"Go on-Take my hand,
Not my picture…"
I suppose he would have wanted us to just look away, go about our business like any other day and pretend he wasn't there in the first place.
For the title of this piece I suppose he would have called me a clichéd little dumb-shit, and told me to fuck off.
But the past few days have proven that, despite his enduring wishes for privacy(the ones he fought for armed with verbal venom and threat of legal action) it has been just as impossible for us to leave well enough alone in death as it was during J.D. Salinger's life.
His wasn't a unique request, but one we have all made from time to time to our friends, husbands, wives and receptionists alike:
"Remember now, if THEY come calling, I'M NOT HERE."
What could sour a man's taste for success and curtail his grand ambition for literary gravitas so much as to take him from that cocky nineteen-year-old for whom an NYU curriculum was a waste of time; that young writer who then stood brazenly at the doors of the New Yorker demanding entry like Achilles at the walls of Troy; a mind and a talent too great to waste on the family business that fed, clothed and awarded him an upper-class living in New York; from prophesying his own status as a great novelist, the catalyst for the next phase of American literature; a handsome man with dark features and forlorn eyes, a literary Humphrey Bogart who had no trouble drawing the stares of beautiful women and blending in with New York's upper crust; An overnight ascension up the publishing world's A-list; to an introverted societal expat in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, where beyond occasional niceties towards neighbors, he refused to share anything more of himself with the world.
…
Salinger was, to my mind and probably many others, the founder of the postmodern "New York" novel. Literary critic James Wood once said of that proposed genre:
"...And besides, the "New York novel" - as opposed to the novel set in New York - is a genre of no importance at all."
But New York was clearly more than just a backdrop for Salinger's novels and stories. He was the voice of upper class disillusionment, a torch he unanimously inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abdicated his seat, joining other east coast writers as they drank themselves into debt and made their ill-fated exodus out west to a land of sunshine, orange groves and statutes on drinking water--the land of that pubescent and promising new media goddess, Hollywood.
Ernest Hemingway once described Fitzgerald as a 'whore' for career moves like this. A term Holden Caulfield uses to describe his brother D.B. in The Catcher in the Rye, who also writes for film...
(F. Scott = D.B.?)
In "The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway graduates from the insular familiarity of his Ivy League world into the corrupt world of bootlegging and 1920's opulence-the world of Jay Gatsby.
Fitzgerald's New York reflected the 1920's, the prosperity following the Great War just before the jugulating grip of the Great Depression; Olympus before the fall, the last fleeting snapshot of America's socialite aristocracy. At the time events in The Great Gatsby play out, there was a slow but steady socio-economic restructuring that gave birth to the American middle class. Salinger's work traced those changes-the canvas, New York City.
If men like Thaw, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt had previously been royalty, with the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Arnold Rothsteins the nobility, then burgeoning families like the Caulfields and the Glass' represented the new 'gentry', the earls and viscounts of New York: affluent though not rich, people of note but not newspaper-worthy, all set against one another, vying for advancement at the king's court.
Holden Caulfield is a progeny of those gentry: talented, directionless and bored out of his mind.
So what was it about one spoiled and, lets face it, often whiny prep-school kid and his inability to count his blessings like the rest of the trust-fund brigade? Why have so many with each passing generation, myself included, felt so much resonance with the narrative of Holden Caulfield?
After Salinger’s death, a blog on the New York Times website posted collected thoughts and reflections about the man and his work. One Leslie from England had THIS to say:
“Catcher in the Rye” was about a self-absorbed, privileged, ungrateful little snot and the two-dimensional female stand-in of a character. The only thing more depressing than that book is the fact that it apparently resonates with most of America. This is telling."
If Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a self-absorbed, ungrateful little snot, and if those tenets are so telling, what words would Leslie use to describe Joyce's Steven Dedalus...
The synthesis of 'Catcher', its spiritual parentage, predates even Fitzgerald. Holden Caulfield's misadventure through New York on his way home from Pencey Prep parallels the odyssey of Stephen Dedalus as he walks the jaded, idealistic artist through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Stephen, much like Holden also finds himself estranged from his parents, especially his father, a well to do gentleman. He has trouble keeping a "real" job, much the same way Holden has trouble staying in school.
