I’ve been reading some biographies lately–they’re perfect bathroom reading, you can read an episode at a time in someone’s life and over the period of a few weeks get a sense of the whole. Recently I read a biography of J. D. Salinger. As you probably know (if you’ve read to this point in the post and haven’t already clicked away), Salinger lived a sad life: ups and downs in his childhood, traumatic military experiences, a short period of productivity and success as a writer, and then several decades of loneliness.
I’ve always been sad that Salinger wasn’t able to follow up The Catcher in the Rye with anything else of that quality. In my opinion, Catcher deserves is enduring reputation; I think it’s just wonderful.
But after reading this biography, I’ve flipped my take–not on The Catcher in the Rye, which I still think it’s great!–but on my view that it was sad that he wasn’t able to follow it up with work of comparable quality.
My current view is that, Catcher aside, Salinger was an OK writer. Given what he had to work with, it’s amazing that he was able to write that one brilliant book. Rather than being sad he couldn’t write more, I’m happy that he produced what he did.
Let me put it this way. It seems that, as an individual, Salinger was an amazing person, full of talent, the kind of person who, if you met him, might well be the most impressive person you ever meet. But, as a writer, he was just fine, not amazing, except for that one book. Don’t get me wrong, some of his stories are great too, but, overall, after reading his biography, my sense is that Salinger didn’t have that much to say. It’s easy to envision a slightly different world in which he became a successful and beloved writer of TV sitcoms.
The best analogy I can think of is Shirley Jackson–hey, I read her biography too! Jackson wrote The Lottery and some other things. Unlike Salinger, she died young so who knows what would’ve come next, but overall I feel like it makes more sense to appreciate her best work rather than to have expected that much more work of that quality would’ve come.
P.S. In contrast, I remain sad that William Saroyan’s work declined after his wonderful early stories. I don’t think Saroyan’s best work is as good as Salinger’s best work, but I somehow have the impression that, had his life gone slightly differently, Saroyan could have kept writing new stuff at his best level.
Shouldn’t someone’s quality as a writer be judged by their works and not by their biography? It seems a bit odd to say that sure, someone wrote an amazing novel and short story collection, but let’s ignore that because their biography wasn’t that interesting.
Anon:
I didn’t mean to imply that we should ignore Salinger’s amazing novel. I’ve slightly rewritten my post to clarify. See the second and third paragraphs above.
Author’s lives are interesting, and Salinger’s is a peculiarly monastic grind. I concur in pegging Catcher as the very best distillation of his teenage angsty authentic self. Everything he wrote after seems to be gross narcissism compounded with esoteric quirks. His mute self-isolation may have been all Salinger was willing to show the world after he suicided his weird fictional family/
I have to quote DeLillo’s version, in Mao II, of authorial self-doubt:
“You can’t let the book be seen,” Scott said. “It’s all over if you
do. The book is a grossity. We have to invent words to describe the
corpulence, the top-heaviness, the lack of discernment, pace and
energy. It’s a master collapse. It’s a failure so deep it places
suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early
work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle.”
My opinion of Salinger was always that he was an OK, but not amazing, writer. He was so reclusive, I never formed much of an opinion of him as a person. I guess you could say I had a prior that was neutral, or maybe slightly positive (sympathetic to being an introvert). But when I read this, my assessment of him nosedived: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/04/joyce-maynard-on-chilling-parallels-woody-allen-and-jd-salinger
The second paragraph of that piece is enough to send someone into a tailspin almost the equal of Seymour Glass’s.
The grooming ruined him for me. He did some messed up stuff in his later years. I can separate art from artist though.
I check once a year to see if his estate (son?) published the rest of his work.
I probably use an idea from the Glass family at least once a week.
There’s a rhyme somewhere in Holden calling everyone a phony and philosophy of science axe you sharpen, Dr. Gelman.
Two of Salinger’s best and best-known stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé with Love and Squalor” feature very young girls with whom very intelligent adult men become enamored, after having (the men) become disillusioned with the modern world. There’s a lot of ruminating on philosophy and the meaning of life and so on, some of it not terrible, but none of it really rising above what you’d expect of a man in his early twenties who’d become enamored with a religious tradition that wasn’t his own, which he found out about in libraries. To the extent there are adult women in these stories, they’re represented in “Bananafish” by a recently married woman who wants to socialize with the couple’s friends and can’t understand the deep truths her husband learned during the war (these are presented as the same thing and it doesn’t seem like her husband foresaw that if he told her “I have deep thoughts” she might not react with immediate submission and adoration), and her mother, who she’s turning into. At no point is the idea that the narrator didn’t want to get married raised. The strong implication is that the wife didn’t want to get married, or shouldn’t have wanted to, because a good person wouldn’t, and that her giving in to traditional marriage is her failing, the typical failing of women. It’s not *quite* her fault, because the cause of the problem is the war and what led to the war, but Salinger really, really seems to want to write about the cause of all his narrators’ problems being adult women and how they’re not as pure as young girls.
