A sad day for bananafish

Updated.

Holden Caulfield sulked and skulked into my life at about the same time as these other young men were beginning their careers in the world inside my head.

Billy Pilgrim, Philip Pirrip, Dmitri Karamazov, Captain John Joseph Yossarian, and Rabbit Angstrom.

He didn’t stand a chance.

There were young women crowding him off the stage of my imagination too.

Hester Prynne, Natasha Rostova, Elizabeth Bennett, Jean Louise Finch.

Like I said.  Not a chance.

I don’t have much to say about the passing of J.D. Salinger.  As Nance says, “it's hard to mourn a writer who hasn't published in 50 years. Let's see what's in the drawers.”

But then books that are still in print and still being read and still being loved might as well have been published yesterday.  When I was the right age to take Salinger’s stories to heart, Dickens and Dostoevsky and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen and Mark Twain were as alive to me as he was.  Their books were as new and surprising as his.  Actually, probably more so.  And it’s still the case. Kurt Vonnegut’s been gone for two years and I still don’t believe it.  But if you’d told me back in high school that Salinger had died I’d have said, “You mean he was still alive?” 

That’s because I met him as homework.  His was a name on an assignment sheet and there are no names deader than the ones you first encounter as an obstacle between you and tonight’s episode of MASH.

It’s not impossible to fall for a writer whose first demand on your attention is a five paragraph essay you forgot was due tomorrow.  I found my own way to my favorites before any teachers told me they were IMPORTANT.  And having to read The Pearl for school nearly killed my curiosity about Steinbeck in the eighth grade.  I never got over my dread of the Brontes.  But Chekhov was an assignment and so were Hemingway, Emerson, Faulkner, John Updike, James Joyce, and Flannery O’Connor.

By the way, I bet you can name the stories and the essay.

Sometime next week or next month a whole bunch of high school students are going to have their mental gardens torn up and relandscaped by Holden Caulfield and the Glass family.

Naturally I don’t think it’s at all strange that some seventeen year old’s going to be carried away by a book written before her parents were born.  But I am wondering about something.

Is it possible for a seventeen year old to have a similar experience as her parents and grandparents might have had and be carried away by the work of still living and publishing writers like Salinger whose stories and novels they first read in high school?

Of course kids are still reading and falling in love with books and their characters and their authors.  (Supposedly this was more true in my day.  But I have to remind myself that I was a weirdo myself and mostly hung out with other weirdos.  Pat Curry introduced me to the political novels of Allen Drury when were in seventh grade, but if Jim Ring and Billy Eagan even read books like Run For Daylight and Throw the Long Bomb!, never mind the stuff the nuns assigned, it was probably at gunpoint.)  The names Harry, Ron, and Hermione, Percy Jackson , Max, Iggie, Fang, and the Gasman , ring bells in more heads and touch strings in more hearts than Franny and Zooey ever did.  Let’s leave Bella and Edward out of this.  But Tiffany Aching is best imaginary friends with countless adolescents.

But that’s unfair and like saying that even back in the day Seymour Glass wasn’t as well-known or beloved as Dorothy, Frodo, Tom and Huck, Anne Shirley, and Jim Hawkins.

By writers like Salinger I mean writers of what’s called serious fiction but which would be more accurately called domestic realism.  Terry Pratchett and Elmore Leonard write fiction that’s far more serious than most of the junk published in the little literary magazines.  A writer like Salinger, though, would be a writer of domestic realism who publishes stories regularly in popular magazines or wrote novels that had half a chance of making the New York Times Bestseller List.  Back in the day, high school teachers didn’t introduce their students to Salinger---or Updike or Cheever or O’Connor or Baldwin or Roth or, before them, Hemingway and Fitzgerald---by telling them what pages to read in the anthology.  They did it by taking out a copy of the New Yorker or Esquire or the Atlantic or Harpers or the Paris Review---or Collier’s, Scribner’s, even the Saturday Evening Post---and dropping it on a student’s desk and saying, “You’ve got to read this.”

These days the fiction hole in the New Yorker’s so small that all that gets published there are extended anecdotes.  The other big magazines publish fiction, if they publish it all, so rarely they might as well not bother.

Salinger’s stories made their way into the anthologies by proving themselves attractive to adolescent readers first.

This must still happen.  I just don’t know how---and I don’t see the evidence of it in Ken Mannion’s homework.  Does it?  And how does it?  How do kids find their way to the contemporary versions of Salinger?  And who are they?

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James Wolcott admits to being “hit as hard by The Catcher in the Rye as any teenager.”

Update: Steve Kuusisto, who on a daily basis faces down classrooms packed with teenagers who read and love books, says they---the teenagers, that is, not the books---are still finding writers who, as Steve puts it, light up their dendrites.

