Born eight months apart
So, Robert McCrum actually did go and read Catcher in the Rye last week; all I managed was three pages of Franny & Zooey. Typical. I was working myself up to Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters – I wanted to read about that tiny little old man again. But fortunately McCrum has written today about his newly re-forged impressions of the Holden Caulfield book, and very interesting they are too. Of course he makes the point that Salinger seems not to have transcended that teen angst he wrote about so well. I said something like this, either here or in conversation, I forget which, remarking that after all, his biggest character (I meant Seymour Glass, in fact) was too innocent and spiritually pure for this world, and ended up killing himself. I also said there must have been more to it than that, given the ferocity over the years and some of the stories we hear…*
Well, McCrum has only gone and noticed the blindingly obvious, which I haven’t seen anyone else do: he’s only gone and Mentioned the War. Essentially, he says this:
What I’m intrigued by is Salinger’s wartime career. Basically, he was drafted as a GI in 1942, served in the infantry, landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, fought his way through France, saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge, and was one of the first to liberate a Nazi concentration camp. In other words, he experienced the reality of the second world war as much, if not more than, many veterans.
It’s a cliché of military memoirs that the real war never gets into the books. Happily, there is one witness to the re-conquest of Europe in 1944: the distinguished literary critic Paul Fussell, whose account, in the closing pages of his classic study Wartime, is powerfully suggestive about the inspiration for Holden’s unforgettable narrative.
“What was it about the war,” Fussell writes, “that moved the troops to constant verbal subversion and contempt? It was not just the danger and fear, the boredom and uncertainty and loneliness and deprivation. It was rather the conviction that the optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable.” To the troops, the war had been “sanitised and Disneyfied” by the phonies back at HQ.
This is similar enough to any analysis of the origin of the “anarchic” – and specifically verbal – humour of the Goons, etc, to warrant a little heads-up, at least in my little world. As has been said to me many’s the time – and I thought I had written it somewhere here on the walls of Baroque Mansions but now cannot find it – that humour – gentle as it may seem compared to our current “edgy” style, but still a humour of disjuncture and even disrespect, came from the fact that after what they had been through they simply couldn’t believe they were even alive. There were probably, quite literally, no words for it.
I feel I can bring poetry into this now. After all, we started with an ethereal novelist – and this anarchic-humour-wordplay-joy-true-poetry-Art-Essence-of-Life trope of mine, which so often ends with a clip from The Bed-Sitting Room or Fred Astaire, is becoming well rehearsed, isn’t it? I might write a book. Anyway, the debate came up a couple of years ago, regarding the über-serious American poet Anthony Hecht – who, like Salinger, was part of the liberation of the concentration camps – and whether he had “earned” his lugubriousness by having “paid for” the “overstuffed damask sofa” that was his world outlook. The idea was that he had, and I think that’s right.
There is probably a massive dissertation to be written (and it may already have been) on why the Americans turned to despair after this experience and the British went all Ministry of Silly Walks. Of course, both Milligan and Cleese famously suffered from crippling depression, so the answer is not that they were simply happy. Duh. It’s about expression – and whether you write angry books and then retire from the world or poke fun at everybody and become a national treasure. National temperament? Dramatic tradition? The difference between coming to help out and thinking you were going to be invaded? Between being supposed to be some kind of saviour, and the surprise of surviving? Going home and having everything be still the same, and going home and having absolutely everything be different?
One thing is for certain, and anyone who wants to get all sniffy about things that were big fifty years ago might do to remember this: these guys had seen what could happen. They had to come back from that and get on with things. I wouldn’t be very impressed with a Brooks Brothers suit and the earning power of a good Ivy League degree either.**
Whatever it is, you have to wonder if, in some small way, Spike and JD might be a bit related.
* New York Times, via my old mucker James Marcus: “Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science, according to the daughter. He also drank urine, and sat in a Reichian orgone box, Ms. Salinger wrote. He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls.” I’m not suggesting anything here about Spike, by the way!
** (Oh, wait. I’m not.)
Baroque in Hackney 