Smokin in the Bathtub with J.D. Salinger
1919-2010
Maybe it was the no-privacy of the apartment layered into the image of Zooey, sitting for hours in the bathtub smoking and reading a four-year-old letter from his brother. Or the twilight feeling of the bus in The Laughing Man, as the stories the protagonist tells a group of children too old to be young captivated them, before depositing them into disappointment inevitable as the betrayals between human beings. Of course, as we tell ourselves, or dare to share with our friends in high school (if talking books outside of English class), the bumpy chest of Mr. Spencer, Holden Caulfield's history teacher, has a feat of adolescence in it. That is: the perfectly observed sick room (camphor), the zing-hiss identifying that foreign country that is the old person's bathrobe. Meanwhile, the sense of loss redolent throughout experience, in Salinger, remains singular and fraught with the blase detail that could be beginner's mind, in zen practice, or, in Caulfield's, the internal drive to suss out the phonies all around.J.D. Salinger died last week, age 91, in New Hampshire, after publishing four books early in his long life, and then going silent (publicly) for the remainder. The books of course were novels Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and story collections Nine Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter. In the habit, say, of those famous writers of the '20s, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of recycling characters through intervals and frames of time, Seymour Glass, the eldest brother of the Glass family who commits suicide while on vacation in Florida in A Perfect Day for Bananafish, functions as phantom of the everyday. Zooey's brotherly intervention resuscitates Seymour wisdom, to help break, in Franny, the force of existential desolation that has her laid out on the couch.
The New York Times obit called Salinger the Garbo of writers, famous for shunning famousness. He erected a six and a half foot high wall around his Cornish, New Hampshire compound, after Cornish high-school students interfered with his privacy by betraying their promise of where they would publish an article about him in their newspaper. Even though writer Joyce Maynard re-arose in the '90s to tell tales of their 10-month love affair and Salinger's bizarre eating habits, one sensed even then that the Vanity Fair-serialized protests of the author of, "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret," may have had a lot to do with her nostalgia for the star power of being recognized by him, none other than the country's master of adolescent liminality.
In the year I entered college (1978), Salinger was still so embedded in the smell of Grand Central Station , the four-martini white noise of Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, as to leap off the page, as if his books as convex mirror rotated slowly over what all the rest of us knew as experience. Yet how different he was from Updike, from Cheever, from Bill Styron and the rest. He was of the east coast, indeed of New York, yet also a universal voice, one who so commanded the anti-establishmentarianism of the artist that his work could not be summed up simply. The books were not protest literature or new journalism; they were not postwar angst, they were chronicles of the impossible problem of outsiderness. In my senior year I conducted a private tutorial with my college English professor and advisor, George Creeger at Wesleyan, about Salinger. I can recall less about what I argued in precision as to Salinger's silence than what Creeger said to me on the last day of our exchange, which was that I had surprised him, because he had thought I was going to fuck up.
0 Comments