Preemptive Retaliation

After finishing the Auster book and, still riding on the highs of New York, I made my way through almost all of JD Salinger’s work. I’ve read them all before, with the exception of Seymour, An Introduction, which I managed to finally finish. The last book I read was Franny and Zooey, which was just as charming and lovely as I remembered it.

The binge was inspired by a friend of mine looking for a book to take on a flight. He had always shied away from “the classics” due to highschool having a propensity of ruining everything about literature, but I convinced him to go with Catcher in the Rye. Normally I’m quite free with giving away books – my shelves are made up of more than a few permanently borrowed items – but I was hesitant of giving him my sentimentally significant ten-year-old copy. He bought a copy at the airport, and his first message to me upon landing was asking if Salinger was one of the influences in my own book, Things Keep Happening. I answered hugely so.

The thing is, Things Keep Happening came out two years ago, and since then I haven’t written anything of real substance. I’ve swung with a few ideas here and there, dabbled in new styles and tried to experiment with different types of stories, but it’s all very difficult and slow. Since releasing the book I’ve been feeling lost in my writing, trying to grab onto a voice or style that I can be happy with. My friend’s comment inspired me to reread Salinger and get back to my roots a little. So, over the span of three weeks, I read his whole available collection, and goddamn I enjoyed it.

It’s interesting to reread the books over time. Everyone always talks about Catcher in the Rye, how when they were an adolescent (like when I read it) Holden is supposed to be this awakened, wise hero (which I believed) and that he was to be emulated (which I goddamn did). Then people read it when they’re older and he comes out as an angsty teenager with these weird moments of delusion. Then you get told he’s writing the story from a mental hospital, and then you start rethinking everything that he was talking about in the book, and how he tries so hard to lie to the reader but doesn’t quite get there, and how fucked up it really is to be talking to your dead brother in some skeezy New York hotel room.

Well, that was me on my most recent reading. I knew all along he was in the hospital and all that, but it wasn’t until I was older and better at reading books that I picked up on how broken Holden was, how utterly fucked in the head he was by his brother’s death and the people around him. Seriously, that scene completely went by me the first few times I read the book. Rereading it has redefined Holden, again, for me, which is I suppose what makes it such a good book.

This made me reconsider all the things that happen in Salinger’s other books too. The internet seems to have a general love of the Glass family, the precocious, almost super human people populating the majority of his other works. It’s a slice of American life in the forties and fifties that I’ve only vaguely seen in films and television, and it’s interesting to see the turns of phrases and mannerisms of the time. But it’s only on my hundredth read of them that I realise how insufferable the Glass family really are. There’s honestly something so pretentious and aloof about the way they all talk and act. They even warn us all about it in their conversations, complaining all the time about how they’re seen and treated by other people. And it is because they’re freaks, the lot of them. They don’t fit in the world. They’re all child geniuses, cursed by a great intellect that makes them so interesting yet so distant.

But, all the same, they are ever so charming. I hate them, but I love them. When they settle down into their characters and interact with each other, when they tell their stories or hold court on some metaphysical conversation, I can’t stop smiling.  

This was the first time I read the whole thing of Seymour, An Introduction. I had tried to read it a number of times before, but never managed it further than the first few pages. It was so thick with rambling words that I almost gave up this time too. But I persevered, and I’m not sure that I’m happy I did. Throughout his work, Salinger has kept Seymour Glass away from the reader, talking about him through second hand stories and extreme bursts of emotion. Every story is about Seymour, in some way or another. He hovers round, just out of sight, like a ghost. This was part of the allure of him. You never really got a sense of what good he did for those around him, but more about what he actually meant to those people.

Seymour, An Introduction almost ruins that. The narrator goes into explicit detail about the character, even so far as to explicitly describe him. The stories are still secondhand, sure, but they’re told with a firsthand flair that makes it seem as though the reader is standing in front of the man himself; smiling, pleasant, and ready for examination. The mystery of the character fades from an intriguing shadow into an opaque outline, like seeing him through frosted glass. It didn’t fit with me. To use the old cliché, it was like standing behind a magician and seeing him do all his tricks.

But what I found even stranger was Buddy, the narrator. It’s stated pretty explicitly that he’s the writer of all of Salinger’s work, so in a sense he is Salinger himself. The character has crafted all of his work, almost, around Seymour. He has spent years of his life dedicated to telling stories about his dead brother in failed attempt after failed attempt to explain the absolute pure genius he was. Seymour, An Introduction is his last attempt, his final scramble at trying to explain an unexplainable man, and still failing to do so, really. And that made me feel so sad for him. It made me feel terrible that this character was trying to tell me about his brother, and I was shaking my head because he wasn’t quite doing it right. He was failing, again.

And I couldn’t stop thinking of Holden, sitting in that hotel room talking about his dead brother, telling the reader little snippets of what he used to do and how he would act. It made me realise that Buddy was a pretty broken character, that he had spent years of his life recreating little scenes with his family in an attempt to give scope to his brother’s life, the impact of it. It made me like the story more, but not much more. The language was self-serving and knowingly pretentious and verbose, but behind it all it had this desperate pain that I couldn’t help but feel. It completely rewrote all of the Glass family stories for me; changing them from charming little vignettes to something slightly darker, obsessive, and sad.

Though I still love Franny and Zooey. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; that book is somewhere near perfection.

It’s got me thinking back on how I was influenced by all of these stories. For all the things it lacks, Things Keep Happening does have a good voice to it, one that took me a long time to find and craft. It’s undoubtable that Salinger helped me find that voice, even though part of it became a cheap imitation of it; an impression to roll out on that sounds almost there, but not quite right. I’m being too hard on myself here, I know, but when standing on the shoulders of giants it’s hard not to notice that they’re still so much taller than you.

Still, the voice for Things Keep Happening was something that I was proud of, and it carries the book through some of my more obscure decisions. I thought I had lost that voice somewhere, misplaced it when trying my new endeavours. Maybe I still have it, but I’ve become more self-conscious of it since showing it to the world. Maybe. If anything, rereading Salinger’s works has made me appreciate what I stole from him before. I loved the interplay between characters, how it didn’t really matter where any of them were, because it could have just been two people standing in darkness and it would make sense. I loved how the characters had their own true voices that struck out loud and clear against Salinger’s own, and how he liked to indulge himself from time to time reminding me that these were stories. All of these pointers I took from him to make them my own.

It was good getting back to my inspiration. It was good seeing where I took so many ideas and made them mine and, to be told, it’s helping me more with my current project. So, all in all, it was good to reread his work, even though I was slightly disappointed with them – and myself – by the end of it.

But, Franny and Zooey though, goddamn.