Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Salinger on Time. 1961

We have a new review on tap. Rebecca Parton rereads The Catcher in the Rye and gives us her vivid impres­sions below.

J.D. Salinger was born in 1919 and still lives among us. He may or may not be writ­ing new fic­tion, though we have had var­i­ous reports over the years that he has cre­ated and cat­a­loged numer­ous works. Unfortunately, we will prob­a­bly have to wait for his death to see those works. His last pub­lished piece was in 1965, in the New Yorker, enti­tled, Hapworth 16 1924.

He led a very inter­est­ing life in many ways. Prior to the fame and for­tune of his later years, he dated Oona O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill’s daugh­ter, before Charlie Chaplin came into the pic­ture for her. Ironically, he would repeat some of the May/​December pat­terns of Chaplin in his own mature years. He fought in many key bat­tles in World War II, met Hemingway while over­seas, and did counter-​​intelligence work for the Allies. In the late 1940s, Salinger began a spir­i­tual jour­ney that would take him from Zen Buddhism to Vedanta, to eso­teric Yoga prac­tices, Dianetics, and Christian Science. The details of this jour­ney are in some dis­pute, how­ever, as his son, Matt, dis­agrees with some of the obser­va­tions his sis­ter Margaret has made about Salinger’s spir­i­tual dis­cov­er­ies. We can infer some of the route from his sto­ries, at least as far as 1965.

Because Salinger is a recluse, and tena­cious about pro­tect­ing his pri­vacy, much guess­work is involved in estab­lish­ing a com­plete and reli­able biog­ra­phy. Legal bat­tles have been waged in recent decades to make that even harder. Perhaps it’s bet­ter, then, to read and enjoy his nov­els, short sto­ries and novel­las, with­out wor­ry­ing about the writer behind them. Admittedly, that can be dif­fi­cult. Sometimes the harder a writer works to pro­tect his or her pri­vacy, the more we read­ers want to know what’s really going on behind the scenes. We often find the recluse far more inter­est­ing than writ­ers who seem to actu­ally seek pub­lic­ity and pub­lic confession.

Getting back to the fic­tion itself, I am drawn to Franny and Zooey the most. Any book that deals intel­li­gently with young, cre­ative, bril­liant peo­ple intriques me, and this one adds the fur­ther draw of exis­ten­tial crises. Salinger ral­lies the Glass fam­ily around the youngest, Franny, to help her work her way out of depres­sion and col­lapse. The power of famil­ial love and Eastern wis­dom unite to take us on the jour­ney with Franny. As is gen­er­ally the case, those who help guide younger fam­ily mem­bers, them­selves learn and grow in the process.

Salinger brings out the kid in all of us. He cen­tered his sto­ries on kids and young adults, related to them per­haps bet­ter than he related to older adults, and reminds all of us about the inner lives we once had that oth­ers so often missed or dis­missed. Many writ­ers and artists have talked about genius being the recre­ation of child­hood. Made fresh. Brought into the present. Salinger does that lit­er­ally. I think the per­fect day for him is to write about a young adult recap­tur­ing his child­hood, while relat­ing that to a child. Perhaps on the beach. In the sun. With no more noise in the wind than two voices and gull-​​calls. Innocence regained. Innocence trans­ferred. Innocence pro­tected to the degree pos­si­ble. Symbiosis.

Of course, Salinger writes about forces work­ing against all of that. He is never naïve in his sto­ries. It may actu­ally be quite dif­fi­cult to live in New York, or any major city, and remain naïve about out­side forces work­ing against the inno­cence of child­hood. Now that he lives in New Hampshire, away from the Big Apple, he has a chance to reflect on those forces with­out being over­whelmed by them. But the Glass fam­ily felt those forces as did Holden Caulfied. The ten­sion between inno­cence and world­li­ness, hon­esty and phoni­ness, guile­less­ness and cyn­i­cism … exist through­out his pub­lished work. Spirtuality is often a buffer and anti­tode to that ten­sion, though it is never pre­sented as a catchall or per­ma­nent escape hatch. Nor is it pre­sented as easy. Process is every­thing. The jour­ney is every­thing. And the jour­ney is never with­out struggle.

Salinger dis­tills this ten­sion down to an essence few writ­ers can man­age. He writes read­able fic­tion. Accessible fic­tion. We can match Salinger’s per­fect day with per­fect days of our own, by adding his books and trans­mit­ting them to oth­ers. Relaying our recap­tured child­hood on the beach, in the sun, with­out noise.

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