Tag: JD Salinger

Art, Truth, Feminism, JD Salinger, Lena Dunham and Sex

LENA about authorwhen 
From Lena Dunham’s Website

 Lena Dunham was just a little older, when she wrote this, than she was in the currently infamous story from her new book; it’s been raging through right-wing and/or feminist (?!) blogs for days.  If you’ve been offline for the past few days, her new book Not That Kind of Girl, includes material about sexual curiosity, sisters, vaginas and sexual limits, all in the form of what were, to many, uncomfortable anecdotes.

Dunham and her book have been brutalized in the press and on blogs – mostly for telling the truth – a truth which some claim is the sexual abuse of a younger sibling.  It seemed more like a less-than-attractive set of events and not, to child development experts, worthy of the outrage it generated.

Beyond that, it’s honest, real and revealing, so: is this cacophony of condemnation how we modern readers reward a writer’s honesty?  It shouldn’t be – and JD Salinger told us why:

Since [writing] is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? … I’m so sure you’ll get asked only two questions.’ Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.”   (Seymour, an Introduction)

So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks

Salinger book  All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass.  To be part of the Glass family, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door.  They were sad and weird and wonderful.

And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved for Holden Caulfield, the eternally adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye.  Holden is worthy of every affectionate word written about him, and his palpable pain is familiar to those who’ve journeyed through the teen years, but the Glasses — well  — they were a different kind of lovely.

They are all the children of one man, and he died today.  I wish I could tell you what it felt like to read Catcher in the Rye at 13.  I can remember where I was sitting as I read it – how I felt – and the deep sadness that accompanied Holden’s story.   It must have been traumatic though, because later, when my son and I read it together, I was shocked to learn that Holden’s brother had died.  I had jammed that fact someplace hard to reach, which means it was even more disturbing than I remember.  Reading it with my own child was a beautiful experience to share with a young man of deep compassion and great sensibility – a memory I cherish.  So Salinger gave me that, too.

(I’m not mentioning Joyce Maynard here.  She had a right – but sheesh!)  And I really don’t have much to say about the quiet recluse in the hills of New Hampshire.    Farewell to him, yes, but also to yet another connection to the days when I was young – and more like Holden than like women of a Certain Age.  The passions, the pain, the poetic anger at people for not being what we expect them to be and the desperate longing to rescue the imperiled and the lost.

Anyway,
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of
rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big,
I mean – except me.  And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy
cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go
over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re
going I have to come out from somewhere and <span>catch</span> them.  That’s all I do all day.  I’d just be the
catcher in the rye and all.  I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing
I’d really like to be.”

I guess those who don’t dream of being the catcher long
to be the one who is caught.  And those longings don’t go away whether you’re 13 or
63 (right – I first read it FIFTY years ago!)  Imagine.  No, it
doesn’t go away, but your perspective changes.  The loveliness of that
kind of protecting — or being protected – it isn’t around much in the real
world.  All the more reason to be grateful for the rare observer who can remind us of its sweetness, and of what we are capable of aspiring to.

And grateful I am.  For Franny and Zooey and Seymour and all their craziness and for Holden, what he gave me then, and what I remember, even today.