Musings

REFLECTIONS ON THE PASSING OF J.D. SALINGER

Sometime back in the early 1960s, when I was in 8th grade, the school board of the South Orangetown (NY) School District held a special meeting to decide if a particular book was suitable for eighth graders to read in English classes.

For a school board to hold a special meeting to decide on the merits of a book says something significant about both the book and the time frame during which this occurred. This particular book had “curse words” in it. It also had prostitutes among its cast of characters. And, keep in mind, this was the EARLY ‘60s, not the LATE ‘60s. School boards of that time still viewed themselves as guardians of our morals and protectors of our supposed innocence.

I don’t know what the vote was but the South Orangetown School Board did, indeed, relent and allow the book to be read in class. And so we read it and, after we finished reading it, we wondered, “What was the big fuss all about?”

Yes, the book DID have curse words and it DID have prostitutes but so what? We may have only been 13 or 14 years old at the time but we weren’t as naïve and innocent as our surrogate fathers on the school board would have liked to think. Many of us had read books or seen magazines and 8-mm “stag films” that were far more explicit than one particular book a school board had to approve.

The book in question was The Catcher in the Rye.

Nearly lost in all the debate over the language of the book were the merits of the story itself but, fortunately, those merits must have prevailed in the end with the South Orangetown School Board. Otherwise most of us would have had to wait until college to read the book, if even then.

The author of that book, J.D. Salinger, died on January 28 at the age of 91. Undoubtedly during his lifetime, and particularly during the “Silent Generation” era of the 1950s, he was aware that The Catcher in the Rye was causing a stir. Especially among school boards and parents of young, supposedly “impressionable” children. But he must have known, also, that he was in the forefront of helping to break down the barriers between what is considered “acceptable” for public consumption and what isn’t. He certainly lived long enough to witness those changes. If he wasn’t TOO isolated in his New Hampshire fortress of solitude for the past fifty years, he had to heard or at least KNOWN about rap music and its nothing-sacred lyrics. Holden Caulfield & Co. were Mary Poppins compared to what the public is consuming today, especially the young people.

After the passage of nearly half a century and no surviving school papers from that time, it is impossible for me to reconstruct what our in-class discussions or written assignments might have been after reading The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield was not exactly someone we public schoolers at Tappan Zee High School could relate to and he certainly wasn’t a heroic figure to anyone I knew or hung out with at that time. Maybe it was just the wrong time to be reading the book. Maybe we weren’t ready for its deeper meanings or maybe it was TOO contemporary. There were no degrees of separation between us and the book’s unconventional hero. By the end of that decade, when those my age were in college, we could better understand and relate to Caulfield’s character and the adolescent dilemmas he encountered, along with the societal milieu in which they occurred.

Truly great literature is best understood from the perspective of a later time. The passage of time is what sets true “literature” apart from the rest of the pack. And it is precisely that definition that allows us to classify The Catcher in the Rye as a work of literature; not just simply another book among millions of pieces of reading matter.

Although I am a professional writer I would never be so presumptuous as to pass myself off as an authority on literature. I was a History major and only minored in English. I have read many, though by no means ALL of what are considered the greatest books of all time; “classics,” if you will. But just reading is one thing: Interpreting is another. The latter takes a greater effort, involving a firm grasp of historical perspective and keen insights into the nuances of human nature.

No one, not even the professors of literature and literary critics, can truly and fully define what a “classic” is or exactly what makes one so. However, there are certain benchmarks by which the merits of a particular written work can be judged and measured. Prominent among those benchmarks would be how well a particular work depicts the period in which it was written. Even though that work may be classified as “fiction” (and most of the great literary classics ARE fiction), it must still tell a story against a backdrop of events that factor significantly into the historical record.

Margaret Mitchell wrote only one novel in her lifetime yet it’s one that everyone knows by name, if not by actual reading or viewing the Clark Gable-Vivien Leigh film epic. It has been called everything from “sappy” and “stereotypical” to “blatantly racist” but even the voluminous novel’s harshest critics have to concede that it tells a powerful story about a significantly transformational time in our nation’s history. More importantly, it captures events and personalities as well as, if not better than, any nonfiction history book covering that same era.

J.D. Salinger, too, only wrote one novel and most people know what that one was as well. He wrote a handful of short stories that were collected in two or three short volumes, and a few published articles in prestigious magazines. But that’s it, unless some so-far-undiscovered trove of unpublished work comes to light now that he’s no longer with us. If that’s the case we’ll probably know soon enough.

Joining Salinger in passing the same week were two other well-known writers, Erich Segal and Robert Parker. They were writers of a much different breed. They wrote for popular consumption. Salinger didn’t. They sought public acclaim and remuneration. Salinger didn’t. Although Segal taught literature – at Yale, no less! – it is highly doubtful Love Story will be read and studied in classrooms a generation from now. Neither will Parker’s Spenser detective novels. The Catcher in the Rye WILL.

