REFLECTIONS J. D. Salinger: Writing As Religion

J. D. Salinger's last book, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, was published in 1963. His last New Yorker short story appeared in 1965. Since then, he has published nothing, even as his most famous book, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), continues to sell some 400,000 copies a year. The author of a recent article in the New York Times Magazine as- serted that Salinger "retreated to a New England fortress when he could no longer write." Indeed, many literary critics have interpreted Salinger's self-imposed exile in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, as a sure sign of artistic exhaustion. Here, critic Dennis 0'Connor takes a fresh look at Salinger's published works and goes on to suggest that the critics have been wrong to assume Salinger's "exhaustion," and wrong, too, to neglect his diverse religious interests. These religious concerns are, in fact, the key to Salinger's fiction.

by Dennis L. 0'Connor

J. D. Salinger is not a typical literary write. I love to write. But I write for my- star. He does not appear in People self and my own pleasure. . . . I pay for magazine, plug himself into the va- this kind of attitude. I'm known as a cant chatter of TV talk shows, write strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm book reviews, ride the lecture circuit, doing is trying to protect myself and my or allow himself to be photographed. work. The last time he went public was Variously ridiculed as a "recluse," in a 1974 front-page New York Times a self-indulgent narcissist resorting interview, the first he had granted to Greta Garbo-ish ploys to gain at- since 1953. Noting a recent unau- tention, Salinger, in fact, approaches thorized attempt to publish some of writing more as a religion than as a his early uncollected stories, profession. Salinger said then: His professional life quietly chal- There is a marvelous peace in not pub- lenges the current penchant for con- lishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a spicuous achievement; his ideas are terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to no less singular. Holden Caulfield,

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Despite his self- seclusion, Salinger has a close circle of friends and rela- tives. In 1955, he married Claire Douglas, a former Radcliffe student. They have two chil- dren-Margaret Ann, now 24, and Matthew, 20. the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, a wealth of references to Hindu, sought simple, genuine communica- Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and tion between people, roundly con- Jewish traditions. It is not a fashion- demning snobbery, pretense, and able vision. intimidation. His championing of Born on New Year's Day, 1919, in spontaneity and openness, especially New York City of an Irish mother as found in children, has touched and Jewish father, Jerome David millions of young people during the Salinger grew up in Manhattan with past three decades. his sister Doris, who was eight years Whether exploring anti-Semitism older. After flunking out of prep in "Down at the Dinghy," sexual ex- school, he attended Pennsylvania's ploitation in "Pretty Mouth and Valley Forge Military Academy Green My Eyes," or the evil of total (where he was literary editor of the war in "For Esm6-With Love and yearbook before graduating in 1936). Squalor," Salinger always directs Salinger took a course at New York the reader to consider the sacred University in 1937, then went to dignity of human beings. He subtly Europe with his father, a prosperous points us toward spirituality through meat importer. Young Salinger REFLECTIONS: J. D. SALINGER

failed to develop a yen for the meat After traveling abroad to escape business, but he learned French and the publicity surrounding the publi- German. cation of Catcher, Salinger returned to New York to continue work on Starting Out what became his Nine Stories (1953). He returned to America in 1938. The first story, "A Perfect Day for The following year he enrolled in Bananafish," leads us-or rather Whit Burnett's short-story course at displaces us-into the world of Columbia; and within two years, he Seymour Glass. Seymour and his had stories published in Collier's, Es- wife are vacationing in Florida. quire, and the Saturday Evening Post. When Seymour teases a young girl The New Yorker bought one of his about bananafish-a mythical fish Holden Caulfield stories in Decem- that swims "into a hole where there's ber 1941 but did not print it until five a lot of bananas" and subsequently years later. dies because it can't fit through the Drafted into the Army in 1942, door-he is obliquely describing his Salinger went overseas in the marriage. Seymour returns to his Counter Intelligence Corps; his pro- hotel, glances at his wife sleeping on ficiency in foreign languages proved the bed, takes out a gun, and blows useful in ferreting out enemy agents. his brains out. In 1944, after training at Tiverton in Salinger's allusions in the story to Devonshire (the probable setting Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry and T. S. of "For Esm6-With Love and Eliot's The Waste Land suggest that Squalor"), he took part in the inva- Seymour, too, is a poet. They alert sion of Normandy. Despite the war the reader to the need to go beneath around him, he continued to write, the surface of the text. The chaos and publish, at an impressive rate. within Seymour, Salinger seems to By January 1948, the New Yorker be saying, only bespeaks the mad- had awarded him a contract and ness surrounding him. By killing published "A Perfect Day for himself, Seymour reveals the high Bananafish." Now back in New York, price of "seeing more" in our society. he published from 1948 to 1953 a Salinger (at about the same age as steady stream of distinguished Eliot was when he composed The stories that established his reputa- Waste Land) is also writing about the tion as a young writer of extraordi- desolation of a world war. Eliot's nary ability. poem and Salinger's story-so In July 1951 came The Catcher in polished and assured, so richly allu- the Rye. The immediate reaction to sive, so difficult because of their in- the novel, a Book-of-the-Month-Club tentional lack of transitions-seem selection, was mixed. "Brilliant," anything but autobiographical. Yet, proclaimed one critic; "monotonous paradoxically, their restraint sug- and phony," countered another. gests a burden of intense personal

