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What might be called the “eastern media” has treated the death of J.D. Salinger as a major literary and cultural event. For people who never came into contact with his major work, Catcher in the Rye, it might seem strange and out of place. Who cares, they might say, about this one little book published almost sixty years ago?
Understanding the attitude toward Salinger and his novel and short stories explains a lot about the divide between the eastern states of the United States and the rest of the country. Where I went to high school, in the eastern side of Pennsylvania, leaning toward New York and Philadelphia, reading this book and a few others were what everyone with aspirations to college and a life with possibilities was what you did, it was what you had to do if you were in the loop or anywhere near the consciousness of your times.
I had earlier gone through the 8th grade in Oklahoma. Since I didn’t go to high school there, I have no idea if there was a set of “in” books that everyone carried around like little treasures. I assume there were, but the set of people carrying them around was most likely smaller and the books, perhaps, were not such cynical examples of distaste for the world and all that was in it.
In the east, it seems, you were supposed to read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager and fall under its spell of disgust with the adult world and, for that matter, the whole world. You were not just entitled, it seems, to be disaffected, you were ordered to be that way. The saying goes, if you are not depressed, you are not paying attention. To be intelligent meant you should be unhappy and if you couldn’t find enough to be unhappy about, study some more, young man.
To be smart, alert and aware meant you were supposed to be unhappy. Meanwhile, get high SAT scores, good grades and move your way into a branded, well known college and then go off and spend your disaffected, perennially disappointed life. Go off and be a doctor or lawyer or whatever you can do, but just keep in mind, there’s a cold wind blowing in the human heart and things are lousy in the world. Wow. That really gave you something to look forward too.
From Salinger you could graduate to Updike and his multiplicities of adulteries or Cheever and his well off suburban husbands traveling the backyards of their wealthy enclave by jumping in everyone’s almost end-to-end swimming pools. These writers had been pumped full of the downward progression of European philosophers of the last 100 years and they had been exposed, in various ways, to the horrors of world wars, so they really knew their stuff, right?
Updike might have been labeled a Christian optimist, but having finger sex in the back of a moving car with the wife of the driver didn’t seem all that uplifting, especially when the youngish reader might have only had minimal experience in such matters and still harbored the foolish hope for long term relationships, even marriage, without bed hopping adventures with all the wives of the neighborhood. Cheever, and many others, treated us to a procession of well dressed failures roaming the suburban grounds like lost hunters in search of prey.
In other parts of the country, you might even be allowed to be young and hopeful. Let the old folks, those over fifty-five, wallow in their disappointments and broken dreams, you need not partake. While the southern brand of Christianity had its own offering of insistent defeatism in labeling humans sinful out of the gate and “lost” without redemption, the core of it’s belief system was rebirth and hope. You were condemned and “saved” in about fifteen seconds flat.
Things don’t look so bad to people in that vast space between the eastern and far western states. The frontier experience is much closer there and the accomplishment of putting people, farms and business across the fruited plane seems a task worthy of some ongoing respect. In the Great Plains of America, it is well known that ordinary people can be content just being there, just passing through the vast landscape of sky and land and feeling they are a small part of it. This idea would be met with sneering contempt in academic circles. Likewise, the literature born of these places. Western writers are scorned, while eastern writers are openly praised for not including any scenes of “wide open skies” and the dramas that take place under them, as the New Yorker did in praising Updike on his death.
To be certain, perhaps people in California should have been depressed all along. Did they know, way back when Salinger was still new, that they were slowly ruining the dream they were building? Did they know that the anti-taxers would hobble their state and make it virtually impossible to govern? Did they know that the beauty of the place they found would be jammed with belching cars, tourist shops and over population?
Sooner or later, many of the same problems that beset the east for more than a hundred years move westward. But it seems to me that the state of mind in the east, drawn as it is far too much from the European base, is not shared by many in the middle and western states. You could say they are under the spell of what can be called persistent optimism. Maybe it is foolish and shallow in the face of human experience and world history, but it is particularly an American kind of optimism that has served us well on many occasions. Some, many in fact, in the eastern states share some of that spirit, but the roots to Europe, and its sense of hopeless defeatism, play a major role, too.
Until Salinger took his leave at age 91, I had given little thought to the cultural dividing line around his book, the story of a pissed off, kicked out prep school boy getting his revenge. Not all of the nation embraced this kind of writing. It is the east which celebrates Salinger much more than elsewhere and it is there where he was seen as some sort of oracle.
In case you want to know, things are really different in various parts of the country. There is as much difference between Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas as there is between Albania and London. Really. We are one nation, divided in ways as important as the ways that unite us. Television and other media bring visions and reports from the other sectors, but life in the personal zone is local, particular and intransigent to change. We might be becoming more alike, but we remain strongly, insistently, different.
