J.D.SALINGER & THE CATCHER IN THE RYE: THE FRONT ROW ANNIVERSARY

I was on BBC Front Row last night, with host Samira Ahmed and Erica Wagner, to discuss the 100th anniversary of the birth of JD Salinger, and his most famous creation, The Catcher In The Rye. You can link to the show here, the Salinger discussion starts about six minutes in. I've written about Salinger here before, when I appeared on BBC's The Strand after his death, and talked about my reaction to the book when I read it as a precocious 16 year old, who'd already read Look Homeward Angel, Lolita, and other books that dealt with adolescents in other ways. You can find that essay, written almost exactly nine years ago, here . It might be an idea to read it first.

I made the same mistake then that most readers did, and do, which is to assume The Catcher In The Rye is a story about Holden Caufield as a badly-adjusted teenager, when really it is a story about his looking into his parents' world, as if he were a child who already had experienced it. It has, in effect, been adopted as a classic for being something it on the surface is, but underneath is not.

Our discussion last night was fast-paced and never quite gave me the chance to say this fully, and say that the most important thing I now take away from the book is its expression of loss of faith, something that comes up often in Salinger, and reflects among other things his war service. I now see Catcher as a sort of allegory about that loss of faith, a picture of adults confronted with it and passing it on. As I said on the programme, I think it was the way readers leapt upon Catcher as a precis of teen-aged, rather than adult, angst that may have led, at least in part, to Salinger's so-called reclusiveness; not just a reaction to becoming a sort of celebrity -- which was something not everyone sought in those days --, but a celebrity recognised for perhaps the wrong reasons.

I mentioned Hemingway twice, which was probably once too much, but his influence on Salinger was huge. They met in Paris during the war, and then when Salinger was in the middle of his most harrowing time on the front in Germany; he and another would-be writer GI took a jeep and visited Hemingway, who was nearby on a reporting assignment, and of course carrying a supply of champagne.

You see Hemingway in Salinger's beautifully clean style, in the wonderful way he shows rather than tells what's happening in a scene. This is especially clear in the short stories, which are my favourites. 'A Perfect Day For Bananafish', in which Seymour Glass seems a remarkably Hemingway-esque figure, like Hemingway's characters holding in feelings which Salinger only hints at through action, and then, like Papa, giving in to that loss of faith or whatever and killing himself. It reminds me strongly of 'The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber', though of course the reasons for death are very different.  'Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut', which I also mentioned, is similar, reinforcing the reason 'Bananafish' is so moving: Salinger's women are far more real than Hemingway's. The plaintive end of the 'Uncle Wiggly', 'was I a nice girl?', to me echoes everything behind Holden Caufield in Catcher. 'Uncle Wiggly' was made into the film My Foolish Heart, which you only need watch once to understand why Salinger never allowed another of his stories to be filmed. The story 'Uncle Wiggly' is more outwardly playful with its imaginary friends and real cruelties, and its women and children are the focus. Which of course leads us to 'For Esme--With Love and Squalor', which was discussed in detail in the programme; it sets out the whole idea of loss of faith quite simply, and with Esme creates a young character who has innocently already absorbed it.

The moment where I started to speak, just as Samira moved on to the next item, was when I wanted to say I actually remember reading the New York Times Magazine piece by the 18 year old Joyce Maynard, then a student at Yale (of course) titled 'An 18 Year Old Looks Back At Life' when it came out in April 1972. I was just turned 21, less than three years older, and about to finish university a month later, after going through the turbulence of protest and college-change, and my reaction at the time was 'where did they find this female Holden Caufield'? (At Yale, of course!). In my previous essay, I said the sotry rang false, making it ironic in the extreme that Salinger might recognise in her that same sort of absence of a faith, or of a centre, and be so attracted to it. From today's point of view, we might consider him preying on her, but there may have been that real connection lying behind it.

I would also have liked to say that Salinger was writing a dissection of the American Fifites, in its conformity and comfort, after two decades of depression and war, well before Richard Yates, and writing it better, too. I would have liked to refer to Holden Caufield's ghost in the 1945 story 'The Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise': reading that reminds you of Holden's brother Allie; Allie's death is the moment you can identify Holden's own crisis of faith. Allie dies of leukemia in 1946, but whenever I think of that I think of the war in coded terms. If you read my earlier piece, you'll see I wondered if Salinger had somehow cut off the adult part of his talent, but that bothered me, and having read on since then, I think it's much more that he wrote his adult perceptions into the story--and created in Holden Caufield a character who was a product of those perceptions, and of what Salinger feared was their effect on his, his youthful protagonist, and humanity's souls.

JACK KEROUAC, THE HAUNTED LIFE, AND BIRTHDAYS

Yesterday was Jack Kerouac's birthday, and mine, which makes his easy to remember. He would have been 92, had he not drunk himself to death at the age of 47. Last week I went on BBC Radio 4's Front Row, to discuss with host John Wilson Kerouac's newly-published novella The Haunted Life, written in 1944 and long thought lost in a taxicab, which was published that day by Penguin. Personally, I would have set the 12^th for the publication date, but maybe that's why I'm not in marketing. You can access the discussion via IPlayer here; we begin about 23 minutes into the programme, just after Johnny Cash. The discussion is good, but time was limited, so I thought I'd add a few things here.

