{"id":312187,"date":"2010-02-12T14:04:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T19:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybooks.com\/post\/385853779"},"modified":"2010-02-12T14:04:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T19:04:00","slug":"salinger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/312187","title":{"rendered":"Salinger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Greenberg<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n<\/p>\n
J.D. Salinger; drawing by David Levine<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Rereading J.D. Salinger after his death on January 27, I am struck by an improbable connection between his work and that of Jack Kerouac. Both were writing in the late Forties and Fifties, from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but with a relentless ethos of non-conformism at the center of their fiction. Salinger, however, has none of Kerouac\u2019s easy American Romanticism, much less his patriotic celebration of the open road. Salinger\u2019s world is one of constricted New York spaces: bathrooms, restaurants, hotel rooms, buses, a tiny obstructed table in a piano bar where one barely has room enough to sit down. The high cost of not conforming is far more palpable in Salinger than in Kerouac. For Salinger\u2019s characters, to be different isn\u2019t a choice but a kind of incurable affliction, a source of existential crisis rather than social liberation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no alternative \u201clifestyle\u201d for Holden Caulfield or the members of the Glass family to retreat to, as there is for the Beats, no group of like-minded adventurers. Salinger\u2019s characters aren\u2019t after thrills. Their quest is for an impossible purity that drives them away from the workaday world, toward a dangerous, self-burying seclusion. \u201cWe\u2019re\u2026freaks with freakish standards,\u201d says Zooey Glass to his sister Franny. \u201cWe\u2019re the Tattooed Lady, and we\u2019re never going to have a minute\u2019s peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Salinger\u2019s subject is the burden of having these freakish standards, of being what Tolstoy called \u201can aristocrat of the spirit.\u201d His freaks are the sort most people would envy\u2014good-looking, witty, talented, well off. But they are paralyzed by their uncompromising sensibility. Franny, a gifted actress, abruptly quits the stage to seek the attainment of satori through repetitive, entrancing prayer. Acting embarrasses her. \u201cI feel like such a nasty little egomaniac,\u201d she tells her boyfriend. The boyfriend accuses her of behaving as if \u201cyou\u2019re the only person in the world that\u2019s got any godamn sense.\u201d He wonders if maybe she\u2019s afraid to compete. \u201cIt\u2019s just the opposite,\u201d says Franny.<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t you see that? I\u2019m afraid I will compete\u2014that\u2019s what scares me. Just because I\u2019m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else\u2019s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn\u2019t make it right. I\u2019m ashamed of it. I\u2019m sick of it. I\u2019m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Effortlessly distinguished, Franny seems the furthest you can be from a nobody; in Salinger\u2019s world this becomes the logical reason for wanting to be one.<\/p>\n

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye<\/em> is beset by a similar crisis of authenticity. It isn\u2019t merely that most people are \u201cphony\u201d; the deeper problem is that sincerity itself is suspect. Like the members of the Glass family, Holden lives in a hell of second-guessing, in which every motive\u2014even those behind seemingly altruistic acts\u2014is potentially corrupt. He demands a purity that is impossible because it opposes the basic machinery of human nature. Thus, to be a high-minded lawyer, for instance, who goes about \u201csaving innocent people\u2019s lives,\u201d would be tainted by the fact that you wouldn\u2019t know<\/p>\n

\n

if you did it because you really wanted to save guys\u2019 lives, or if 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 godamn trial was over\u2026. How would you know you weren\u2019t being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn\u2019t<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/p>\n
J.D. Salinger, New York, November 20, 1952 (San Diego Historical Society\/Getty Images)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Intent is given equal moral weight to action, even when intent can\u2019t be definitively known! Under the circumstances, the only solution is the renunciation of ambition itself. Salinger\u2019s characters are like aspiring monks with no religion.<\/p>\n

Throughout Salinger\u2019s fiction is a highly defined, consistent aesthetic, so exacting that it negates creative action itself. In The Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, a virtuosic jazz pianist has stooped to \u201cdumb show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.\u201d The people in the club listening to the pianist roar their approval, \u201cthe same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn\u2019t funny.\u201d Attending a Broadway play starring the universally worshiped actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Holden remarks \u201c\u2026they were good, but they were too good.\u201d The delivery of their lines was<\/p>\n

\n

supposed to be like people really talking and interrupting each other and all. The trouble was, it was too much like people talking and interrupting each other. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don\u2019t watch it, you start showing off. And then you\u2019re not as good anymore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Holden is instinctively postmodern, too knowing to suspend disbelief, and hyper-aware of the motif or trope that is behind every formal performance. At Radio City Music Hall \u201ca guy came out in a tuxedo and roller skates on, and started skating under a bunch of little tables, and telling jokes while he did it. He was a very good skater and all, but I couldn\u2019t enjoy it much because I kept picturing him practicing<\/em> to be a guy that roller-skates on the stage.\u201d To be a true artist, the performer must give up being on stage.<\/p>\n

Near the end of the novel Holden has an elaborate fantasy of living in seclusion in a cabin in the country. \u201cI\u2019d have this rule that nobody could do anything phony when they visited me. If anybody tried to do anything phony, they couldn\u2019t stay.\u201d Holden doesn\u2019t make good on the fantasy, but his creator did, living reclusively in Cornish, New Hampshire, for more than fifty years, in what appears to have been a state of relative contentment. According to Salinger he continued to write about the Glass family during those years. He declined to publish these books, if that\u2019s what they are, while he was alive, disgusted perhaps with the vagaries of \u201cego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else\u2019s,\u201d as Franny put it. He seemed to regard his literary success as a moral stain. It would be hard to think of a contemporary American writer whose personal life was more true to the ethos of his fiction.<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Greenberg J.D. Salinger; drawing by David Levine Rereading J.D. Salinger after his death on January 27, I am struck by an improbable connection between his work and that of Jack Kerouac. Both were writing in the late Forties and Fifties, from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but with a relentless ethos of non-conformism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}