SOURCE: “Salinger Revisited,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 61-8.

[In the following essay, McSweeney offers a reevaluation of Salinger's fiction and critical reception. According to McSweeney, “The only work of Salinger's that has not shrunk with the passage of time is The Catcher in the Rye.”]

For anyone who was a literate North-American adolescent during the 1950s, it is probably difficult, even after fifteen or twenty years, to go beyond a personal estimate and/or historical estimate of the fiction of J. D. Salinger and attempt a ‘real’ estimate. The task will be especially difficult for those who were in those days uncritical enthusiasts of Nine Stories, The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass stories; for a retrospective distaste and embarrassment over one's youthful intensities, idealisings and over-simplifications may well make for a prejudiced rereading.

The possibility of overreaction on my part may be indicated by a catalogue of the Salingeresque items—tokens of sensitivity, emblems of non-aggression, touchstones of selflessness—that fell out of my copy of Catcher when I recently opened it for the first time in a decade and a half: （a） a transcript of a poem by the then Brother Antoninus, which begins

Annul in me my manhood, Lord, and make
Me women-sexed and weak,
If by that total transformation
I might know Thee more;

（b） another of a Bob Dylan song, which begins with

I ain't looking to compete with you, beat or cheat or mistreat
you,
Simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you,
All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you;

（c） a Peanuts cartoon, in which Linus, holding as ever his security blanket, declares to Charlie Brown that ‘No problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from’; and （d） a New Yorker cartoon of two men in dinner jackets, holding highball glasses and looking at a wall on which are mounted heads of a number of ferocious looking animals—except for the centerpiece: the enormous head of a benign, quietly smiling lion, whose post-prandial countenance echoes those of the men, one of whom is explaining that ‘I was removing a thorn from its paw when I suddenly thought: “What a magnificent head”.’

Still, one aspires to objectivity and disinterest, and there is little doubt that now is a good time for a retrospective assessment of Salinger. For one thing, Warren French may well be more than self-serving when he says in the preface to the newly revised edition of his J. D. Salinger that ‘former readers, alienated from Salinger during the activist 1960s, are now returning to his books with renewed interest and are commending them to their children and their students’. For another, the Salinger canon seems essentially complete. His last published work, the unreadable ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, appeared in the New Yorker twelve years ago. This ‘story’ consisted of an interminable letter sent from summer camp to his parents by the then seven-year-old prodigy, poet, and saint, Seymour Glass. What can you say about a kid who describes his meals thus: ‘While the food itself is not atrocious, it is cooked without a morsel of affection or inspiration, each string bean or simple carrot arriving on the camper's plate quite stripped of its tiny vegetal soul’? ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ had given the impression that Salinger had become self-indulgent in his writing, and was withdrawing into a self-referential fantasy world. This seemed confirmed by the disheartening statement the author made in 1974 when he broke a public silence of more than twenty years to complain in a telephone interview with the New York Times about the publication of an unauthorised collection of his apprentice work: ‘There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.’

The first of his works that Salinger regarded as post-apprentice were among those included in his 1954 collection, Nine Stories. All these stories are set in the only world Salinger knows: that of upper middle class New York City. They contain an abundance of acute social notation: Salinger is particularly good at using the details of speech, dress and decor to register the nuances of social stratification and character type. The world of the stories is mimed by Salinger's characteristic prose: the mannered New Yorker style of coy hyperbole and sophisticated overstatement, the knowing tone, and the self-conscious, mandarin poise tempered by measured colloquialisms.

While Salinger clearly finds much that is wrong with the world he describes, unlike Flaubert or Joyce he does not reveal his disapproval through his style, which in fact tends to exemplify the values of that world. This important point was made by Frank Kermode in 1962: ‘the really queer thing about this writer is that he carefully writes for an audience [a culture-acquisitive audience] he deplores.’ To put the matter differently: while there is in Nine Stories, as in the rest of Salinger, much excellent social observation, albeit of a very narrow part of the social spectrum, there is very little social vision because Salinger has no outside point of view to bring to bear on a world to which he can imagine no positive, post-puberty alternative and of which, faute de mieux, he remains a part. Philip Roth overstated the case in 1962, but one understands his exasperation: ‘the problem of how to live in this world is by no means answered … The only advice we seem to get from Salinger is to be charming on the way to the loony bin.’

