Re: Smoking in Salinger's fiction.
Malcolm Lawrence (malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Mon, 16 Feb 1998 22:39:43 -0800
Bethany M. Edstrom wrote:
> 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 beg to differ. There’s no way you can ever explain the significance of a
cigarette to someone who doesn’t smoke. In fact....has anybody seen the movie
Smoke? (and/or it's accompanying sequel, Blue In The Face?) I wrote a piece that
serves as a critique of both of those films as well as a commentary on smoking
itself. It can be found at:
http://www.wolfenet.com/~malcolm/smoke.htm
Malcolm
> 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