This article was originally published on October 19, 1959.
In his latest work of fiction, J. D. Salinger, speaking through a favorite narrator, makes the following observation about P. B. Shelley, a writer some one hundred-odd years his senior: "I surely think," he says, "that if I were to ask the sixty-odd girls in my two Writing for Publication courses to quote a line, any line, from 'Ozymandias' or even just to tell what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I'd bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love and had one wife who wrote Frankenstein, and another who drowned herself." Probably, it would be another safe bet, and one must assume Salinger knows it, that for every ten of Salinger's fans who know anything about the intellectual basis of Zen, a pet subject of his, or the contents of The Bhagavad-Gita, there are at least fifty who know that Holden Caulfield had to go to a psychiatrist ("it killed him, really it did"), and that Franny Glass wasn't pregnant after all. Salinger's Zen is to the faithful like Shelley's Platonism - vague and a little dry. But Holden and Franny - that's different. They are the author's kin, as much kin as Shelley's wives were to Shelley. Information about them is more than mere information; it is intimate lore. And discovering it has led naturally and indiscriminately to the quest for information about the paterfamilias, Salinger himself.
Nobody can fail to recognize that this rampant curiosity about the author - "lurid and partly lurid," Salinger calls it - is one of the most interesting aspects of his reputation. Just how intense the interest is may be hard to gauge, but if his experiences are anything like those of Buddy Glass, the writer through whom Salinger has written much in the last few years, the fifty are already beating a path to his door, planting tire tracks in his rose beds and asking him silly questions about "the endemic American Zeitgeist, just as they have done with Buddy. This is remarkable devotion in a generation as cagey as the present one is supposed to be and yet it might all be conceded to Salinger gracefully enough (fads being what they are) if the body of Salinger's admirers was confined purely to that undergraduate group which sees that it can follow Holden Caulfield's nice line between colloquial earthiness and colloquial mysticism without feeling either too far In or too far Out. But the group is much larger than that, and some people, outside it, have wondered why. About the only explanation Salinger has offered, as he no doubt recalls all the bad imitations of Holden Caulfield, is Buddy Glass' crack, "I have been knighted for my heart-shaped prose."
Going beyond that answer, certain critics, like Maxwell Geismar and John Aldridge, have tried to explain Salinger's appeal by examining some of his favorite themes. Geismar calls Salinger "the spokesman of the Ivy League rebellion of the early Fifties." "Ivy League" means to Geismar that it is a rebellion founded mostly on a dislike for the fancy prep-school phony who abounds in Catcher in the Rye and Salinger's other fiction. For Geismar, and for Aldridge too, the rebellion never quite transcends this adolescent pique at wrong guys and boring teachers. The sympathy of the undergraduate with Salinger can, by this line of reasoning, be reduced to the fact that he doesn't like his roommate any better than Holden does and that he may also share Holden's wish for deafness, or Teddy's wish for death and reincarnation in a quieter world where nobody, for God's sake, is lecturing at him on Western Civilization three or four mornings a week. For Geismar and Aldridge, the "rebellion," thus interpreted, seems irresponsible and "adolescent."
It is hard to argue with their opinion, except to observe that the derogation of “adolescent” has also been applied at different times to Goeth, Schiller, Stern, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Hemingway and others. The trouble with such a reduction is that it tends to cancel out Geismar’s equally interesting opinion that Salinger is “the ultimate artist of The New Yorker school of writing,” a compliment which out to have some bearing on our question. Beyond that, their assessment does not do much about telling why the “lurid or partly lurid” curiosity that has always distinguished the interest in Shelley turns today to somebody like Salinger rather than to other writers who are concerned with adolescent and pre-adolescent characters.
Salinger's subject matter is not unique, nor are his positions quite as intelligible as the talk about rebellion would indicate. He has undercut almost every position he has taken, so much so lately that to call him the spokesman for anything seems bold. Probably, if we could find the True Blue Salingerite, that ideal reader who would remain staunchly superior to any ad hoc image of Salinger, he would be no more addicted to rebellion than he would be to Zen. He would, I think, be likely to say that he is interested in Salinger for no better reason than that Salinger's characters are so uncomfortably alive that one has a kind of irrational desire to keep after them and see if something can't be worked out. If pressed, he might guess further that Salinger made them uncomfortable quite deliberately, and that there is an apparently conscious development toward isolating and then enlarging upon the discomforts of the people he is writing about.
This may be put in terms of two propositions; first, that Salinger is offering something different, something presumably more provocative than other writers of his "school" - certainly a good reason for popularity. And, second, that he becomes increasingly interesting to follow because he has changed (and is changing) his own methods after a conscious pattern.
The first proposition is fairly easy to demonstrate. Compare any of Salinger’s stories – they all deal more or less with the indigestible past – and the work of most of the other writers of Reminiscence fiction in The New Yorker and the little quarterlies. The difference is in the half-embarrassed attitude of Salinger’s characters (“I did something very stupid and embarrassing.” “Why do I go on like this?” “I’m a madman, really I am.”). This is a bit more than a trademark; the writers of conventional Reminiscence avoid any tinge of self-consciousness like the plague. While they may be just as jealous of their hunting caps and crocus-yellow neckties as Holden Caulfield and Buddy Glass are, they make it all sound blithely natural and healthy. Where Salinger lurks off in the shadow of his banana tree, they plant themselves under a spreading chestnut, anyway something more solid and less sickly-green. They may experience the same reaction against Today, the same cherishing of Yesterday, but seldom see any implications in so much nostalgia.
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