The dominant subject of Nine Stories is the opposition of the few （the sensitive, delicate and discerning, usually children or disturbed young men） and the many （the crass, insensitive and phony）. The upshot of this opposition can be destructive: the first and last stories, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘Teddy’, end abruptly with the suicide of the representative of the few. But when two sensitive, non-aggressive souls can make contact, a more optimistic, even sentimental, conclusion becomes possible, as in ‘De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period’ and ‘For Esmé—with Love and Squalor’, for the latter of which, despite the narrator's Dostoyevskian rumblings, this quotation from Silas Marner would have made a perfect epigraph: ‘In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.’

Of course, some of the Nine Stories are better than others. One of the finest, ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut’, has at its center the quintessential Salinger theme of the true life which is absent. In ‘Zooey,’ Franny Glass, on the brink of a breakdown, will say that the one person she wants to talk to is her dead brother Seymour; in Catcher, Holden Caulfield, when challenged to name just one person whom he really likes, will name his dead brother Allie. In ‘Uncle Wiggily’ two old friends, Mary Jane and Eloise, get together in the latter's suburban home for an afternoon of reminiscence, complaint and too much drink. As their conversation becomes intimate, Eloise begins to speak of the young man, a brother of Seymour Glass, who was different （the story's title alludes to one of his fey witticisms）; who was in fact everything that her husband is not; whom she loved; and who was killed in an absurd accident during the war. The loss is nicely counterpointed by the relationship of Eloise's young daughter to her imaginary friend, Jimmy Jimmereeno. When Jimmy is run over, his place in the daughter's bed is taken by Mickey Mickeranno. But Eloise cannot make contact with her daughter—she even insists on making her sleep in the middle of the bed as a way of negating Mickey's existence—and for her there is nothing to fill the absence of Walt Glass except her maudlin insistence at the end of the story that she used to be a nice girl.

On the other hand, ‘De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period’, which has a similar theme, is a weak story. Its narrator is a sensitive young man stuck in a cheesy art correspondence school in Montreal, who becomes unilaterally involved through the mail with a nun in Toronto whose work shows promise but whose superiors unexpectedly require her to withdraw from the school. The nun, a variant of the Salingeresque child figure, is of course an embodiment of the absent true life for which the narrator yearns. The story's events take place when the narrator is nineteen; he is thirty-two when he recounts them （the same age, incidentally, as Salinger when he wrote the story, just as the narrator's initials are identical with the author's）. But the older narrator is indistinguishable from his younger self, there is no distancing, no perspective, no way of placing or grounding, the epiphany with which the story concludes. Gazing into the window of an orthopedic appliances shop, De Daumier-Smith suddenly has ‘an extraordinary experience’, a moment of vision which leaves ‘twice blessed’ the objects in the window and leads to the assertion that he can give up Sister Irma because ‘Everybody is a nun. （Tout le monde est une nonne）.’ This climactic moment, a harbinger of the notorious ending of ‘Zooey,’ where it is asserted that the Fat Lady is Christ, seems to me quite hollow and unearned, and, like the narrator, immature and callow. ‘Twice blessed’ is an empty poeticism borrowed （probably unconsciously） from Portia's speech in The Merchant of Venice. And ‘Everybody is a nun’ recalls the ‘Tout est grâce’ at the end of Bernanos' great novel, Journal d'un curé de campagne, in a way that devastatingly points up the thinness, staginess, and merely notional quality of Salinger's scene.

One generalisation that could be made about these two stories involves the old chestnut about the relative difficulty in creating convincing fictional representations of unfallen as opposed to fallen, transcendent to quotidian, gain to loss, saint to sinner, selflessness to egotism. Salinger seems to be aware of this problem in that ‘De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period’ contains a degree of narrative self-consciousness （absent in ‘Uncle Wiggily’） which suggests uneasiness in the face of a difficult creative problem. For the same reason, narrative self-consciousness becomes more and more prominent in the four Glass family stories which began to appear in The New Yorker the year after the publication of Nine Stories.

