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Meeting Ourselves: Ian Hamilton's J. D. Salinger

2011; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2011.547068

1545-5866

Mark Silverberg,

Sports, Gender, and Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For more details see my essay “‘You Must Change Your Life’: Formative Responses to The Catcher in the Rye.” All four of these authors share a compulsion not just to “talk back” to Salinger but also to re-write or re-create him in their own personal ways. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (originally to be titled The Kidnapping of J. D. Salinger) is generally regarded as a baseball novel and is best known as the source text for the 1989 film Field of Dreams, but really is, more than anything, a “Salinger novel.” The same voice that commands protagonist Ray Kinsella to build a baseball field for the disgraced Shoeless Joe Jackson also instructs him to “ease” the reclusive author's “pain,” to save the suffering Salinger. The protagonist—and with him the author who shares his surname—is linked and links himself to Salinger in several essential ways throughout the novel. Indeed, the character's name itself comes from an early Salinger story, “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” where Salinger's protagonist, Ray Kinsella, is likely a persona for the author himself [see Alexander 121–22]). Ultimately Shoeless Joe is about one obsessive fan's identification with, and plan to kidnap (and hence metaphorically to capture, control, re-write), J. D. Salinger. Former Esquire editor and author Gordon Lish's long-time engagement with the absent author is narrated in a voice borrowed from Salinger in his essay “A Fool for Salinger.” The piece recounts Lish's attempts to find, possess, or replace Salinger. This formative process begins with Lish's attempts to entice Salinger to edit or write for a special issue of Esquire and ends with his decision to write for Salinger (since Salinger won't write for him) in his infamous pieces “For Rupert—with No Promises” and “For Jeromé—with Love and Kisses.” Mark Chapman's fatal engagement with Salinger, enacted in the belief that by assassinating John Lennon he would become “The Catcher in the Rye of [his] Generation” is summarized by Stashower, Jones, and others. The 2002 Letters to J. D. Salinger contains approximately 80 personal responses to the author. Since that time, editor Chris Kubica's website has offered a forum “for anyone who has read and been touched by Salinger's words” (Kubica and Hochman xviii). As of the date of writing (5 Oct 2010), has posted an additional 4274 letters. “Formative” responses are in high incidence on this site. A few examples: “I have to say that this has been my favorite book ever! I read it in my sophomore year in high school and it changed my life forever. I loved everything about the book” (Marili Avalos-Rodriguez, 9 Jun 2009). “Holden changed my life. He changed the way I see people, and the way I see myself” (Diana, 19 Oct 2004). “Your novel has filled a part of me that I did not know needed to be completed” (Beth Livesay, 16 Sep 2004). “I was so greatly influenced by your book and I thank you for sharing it with me. It changed my life. You put everything I was thinking into words that describe it beautifully” (Kat, 26 Apr 2003). Freud's concept of “working-through” (from his 1914 paper “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”) focuses on the analysand's process of free-associating, repeating, and re-interpreting in order to better understand and “overcome resistances due to repression” (148). I suggest that re-writing or re-performing texts that have a marked emotional effect on readers is likewise a way of working through conflicts, cognitions, impulses, and affects to better understand the self. By the 1990s these responses were increasingly being produced in that quintessential adolescent genre, rock music. Consider songs like Green Day's “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield,” the Offspring's “Get it Right” (“Like Holden Caulfield I tell myself/There's got to be a better way”), and The Bloodhound Gang's “Magna Cum Nada” (“Why try? I'm that guy/Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye”) along with the proliferation of bands with Salinger-inspired names: “Holden,” “Catcher,” “The Caulfield Sisters,” “Ryecatchers,” and “Rollerskate Skinny” among others (see Graham 106–7). In the first category, “Finding Salinger” we might consider the interminable “searches” from Ernest Havemann's Citation1961 expedition, though Hamilton's (Citation1988) and Paul Alexander's (Citation1999) quests, as well as their many fictional correlates in literature or films like Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester (Citation2000). In the second category, “Reproducing Holden,” the list is equally long with Swedish author Fredrik Colting's (aka J. D. California) 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye as the latest offering. Hamilton did, indeed, have impressive credentials. An Oxford graduate, he was the founder and editor of the influential literary journals The Review (1962–72) and The New Review (1974–79), and was a reviewer and then Poetry and Fiction Editor for the Times Literary Supplement (1965–73). By the time In Search of J. D. Salinger came out, Hamilton had published a collection of essays (A Poetry Chronicle [1973]), four poetry books (two published by Faber and Faber), and a well-received biography of Robert Lowell (1982). He would go on to write half a dozen other biographies and critical works. His Collected Poems (2009) was published posthumously by Faber and Faber. Chapter 13 of Hamilton's biography gives a detailed account of the lengthy legal battle over the book. In the end, Hamilton is not really satisfied with any of the versions of his book. The first was “not really the book I had wanted it to be. It was too nervous and respectful, and in many ways disabled by my anxiety to assure Salinger that I was not a rogue” (192). The second version, in which Hamilton was forced to paraphrase Salinger's letters, was satisfactory neither to biographer nor to subject, as Hamilton's summary of Salinger's reaction indicates: “For all my ‘inartful’ fiddling with word order and vocabulary, I was still effectively a thief. I had used his literary property to ‘flesh out an otherwise lifeless and uninteresting biography’” (199). And the final version, rather than bringing Hamilton any closer to the truth of Salinger's life, ends in a rather depressing legal malaise: “I can't rejoice that, whatever happens, my name and J. D. Salinger's will be linked in perpetuity as those of litigants or foes …” (212). The introduction to Alexander's biography encourages readers to plod on with these extreme, book-selling, possibilities. “Why did Salinger go into seclusion and remain there?” Alexander asks, “… did he feel some drive within himself—emotional, sexual, or psychological—about which he wanted as few people as possible to know at any cost? Was there some instinct he had that was so troubling to him he was willing to alter the