Stephen converses, or is coerced into social interaction with schoolmasters and newspaper editors, authoritative figures with whom he is deeply resentful and whose shallow worldview disgusts him. Like Holden, he has no practical use for religion, expressing distaste for the repressing, censoring effect of Catholicism on his native Ireland. He shares, at least at the start of his journey, a living space with a boisterous ignorant slob. Over the course of a day Stephen too finds himself stumbling drunk into the street, in an embarrassing failed attempt at soliciting a prostitute, and in literal tears later on.
Stephen has Leopold Bloom, (technically the titular 'Ulysses' of Joyce's epic) an older, more experienced and perhaps more practical man who has also dealt with the low ways of the world to catch him when he is at his lowest emotional ebb.
Though their encounter ends a bit abruptly, Holden in turn has Mr. Antolini, a teacher, whom he turns to for a much needed ear, and sound wisdom.
When the 16 year old Holden states that he'd like to use all of his 'dough' and move someplace far away to get away from the ignorance of people and their inane conversations, that he may for once be given the chance to be true to himself and see himself in that strange context he finds so personally fitting, it echoes, though maybe less eloquently, Stephen Dedalus's famous proclamation at the end of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."
Dedalus is a paragon of artistic integrity then? Lauded as the young man who refuses to accept his birthright, and instead makes his own way according to his own set of values.
And Holden is just a whiny, spoiled brat
...
Flashing forward this time, about sixty years...
Jay McInerney's 1984 novel "Bright Lights, Big City" follows an unnamed character (a WRITER, go figure, who yearns to see his work grace the pages of the NEW YORKER, for whom he is employed as a stressed out fact-checker) seeking escape in the vapid excess of New York's 1980's party scene. He, like Holden Caulfield, possesses a cynical worldview and partial detachment from reality, all the right ingredients for an unreliable narrative. The young man's wife has left him, a reality he is unable to cope with. His nocturnal exodus leads him around Manhattan to all the places she would go, believing she will return to him. As he suffers severe burn-out, the young man then struggles to liberate himself from this hedonistic undercurrent before he suffocates.
Tack on about 5-10 years, subtract his youthful naivety and squeamishness, and lose him in gaudy nightclubs, the cocaine mist of upper west-side bathrooms, larger quantities of booze, sex and other such inherent yuppie vices, and McInerney's novel very well could be a continuation for Holden.
What these characters, and in the end Salinger himself have in common is that they are all "new money", each one marking the birth and evolution of the middle and upper-middle class (of which is slowly disappearing from the American landscape), and no place better is it played than the avenues and neighborhoods of America's foremost metropolitan epicenter. They are each distrustful of something; institutions that set dogmatic artistic standards, and paper-thin societal norms. Though part of an (ever-changing) infrastructure and lifestyle that kept them financially safe and secure, they shun their birthrights. They are sickened by artifice, and have felt the effects of materialism and egotism on their life and work. They all possess a chronic allergy to bullshit, and to have stayed where they were risked a fatal case of anaphylactic shock.
An affliction JD Salinger knew was just part of life in the big city.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger (Part Two)
The synthesis of 'Catcher', its spiritual parentage, predates even Fitzgerald. Holden Caulfield's misadventure through New York on his way home from Pencey Prep parallels the odyssey of Stephen Dedalus as he walks the jaded, idealistic artist through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Stephen, much like Holden also finds himself estranged from his parents, especially his father, a well to do gentleman. He has trouble keeping a "real" job, much the same way Holden has trouble staying in school.
Stephen converses, or is coerced into social interaction with schoolmasters and newspaper editors, authoritative figures with whom he is deeply resentful and whose shallow worldview disgusts him. He shares, at least at the start of his journey, a living space with a boisterous ignorant slob. Over the course of a day Stephen too finds himself stumbling drunk into the street, in an embarrassing failed attempt at soliciting a prostitute, and in literal tears later on.
Stephen has Leopold Bloom, (technically the titular 'Ulysses' of Joyce's epic) an older, more experienced and perhaps more practical man who has also dealt with the low ways of the world to catch him when he is at his lowest emotional ebb.
Though their encounter ends a bit abruptly, Holden in turn has Mr. Antolini, a teacher, whom he turns to for a much needed ear, and sound wisdom.