One thing that can be said about all of the Nine Stories is that they are professional pieces of work, textbook examples of the short-story form. By the same token, despite a good deal of ingenuity, they are limited by the form's conventional boundaries. One senses Salinger's dissatisfaction with this, and sees him beginning to push beyond the boundaries in ‘Franny’. As in the Nine Stories, the subject of this long short story is the opposition of the phony and the seeker after authenticity. Again, it is the phony—the splendid figure of Lane Coutell—that is better done. The presentation of Franny, an equally recognisable social type （a female Ivy Leaguer）, is more fuzzy and uncertain. Particularly telling is the fact that Salinger can only convey a sense of Franny's spiritual yearning by having her summaries the contents of a Russian religious work, cry a lot, and continually mumble the Jesus prayer.

In ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, a novella-length short story （it is not a short novella）, the same contrast is in some ways better handled. The members of the wedding-party diaspora who eventually gather in Buddy and Seymour Glass's apartment are the rather too exhaustively detailed equivalent of the Lane Coutell world. The contrasting figure is again a Glass sibling, this time Seymour, like Franny a quasi-mystic, a seeker after higher truth who is half drawn towards, half put off by sexual and emotional involvement （for Franny, Lane; for Seymour, Muriel）.

It is in the contrast between Seymour and Franny that the superiority of ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ lies. Seymour is a much stronger and more convincing representation of spirituality. The principal reason for this is that he never appears in the story. He is the true life whose absence is mediated by his loving brother Buddy, the narrator. Because Salinger does not present Seymour directly he can become an acceptable, almost palpable representative of the higher life. Even his metaphorical stigmata—‘I have scars on my hands from touching certain people’ （from a diary Buddy has found）—which seems particularly annoying to certain critics, seems to me a striking evocation of what George Eliot called ‘a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life’, which if we had them would be ‘like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat’ and cause us to ‘die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’.

The two other Glass stories, ‘Zooey’ and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, are both disappointing pieces of work, much shrunken from the dimensions they had for me in the late 1950s. Both, particularly the latter, represent an interesting technical development in Salinger's art, for in them he has broken away completely from the conventional short-story form. This has been mainly achieved through the increased self-consciousness of the author/narrator and his active involvement in the story he is trying to tell. As Philip Roth was perhaps the first to recognise, in these stories Salinger was concerned ‘to place the figure of the writer directly in the reader's line of vision’. （More recently, in a piece in the 13 June 1975 TLS, David Lodge has suggestively discussed the ‘elaborate game with his audience and with the conventions of his art’ that the later Salinger is playing）. For example, in ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ the subject of the story is as much the creative difficulties of Buddy Glass in presenting to the reader his saintly brother （‘the one person who was always much, much too large to fit on ordinary typewriter paper’） as it is Seymour himself. The spiritual theme （Seymour） and the epistemological/aesthetic theme （the apprehension and presentation of Seymour） become indistinguishable and are simultaneously held in the matrix of the writer-reader relationship.

It is from this technical point of view that ‘Zooey’ and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ are most interesting. But this is not enough to save either story from its content. There is too much in the 44,000 words of ‘Zooey’ that is self-indulgent and inert; and the presentation and resolution of the religious problem is pitched in so shrill a key that one eventually comes to see that Salinger has taken Franny's rather run-of-the-mill collegiate identity crisis and tried to do much-too-much with it. And both the closing affirmation at the end of the 27,000 words of ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ （‘all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next’） and its climactic epiphany （the apparition of Seymour at ‘the magic hour of the day’ during a marble shooting game and his admonishing Buddy not to aim）, though the latter once seemed to me the most incandescent moment in Salinger's canon, now seem too meager and too much like cut-rate Zen to justify the expenditure of time and energy necessary to get to the end of the story.

The only work of Salinger's that has not shrunk with the passage of time is The Catcher in the Rye. The macro-subject of Salinger's only novel is that of all his fiction; as Carol and Richard Ohmann say in their provocative ‘case study of capitalist criticism’ of Catcher in the autumn 1976 Critical Inquiry, the novel is ‘among other things a serious critical mimesis of bourgeois life in the Eastern United States ca. 1950. The micro-subject is a crisis point in the adolescence of a sensitive and perceptive youth: Holden Caulfield is sixteen when the events in the novel take place; seventeen when he narrates them. The social notation is superb: the expensive prep school with its Ackleys and Stradlaters; the lobby of the Biltmore （the in place for dates to meet）; the Greenwich Village bar and the equally tony Wicker Bar uptown; the crowd in the theater lobby at intermission; Mr and Mrs Antolini; the sad ‘girls’ from Seattle who are in the big city to have a good time; and so on.