very way he lived his life to keep it secret?” (27). I take this “map” metaphor from Hamilton. He explains that as part of his research procedure he created folders with maps on the inside covers—“drawn [with] vertical and horizontal lines, creating a neat little box for every month of Salinger's life, 1936–65. His writing life” (96). Within these boxes, Hamilton would write in red ink for “confirmed evidence” and in faint grey pencil for “conjectural” notes. As well, many of the boxes remained tantalizingly empty. The empty spaces on the map are perhaps the most relevant places in the text—for it is into these gaps that the biographer most clearly writes himself. The Inverted Forest, at about thirty thousand words, was described as a “novel” in the December 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan where it was published. Hamilton notes that the magazine was swamped with letters of protest from readers who were bewildered by the story (101). As with the majority of Salinger's early stories it was never re-published. His “guilt,” in Hamilton's interpretation, comes from Salinger's conflicted relations with the slicks in which his commercially successful, popular stories were published. His “determinations” are to become more like Raymond Ford, the genius poet and “gigantic psychotic” divorced from the world of publishing but committed to the world of writing. Hamilton goes on to explain Salinger's ambivalent relationship with the movies: “More than once he had cold-bloodedly written material that had a movie potential, and yet his early stories are also full of characters who are to be pitied for their susceptibility to screen versions of how life should be” (106). Salinger finally did sell his story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” which was transformed into the film My Foolish Heart. As Hamilton explains, the film was “a travesty, even by Hollywood criteria … . [The] shamelessly lachrymose screenplay is barely polite to the original” (107). Salinger, apparently, “was furious—not just at Hollywood, one suspects, but also at himself for having let all this happen” (107). Certainly, Salinger made sure nothing like that would happen again by maintaining rigid control over all his works. In one interesting example, Salinger flatly refused a personal request from Laurence Olivier to turn “For Esmé” into a radio play (Hamilton 119). The Foolish Heart incident may also help to explain, Hamilton suggests, Holden's “excessive rage against the movies” (107). French's essay “The Phony and Nice Worlds” appeared originally in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature (January, 1963) and was later revised for J. D. Salinger (Twayne, 1963). These yearbook writings, which Hamilton quotes at length (perhaps because they are among the few words he is legally permitted to quote) are basically glowing tributes to the school and teachers. Hamilton wonders whether Salinger's words are “heartfelt or slyly subversive?” (26). He decides for readers a page later: “If we accept that whoever wrote this couldn't actually have meant it, then there is no need to challenge the probability that the author is indeed sardonic young Jerome” (27). There is probably also no need to point out the frequent hesitations and weak circular of Hamilton's argument here: because these yearbook writings might be sarcastic, they were probably written by Salinger. Once again, Hamilton is the target of his own irony. Just as he earlier ironized his teenage infatuation, here Hamilton ironically undercuts his adult obsession by using the farcical images of espionage (“cloaks and daggers, messages in tree trunks …”). In both cases irony is used as distancing technique and a way of undercutting the formative nature of Salinger's influence. The themes of desire and failure haunt a great deal of Hamilton's literary output. After his “unsuccessful” search for Salinger, Hamilton wrote a biography of failed English football star Paul Gascoigne, whose off field excesses destroyed what might have been a brilliant career. His next biography, A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold, takes its title from Auden's famous diagnosis of Arnold: “He thrust his gift in prison till it died.” Reflecting on Arnold's anxiety about his own early lyrical brilliance, Hamilton's book dissects the author's ruinous choice to “abandon the poetic life and settle for three decades of drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools” (xi). Hamilton's final work is series of portraits of 45 poets, all battling to gain a small foothold “against oblivion” as the eponymous title has it. Hamilton's own sparse but exquisitely crafted poems are similarly brief and barely hopeful stays against defeat. The two overwhelming subjects of his work—his loss of his father to cancer when Hamilton was thirteen and the experience of his wife's long struggle with mental illness—continually circle around themes of suffering, impotence, and loss. Hamilton speaks of the poems themselves as failed fantasies, impossible talismans attempting to control the uncontrollable. “Did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead?” He writes in the preface to Fifty Poems. “In some way, yes, I think I did” (ix). In the end, Hamilton's (many would argue important) poetic achievement may have been seen as insufficient to the writer himself. In the same preface he writes: “Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And in certain moods, I would agree” (ix). To briefly recap, Hamilton constructs Salinger as a “schizophrenic” in a number of ways: He suggests that the young Jerome (like Holden) was both “mildly rebellious” and a “straight-faced joiner” (25), torn between companionship and superior isolation. Likewise, in his college days at Ursinus, Salinger appears to have two distinct writing voices: “Writing in the newspaper as JDS, Salinger is laconic and airily delinquent. Writing as Jerome Salinger, the Ursinus Weekly's drama critic, he is leaden and agreeable, stretching his paragraphs to make sure a good word is said about almost everyone …” (49). These “two voices” carry over into Salinger's later professional career, according to Hamilton: “Salinger was, again, the master of two voices, and to his literary friends he was already making a separation between his ‘commercial’ and his ‘real’ work” (61). Salinger's early career thus enacts “a balancing act … between integrity and commerce” (64). Finally, Hamilton's picture of the contemporary Salinger is also one of a split personality who both courts and shuns publicity. Salinger's reclusiveness (in this now popular interpretation) is thus read as an elaborate means of seeking attention. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark Silverberg Mark Silverberg is Associate Professor of American Literature at Cape Breton University. His essays on contemporary literature, theory, and culture have appeared in journals such as Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and English Studies in Canada. His book, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant Garde, was published by Ashgate in 2010.