Re: Smoking in Salinger's fiction.
Bethany M. Edstrom (Bethany.M.Edstrom@Dartmouth.EDU)
Mon, 16 Feb 1998 20:02:01 -0500 (EST)
Darn it, D, I was on my way home with a great insight (not really) on the
smoking habits of Salinger's characters, and you've gone and beaten me to it.
:-)
I agree with you on both of your points: that smoking was a mark of Salinger's
time (and place), and that smoking is a mark of spiritual emptiness. I also
noticed that while his characters don't see smoking as a health hazard per se,
they are aware of the MINOR health concerns related to smoking. I'm thinking
especially of Holden remarking that he has "hardly any wind left" due to his
smoking (at the beginning and also elsewhere in Catcher), Buddy's understanding
that he shouldn't smoke when he has pleurisy (RHTHC), and Holden's comment that
his mother is so nervous that she sits up in bed half the night smoking
cigarettes.
My "great insight" was actually not an insight at all but a passage that jumped
out at me from the pages of Auden's "The Orators." I'm not making a case for
linking Auden and Salinger in any meaningful way, but I thought this passage
here described some Salinger characters pretty well, and it makes reference to
smoking.
(The context of this passage, by the way, is Auden's description of different
kinds of "defective lovers," and what should be done about them. It is a speech
to a sgroup of schoolboys, which explains all the school references.)
"Then the excessive lovers of their neighbours. Dare-devils of the soul, living
dangerously upon their nerves. A rich man taking the fastest train for the
worst quarters of eastern cities; a private schoolmistress in a provincial
town, watching the lights go out in another wing, immensely passionate. You
will not be surprised to learn that they are both heavy smokers. That one
always in hot water with the prefects, that one who will not pass the ball;
they are like this. You call them selfish, but no, they care immensely, far too
much. They're beginning to go faster. Have you never noticed in them the
gradual abdication of central in favour of peripheral control? What if the
tiniest stimulus should provoke the full, shattering response, not just then
but all the time? It isn't going to stop unless you stop it. Daring them like
that only makes them worse. Try inviting them down in the holidays to a calm
house. You can do most for them in the summer. They need love."
Sound like anyone we know?
Bethany