Enough Salinger Already - Page 2

It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction — extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-earned runt of the litter. It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.

This passage is not the best in the Glass works but it is by no means the worst. The comment on his own fervent and rather ghoulish admirers is amusing — Salinger, like the sainted eldest Glass, Seymour, is a sort of suicide poet himself — but let's look at the style for a second.

Like many unprolific authors Salinger has acquired an undeserved reputation for brevity. In fact he is a gasbag, right in there with Thomas Wolfe, sentence for sentence, just fewer sentences. The snobbish qualification "to put it much more horribly than I really want to" is characteristic. He can't think of anything better than "floppy-eared runt" yet he wants to let his reader know, sotto voce, that he isn't really happy with it either. One might object that this is the voice of Buddy Glass, not Salinger himself; but in Franny and Zooey, where he's narrating on his own account, he writes exactly the same way.

Then there's the jumbo list of authorial flaws in the middle of the paragraph. Salinger likes lists. Franny and Zooey has one, of the contents of the Glass family medicine cabinet, that's nearly three times this long and apropos of nothing.

Not having read Salinger in fifteen years I didn't remember how awful, how self-conscious, how snobbish the style is; how full it is of parenthetical throat-clearing, pedantic qualifications, go-nowhere asides, shuck and jive.

Article Author: Aaron Haspel

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