McEvoy: “[W]e live in an age where "[The] Catcher in the Rye" is more likely
seen as a study of a heroically free-spirited anti-“phoney” than of an immature
adolescent whose harsh eye on the world obscures from his view his own
excessive sense of self.”
Dunno. In any case, two points:
(i) Salinger’s War – was supposed to be the original title
for what later became the film “Rebel in the rye”. Salinger’s wartime
experience was horror, with savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen
bivouacs. Helm may not agree, but it seems hard to think of an author who had
more combat experience than Salinger did. Salinger lands on Utah Beach on
D-Day. Of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who landed with him, only
1,130 survived. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy,
labyrinthine Hürtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the
statistics are even more horrific. After reinforcement, of the original 3,080
regimental soldiers who went into Hürtgen, only 563 were left. Salinger escapes
the deadly quagmire of Hürtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the
Bulge, and shortly thereafter, participates in the liberation of Dachau. “You
could live a lifetime,” Salinger tells his daughter, “and never really get the
smell of burning flesh out of your nose.” All the while carrying early chapters
of “Catcher” with him (as Witters carried propositions of the “Tractatus” in
the Great War). Salinger checks himself into a hospital for treatment of what
we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. In a letter to
Hemingway (yes, Helm is right that Salinger admired, but apparently, he admired
Scott Fitzgerald even more – and he has Caulfield admiring him, too!) whom
Salinger had met at the Ritz bar shortly after the liberation of Paris,
Salinger wrote that he’d been “in an almost constant state of despondency.” He
would later allude to that experience in “For Esmé — With Love and Squalour.”
Readers are left to imagine the horrors between the time that Sergeant X,
stationed in Devon, England, meets Esmé and her brother, Charles, two war
orphans, and the time that Esmé’s letter reaches him in Bavaria a year later,
after he has suffered a nervous breakdown. It seems remarkable that this deeply
ambitious author, who continued to send stories to Ober from foxholes, chose
not to write about his combat experience when he clearly had the material for a
European-campaign version of “The Naked and the Dead.”
(ii) Add to that love. The film – “Rebel in the rye (Was:
Salinger’s War) follows Salinger as woos Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona, and
is cuckolded by Charlie Chaplin.
But I suppose there is something Griceian about McEvoy’s phrase, “excessive
sense of self,” especially if we abide by Occam’s razor, ‘do not multiply
senses of self beyond necessity!
Cheers,
Speranza
