Salinger article.
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 05 Jan 1999 10:53:29 +1100
I was pleasantly surprised to find this rather curious article in the
newspaper today. I say curious, because it makes absolutely no mention of
Hapworth, which seems the raison d'etre of most recent Salinger articles.
As you'll see there's a couple of clanging inaccuracies and distortions,
but he makes a couple of interesting points - the idea that Salinger's
incarceration has something to do with perpetuating himself as an
everlasting teenager is one such idea which, while I'm not sure is totally
plausible, is certainly food for thought.
P.S. By `unexpurgated' English version, I assume he means with the `---
you's' changed to `fuck you's'. If this is the case, in Australia we still
only have the `expurgated' version, as I've never yet come across a copy
which has anything but the dashes. But please confirm this for me someone -
there isn't some missing chapter or something is there !!!??? (:
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
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Reprinted from Sydney Morning Herald Summer Section, 5th Jan 1999.
World's Oldest Teen Idol
Silent for 35 years, he still remains the voice of youth for millions
of readers. Daniel Johnson examines J.D. Salinger at 80, a cross between
Peter Pan and Howard Hughes.
Ask a 17-year-old - just about any 17-year-old - what is the
best novel he or she has ever read, and the answer you
are most likely to get is: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher
in the Rye. Ask a twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fiftysomething
the same question, and there's a good chance you will
get the same answer. We were all 17 once, and many
of us have never read as intensely since we read
Salinger. Even as parents, the post-'60s generation
instinctively sympathises with rebellious youth.
First published in the United States in serial form
in 1945-46, in book form in 1951 and in Britain for
the first time in unexpurgated form only in 1994,
The Catcher still regularly tops polls of the most
popular novel of all time. More to the point, it still
sells a quarter of a million copies a year, every year.
It is a reading-list fixture in every school and college
in the English-speaking world, the bible of the cre-
ative writing class. Its idiomatic, deliberately unliterary lan-
guage makes it the most sacred of all set texts in the post-'60s
literary canon.
The Catcher now reads like a period piece; a study in the
optimistic assumptions of post-war America. The hero, Hold-
en Caulfield, goes AWOL from his boarding school, Pencey
Prep; the episode is based on Salinger's departure from Valley Forge
Military
Academy. Holden's only real problems are those of
prosperity. But his immaturity has rendered him
immortal. He is forever the disaffected teenager who
does not want to grow up.
Yet his inventor, the apostle of adolescence,
turned 80 on January 1:
Jerome David Salinger has, it must be said, done
his best to perpetuate the myth of eternal youth, by
retreating into well-guarded seclusion almost as soon
as he became known. Since 1953, he has lived as a
virtual recluse in Comish, New Hampshire, where he
is said to brandish a shotgun at uninvited visitors.
Only one recent photograph of him is known to
exist: the face a fearful and furious mask, unreco -
nisable from the suave, grinning young author of the
early 1950s. Salinger also uses lawyers to protect his
privacy. As a result, the only major biography, by
Ian Hamilton, had to be rewritten and published
under a new title.
Salinger has published nothing since 1963,
though he has apparently continued to write; he must
by now have accumulated the largest corpus of
unpublished work of any important living writes
Since he shows no sign of wishing to publish any more
books during his lifetime, one said to must assume that the only
additions to the one short novel and four slim volumes
of short stories on which his reputation rests are likely to
be posthumous. His literary executor will clearly have an
extraordinary responsibility. Hence the interest in the
writer's private life has some justification aside from
natural curiosity about the autobiographical nature
of his fiction. Salinger has been thrice married and
twice divorced; his present wife is a much younger
woman, Colleen O'Neill, whom he met in Cornish,
where she used to run the town fair, and he has
become something of a local legend. Now ailing and
deaf, he seems to have found happiness with.a
woman who is, by an odd coincidence, a namesake
of his first great love: Oona, the daughter of Eugene
O'Neill, who wag the first American writer to win
the -Nobel Prize and who was to some extent the
young Salinger's model. If his will grants her control
over access to his papers, Salinger's present wife could
become one of those fiercely protective literary widows. This
may mean it will be some time before we get to know what
Salinger was really like - or what on earth he has been
doing all this time.
In the shape of an old lover, however, his past returned to haunt
him last year. Joyce May- nard's rather tawdry book At Home in the World
revealed how he had wooed her by correspondence and then conducted a
10-month affair in 1971-72, when she was 18 and he was more than 50.
But apart from the Clintonesque detail that their only sexual
activity was oral, Maynard's memoir added little to our knowledge of
the man. Her insistence that the relationship was exploitative does
not ring true: she had already published a cover story in The New York
Times Magazine entitled, "The Embarrassment of Virginity".
All the same, Maynard's story has stimulated gossip. Hints that
Salinger may have a Lolita-like fixation on prepubescent girls have
been linked to his fiction. It is true that he depicts several such
girls. But there is nothing lascivious in these portraits.
Take one of his best stories, For Esme - with Love and Squalor,
about a 13-year-old English girl with whom the narrator, a GI waiting for
D-Day, has a single, chance conversation in a tea-room. It is almost
certainly based on a wartime encounter. Yet its charm depends not on
sexual undertones, but on the almost clinical objectivity with which the
narrator observes Esme's gauche attempts to make friends, her mixture of
precocity and innocence. Esme and her little brother are rich, even
aristocratic, but they are also orphans of the war. She craves
contact with her dead father's world of action. Her valediction -
"I, hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact" - has,
in the light of the narrator's nervous breakdown, an ironical significance.
But not an erotic one. Salinger's psychology isn't really very complex;
the great strength of his writing is precision.
The key to Salinger may turn out to be not pedophilia but philosophy.
Long before it became fashionable, Salinger took up Zen. Under its
influence, he has become sufficiently self-contained not to crave the
critical adulation that was always a substitute for the absent paternal
approval of his disappointed Austrian Jewish father, a cheese importer
who sent his son to expensive schools to no avail.
Holden Caulfield, like most of his characters, is at once
self-indulgent and self-destructive. Salinger's most celebrated short
story,
A Perfect Day for Bananafish, hints at a propensity to suicide. Zen seems
to
have taken the sting out of Salinger's life - the dread that he might be a
"phoney". Now he is content to wait for posterity. We must hope that this
Peter Pan of American literature leaves us plenty more by which to judge
him.
The Daily Telegraph, London