Far From Brooklyn

I was unexpectedly moved by J.D. Salinger’s death last month.  I was not one of those readers who still wondered if or when a new Salinger work might become available.  I never dug up “Hapworth 16” from the archives of the New Yorker, nor had I chased down and read the uncollected stories that he published in the 1940s.

So I’m not a completist by any means.

What I am is an unadulterated fan.  I don’t look down my nose at “Catcher.”  I consider it a work of art in full.  I have long considered “Franny and Zooey” one of the signature volumes of Post-War American fiction, and “Nine Stories” contains several pieces that are damn near perfect.  

In fact, “perfect” is a word that seems oddly applicable to Salinger’s output as a whole.  What novel could be closer to perfect than “Catcher”?  What novella is so nearly without fault as “Franny”?  And a many of the pieces in “Nine Stories” – I’m particularly thinking of “For Esme,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” and “The Laughing Man” – are likewise impeccable.

As much as a fan as I am and have been for 30+ years, I hadn’t read any Salinger in at least five years and probably more like 10.  So, when I learned of his death, I dug up a copy of “Franny and Zooey” and “Nine Stories” and gave them a read – trying, if I could, to see them with new eyes.

And in many ways I could in fact read them fresh.  Of course there are sentences that had stuck with me, and that I looked forward to reading again, and those sentences did not disappoint.  Like this one from the beginning of “Franny”:

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

Those baroque creations were Salinger’s specialty, of course, but he could also write with beautiful economy.  The final sentences of “The Laughing Man” are simple, direct, heart-breaking:

A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief’s bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go right straight to bed.

It was rather amazing to re-read these flawless gems of fiction in the wake of his death.  The obituaries and even the considerations of his work were more about his life – his reclusiveness, his unsavory relationship with the young Joyce Maynard, the hoarding of his writing – than his writing and the effect it has had on several generations of readers.  The headline of the New York Times obituary put it this way: “J.D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91.”

It’s extraordinary to think that, in the 1950s, serious literary writers were hard-pressed to find a way to write their way out from under his shadow.  His work was so powerfully influential, so widely read and admired, that John Updike said it sometimes felt as if it would be impossible to set an original sentence on paper – that is how powerful and original Salinger’s voice was in the 1950s.

The problem is that we loved Salinger so, and he refused to grant us what we wanted, which was simple: more.  No writer so beloved (not that there are many) was so stinting with his work.  And that fed the love and raised Salinger up ever higher – if only he had published more, he surely would have failed us, and we would have taken him down from the pedestal, and we could consider him more generously.  But he didn’t write, or at least he didn’t publish, and so we were all forced to read our favorite books over and over, and we associated them with our teenage selves and our teenage viewpoints, and after a while we came to think of the works themselves as teenage artifacts – rather than adult art. 

Supposedly “Catcher” is losing some of its appeal – many teenage and college-age readers prefer a plucky hero (Harry Potter) to the self-conscious, sarcastic, and generally powerless Holden Caulfield.  Re-reading “Nine Stories,” it was  striking to me how many of Salinger’s characters are similarly helpless, however wealthy and privileged their families and upbringing.

And something else: Reading these stories in 2010, I was struck by the nearness of World War II.  The war cast a huge shadow over these characters.  These are not heroic warriors.  At best they are survivors, like the narrator in “For Esme,” and at worst they are failures, like Franklin in “Just Before the War With the Eskimos.”  Mostly they were observers, and self-conscious ones at that.  They did not look at the war and think that they would have been heroes. Quite the opposite.  Salinger captured the sense of what is like to be “untriumphant” in a triumphal world. 

I suppose that was Salinger’s great sin – to focus on the small, and to be willing to be small himself – small in output, small in life, occupying a small corner of a small state, rather than taking a place at the head of the literary table in New York as others would have done.  But choices like that do not preclude greatness in art, and without question his output stands alongside the great works of 20th Century literature.

The headline should have read: “J.D. Salinger, Giant of 20th Century Fiction, Dies at 91.”

Photo credit: Caroline Veronez on Unsplash