeleteLate to the party, slipping in the back door.
ReplyDeleteI read "Catcher" in high school, and again in college. I liked the book very much.
I also liked "Lord of the Flies" more.
What matters is that my father liked "Catcher." My sad and distant father, who knew, who knows, more than anyone should, about phonies. He identified with Holden. My dad can't talk about himself, but Holden could, and did. For me, a daughter in search of her dad, the book meant the world.
I was very sheepish about writing anything on this subject. It felt too personal and writing about it felt diminishing. Now I am redoubling my efforts and letting my heart inch out onto my sleeve a bit.
ReplyDeleteI have never felt more personally connected to any characters like I have to the Glass family, right down to them loosing their touchstone in Seymour. They think and speak and laugh and feel in the most familiar ways. Obviously, I am not discovering or uncovering anything about Salinger that has not been said a thousand times, so much so that he walked away from it in an attempt to stop being claimed by people like me. I think his response was true and thoughtful, a writer's response. But not my response. I feel no shame in my intensity. He has reserved a place in my mind and heart that I have never identified with any other.
from The New Yorker, February 8, 2010 (It is not lost on me that he has been one of the magazine's golden boys since the 1950's. But I agree with them so I don't care.)
"...it was Salinger's readiness to be touched, and to be touching, his hypersensitivity to the smallest sounds and graces of life, which still startles."
"Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his."
--Adam Gopnik
ps - I love "A Separate Peace". ah me.
pss - I think the the 80's cultivated a fear of art that was so deep that it turned to contempt in many instances, particularly with writer's. It seems we have a lot more authors then we do writers, as a result.
I agree with you about the eighties. Reagan was not well liked and his regime's treatment of artists (not to mention other insane people) was not becoming. On the other hand Robert Mappelthorpe may have done more to cultivate a fear of art than did Ed Meese and Jessie Helms.
ReplyDeleteRE: authors vs. writers. Interesting contrast (conflict?). Never seen that before ...
In my mind it's the difference between the artistic vs. the production of. The anti-intellectualism of the time did nothing to encourage the artistic life:
ReplyDeleteproduction=business=money.
Anyone can be the author of a thing but that hardly makes a writer. The garret needing, painstaking word master, who needs to write, recognition or no. I give you vast expanse of author's on the internet to contrast. I don't necessarily thinks it's conflict, no, but contrast most definitely.