It'a frustrating when I have ideas for blog posts so close together as this one that follows on the one aout Israel I wrote just a few minutes ago. This one will rise to the top of th epage and that one move down while I'd really lik e it to have preeminense ce ofr a while at least. But I have this new topic fresh in my mind and if I put it off I may never write it at all. that happens.
Because one of my grandsons is reading J D Salinger's Cather in the Rye for school I decided to see if I could find it as an audio book at You Tube because although I thought I'd read it I hadn't. It's so famous it's easy to think you've read it when all you know about it is from reviews and things people say about it. And then you read it and it's way more than all that. Yes I did listen to it. I can't exactly say I LIKED it, that's the wrong wrord somewhow, but in way I do have to like Holden. In a way. But I don't want to discuss the book here. I don't think it's necessary but if it seems to e I'll say something about it later on.
Then I read Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and A Good Day for Bananafish. And heard may interviews with people who either knew him personally, Salinger I mean, or had ;written a lot aout his books and that sort of thing. Some women are heard from who present a less than lovely portrait of Salinger. Especially Joyce Maydnard.
I wanted to read her book, listen to it that is, where she writes about her time with him but it's one of those teasere things where I got to heard some of it but then it refers you to a page that wants you to sighn up to hear more, right at the point in the story where she's starign to describe her pexperisnces with himj of course.
But she said enough in an interview I heard, and so have some others who are up on the story, to get a picture of the man that interesetingly fits almost too perfectly with what I've been hearing recently about the narcississtic personality. An unlikeable man underneath a carefully cultivated very likeable exterior. Cruel, uncaring, tyrannical, cold, emotionally abusicve.
He has some sort of facination with chilcrdren. Holden in a Catcher in the Rye is especially fond of his little sister, Seymour in A Good Day for Bananafish seems to cultivate children as friends. Salinger started relationships with at least three women in their teens, married two of them when they turned nineteen, no not at the same time, years apart. Waited until they were nineteen. But I get the feeling he would have preferred to have a closer relationship with them when they were younger. From everything that has been written and said by him and others I don't have the impression that he had a sexual attraction to tchildren, but of course if that were the scase he'd camouflage it anyway so it's hard to know. It sounds more like a an idealization or emotional obsession. But again he would camouflage it if it were an erotic fixation of course. But it culd have been mental rathern than physical . Some suggested that.
He married one of the young women and had two children with her. She finally left after about ten years if I remember fightly, having endured much tyrannical controlling abuse from him. Another rlationship ;he started when the girl was fourteen and when some years later he had sex with her that abruptly end ied it for him and he simply broke it off. With Joyce Maydnard he "love bombed her" for a long time through letters and she was sure she would be happy hmarried to him although she was only eighteen and he fifty four at the time and went to live with him and married himj. But they were together only a year when he suddenly told her he wanted to end it, uite absruptly, she should go to their ohome, get her things together and leave. Just like that. these behaviors are described as typical of the narcissistic personality in many of the videos I've een hering. the love ombing and the abrupt rejection.
In A Good day for Bananafish, Seymour takes a little girl into the ocean on a raft and at one point imnpulsively kisses her bare foot to which she protests. He has gone tdown to the beacdh without his wife who is in their hotel room. When he returns there she is asleep and he lies down on the other bed and ;shoots himself through the temple.
There is another story I couldn't find in a form that I could hear well, it was way too fuzzy sounding, callee Seymour, an introduction, which gives a lot more decription of this man Seymour though those who discuss it say it doresn't answer the question fo qhy he killed himself. \He carried the gun around in his valise so he probably had the idea for some time but had he planned it for that day? As I was pondering this I decided that something about the encounter with th elittle girl is what pushed him over the edge. Something about an unfulfilled desire for the child. He as not happy with his wife, that was suggest in an early ier story, Raise Hight the Roof Beam Carpenters. He mjight even have wanted to push her in some way by killing himself in the nxr bed. \
Anyway this is how I put together what I think could be the underlying mindset of Salinger as he wronte the story. He marries oung women, no doubt not as young as he'd like but young, then throws them away when they become too adult for him.
Oh well, I can' speculate about such things I guess. Why not.\\
I did start thinking that the man has such a comjplex emotional life and probably a life laden with shaeful aspects or aspects of it that would not go over well with mots people so would have to be campuouflaged somewhoe, and that his writing would be a sort of therapy, a way to express his deepest desires in some kind of code that would hide them from others while keeping them clear to himself. What all these things might be of course I have no idea though I've mentioned one above. Another is that I wondered why he shocese the name Glass for the family whose members he writes about in so many separate short stories, such as Seymjour, wwho is Seymour Glass. Why Glass? It's an odd name isn't it? Glass as in mirror? His characters all reflect some aspect of himself? Somehting like that? he writes beautifully. He creates marvelously natural dialog. I suspect there is also a code in there somjewhere that epxresses something very deep in himself for himself only.
Glass as in glass houses, not throwing stones and all that. Glass as in breakable, brittle and vulnerable. But glass as mirror above all I suspect.
Oher themes come flodding in but I'm not usp to all that right now. He was in the war, at D Day, at the Battle of tht eBulge. at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. He's half Jewisyh. He'd lived before the war for a time in Vienna with a Jewish family, all of whom were killed in the camp[s. Somebody suggested that Catcher in the Rye ws his way of dealing with the war. Not somethihn gI can see but it would be interesting to haear how it fits.