Similarly, the macro-theme of Catcher is that of the rest of Salinger; the almost Dickensian dichotomy between the lower world of the many and the innocent, constantly threatened world of the few: the dead Allie, who used to write poems all over his baseball mitt, and Jane Gallagher, who when playing checkers always kept her kings in the back row （both activities recall Seymour's admonition not to aim when shooting marbles）; the two nuns who ‘went around collecting dough in those beat-up old straw baskets’; and Phoebe, the wise child, for love of whom her exhausted brother is moved to tears on the novel's last page.

What is different in Catcher, and what must be considered the key to its success, is its method. Holden's first person narration ipso facto removes from the novel any trace of New Yorker preciosities. Everything is seen from Holden's point of view and reported in his pungent vernacular. The voice and the perceptions are wholly convincing and of sustained freshness. Indeed, the only comparatively flat scenes—on the train with Morrow's mother, in the restaurant with the nuns—are the two places in the novel where one feels that there is something derivative about Holden's characterization and narration, that he is drawn more from Huckleberry Finn than from life.

Holden's adolescent perspective, halfway between the childhood and adult worlds, fully a part of neither yet acutely sensitive to and observant of both, provides the perfect point of focus for Catcher. Holden is in a privileged though precarious position. A two or three-year difference in his age, in either direction, would have made for an entirely different book. In his own image, to which the novel's title calls attention, Holden is ‘on the edge of some crazy cliff’, with little kids playing in a field of rye on one side of him, an abyss on the other. Like that of Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald's narrator in The Great Gatsby, Holden's bifocal vision allows him simultaneously to register both the phoniness and meretriciousness of the fallen world and the sense of wonder and tenderness, and the supernal frissons, of the innocent world. And since they are so well grounded （and thereby authenticated） in a particular person at a particular time of life, Holden's longings, needs and intimations of mystery never became sentimental or merely notional. Indeed they are the most resonant images in all of Salinger of the longing for the absent true life, as in Holden's haunting question of where the Central Park ducks go in the winter, his love for the dead brother, and for the live sister whom he wishes could, like things in the museum, always stay the way she now is and never have to grow up.

Near the end of Catcher Holden reflects that there is no place where one is free from somebody sneaking up and writing ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose. Holden's erasures of this phrase recall the last page of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway deletes an obscene word from Gatsby's steps before going down to the water's edge to begin his great mediation on the capacity for wonder and the longing for absent true life, which draws one ceaselessly back into the past. There are more similarities between Fitzgerald's and Salinger's novels （and between the two authors） than might at first meet the eye, and a brief concluding comparison of the two may be of help in making a stab at gauging the ‘real’ status of Catcher.

Both novels turn on the contrast of a fallen world of aggression, selfishness and phoniness and a tenuous higher world of （to use Fitzgerald's phrase） ‘heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’. Both writers have been charged with having no real social vision to complement their acute social notation: what the Ohmanns say of Holden Caulfield may, mutatis mutandis, be said of his creator: ‘for all his perceptiveness … he is an adolescent with limited understanding of what he perceives’. And Fitzgerald has of course been described as having been taken in by what he could see through. I believe that this remark is manifestly unfair to Fitzgerald at his best, and that there is much to ponder in his （admittedly oddly phrased） notebook comment that D. H. Lawrence was ‘Essential[ly] pre-Marxian. Just as I am essentially Marxian.’ There is real social insight in Gatsby, which offers a complex anatomy and moral evaluation of the world it describes. Because its bifocal vision is that of a discriminating adult, not that of an engagingly screwed-up teenager, the novel is able to offer a richer and more complex exploration both of the lower world and the higher world of threatened innocence and longing.

For these reasons, among others, Gatsby seems to me an appreciably greater novel than Catcher. But the difference is perhaps one of degree rather than of kind, and if one accepts John Berryman's definition of a masterpiece （found in his excellent essay on Gatsby in The Freedom of the Poet）—

a work of the literary imagination which is consistent, engaging, and dramatic, in exceptional degrees; which exhibits largely mastered a human subject of the first importance; and which seems in retrospect to illuminate the whole physical and spiritual situation of which it was, by the strange parturition of art, an accidental product. One easy test will be the rapidity with which, in the imagination of a good judge, other works of the period and kind will faint away under any suggested comparison with it.

—one may go on to say that both The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye belong on permanent display in the gallery of classic American fiction.