When the 16 year old Holden states that he'd like to use all of his 'dough' and move someplace far away to get away from the ignorance of people and their inane conversations, that he may for once be given the chance to be true to himself and see himself in that strange context he finds so personally fitting, it echoes, though maybe less eloquently, Stephen Dedalus's famous proclamation at the end of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."
Dedalus is a paragon of artistic integrity then? Lauded as the young man who refuses to accept his birthright, and instead makes his own way according to his own set of values.
And Holden is just a whiny, spoiled brat
...
Flashing forward this time, about sixty years...
Jay McInerney's 1984 novel "Bright Lights, Big City" follows an unnamed character (a WRITER, go figure, who yearns to see his work grace the pages of the NEW YORKER, for whom he is employed as a stressed out fact-checker) seeking escape in the vapid excess of New York's 1980's party scene. He, like Holden Caulfield, possesses a cynical worldview and partial detachment from reality, all the right ingredients for an unreliable narrative. The young man's wife has left him, a reality he is unable to cope with. His nocturnal exodus leads him around Manhattan to all the places she would go, believing she will return to him. As he suffers severe burn-out, the young man then struggles to liberate himself from this hedonistic undercurrent before he suffocates.
Tack on about 5-10 years, subtract his youthful naivety and squeamishness, and lose him in gaudy nightclubs, the cocaine mist of upper west-side bathrooms, larger quantities of booze, sex and other such inherent yuppie vices, and McInerney's novel very well could be a continuation for Holden.
What these characters, and in the end Salinger himself have in common is that they are all "new money", each one marking the stages of the birth and evolution of the middle and upper-middle class (of which is slowly disappearing), and no place better is it played than the avenues and neighborhoods of America's foremost metropolitan epicenter. They are each distrustful of something; institutions that set dogmatic artistic standards, and paper-thin societal norms. Though part of an (ever-changing) infrastructure and lifestyle that kept them financially safe, secure They are sickened by artifice, and have felt the effects of materialism and egotism on their life and work. They all possess a chronic allergy to bullshit, and to have stayed where they were risked a fatal case of anaphylactic shock.
An effect JD Salinger knew was just life in the big city.
Stephen, much like Holden also finds himself estranged from his parents, especially his father, a well to do gentleman. He has trouble keeping a "real" job, much the same way Holden has trouble staying in school.
Stephen converses, or is coerced into social interaction with schoolmasters and newspaper editors, authoritative figures with whom he is deeply resentful and whose shallow worldview disgusts him. He shares, at least at the start of his journey, a living space with a boisterous ignorant slob. Over the course of a day Stephen too finds himself stumbling drunk into the street, in an embarrassing failed attempt at soliciting a prostitute, and in literal tears later on.
Stephen has Leopold Bloom, (technically the titular 'Ulysses' of Joyce's epic) an older, more experienced and perhaps more practical man who has also dealt with the low ways of the world to catch him when he is at his lowest emotional ebb.
Though their encounter ends a bit abruptly, Holden in turn has Mr. Antolini, a teacher, whom he turns to for a much needed ear, and sound wisdom.
When the 16 year old Holden states that he'd like to use all of his 'dough' and move someplace far away to get away from the ignorance of people and their inane conversations, that he may for once be given the chance to be true to himself and see himself in that strange context he finds so personally fitting, it echoes, though maybe less eloquently, Stephen Dedalus's famous proclamation at the end of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."
Dedalus is a paragon of artistic integrity then? Lauded as the young man who refuses to accept his birthright, and instead makes his own way according to his own set of values.
And Holden is just a whiny, spoiled brat
...
Flashing forward this time, about sixty years...
Jay McInerney's 1984 novel "Bright Lights, Big City" follows an unnamed character (a WRITER, go figure, who yearns to see his work grace the pages of the NEW YORKER, for whom he is employed as a stressed out fact-checker) seeking escape in the vapid excess of New York's 1980's party scene. He, like Holden Caulfield, possesses a cynical worldview and partial detachment from reality, all the right ingredients for an unreliable narrative. The young man's wife has left him, a reality he is unable to cope with. His nocturnal exodus leads him around Manhattan to all the places she would go, believing she will return to him. As he suffers severe burn-out, the young man then struggles to liberate himself from this hedonistic undercurrent before he suffocates.