Dennis L. O1Connor, 36, is assistant professor of literature at Georgetown University. Born in New York City, he received a B.A. from Fordham University (1966) and an M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1975) from Cornell Uni- versity. He has taught at SUNY (Oneonta), Hobart-William Smith Col- leges, Siena, and Cornell. His essay here is drawn from a longer article.

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

In a conversation with his little sister, Phoebe, Holden Caulfield describes a fantasy-the novel's central metaphor~andthus his abiding concern with the world's lack of feeling. In retreating to nature and in protecting the innocent children, Holden rejects the "phony" values he sees in adult life:

"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like-" "It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Bums." "I know it's a poem by Robert Burns." She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though. "I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,' " I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff-I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

pain and guarded revelation. letter, Charles's string of hellos and In what is probably Salinger's his revelatory signature, and their most famous story, "For Esmk- father's watch, which she has en- With Love and Squalor," a lovely, in- closed-is a many-layered eucharist. telligent 13-year-old English girl It restores the American after war named Esmk approaches the nar- has stripped his nerves. rator, an untested American soldier The original stimulus for Salin- stationed in Devonshire, and joins ger's interest in religion remains him for tea. Eager to give and receive obscure. Scholars have failed to un- affection, Esmk unwittingly reveals cover any evidence of his involve- the depth of her loneliness and sor- ment with religion during childhood row. The story ends with the nar- and adolescence. Later, he was to rator reading a touching love letter shroud his personal life in secrecy. from Esmk. In it, Esmk's little Yet, the sketchy facts do speak. brother Charles has added "HELLO" In 1938, he attended Ursinus Col- ten times and then misspelled his lege, then affiliated with the Protes- name, "Chales." Charles's "mistake" tant Evangelical and Reformed furthers Salinger's purpose. Church, for a semester. During the Chales, in fact, is a Middle English 1940s,- he became interested in form of the modern word chalice. Buddhism, attending a series of lec- Esme's gift-her splendidly stilted tures on Zen delivered by D. T.

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Suzuki at Columbia. It has also been ern wisdom* in "Zooey" lifts Franny reported that he studied Advaita out of her hysteria and despair and Vendantic Hinduism at the into a higher state of conscious- Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in ness-dreamless sleep. New York under Swami Nikhila- nanda before moving to New Eng- A Prose Home Movie land in 1953. With the publication of "Zooey," In 1961, 10 years after Catcher and Salinger's work became unmistake- 8 years after Nine Stories, Salinger ably experimental. Instead of a published Franny and Zooey, two tightly constructed short story, Glass family stories that originally "Zooey" is a "prose home movie." appeared in the New Yorker in 1955 The Glasses are vaudevillians and and 1957. prodigies. Larger than life, they do These related tales recount young not fit the norms of realism or natu- Franny Glass's unsuccessful effort to ralism. Salinger steps away from avoid her vocation to be an actress conventional plot toward a self- by frantically (Salinger plays on both reflexive spiral more suitable to the the hint of frenzy and St. Francis of portrayal of a spiritual quest. Assisi in her name) taking refuge in In 1963, Salinger collected two the Jesus Prayer.* more Glass stories in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: Into Dreamless Sleep An Introduction. The book introduces Franny finds herself in an impossi- Buddy Glass's complex relationship ble contradiction: An actress who with his older brother, Seymour, dares not act, a highly sophisticated who, we learn, was a poet, a seer, and college woman who wishes to follow a mukta (one who, in Advaita Vedan- the path of renunciation and simplic- tic Hinduism, has achieved spiritual ity but can only manage to have a liberation). "tenth-rate nervous breakdown." Narrated by Buddy and sup- This convoluted tale ends when posedly written by him to reveal Franny's brother Zooey helps her to Seymour's character, "Seymour" understand her situation by recalling emphasizes Buddy's journey into his their brother Seymour's advice to own heart. Salinger is concerned them as children: Act so that every- here with an author's relation to his thing you do is for Christ. Zooey tells reader. As Buddy examines himself Franny that "the only religious thing in order to understand Seymour, so you can do, is act. Act for God, if you must a reader examine his inner self want to-be God's actress, if you to "participate" in (i.e., to gain in- want to. What could be prettier?" sight from) the story. This joining of Eastern and West- Having abandoned tightly con- structed narrative elegance in 'This prayer-"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me"-aims at drawing the petitioner into *Throughout the book, Salinger alludes to the depths of his own heart in order to find God. Rilke, Sappho, the Mundaka Upanishad and Part of the hesychast tradition (from the Greek Bhagavad Gita (two crucial Vedantic Hindu hesychia, the quality of stillness or silence), the texts), Zen Buddhist sages and poets, The Way Jesus Prayer, or the Prayer of the Heart, has its of the Pilgrim, and the Philokalia (the great roots in the spiritual practices of the Desert compendium of teachings concerning the Fathers, a group of 4th-century Middle Eastern Prayer of the Heart), as well as to various works and European Christians who sought isolation by Stoic philosophers, Christian theologians, from secular society and organized religion. and European and American novelists.

