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David Warren

David Warren

  posted on Saturday, January 30, 2010
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Perpetual adolescence

It really wouldn’t do, in light of his death this week at age 91, for me to share what I truly think about J.D. Salinger; especially after mentioning in this column only five years ago that his most famous work, Catcher in the Rye, was “a book I believe to have been written ... under direct demonic possession.” So let me go about this as gently as I can.

We are instructed, at least by the Christian authorities, to pray for the repose of all souls, and look for virtues even in the lives of the least saintly. It is among the most difficult instructions.

“The good is oft interrèd with their bones,” as Shakespeare assures us, in the third act of Julius Caesar. Whereas, “the evil that men do” went on to become the title of innumerable heavy metal hits, paranoid thriller films, comic books, and vampire novels.

Fortunately, Christian instructions to search forensically for good are balanced by others, and I was delighted to be apprised recently of this clarification, in the encyclical Pope Pius XI wrote against the Nazis:

“Charity by no means implies a renunciation of the right of proclaiming, vindicating and defending the truth and its implications. The priest’s first loving gift to his neighbours is to serve truth and refute error in any of its forms. Failure on this score would be not only a betrayal of God and your vocation, but also an offence against the real welfare of your people and country.”

Suffice to say I read Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school—as everyone did, in my Grade 10 class, for the reading was assigned by our countercultural English teacher, who, in her evening role as supervisor of the film club, forced us to watch Barbarella. Perhaps “forced” is too strong a term—membership in that club was voluntary—but what I recall over the temporal distance was an almost conscious campaign to corrupt us. Even at the time, I remember thinking that the book, especially, was a threat to public morals.

Barbarella much less so: it was merely an opportunity for progressive young men to watch the once-estimable Jane Fonda take off her clothes. My own taste ran more to another film club outing in that 1968 season, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the question was whether the female lead, played by the more shyly attractive Olivia Hussey, had taken her clothes off or not.

My younger readers, raised on movies in which the female lead always takes her clothes off, may snicker at the innocence of my baby-boom generation, just as we snicker today at the absence of any subtlety at all, but “such, such were the joys.”

No, as I say, “soft pornography” never quite struck me as so powerful a corrupting force, as a novel which exalts the worst kind of self-pitying adolescent narcissism, and holds it up as an ideal, through adulthood to a senile old age.

The book has had a remarkable and, to my mind, infernal influence on society, owing in part to its author’s literary skill in the manipulation of colloquial language, in part to the emotional and even hormonal power in that peculiar explosion of sex and ego that is adolescent narcissism itself. The proof is in the pudding, and the fact that Catcher in the Rye went on to inspire at least three celebrity assassins (Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and Robert John Bardo), along with who knows how many “little league” psychos and suicides, speaks to its real power.

The great German poet, J.W. von Goethe, achieved something similar with his own original contribution to the genre of the “coming of age novel”—The Sufferings of Young Werther, in 1774. It not only triggered the suicides of innumerable overwrought young dandies across the Europe of his day, but launched the German Romantic movement.

Still, what for Goethe had been the over-talented expression of a passing phase in youth—ironically disavowed even within the novel—was for Salinger the embodiment of a permanent worldview. The latter’s paranoid demonization of “the Phonies” is echoed in the 1950s Jimmy-Dean cults of rebellion, in every hippie tract against “the Squares,” and to this day in delusionary ideas about how the world works, among our leftwing “intellectuals.”

Indeed, one cannot look through the list of President Obama’s strange and demented policy czars without spotting so many Holden Caulfields, nor escape their ever-presence among the talking heads of MSNBC. And in watching the president’s State of the Union address this week, I had the distinct impression of a man whose big-government vision rests less in Marxism than in the faux-naïf of “a catcher in the rye.”

Nice line, eh

...

David Warren is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.  Visit his web site at davidwarrenonline.com.


Posted on 01/30/10 at 08:52 AM
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