Tack on about 5-10 years, subtract his youthful naivety and squeamishness, and lose him in gaudy nightclubs, the cocaine mist of upper west-side bathrooms, larger quantities of booze, sex and other such inherent yuppie vices, and McInerney's novel very well could be a continuation for Holden.
What these characters, and in the end Salinger himself have in common is that they are all "new money", each one marking the stages of the birth and evolution of the middle and upper-middle class (of which is slowly disappearing), and no place better is it played than the avenues and neighborhoods of America's foremost metropolitan epicenter. They are each distrustful of something; institutions that set dogmatic artistic standards, and paper-thin societal norms. Though part of an (ever-changing) infrastructure and lifestyle that kept them financially safe, secure They are sickened by artifice, and have felt the effects of materialism and egotism on their life and work. They all possess a chronic allergy to bullshit, and to have stayed where they were risked a fatal case of anaphylactic shock.
An effect JD Salinger knew was just life in the big city.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger (Part One)
"Go on-Take my hand,
Not my picture…"
I suppose he would have wanted us to just look away, go about our business like any other day and pretend he wasn't there in the first place.
For the title of this piece I suppose he would have called me a clichéd little dumb-shit, and told me to fuck off.
But the past few days have proven that, despite his enduring wishes for privacy(the ones he fought for armed with verbal venom and threat of legal action) it has been just as impossible for us to leave well enough alone in death as it was during J.D. Salinger's life.
His wasn't a unique request, but one we have all made from time to time to our friends, husbands, wives and receptionists alike:
"Remember now, if THEY come calling, I'M NOT HERE."
What could sour a man's taste for success and curtail his grand ambition for literary gravitas so much as to take him from that cocky nineteen-year-old for whom an NYU curriculum was a waste of time; that young writer who then stood brazenly at the doors of the New Yorker demanding entry like Achilles at the walls of Troy; a mind and a talent too great to waste on the family business that fed, clothed him and awarded him an upper-class living in New York; from prophesying his own status as a great novelist, the catalyst for the next phase of American literature; a handsome man with dark features and forlorn eyes, a literary Humphrey Bogart who had no trouble drawing the stares of beautiful women and blending in with New York's upper crust; An overnight ascension up the publishing world's A-list; to an introverted societal expat in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, where beyond occasional niceties towards neighbors, he refused to share anything more of himself with the world.
…
Salinger was, to my mind and probably many others, the founder of the postmodern "New York" novel. Literary critic James Wood once said of that proposed genre:
"...And besides, the "New York novel" - as opposed to the novel set in New York - is a genre of no importance at all."
But New York was clearly more than just a backdrop for Salinger's novels and stories. He was the voice of upper class disillusionment, a torch he unanimously inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abdicated his seat, joining other east coast writers as they drank themselves into debt and made their ill-fated exodus out west to a land of sunshine, orange groves and statutes on drinking water--the land of that pubescent and promising new media goddess, Hollywood.
Ernest Hemingway once described Fitzgerald as a 'whore' for career moves like this. A term Holden Caulfield uses to describe his brother D.B. in The Catcher in the Rye, who also writes for film...
(F. Scott = D.B.?)
In "The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway graduates from the insular familiarity of his Ivy League world into the corrupt world of bootlegging and 1920's opulence-the world of Jay Gatsby.
Fitzgerald's New York reflected the 1920's, the prosperity following the Great War just before the jugulating grip of the Great Depression; Olympus before the fall, the last fleeting snapshot of America's socialite aristocracy. At the time The Great Gatsby plays out there was a slow but steady social class restructuring that gave birth to the American middle class. Salinger's work traced those changes. If men like Thaw, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt had been royalty, with the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Arnold Rothsteins the nobility, then burgeoning families like the Caulfields and the Glass' represented the new 'gentry', the earls and viscounts of New York: affluent though not rich, people of note but not newspaper-worthy, all set against one another, vying for advancement at the king's court.
Holden Caulfield is a progeny of those gentry: talented, directionless and bored out of his mind.
So what was it about one spoiled and, lets face it, often whiny prep-school kid and his inability to count his blessings like the rest of the trust-fund brigade? Why have so many with each passing generation, myself included, resonated so much with the narrative of Holden Caulfield?
