Jerome David Salinger (1919)

Salinger has become a classic because of his real understanding of American youth. His works written in the 1950s, the years of the cold war, depict young boys and girls, who have been justly called by critics the “silent generation”, because they can’t find their way in the post-war chaos.

Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 in New York. His father was a prosperous importer of ham and cheeses. Salinger did not do well at school, so his parents enrolled him in the Valley Forge Academy in Pennsylvania which was a military academy. There at night, tenting a blanket over his head to hide his flashlight beam from the duty officer, Salinger wrote his first short stories. Literature was the only subject he really liked at school. On graduating from the Academy he told his family that he wanted to become a writer. His father thought that was not the career for him; his son, he believed, should step into his father’s shoes. So Salinger was sent to Poland to learn the ham business. Two months later he returned to America. Salinger tried to attend college but soon found that the academic program was of no avail to him. The first story he published in 1940 was “The Young Folks”.

During World War II he spent four years in the army and was sent to Europe on a special mission. He was assigned to discover Gestapo agents by interviewing French civilians and to capture Germans.

In 1943, the American magazine “Saturday Evening Post” published his story “The Varioni Brothers”. Sergeant Salinger sent the money he earned to the editor of the magazine “Story” to help other young writers. In 1944 Salinger met Ernest Hemingway, then a war-correspondent in France. Hemingway had read Salinger’s stories and said that the young writer “had a helluva talent”. Some other stories of his, published in 1946 in the “New Yorker”, a very respectable literary magazine, brought him fame as a writer. One of these stories “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was filmed. But Hollywood turned it into a “soap opera”, that is to say, made a commercial film characterized by little action and much sentiment. Since then Salinger has refused to sell any of his stories to film companies.

Salinger sees the falsity of American life in the same way as his heroes. He has always disliked American sensational films about writers and actors, because he considers these to be intended mainly for publicity. He also hates American advertisements because they are meant to fool the public into buying things, whether they need them or not, and he so detests fashionable social recreations, that he lives the life of a recluse.

“The Catcher in the Rye” (1951)

Salinger usually writes of very young people. His short novel “The Catcher in the Rye” appeared in 1951. The book became popular with its readers and was admired by many writers. Salinger depicted the indefinable vexations that caused discomfort and pain to the sensitive and roused the feeling of protest among the sensible.

Salinger used an original form of narration. The story is told by a teenager in funny schoolboy slang. The tone of narration is intimate and friendly. The main character, Holden Caulfield, seems to be full of laughter. But through the boy’s artless humorous talk his tragic attitude towards life soon becomes visible. He is seeking something he can’t find; crying for something he knows not what; he is angry and defiant he knows not why; he is fighting something but all in vain because it is invisible; and he despairs. This “something” is Salinger’s theme. It is Truth. Truth and Beauty have disappeared in the large cities of the 20^th century. Salinger describes the trying situation of a good and sensitive boy who can’t conform to the corrupted morals and conventions of the adult world.

Holden Caulfield is a sixteen-year-old pupil in the Pencey Preparatory school, which is a boarding-school for boys from well-to-do families. Just before Christmas, he is expelled – “kicked out” – for not studying. He has failed in every subject except English, and this is the third school he is flunked out of. He is not a bit sorry. Holden Caulfield hates school and all teachers.

Holden himself tells us about his family. We learn from bits and ends of his little chronicle that his father is a successful lawyer; that his mother is a kind woman and has artistic tastes; that there are four children in the family. The youngest of the family is his little sister, Phoebe, who seems to understand him. But outside his family Holden has no real friends. Holden even dislikes sport because it is based on ambition and competition. Holden hates pretence. All his schoolmates try to imitate the “adult” world, but he, in protest, behaves like a kid of 12. He can’t accept this world, and he takes refuge in lying. When Holden can’t stand the atmosphere of his school any longer, he escapes to New York. He wants to be alone and have some rest. But Holden is unable to become a hermit. He wants to know what life is made of. Throughout the story Holden tries to find out what people live for. Holden is awfully lonely and unhappy.

The field of rye is the symbolic world of childhood in the short novel. Holden wants to guard the children playing in the rye from “growing up”, because to grow up means to fall in with the “adult” world of modern America and it is as dangerous and fatal as falling off a cliff into an abyss.

A western critic has said about Salinger that he is one of today’s few authors who write about man with hope.

LECTURE XV