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Courtesy of the Sinitl~sonianInstitution, Freer Gallery ofAn, Washington, D.C. In The Catcher in the Rye, 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, having fled boarding school, confides to a Manhattan taxi driver his concern over where the ducks on Central Park's lake go in winter. Salinger, taking his cue from Hindu and Bud- dhist beliefs, equates the image of the bird with that of the human soul.

"Zooey," Salinger goes even further that brings the usual fluid to my eyes as I stylistically in "Hapworth 16, 1924," bring the matter into the open. It would his last published story (1965). Cast be quite a moving, humorous boon, to be in the form of a letter written from sure, if one knew quite well, every single summer camp in Maine, this tale re- day of one's splendid current appearance, exactly where one's everlasting duty lies, veals Seymour at age seven, mindful obvious and concrete. of previous incarnations, present proclivities, and future problems. This extraordinarily frank child, Seymour's counselors are con- whose precocity would be intolera- cerned, he writes, ble if it were not so generously funny, terrible, and self-accepting, sheds that my consuming admiration for God, some light on the poet and mukta straight-forward and shapeless, will who later kills himself. The child upset the delightful applecart of my poetry; this is not stupid; there is always Seymour confesses to "personal in- a slight, magnificent, utterly worthy risk stability," "excess motion," and a that I will be a crashing failure from the "heritage of sensuality." But word go, disappointing all my friends and Seymour's last gesture, his suicide in loved ones, a very sober, rotten possibility 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish," ul-

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& NOSE DROPS AND VAPORUB mu Despite his deep religious and philosophical themes, Salinger is a master of the evocative detail. In "Zooey," Mrs. Bessie Glass, worried about her children, steals a moment for reflection as she examines the contents of the bathroom's medicine cabinet. What she finds introduces us to the Glass family in 1950s America:

[She] surveyed the congested shelves with the eye-or, rather, the mas- terly squint-of a dedicated medicine-cabinet gardener. . . . The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, Anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillette razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, three combs, two hair- brushes, a bottle of Wildroot hair ointment, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small, unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy . . . , a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs of scissors, a nail file, an un- clouded blue marble . . . , a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strapless chassis of a girl's or woman's gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl's boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette-and, inconceiv- ably or no, quite a good deal more.

timately remains impenetrable.* sponse has been mixed.* Commen- While people continue to buy and tators could react to Catcher without read Salinger's books, critical re- having to address its underlying reli- gious dimension, but the later Glass 'Salinger plants other clues to Seymour's per- family stories unavoidably raise reli- sonality in "Hapworth." He alludes, for in- stance, to Irish mathematician Sir William gious issues. Salinger's critics- Rowan Hamilton (1805-651, a fastidious writer notably England's George Steiner who published little of his extensive research. and the New Yorker's own John Significantly, Hamilton, like Seymour, was a Updike-were hostile or unrespon- child prodigy of astonishing linguistic ability. Also like Seymour, he was the equivalent of a sive to his interest in Eastern and full professor at 21, had an extraordinary mem- Western religions. And the noted ory, and a passion for exactitude. Described by New York critic Alfred Kazin con- contemporaries as delighting "in music, play- tended that Salinger lost "the ing with children and reading their fairy tales," Hamilton distinguished himself in mathe- deepest possibilities of literary art" matical optics. Salinger calls Seymour "our by his excessive attachment to, and double-lensed burning glass . . . and one full poet." Seymour also resembles Shankara (A.D. "Salinger's four published volumes are still in 788-820), the Hindu philosopher and mystic print-in hardcover, from Little, Brown, and in who, like Seymour, died at age 31. paperback, from Bantam Books.