After Salinger’s death, a blog on the New York Times website showed collected thoughts and reflections about the man and his work. One Leslie from England had THIS to say:
“Catcher in the Rye” was about a self-absorbed, privileged, ungrateful little snot and the two-dimensional female stand-in of a character. The only thing more depressing than that book is the fact that it apparently resonates with most of America. This is telling."
If Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a self-absorbed, ungrateful little snot, and if those tenets are so telling, what words would Leslie use to describe Joyce's Steven Dedalus...
Not my picture…"
I suppose he would have wanted us to just look away, go about our business like any other day and pretend he wasn't there in the first place.
For the title of this piece I suppose he would have called me a clichéd little dumb-shit, and told me to fuck off.
But the past few days have proven that, despite his enduring wishes for privacy(the ones he fought for armed with verbal venom and threat of legal action) it has been just as impossible for us to leave well enough alone in death as it was during J.D. Salinger's life.
His wasn't a unique request, but one we have all made from time to time to our friends, husbands, wives and receptionists alike:
"Remember now, if THEY come calling, I'M NOT HERE."
What could sour a man's taste for success and curtail his grand ambition for literary gravitas so much as to take him from that cocky nineteen-year-old for whom an NYU curriculum was a waste of time; that young writer who then stood brazenly at the doors of the New Yorker demanding entry like Achilles at the walls of Troy; a mind and a talent too great to waste on the family business that fed, clothed him and awarded him an upper-class living in New York; from prophesying his own status as a great novelist, the catalyst for the next phase of American literature; a handsome man with dark features and forlorn eyes, a literary Humphrey Bogart who had no trouble drawing the stares of beautiful women and blending in with New York's upper crust; An overnight ascension up the publishing world's A-list; to an introverted societal expat in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, where beyond occasional niceties towards neighbors, he refused to share anything more of himself with the world.
…
Salinger was, to my mind and probably many others, the founder of the postmodern "New York" novel. Literary critic James Wood once said of that proposed genre:
"...And besides, the "New York novel" - as opposed to the novel set in New York - is a genre of no importance at all."
But New York was clearly more than just a backdrop for Salinger's novels and stories. He was the voice of upper class disillusionment, a torch he unanimously inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abdicated his seat, joining other east coast writers as they drank themselves into debt and made their ill-fated exodus out west to a land of sunshine, orange groves and statutes on drinking water--the land of that pubescent and promising new media goddess, Hollywood.
Ernest Hemingway once described Fitzgerald as a 'whore' for career moves like this. A term Holden Caulfield uses to describe his brother D.B. in The Catcher in the Rye, who also writes for film...
(F. Scott = D.B.?)
In "The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway graduates from the insular familiarity of his Ivy League world into the corrupt world of bootlegging and 1920's opulence-the world of Jay Gatsby.
Fitzgerald's New York reflected the 1920's, the prosperity following the Great War just before the jugulating grip of the Great Depression; Olympus before the fall, the last fleeting snapshot of America's socialite aristocracy. At the time The Great Gatsby plays out there was a slow but steady social class restructuring that gave birth to the American middle class. Salinger's work traced those changes. If men like Thaw, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt had been royalty, with the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Arnold Rothsteins the nobility, then burgeoning families like the Caulfields and the Glass' represented the new 'gentry', the earls and viscounts of New York: affluent though not rich, people of note but not newspaper-worthy, all set against one another, vying for advancement at the king's court.
Holden Caulfield is a progeny of those gentry: talented, directionless and bored out of his mind.
So what was it about one spoiled and, lets face it, often whiny prep-school kid and his inability to count his blessings like the rest of the trust-fund brigade? Why have so many with each passing generation, myself included, resonated so much with the narrative of Holden Caulfield?
After Salinger’s death, a blog on the New York Times website showed collected thoughts and reflections about the man and his work. One Leslie from England had THIS to say:
“Catcher in the Rye” was about a self-absorbed, privileged, ungrateful little snot and the two-dimensional female stand-in of a character. The only thing more depressing than that book is the fact that it apparently resonates with most of America. This is telling."
If Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a self-absorbed, ungrateful little snot, and if those tenets are so telling, what words would Leslie use to describe Joyce's Steven Dedalus...
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