Writing and getting published in these years of the early 21st century has never been easier. With computer technology giving rise to “e-books” and “print-on-demand” books, it is no exaggeration to say that ANYONE can get published now. Certain POD companies don’t even screen the manuscripts they agree to publish, nor do they edit them for style, grammar or potentially libelous content. They simply agree to put the work between covers without accepting them on the basis of their merits, and they print only as many copies as are requested from book buyers. Aside from posting an online entry with a book service like amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com, it’s up to the authors to do their books’ promotion and selling. In most cases the author ends up becoming his or her own best customer.

These new innovations and options have turned the conventional publishing world on its head and upset their previously tightly controlled applecart. There are a lot more books out there, competing with the more carefully screened works that the remaining handful of “major publishers” choose to put into print.

This has, no doubt, cheapened the whole concept of getting a book published and, having gone that POD route myself, I am not in a position to be critical of the practice. The inevitable result, though, has been to flood the market with hundreds of thousands of books that probably don’t belong out there. This makes it harder for the really good writers to rise above the pack. And, if there are any potential “classics” among this group, they may never get noticed. Or, if they do, it may be a long time from now.

To write for “posterity” is the goal of every writer who takes his or her craft seriously. We are all egotists who want our legacies to outlive us. We want our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be reading and evaluating our books in literature classes a century or more from now. We all want to write a great “classic” or two. Or MORE! Few of us will, though.

More often than not, “classics” are created inadvertently. Spontaneously, rather than by design. Rarely does an author set out to write one and actually have it happen. And, if it does happen, they rarely live to see it. J.D. Salinger was one of the fortunate ones who did. Though largely cut off from the world – by his own choice – he could not have been unaware of the fact that his one complete novel had entered the pantheon of American literary classics. A “one-hit wonder?” Maybe, but WHAT A HIT!

Any one of us in the writing fraternity would most eagerly welcome that distinction.



HIGH DREAMS, LOW OVERHEAD

I woke up one recent morning feeling very depressed.

Not a nice way to begin a day - or an article - but don't stop reading yet. The story gets better.

I had just spent $2,000 to get the engine replaced in my seven-year-old car. Two thousand dollars, because a $25 part - a timing belt - broke and other vital parts in the engine broke with it. And it left me broke. Broke and behind on all my bills, including my rent.

Of course the cause of my vehicular seizure had to be the one exception to the power train warranty my car was still under; the one thing most likely to go and the manufacturer knew it. And stupid me for not reading every word in the 80-page owner's manual and knowing it also. But the dealership would be more than happy to replace the engine for me - for only $4,100! I told them what they can do with their forty one hundred dollars and it has something to do with a place where the sun doesn't shine. Then I shopped around and got an estimate for half that amount.

Two thousand dollars, to most working people, may not seem like a lot of money but for a freelance writer who has finally—after 40 years—mastered the art of getting by on $1,200 to $1,500 a month, it's a killer. An unplanned expense like this can (and does) throw everything else off: especially a carefully planned budget. It's something we all would like to be prepared for and all of us should have some kind of a cushion—a contingency fund—set aside for just this type of situation. But, with the cost of everything these days . . . ha! Good luck on that.

So I sat down and did my I.Os. (as in I Owe), calculating everything I was behind on, and came up with $1,271.10. Depressing. But when I did the numbers for what I had coming in, guess what? . . . the sun came out! $1,850!! See, I told you it gets better. My granddaughter was actually able to get a few extra Christmas presents after all.

There are two lessons to be learned from this: keep your overhead low and your income incoming. Keeping overhead low may sound elementary and, when there's not much income to begin with, you may not have any choice in the matter. But, we're all human - yes, writers too -- though some unknowing souls may think we're superhumans who love working for little or nothing. And, being human, we tend to want things we can't afford and we hate to be denied.

Well, deny yourself anyway. It's not easy and it's not fun. It may entail staying home and working on a Friday and Saturday night instead of going out to your favorite music club and dropping $60-$80 between the bar and the musicians' tip jar. It might mean putting off that nice little weekend getaway you've been itching to take in the Tennessee mountains. It might mean doing without a lot of things you want. Suck it up and do without them anyway.

I might have had to junk my car were it not for a $1,000 check I knew I had coming in, thanks to a series book writing job I completed three months earlier. Coupled with the thousand dollar check I get every month for writing an online tourism newsletter, it was enough to put my car back on the road - for half the price the dealership wanted to charge me. Having half of what I needed in hand and knowing the other half would be arriving soon enabled me to negotiate a 50-50 deal with a mechanic I knew. If I had been living beyond my means, there's no way I could have done this.

Like all writers whose writing is their sole source of income (and not a hobby or a sideline), I dream of hitting the big payday: That blockbuster novel that makes the NYT Bestseller List or the screenplay that turns into a blockbuster feature film. And I am confident that my day will come as long as I keep working toward it and I don't let the dream die. In the words of one of the real-life characters in one of my ten yet-unsold screenplays, "When a dream dies its fate must be shared by the dreamer as well."

That wasn't my protagonist speaking. It was me.