Salinger
There are numerous writers who captured the isolating, relentless tenor of modern times, writers such as John Dos Passos, Alfred Döblin, and Andrey Biely, among others. Only a very few writers, however, captured the mythic heart of what it was to be alive in modern times, not merely the pathos of the overwhelming, baffling experience and the dubious but intoxicating excitement, but the quiet (and at times unquiet) terror of an increasingly mass society driven by the drastic whims of invention and the sloganeering impulse, be it political, educational, or commercial. Salinger and Kafka are the two writers who come most readily to my mind.
Salinger’s writing has more of the trappings of realism. He came, after all, from the bustle and ambition of New York City rather than the rabbinic heartland of Mitteleuropa. Accordingly, his characters can notice what is going on around them but cannot open up to life in any convincing fashion. Their failure (which is also a form of achievement) stems not from any particular set of naturalist circumstances—bad parents, bad environment, bad schooling—but from the human condition in modern times.
“What could be so bad?” a rabbi might have asked Jerry Salinger. “You have the comfort of God and your people.” Neither of those sustained Salinger but, in that regard, he didn’t differ from many thousands. He differed in the depth of his disappointment, his sensitivity, and his exposure to the horrors of war. He differed in his willingness to touch a wound that few people wanted to even consider. He couched the wound most memorably in the voice of a seventeen- year-old boy (very much not a man yet) who has been kicked out of a private school and finds himself at loose amid the sordid candor and concealment of New York City, the realist version of Kafka’s Castle where there are no forthcoming answers to any and all questions.
Holden Caulfield is full of questions, as Salinger himself was. The questions fuel the idealism and the disillusion. The questions fuel the frustration and longing for innocence. The questions fuel the mild sarcasm and the feeling for the impossibility of the human endeavor, the grief that is as much built-in as a liquor cabinet in an East Side Manhattan apartment. The questions fuel the awkwardness and dim humor of so many misapprehensions. The questions make life unlivable but life must be lived, nonetheless. Holden Caulfield dangles in that “nonetheless.” No one would bet on him going much further down the rutted road.
Millions have taken Holden to heart because he spoke so explicitly to the modern condition of wishing to be human while watching humanity leak out of the social fabric’s stuffing. For Salinger, who saw extensive combat duty in World War II, that stuffing did not so much leak as go up in ghastly smoke. He witnessed what was, for all practical purposes, the end of the world: death and devastation on a scale that beggared the darkest mind. To American optimism, Europe offered the spectacle of unrelieved misery. Like Kafka, Salinger came from that place where the writer must write but there is nothing to say. The void the writer inhabits is not in the least poetic, yet the writer perseveres because he is a writer. It is what he knows to do, even as he encounters at every step a species of terror.
Holden is a myth, a legend, an impossibility made real. It is not that there was no one like Holden, rather the opposite. Everyone is Holden in the sense of wishing more from life than life is going to give. Somewhere in everyone there must be the cherishing gene. It was, as Europe showed Salinger, easily discarded and modern times, as they gave human beings the opportunity to whip up loathing on a hitherto unimaginable scale, would seem to have buried that gene. “Not so,” Holden insisted. “Not so.” There is the yearning, the glimpsing, the deep insights of childhood along with the intuitive tenacity of love and friendship: all these are genuine. Whether anything social can be built of such vulnerable materials is a perpetual question (to go back to the questions) but to ignore those materials is to throw up one’s hands and wash them of the human predicament.
The writing that Kafka and Salinger did was much more than bearing refracted witness. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that emerged from the agony of World War II but contains no combat. Instead, Salinger went to one American place or another—a school auditorium, a restaurant, a hotel room—a mediocre, trying-to-get-along place. Agony was fluent and everyday; life, as some Buddhists say, was a house on fire. Salinger’s insight issued from his trying to square an impossible equation about human suffering. He admitted the confusion and gross stupidity of much socialized existence while recognizing how easily it slid into utter horror while acknowledging the redemptive qualities of human beings, their blind goodness. This seems impossible. That Salinger wrote what he wrote seems, as with Kafka, a literary miracle.
Modern times have not been good with miracles. You can’t put a miracle on the cover of a magazine. You can’t submit a miracle to an academic panel. You can’t turn a miracle into a movie (though Hollywood has tried). In a world that believes that everything can be accounted for, a miracle remains unaccountable. Salinger enjoyed the powers of reason as much, I suspect, as Kafka did, which was to say, with rue and unease, akin to hearing a persuasive verdict about a dubious case. All those firm, declarative sentences about who was right and wrong were part of the human repertoire. But beyond and within reason there lay the bloody fields of Europe and the baying voices that made those fields. Holden had nothing to offer to oppose those voices. He had only intimations and a few protestations about the absurdity of everything. In face of this, a rabbi might have pointed out that God already had issued a set of directives. That, as both men knew, was part of the dilemma.
When, in end of one of his other stories, Salinger’s main character desperately says, “I was a good girl wasn’t I?”—despite the failure and superficiality surrounding her, her pain is gigantic.
All the time I was reading this, I had two things in mind that weren’t mentioned, in spite of how very insightful this essay is. One was Salinger’s book Franny and Zooey, which is quite different from Catcher in certain respects, and includes reference to the Jesus Prayer, which I have found, together with the Tradition behind it, to be of help In the midst of the barrage. The other is Walker Percy, who, at least in The Moviegoer, and I suspect in other of his works that are on my list, belongs as the 3rd member to complete your trinity. He said that one must be “onto something “ or be dead, and that’s an important key I think to navigating these times.