Salinger
Tormented
by War
A
whole generation was shaped by The
Catcher in the Rye
I
hadn’t realized Salinger’s reach. I’d read the book, of course—several times,
including for a college class. I felt the pain of the teenage misfit narrator,
Holden Caulfield. But I was born five years before the first Boomers began
arriving. They were the ones most mesmerized by Salinger’s work.
I
got to wondering, then, what made Salinger so influential that some people
practically worship him? I knew he had a following, but until I saw the
documentary I had no idea how much he is admired by students of modern lit.
And
though I knew he’d gone to war, I also had no idea that he’d endured an
exceptionally long tour of duty at the front of some of the bloodiest battles
of World War II. He came home a psychological wreck, suffering acutely from
what we today call PTSD.
In
that frame of mind he wrote Catcher in
the Rye
But
what made a whole generation of young people identify so passionately with
Holden Caulfield? America
To
approach that question, I can only compare the first years of my life with my
sister’s. She’s a first-year Boomer, conceived in the womb as the war in Europe ended and the Holocaust became public,
born just after the Bomb dropped. These atmospheric influences couldn’t fail to
shape her emerging consciousness.
I,
on the other hand, was born over a year before Pearl Harbor . Though the war in Europe had already begun, a semblance of
peacetime stability surrounded me, in the womb and after. The undreamed-of
horrors of the coming war had not happened yet.
At
the same time, neither of our parents served in the war.
My
sister became a Civil Rights activist with a high resentment of unjust
authority. I became a conscientious objector who escaped war altogether. The
conditions surrounding our births shaped our destinies.
Then
what about the Boomers conceived by the returning troops, men like Salinger
with huge horrors still playing in their heads? Is there a subconscious
pattern, a gene passed on which remembers that, preparing the cultural soil for
the emergence of the flower children?
—————
After
the PBS documentary I came to see Salinger as a man running away in revulsion
from war and all that created it. Like poet William Blake, he bitterly laments
the plunge from innocence to experience that defines “growing up.” He lives in
the world but rejects the world, identifying himself spiritually as a
Vedantist.
To
me that says J.D. was an early hippy, an avatar of what my mother disparagingly
called “the Peter-Pan generation” who never wanted to grow up and eventually
drifted from the magic of psychedelic drugs into mystical religion. Where, it
must be added—like Salinger—they found some solace
Yet
the savagery of war continues, despite the sickness it both produces and
fosters in its warriors. Depression, suicide, rape, domestic rage—we hear these
things leaking out of the military all the time. But we hear a lot less about
the causes behind the behavior.
Salinger
speaks for those warriors wounded by their terrifying encounters with
uncivilized horror. His hope lies in protecting the innocence of the children.
Those children are the Boomers.
Salinger’s
dead now, of course—withdrawn from our material plane. But he’ll continue to
haunt us with posthumous works, to be published in sequence over the next few
years. And the psyche he passes on—tormented by war—has become at last an
acknowledged illness in a country at war too much.
That’s
some kind of progress.
posted by Delaney @ 3:35 PM
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