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obsession with, the "cute, narcissis- the reader's inescapable duty to tic" Glass family. "undo the knot" of life for himself, The critics' failure to explore the Salinger adamantly refuses to com- complex aesthetic and spiritual tra- ment on his writing: "The stuff's all ditions from which Salinger's stories in the stories; there's no use talking draw their strength is crucial be- about it." His fictions, like the koans cause his religious concerns struc- and paradoxical observations in Zen ture his approach to language, and Taoist literature, try to lead the characterization, and humor. As reader to reflect on his own spiritual- writer Buddy Glass says to his ity, not only to feel but also to think readers, "It's the truth. Please don't from the heart, or the core of being simply see it; feel it." where one is in touch with all life. Salinger, again echoing Kierke- Straight to the Heart gaard, describes-with playful From the time of Emerson, seriousness-who his reader is. Thoreau, and the transcendentalists, Kierkegaard imagined his "edify- through Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Allen ing discourses" finally meeting "that Ginsberg, and Thomas Merton, a individual whom with joy and grati- strong religious tradition has tude I call my reader, that individual flourished among American writers. whom it seeks . . . who is benevolent These authors were captivated by enough to let himself be found." Lik- Eastern religions and their notions of ening his book to "an insignificant the nature of man's spirituality. They blossom," Kierkegaard imagined integrated these ideas in their criti- "how the bird whom I call my cism of American acquisitiveness reader, suddenly . . . flew down to it, and competitiveness. plucked it off, and took it to himself." The dazzling verbal surfaces of A Gift to the Reader Salinger's stories are deceptively col- loquial and American. Yet, they lead Salinger consciously builds on this us to an understanding of an alterna- account when he has Buddy Glass tive perception of the universe that describe his reader in "Seymour": welcomes all experience as divine gift. This perception is Buddy Glass's I found out a good many years back prac- tically all I need to know about my gen- revelation that "all we do is move eral reader; that is to say, you, I'm afraid. from one little piece of Holy Ground You'll deny it up and down, I fear, but I'm to the next." really in no position to take your word for Salinger tries to communicate not it. You're a great bird lover . . . you're information but the ability to see; he someone who took up birds in the first seeks to change the reader's heart by place because they fired your imagina- moving him to see himself in the tion; they fascinated you because 'they text. Thus, through "indirect com- seemed of all created beings the nearest munication," the text gradually to pure spirit'. . . . I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I'm afraid), changes from an amusement, to a please accept from me this unpretentious mirror, to a crucible in which the bouquet of very early-blooming pa- reader literally takes the story to rentheses: (((( )))). heart so that it consumes and ir- radiates his everyday interaction The bird, of course, symbolizes the with the world at large. human soul, the immortal human Like Kierkegaard, who insisted on heart. And those parentheses, which

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have blossomed for 20 years, present 61, he continues to work daily on the the key to this story. Glass family history-in a concrete- As gestures or signals, they resem- block studio, so it is said, near his ble prayerful hands holding pure secluded house in New Hampshire. mystery. They resemble stillness, the Perhaps some day we will learn bull's eye of perfection, the openness more about the relationship between of a cave, a womb, a plenitude of ref- the elder Glasses. Or maybe we will erential meaning. Whatever one's understand Seymour better because personal reactions to this strange we will know more about his twin bouquet, the parentheses, which ex- brothers, Walt and Waker. Perhaps pand or contract depending on one's they, like Seymour, kept diaries, and point of view, are meant to penetrate Buddy will share some future Glass the human heart, to strengthen its re- chronicles. lationship with the Divine. In his own way, Salinger is as Salinger has spent his entire career much a visionary as Emerson or since Catcher trying to integrate a Whitman and as consummate a vision of Eastern and Western holi- craftsman as Eliot or Faulkner. No ness with artistic achievement. It is less a judge of American letters than in the Glass family saga that his Edmund Wilson said in 1967 that unique contribution to American let- "Salinger really is our greatest living ters is most evident. American writer." Thirteen years la- He has not stopped writing. At age ter, Wilson is still right.

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