Subject: Salinger's reclusiveness
From: Jordie Chambers (c_jordie@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat May 12 2001 - 03:48:59 GMT
Hi everbody, I used to contribute to banaafish a long time ago and not much
has changed except for a flu bug literally lodging itself in my nostrils and
fighting its way down. Perhaps I'd better stay on topic.
Many people think that Salinger betrayed his readership by refusing to
publish any of his later works, and refusing to read the buckets of mail
he'd receive. What strikes people as some kind of insult is he left without
an explanation, which presupposes that he owed something to his readership
after drawing them in. That speaks to the power of The Catcher in The Rye,
and I felt like many readers in that I wanted him to publish more of his
work, but I did not feel that he owed us anything. I did however have
pretensions, but on my most recent reading of TCITR, those pretensions have
dissolved and like a monument at the New York Museum I have taken to a new
respect for him.
Like a premonition, he (if we implicate Salinger in Holden's dialogue) knew
that the world away from childhood was full of phonies. Hollywood was the
proving ground for the phonies. He lost respect for DB because he wrote for
Hollywood after coming home from the war. Holden wondered how a person can
keep his instincts sharp in a place that ate the cream or the sludge of the
phonies that rose to the top. Reference to the Indians with 'big bang'
suggests some kind of parallel between childhood and the aboriginals. In
contrast, he speaks of the stage as a sort of warped mirror that can only
reflect the truth for Holden. The phonies have lost in the game Holden is
trying to keep sacred to himself, and Holden is losing in the phony's game,
causing him to feel lonely. However he is adamant in his will to stay
young.
When asked by Phoebe why he wouldn't want to become a lawyers like his
father, Holden told her, '"Lawyers are all right, I guess -- but it doesn't
appeal to me,... I mean they're all right when they go saving innocent guys'
lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if
you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golfd and play
bridge and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if
you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did
it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it
because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with
everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the
goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the
dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble
is, you wouldn't."' Furthermore, what seems like a preoccupation in
Holden's hesitation to embark in a world of phonies is repeated in Ernie's
bar. He's listening to this piano player that plays as if everyone's
clapping, 'I don't even think he knows any more when he's playing right or
not. I partly blame it on those dopes that clap their heads off -- they'd
foul up anybody.'
There is a schism with Holden. He's hungry for company and he's hungry to
prove himself in the world. Salinger suggests in one chapter (I forget
which) that literature and maybe art is a meshing between these two hungers,
which Salinger obliquely refers to as a shism between sexual satisfaction
and intellectual accomplishment. Maybe his art failed to provide for him
that satisfaction, founded on an Indian's belief in what constitutes
unfouled poetry. With Luce Holden says (in reference to having sex with
Eastern girls), '"I know it's supposed to be physical and spiritual, and
artistic and all. But what I mean is you can't do it with everybody --
every girl you neck with and all -- and make it come out that way. Can
you?"' To me, this seems like an admission of his publishing as a need for
company. Why he chose to become a recluse is probably something that comes
with maturity and a stern Indian will. God bless his loneliness.
We can safely make the assumption here that the publishing world is a mess,
with the most popular authors commanding the marketplace and the literary
authors lost in a chase of their own making and perpetuated by each other.
How about Kurt Vonnegut's later works or by a stretch maybe Salinger with
Hapworth, so lost in his own iconoclasty that he publishes some esoteric
whatever you want to call it. It's my opinion that an author's first book
is usually his best, not in craft but in artfullness.
Holden is dying to be caught. Why Holden won't commit to a life of
phoniness is ironically shown by his meeting with Mr. Antolini. Mr.
Antolini speaks to Holden on another level. From his own driven nature he
assumes Holden will react to what worked for him as a troubled teenager,
'The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause,
while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.'
But Holden does not take to this as Mr. Antolini would. Not a phony, Mr.
Antolini is similar to Holden in this Indian nature, but Mrs. Antolini is a
wrack of nerves and Mr. Antolini just tells Holden what he thinks of English
and what he thinks of thinking. That's the ironic part. Pretty depressing
at this point in the book, the reader feeling that Holden will never make it
out okay. But this is shown untrue by Salinger's success in literature,
touching hundreds of thousands of people with his words. He was caught by
literature. Then he was unbound because the catch was crucifying him.
In the concluding words of the book, he said to D.B that he was sorry he
told so many people about his journal. He said '[he] didn't even know what
to think about it.' But Salinger stopped publishing, and he still writes,
just not for us. He writes for his own reasons and we'll be lucky if he
publishes what he's written and luckier if he saved that Indian soul.
I feel much better having lost my pretensions about why he stopped
publishing. I still wish he'd read the letter I sent him, but now I know
why he wouldn't.
Cordially,
Jordan Chambers
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