first encounters
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Sun, 25 Jan 1998 21:22:06 +0000
One winter evening in 1955 (56 ?), after finishing a clinic
session in the Croydon General Hospital, I was scrabbling
under a pile of desk debris in search of a pen. I found, instead,
a copy of The Catcher which had been abandoned, I presumed,
by one of the social workers who occasionally used the same
office. (I was sure it couldn't have been one of my medical
colleagues since they were not as a rule sufficiently literate to
read anything more demanding than an X-Ray plate.)
I was mildly curious & began reading - though with no particular
expectation, since the name Salinger, at that time, meant very
virtually nothing to anyone in England.
Long, long before I reached the bottom of the first page I knew
I had no choice but to take the book home with me & not leave
it out of my hand until I'd finished it. Which I duly did, sometime
in the early hours of the next morning. It really didn't matter to
me one damn who might have owned it & I doubt, in fact, I ever
returned it. I shouldn't like to think for how many days thereafter
my brain continued in obsessive turmoil over the idea of this young
lunatic in the red hunting cap.
This seems a rather different experience from the one Jim &
others describe when they tell us of their original contact with
Salinger: (`...I didn't read Catcher until AFTER I graduated
college, and I was an English Major.....I only read the opening
page of Catcher in a writing class once, that was it...)
This suggests a considerably cooller response to my own & I wonder
has it something to do with the way Salinger seems to have been an
established figure of literature - set on college courses & so on -
by the time most list members first encountered him. For people of
my generation who were interested in writing, he represented a bomb
going off ("all that David Copperfield crap") - very much as I
imagine Hemingway did to the generation before mine. (I don't
believe he had, in fact, the same potential for liberation that
Hemingway presented & I don't think he has lasted so well, but the
parallel may still have some validity.)
Considering my own lifelong & instinctive resistance to books
recommended by teachers I wonder would I have ever got round
to him - even at this late stage in the proceedings.
Scottie B.