I have a lot of memories associated with J. D. Salinger, who died today at 91.
I read The Catcher in the Rye a little later than many of my peers-- It wasn't assigned to me in Junior High or High School. Instead it came to me around my 18th or so year via Becky Gross (coincidentally a Junior High English teacher, but at the time my dreamy former summer camp counselor). She must have wanted me to read something good, or seen a little of the anti-establishment anger that I was throwing in all directions at the time.
I read Catcher first when I was away at the first year of University, up in lonely and wet Eugene Oregon. It captured my rebellious state of mind perfectly. It added the word phony to my vocabulary.
And it planted the first seeds of romantic New York City in my mind, which had previously only been exposed to the cynical decaying New York of Taxi Driver and the old Late Night with David Letterman. Holden Caulfield taught me about the lake in Central Park, about the Museum of Natural History and the glamorous, lonely Upper East Side. I would later chase these images when I lived in New York City, and spent way too much time strolling up and down Manhattan on my way to and from work.
Nine Stories taught me about the shock of killing off the main character in the first story of a book, then using many of the remaining stories and 2 more books trying to define him-- Seymour Glass-- in abstentia.
I didn't realize that Frannie was pregnant in the long piece about her in Frannie and Zooey. I only learned this in reading a book review several years ago.
I learned what a Tom Collins was in Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters
Salinger was certainly my one and only introduction to adult literature.
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91 - New York Times
Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”
“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
I'm pretty sure I read it in high school, but the experience must not have been highly memorable. It didn't really register with me until when I began teaching and needed to prepare for that -- I was more rebellious as a young teacher than I was as a teenager. Funny how things work.
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Very interesting to read such articulate reactions to him, Shanan. When I was at University (in the 60's), I read almost all of those novels & still have them in our library. I was an exchange student/lecturer in Lausanne in '63 & decided to use a few paragraphs of Catcher in the Rye to teach a bit of American culture to students there. It was nigh impossible to translate the slang & the attitude to the young Swiss. I shouldn't have even tackled it! Susan J. of Flickr.
ReplyDeleteIn recognition of Salinger's passing, I just finished reading "Franny and Zooey" and "Catcher in the Rye" after hearing about them for forty of my fifty years.
ReplyDeleteI loathed both books. I have almost no sympathy for any of the characters now, and would have had even less had I read them in my teens.
Though these are classics, I find nothing admirable in them. Perhaps Salinger was the first person to do stream-of-consciousness storytelling in the modern novel? Perhaps he gets all this acclaim for being an innovator?
Because surely, it's not for engendering sympathy for, or identification with, these unappealing characters -- except for poor Franny, plainly pregnant and desperate in the 1950s in a way that modern readers have to stretch to understand, and which contemporary book reviewers (I've only seen reviews from men from back then, e.g., John Updike) either missed completely, or were too inhibited to dare to mention in their reviews.
If he existed in the real world and I met Holden Caulfield in person, he'd be insufferable and not worth five minutes of my time. It took a huge effort to spend so much time with him in the pages of Salinger's book.