Woody Allen is like seconds from the Salinger stock, half-understood psychobabble standing in for the four-fifths understood Buddhism. Though cinema is probably a better medium for that kind of thing and he worked at it longer.
Any woman who was told to ignore the overt misogyny and veiled pedophilia of Salinger’s stories because of the door they undeniably open up onto deep truths will have some impatience with the whole thing by now.
I could add that there’s no suggestion in either story that the protagonist’s realizations about the meaning of life actually aren’t “deep thought” of any real quality but an emotional reaction caused by depression or something like “shell shock”/PTSD.
I don’t weight his characters’ inner psychology as being even an inch from Salinger’s, so the inarticulate quality of their profundity is also his. And the characters’ implicit survivorship is also autobiographically his own karma. Even today, not everyone seems to realize that Salinger was among the liberators of the Concentration Camps in Germany. How could that not have been completely life-defining. The fact that most don’t know it is a pure watermark of that era, that he was so nutty, but never once considered getting a handicapped by Auschwitz pass.
that last phrase is too glib, i’m remarking just that Salinger’s 50s masculinity meant even the most legitimate trauma is passed over in silence.
Yes, I think Salinger wrote before the idea of writing about Auschwitz in the “polite” press could ever have been thought of. As far as I know the closest he gets is “Esme” and the closest the character gets to anything like a war experience is sitting in the library of an SS officer who’s been killed or captured and reading his books.
Thank you for sharing your perspectives. I read the Catcher but haven’t read other novels. Thanks to your comments, now I am curious.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, these are very good stories. I tend to think the stories and the novellas (Franny and Zooey) are better than Catcher in the Rye but the way all of them stick in your mind after you read them, I think, is a sign Salinger did something right.
https://youtu.be/guPCKCAzSXk
My dad was a huge Saroyan fan, and when I learned this (sometime in my thirties) I picked up some bike Saroyan Reader or something, and read a bunch of his stories…and I thought they were good. Not great, but good, so, fine, my dad loved them and I only thought they about as good as the average short story I’ve ever read. (That’s not bad, when I read short stories they are almost always stories that have been recommended or well-reviewed so there’s a big selection effect, I’d guess almost all of the short stories I read are better than the median short story that gets published). Fifteen years later I thought maybe I had missed something in Saroyan’s work so I read the stories again…and again thought they were good. But just good, not great.
Andrew, can you recommend a couple of specific Saroyan stories you think are wonderful? Maybe they weren’t in the collection that I have.
As for Salinger, ick. Same with Woody Allen (who also was hiding his predilections in plain sight, if he can be said to have been hiding them at all).
Good stories and great book, though, I agree. And Woody Allen made some great movies. But I’m not sure I can really enjoy any of either of these men’s work anymore, not so freely anyway.
For some reason it’s harder for me to separate the authors from their work than it is to do the same with, say, musicians or composers. Wagner was virulently anti-Jewish, but when I hear his music (at least, his instrumental music) I don’t have to worry that I’m missing some anti-Jewish subtext. But I can’t watch Manhattan, or Husbands and Wives, without Woody Allen’s behavior being brought unpleasantly to mind. Ditto for Salinger and A Nice Day for Bananafish.
Phil:
I agree with you on Saroyan. I think his stories are fine, not great. I think they had an impact because they were a breath of fresh air, compared to the artificiality of slick magazine stories, the heaviness of Faulkner and Hemingway, and the general ponderousness of novels of the era. Saroyan wrote about real people affectionately and with some insight and event, without the sentimentality, melodrama, or condescension typically associated with writing about the working class. It wasn’t minimalism, exactly, but it was something that felt new, and he was a popular writer who was taken seriously by the critics. And then, over the years, his writing just got gradually worse. So, he started well (if not at the top) and worked his way down. I don’t think it’s tragic that Saroyan never wrote “another masterpiece” because I don’t think he wrote any masterpieces in the first place. But I do think it’s tragic that he was not able to continue writing at that level. Also, given that he was a unique writer, I think there’s a chance that, had he continued to exercise his full capacities as a writer, that he could’ve developed in interesting ways.
Regarding Woody and ick, I recommend this long post on the general topic from last year. I agree with you that I can separate the reading from the ickiness but not when they’re too closely tied together. I have no problem at all with Catcher in the Rye, but A Nice Day for Bananafish makes me so uncomfortable that I can’t enjoy reading it. It’s hard to know, though, because I first read Bananafish before I’d heard of Salinger’s issues, and I didn’t think it was so great even then. It just seemed too gimmicky, as compared to Catcher which seems more real.
One thing I learned from the biography of Salinger is that the genesis of Catcher was several different short stories, which Salinger had to alter to make them fit together. Maybe part of the convincing aspect, the realness, of Catcher came from that constraint. Real life is to some extent a collection of events that don’t always fit together perfectly. Had Salinger constructed Catcher in the way that he wrote his stories, the novel might have been more unified in its themes and then felt more artificial. Another thing I learned from that biography is that Salinger was wanting to make a living by writing short stories for magazines, and magazine stories can be formulaic.