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Comments

[Janelle]

My elder son discovered Salinger as a sophomore and loved his stuff, "discovered" meaning it wasn't assigned. He jumped headlong into the angst and adolescent alienation and then moved to Mark Twain's "Letters from the Earth". We had about three years of nihilism going on here. Quite an interesting time.

[Ken Houghton]

"And having to read The Pearl for school nearly killed my curiosity about Steinbeck in the eighth grade."

That's a GOOD thing.

Salinger's greatest contribution to recent history is Sean Connery's last great performance: "I'm that one."

(Arguably, Connery was just a white Scottish Ralph Ellison, but that's for another Lance post.)

[Tim McGovern]

They don't. My father was an English teacher at a high school, so I stole all his books to read. Past that, I just hope the kids' parents have HBO so they can watch good TV.

Oh, and Hemingway is impossible not to love, as long as you start with For Whom the Bell Tolls and follow through with Farewell to Arms.

[CrayolaThief]

I was inspired to read Catcher in the Rye by stories in the family that my grandmother had forbid my aunt from reading the novel for a class assignment, and had gone up to the school to chastise the teacher for assigning such degraded filth. Wouldn't even allow the abomination in her house. Of course I read it after that. Who could resist such temptation?

Such questions often occur to me -- "who are the contemporary versions of [regarded author]?" As far as I can tell they're not writing stories, they're writing song lyrics. Music seems to have taken the place of literature, as far as tokens of identity which people clutch to their hearts. Probably in part due to its immediacy. Literature seems to be joining sculpture and pottery on the fringes of cultural relevance.

[Tim McGovern]

Oh, and the answer as to where they find good writing...

it's you!

And Steve Gilliard, and driftglass, and Digby, and Billmon, and all the other wonderful people who made living under GW slightly bearable.

[Linkmeister]

Temptation works both ways, CrayolaThief. To my knowledge, no school ever assigned it, but I found a copy of Peyton Place in my Aunt's house and read it in part because it was so vilified by The Right People. At least Catcher had some redeeming value.

[actor212]

It's funny, Lance. I was introduced to Salinger in a similar fashion: required reading. I skimmed the Cliff Notes before I read it, then plowed in over three nearly-sleepless days (term project, and it was one of my rare badly time-management incidents).

Catcher was a bit of a mirror for me. I couldn't understand what all the hoopla was over it and wondered why he just didn't get spanked and hard.

It was years later that I understood that was what I was supposed to get out of the book: what I brung to it.

[Victoria]

I had the weakest imaginable English teachers in my small town public high school, two of which taught Shakespeare by reading directly to us from an upheld Cliff's Notes. Looking back, I count two saving graces: my mother was an avid reader who had taken us weekly to the library + we were one of the few families I knew who had bookshelves in our house (Actually, I didn't notice; my friends pointed it out to me.), and when I got to stay up late I saw great authors on Carson and Cavett...and wanted to see and hear them more. They were my kind of people. Then I got plunged into a top-notch college English department where I almost drowned trying to catch up to classmates who had almost all attended private schools. My revelatory wake-ups to great writing were there, even under the ridiculous pressures of three novels a week. I have vivid memories of the night I "got" drama; that is, I read the play and SAW it as a play in front of me. I had a near mystical connection with Euripides that sent me out for a two-hour middle-of-the-night walk through autumn leaves and landed me on the steps of my professor's office at 6 AM, waiting for him to arrive at 7 so I could confirm that I wasn't crazy. He walked me to the campus coffee shop, treated me to tea, and spent 90 minutes talking with me like a peer. Sigh. I still love him. And Euripides.

Much later, I taught the full four-course round of Collegiate Seminar (Great Books) at a small college. I wish I could say I had one student (4 x 20) there who seemed to enjoy any of the assignments. When I asked them what books they had read in high school, many could not remember; most were sour on their memories. When I asked what books they loved, the response was usually a shrug... not really into books, reported the college students. I really wanted to take just one kid to the coffee shop, just once. I have no idea what's going on with young readers. I want to believe my experience there was an aberration, but that's not what I hear.

[Rana]

I think for me the problem with most assigned readings in high school was not that they were assigned; it was more a matter of the types of books that were assigned. Basically, as an angsty, uncomfortable, worried about fitting in kid, I didn't find comfort reading about alienation, or domestic struggles, or conflict. If I wanted to encounter those, all I had to do was walk out of the classroom door. It was the weird books - the ones that were different enough from my everyday life - that caught my attention; my personal reading list at home was almost entirely light stuff mixed with fantasy and later, after I discovered it, science fiction. I still feel this way about a lot of books; I like either nonfiction or stories in blatantly fictional settings - but not the ones that are "realistic" dramas involving self-torturing individuals and their families.