Theres a gentleman from Ripon Street in Calcutta whose eyes light up when he pronounces: An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick,unless Soul clap its hands and sing,and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress… He works the music and meaning of poetry into your budding enchantment with the written word. From him,you might come away convinced that Jerome David Salinger was a poet,the perfect poet. Professor Bertram da Silva of St Xaviers College,Calcutta has been the road to literatures most famous recluse for many,at an age when vacant-eyed students typically read as young adults what might have been a book about a child,for children. Except that,it wasnt. As for me,the handed down wisdom of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was not subverted but eclipsed by Berties insight. This had been a cult novel,by a mysterious and elusive genius,and mine may even be the last generation to connect with Holden Caulfields story of initiation.
But what did I discover about Holden that was not about a 16-year-olds rebellion in a post-war society soon to be ruptured by audacious change? It is significant that we do not discover Holden for ourselves when we are his age. And Holden has long dated. In another 10 years,the book wouldnt have remained compulsory reading had Salinger not died now. Catcher is an over-cited,over-analysed,over-clichéd,over-inspiring book that made Salinger a target of the literary paparazzi,hastening his decision to stop publishing in the middle of the next decade. It also engendered in him the obsessive compulsion to sue anybody who tried to do anything with his life and works: Ian Hamilton,if he were still around,may have been forgiving if last year Salinger had indeed sued himself for the Catchers purported sequel.
For Salinger scholars too the compound Raise High the Roof Beam,Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) or Nine Stories (or For Esmé with Love and Squalor,and Other Stories,1953) is immensely more rewarding than Catcher. Is there a Salinger philosophy of art? Did he believe the artist has no social responsibility? Did he,a la Buddy Glass,lose faith in fiction and retreat into silence? The closest you come to a textual answer is in the two novellas in Raise High. What about Salinger and Zen,Salinger and Ramakrishna? There are interpretations several times the number of stories in For Esmé,with claims to these being steps in a transcendental evolution. But did America qualify him as even a nominally Jewish writer? In any case,the Glass family is Salinger,up closer.
To return to the singular place of Catcher in our hearts,it was a path-maker for the demolition of the canon and the meeting of the popular and scholarly. Is Holden Caulfield indeed American literatures best known anti-hero after Huckleberry Finn? The teenage,20th-century embodiment of the American Dream in its skeletal,re-spiritualised essence in its passion for the authentic and hatred for the phoney? We discover that Holden is all words,all impotent rage,who undergoes a very predictable and yet even preposterous breakdown. A nice Christ figure; destroyed by the nasty world that was never meant for one as beautiful as him. Didnt we all in the feebleness of teenage martyrdom wish to give in and go under?
Truth is,Holden is not beautiful. Nor is he a child. He is Huck Finn as a premature adult. Catcher is America arriving at disillusioned middle age. Itd be all downhill from here. No noble savages; no pioneers. The American literary protagonist,traditionally a solitary figure lighting out for the territory before Aunt Sally adopts and sivilizes him,is reduced to riding a cab in a city and a disastrous date. The territory out there is the sanatorium. History has taken away the geographic expanse of his happy hunting grounds. Holden is not an aged man,but a rapidly aging one. He doesnt know it,but hes taken the children over the brink. Thats the truth behind the legendary refusal to grow up. Catcher did to Huck what Lord of the Flies did to The Coral Island: it smashed the illusion of innocence. We arrive in the wide world with our hair secretly grey; not exactly tattered coats upon sticks but paltry things nevertheless. There is little rebellion,for we know its not going to change anything.
As for Salinger,it doesnt matter anymore why he had retreated. It might have been his strategy to perpetuate interest in his meagre corpus. Some even thought once that Thomas Pynchon was Salinger in disguise. He didnt fall silent; he kept writing but not publishing: in 1996,he sanctioned and eventually stopped Hapworth 16,1924 (his last publication,New Yorker,1965) from arriving in book form. Perfect poet. Ill tell myself that he lived out the truth that art is for its maker alone. It makes nothing happen in the world.
Poor Mark David Chapman.
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
