After Holden: the lesser-known work of JD Salinger
Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters/Seymour: an Introduction
Penguin 1994
Franny and Zooey
Penguin 1994
I wonder what JD Salinger makes of the myth that has grown up around his most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye? Now 87 and living in self-imposed seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, there’s not much chance of finding out his thoughts on the subject. I suspect that a man who shuns the culture that made him a literary star would surely scoff at the almost religious significance currently accorded to his 1951 novel.
Brave (and defiantly unauthorised) biographers such as Ian Hamilton, however, claim to have uncovered a streak in him that covets attention and relishes the mystery his disappearance from public life has engendered. Maybe he revels in it? That’s all just speculation of course, but there is a question I'd like to know the real answer to more than what happened to Lord Lucan, or who Deep Throat was (come now, who he actually was). That is, Salinger's reaction when Mark Chapman gunned down John Lennon in the name of Holden Caulfield.
The novel chose an easy target: the theme of adolescent confusion and sexual paranoia is hardly original in literature. Indeed, Salinger wrote in the slipstream of fiction such as Sartre's masterful The Childhood of a Leader, and Catcher emerged at the centre of a ‘youthquake’ in the 1950s, accompanying Jack Kerouac and Rebel Without a Cause in their explosion through America’s consciousness. The novel has grown from generation to generation into something the author could not have anticipated.
So that’s Catcher. Now let's move on to something more interesting and obscure.
To explore Salinger's oeuvre beyond the infamous Caulfield is to enter a minefield of erratic short stories and unpublished material, but also to discover his most rewarding, challenging and inspiring work. Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters/Seymour: an Introduction and Franny and Zooey both feature the Glass siblings, all seven of whom, as children, were precocious contestants on a radio show designed to showcase genius infants. ‘I love working on these Glass stories, I've been waiting for them most of my life’ says the man himself in the preface to Franny and Zooey.
Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters is among the most underrated novellas of the past century, reminiscent of The Great Gatsby in its social observation and Hemingway-esque in its well-disguised depth. Buddy Glass, the second eldest sibling, recounts the story of his elder brother Seymour's wedding. Briefly, the groom fails to materialise, and Buddy is left marooned in a cab with the bride's party who, oblivious to Buddy's identity, proceed to verbally demolish Seymour and his family. That's briefly – I urge you to track it down and enjoy it in its entirety.
Seymour: an Introduction is preposterously indulgent – a lengthy missive written by Buddy describing and paying tribute to Seymour, who has committed suicide some years earlier. Buddy’s purpose is to make the reader idolise Seymour as much as he does and Seymour is, according to biographer Ian Hamilton, ‘quite simply, an embodiment of excellence, a great poet, a reincarnated seer, and an infallible judge, jury, executioner in matters moral and aesthetic’. Buddy's struggle to depict his brother appropriately renders the work ultimately tragic.
Franny and Zooey is a curious combination of two short stories concerning the youngest Glass siblings. 'Franny' is an exuberant attack on academia. The eponymous heroine rails that ‘the English department has about ten little section men running around ruining things for people’, and is ‘so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers [she] could scream.’ In typical Salinger style, reflecting his own (often slightly pretentious, by some accounts) devotion to eastern religions, Franny pursues Bhakti yoga. That is, incessant prayer, ‘to keep the mind on God by chanting His name and glories’, as an alternative to this putrid scholarly domain.
It does not detract from the quality of his writing (bar perhaps the often rather grating vernacular of Caulfield), but Salinger's capacity to fill his pages with deeply annoying characters, such as Franny, is unrivalled.
'Zooey' is stronger as a story. The title character is an actor who, after a lengthy bathroom scene sparking with colloquial dialogue just as sharp as that in Raise High, attempts to lift his sister out of her wallowing in prayer. Zooey phones Franny pretending to be their brother Buddy, which has a profound effect on her. The subtle intricacies of Franny and Zooey, which is ultimately a theological treatise, demand thorough and thoughtful reading.
The suggestion, made by Salinger himself on the jacket of Franny and Zooey, that Buddy Glass is his alter ego makes them all the more fascinating to his fans. In Raise High, Buddy is a reclusive writer (he doesn't own a phone), lacks a university degree (like Salinger) and has reached a turning point in his career in the wake of curious work and behaviour that has left critics scoffing (JD was a proper weirdo post-Catcher).
As these later works prove, Salinger’s legacy goes beyond the spawning of Holden Caulfield and while he may be an awkward and haughty character, as readers we owe him a reappraisal.
It’s curious to think that Salinger may have already died. How would we know? A man so concerned with maintaining his privacy would surely take steps to ensure his final withdrawal from the world was as secretive as possible. And there remains the tantalising thought that there may very well be a huge amount of work unpublished on the Glass family, under floorboards or between mattresses in the house the old hermit has been hiding out in all these years.