When I was a teenager, I was pleased to be attending a high school where books were important, where the “kids” carried around their tattered copies of paperbacks that weren’t on the reading lists or taught in the classrooms. That was cool, to me. The sad part is that just four or five books at the right or wrong time can change your whole life and not necessarily for the better. If you are educated and want to be in tune, you look to the heavy weights of literature to give you knowledge of great writing, perspective on social and cultural change and, all too often, a veiled philosophy of defeat. And so, the older generation, and those long past, can poison the minds of the young, foolish and hopeful.
In a writer like Beckett or other “French absurdists”, the philosophy of defeat was more acceptable to me, because it took on a larger context of human struggle against, not the prep school dean, but the universe itself. Hey, I can be happy with this sort of depression. Yet, at this remove, I can’t help but wonder if these “nattering nabobs of negativism” have played an unseen role in my life, in all of our lives: we are supposed to be defeated and unhappy. Isn’t that the human condition? If you are not, what’s wrong with you?
And so we had these teachers and professors, ushering us forward toward the depressing dung heap of the literature of hopelessness. Hey, we wanted to be knowledgeable, informed, ready, so we submitted. There must be something there. There must be. Read on. Another 200 pages before class tomorrow.
In the middle states, it is not necessary to be so sophisticated and that is why, at times, they scorn the east, even while well-off parents hope to send their kids eastward to elite schools to study desolation with the best of them. The political divide follows these fault lines, too. In the east, they know, they believe, that certain problems will never be solved unless there is intervention. In the newer south and west, they believe that the prosperity which lifted each generation (with rather major interruptions along the way) for the last hundred and fifty years will keep going and make things better without any assistance. Though this view does not translate completely into a political ideology, there are plenty of western politicians ready to pretend it does. They run on “western values” and then sell their offices to powerful interests of money, banking, resources and technology and on and on the cycle goes. .
The east sees Europe, the west sees tall buildings and suburban housing development where fifteen or twenty years before there was little or nothing. If people have good work and a nice place to live, that’s progress. In the western states, they often turn their backs on people without jobs and without hope, holding to the latent Calvinist view that they brought disaster on themselves and, perhaps, fairly deserve their fate. Being down and out is not a social failure, but a personal one of that individual. Tough luck.
In the east, they know that there is no guarantee of a fair shake and that people can fail while working hard and trying harder. In truth, both sides, all sides, know that the deck is stacked in favor of certain people from the moment they are born and that others, of lesser intelligence, ambition or family aspirations, will soon enough find their fate at the bottom of any pile. In the west, they say, so be it. In the east, they wonder if we can’t do better.
Often, in the western and southern states, help in heading to the bottom is provided by overly aggressive police work and state laws fashioned in the aftermath of southern slavery that give undue consideration to the rich and powerful. The police come down hardest on those on the edge of poverty. A persistent drug abuser, such as David Carr was in the years before he joined the New York Times, would quickly find himself with a long jail term in the southern or western states, not being ushered into treatment centers as Carr was in Minnesota. The ordinary, first or second generation middle class person in the west chooses not to look at the dire results of a social system oriented toward harsh punishment, but rather be thankful that some people who “probably need it” are being reined in. To the eastern mind, it is all self congratulation and galloping ignorance.
It is said that Salinger was the king of irony in 20th century American literature. Who needs that? Isn’t irony mainly a tool to remove yourself from the action and feel better than those around you? To me, he, as most writers of note in our post Freudian existence, hatched open a place where all the world is a stage and all the actors are excessively aware of it. We are now inside and outside our world at the same time. We look in on ourselves, acting out our roles and wonder if we are doing the right thing. Are we depressed enough? Do will treat others with sufficient disregard? Did I wisecrack enough in the face of that guy back at the party?
Which brings me to a final point: what is it we are supposed to be angry about? What was the motivating thought engine behind the disgust of Holden Caufield? Just being alive? The Marlon Brando character in “The Wild Ones” was asked what he was rebelling against. Brando replied, “What you got?”, which is to say anything and everything and maybe nothing at all, except just being ordinary, a fearsome fate. Being disaffected long ago became a pose, often one in search of a cause. A callow youth who did not experience those emotions was left to fend for himself to find a path toward believing in something of larger importance than his own needs, with no literary guides provided on the contemporary scene.
It has been said, and written much about in the eastern print media the last couple of days, that Caufield was disgusted with the adult world. Fair enough. Neither Caufield nor Salinger ever moved forward long enough to put that disdain into a plan of action. The only plan was to wallow in it and take joy in your hidden sophistication and inherent superiority to others who still believed that spending a day doing something, like going to class, might be worth anything. You could achieve an advantage on the whole rest of the world by withdrawing and floating above it, all the while feeling contempt. And this is what they want young people to learn and take to heart? Why?
Doug Terry, 1.30.10
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