Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Salinger captured essence of '50s
Editorial commentary
Recent contributions
- What Obama didn't say
- How my education and religious training failed me
- Can we be a two-trolley town?
- Striving for civility
- Commentary archive
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Marc C. Conner
Conner is professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington.
J.D. Salinger's stories could only have happened in America. Ours is a children's literature. Huckleberry Finn, Little Pearl, Rip Van Winkle, Jay Gatsby -- all our great characters are children, or at least childlike: They charm and enchant because they promise that, like Peter Pan, we might never grow up -- that the defining American innocence can stay with us forever.
J.D. Salinger's imagination was completely in this American vein. Salinger's children, such as Holden Caulfield and Franny Glass, continue to haunt readers to this day, for, like so many other children in our literature, they are victims, sacrifices to a world that will not accept them.
Salinger's 1951 novel, "The Catcher in the Rye," is still very much a youth classic. Yet, what makes this novel so powerful is the moment of its appearance in American culture. It defines the mood of the '50s, chronicling the awful fragility of the young and innocent during a time of terror.
Its famous protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is in terrified flight from the entire conventional world around him. But he cannot tell you what he flees. All Holden can point to is a general malaise, an overall complaint about American culture that he articulates in his most oft-used word, "phony." Phony is a child's word; but one of Salinger's points is that the adults in the 1950s were not attending to the wisdom that comes from the mouths of babes.
This is one of the great ironies of the legacy of "Catcher in the Rye." It is not a revolutionary book; it does not call for overturning the world, nor promote an alternative culture. Rather, it is a cry for the adults to do what they are supposed to do -- to nurture and train their children, to show their children how to live in the world, to provide that most dreaded phrase for youth: role models. It is a profoundly conservative book, and it lays the blame for the world squarely at the feet of the adults.
For every adult Holden turns to fails him; as he says of his old history teacher, Mr. Spencer, "He wasn't even listening. He hardly ever listened to you when you said something."
It may seem, in retrospect, that Salinger's status outweighs his rather modest achievements: From 1948 to 1963, he published four small books, one novel and 13 stories. The first was "Catcher in the Rye," followed by "Nine Stories" in 1953, "Franny and Zooey" in 1961, and finally "Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction," in 1963. Then Salinger's famous literary silence began.
Although I suspect the excess and infantilism of the '60s horrified Salinger, nevertheless his work clearly anticipates that troubled time, and offers a fine example of how the 1960s have their roots in the 1950s. For Salinger writes of the alienation of youth, of the plight of quick young things who come to confusion, who find the traditional ideas and attitudes not just unsatisfying but downright deadly.
Here we most clearly see the oft-noted comparison between "Catcher" and Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." Huck's voice has much in common with Holden's voice: Given the differences of time and culture, both are the same voice of honest, direct, colloquial youth, giving us the straight story, with no "lies," as Huck would say, and no "phoniness," as Holden would say.
Salinger's departure from the public world of writing has puzzled two generations of readers. Why did he stop writing? Some say his embrace of Buddhism helped him relinquish the desire to publish his work. Others speculate that he was so disenchanted with the world that he refused to contribute his voice to it any longer. Holden's famous last line suggests such a withdrawal: "Don't ever tell anybody anything," he says. "If you do, you start missing everybody." Perhaps Salinger stopped telling us things because he did not want to miss everybody afterward.
Yet, there remains a stubborn optimism to his writings. Even Holden, writing from his psychiatric ward, has given us his confession. Why put the whole story down for someone to read, if it all points to nihilism? No, the writing of the book is precisely Holden's therapy, as perhaps it was Salinger's, too. If we regret his silence, we treasure the books, and are perhaps heartened to think that they brought Salinger to the peace he sought.