First some background to the book. The MS was sold at auction in 2002. Reading between the lines in the introduction by Todd Tietchen, a professor at Umass-Lowell, one can assume that the MS was left behind by Kerouac in Allen Ginsberg's Columbia dorm room, and put up for sale after Ginsberg's death by his partner Peter Orlovsky or his heirs, after the On The Road scroll sold to Jim Irsay for nearly $2.5 million. It's not his first 'lost' MS to be published recently; in 2011 another, slightly earlier novella, The Sea Is My Brother, was issued as an e-book.

1944 was the year he met Ginsberg, the year of the killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr (see the film Kill Your Darlings, which I also discussed with John on Front Row), and Kerouac's jailing as an accessory; he married his first wife, in essence, to make bail. The run-up to those events is interesting. Kerouac was already a year older than many freshmen when he entered Columbia; he had done a post-graduate year of high school at Horace Mann to get his grades up. He broke his leg playing freshman football, and when he came back his sophomore year, he couldn't get along with coach Lou Little. In 1942 he left Columbia to join the Merchant Marine; completing only one voyage to Greenland before quitting. A few months later, his ship was sunk by the Germans, with many of his shipmates lost. In 1943 he joined the Navy, but lasted less than two weeks before being discharged on psychiatric grounds. He was described as 'restless, apathetic, seclusive', and the shrinks described his 'auditory hallucinations, ideas of reference and suicide, and a rambling grandiose philosophical manner'.

Which is a pretty good description of The Haunted Life. It's very much a piece of juvenelia, which seems surprising when you consider Kerouac was already 22 when he wrote it, and had at least second-hand experience of war. You can see loss in the shadows behind this book; he is already writing about friends dead in the war. But both of these lost novellas may be seen as rehearsals for Kerouac's first published novel, which became The Town And The City—a working out of the characters and situations, and, as the introduction shows, of Kerouac's plan to use those people to reflect the changing of the times. It was all modeled on The Brothers Karamazov.

He never is able to hang such grand plans on his story. Instead his main character, Peter Martin, is mostly there to show his and Kerouac's influences, very much a Stephen Daedalus figure. He is a would-be writer, with a hugely romantic idea of what being a writer means. Mostly this is expressed through lists and descriptions of those he admires, like William Saroyan or the now-forgotten Albert Halper. Martin, like Kerouac he is also an athlete—not a football player but a runner (although he smokes incessantly, obviously not in training). He is a dreamer, but it is his brother who has already left Galloway (the stand in for Lowell) and gone to see to world; it is a friend who has the dreams of enlisting and/or traveling.

This is something that indicates the conflict between the tough persona of Kerouac the French-Canadian jock from Lowell, trying to please his reactionary and hard father, and Kerouac the sensitive poet with the adoring mother. You can see it in his naval enlistment photo, and it's always been something that's made Kerouac hard for actors to get. You don't need to look like Allen Ginsberg to play him, but with Kerouac you need the physicality along with the brooding. Jack Huston absolutely misses this in Kill Your Darlings (and he can't even throw a football); Sam Riley's far too fragile in On The Road, and John Heard gets the insecurity but not the bruised toughness, and pales before Nick Nolte's Neal Cassady in Heart Beat, which is kind of how they related in life too.

The force behind The Haunted Life, and The Town And The City, is clearly Thomas Wolfe. You can see in moments of Wolfe's breathlessness the beginnings of the stream of consciousness that would become On The Road. For all the importance of the meeting of minds between Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Carr at Columbia, none of them ever really adhered to the principals of 'The New Vision', their early manifesto. Indeed both Ginsberg and Kerouac worked their way through older models (Whitman and Wolfe) quite plainly; their creative group was driven primarily by the mix of personalities, not theoretics.

As you read the Peter Martin of The Haunted Life, you cannot help but recall the Peter Martin of The Town And The City, and remember that that novel ends with Martin putting on a leather jacket and going On The Road. He's like a working-class Holden Caufield, almost as passive to life's struggles, except he can actually take the decision to hit the road. You see a bit of Caulfield in Peter Martin, but Sal Paradise has transcended that. There's an unintentionally hilarious line in the introduction, where Tietchen comments that On The Road was the 'perfect accompaniment' to the Federal Highway Act of 1956, through which Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway system. But of course, beyond the unlikely vision of Ike reading On The Road, nothing could be further from the Kerouac experience than the hitch on the free-flowing emptiness of I-whatever. Years ago I considered just that point while hitching from Montreal to Martha's Vineyard, just as I-93 was crossing into Massachusetts and I was yearning for picturesque diner.

Kerouac's personal problem was that his first, apprentice novel would not be published finally until 1950, and On The Road would take seven more years to see print, by which time Kerouac was 35 years old, no longer a young rebel, and ill-prepared to be shot to mainstream stardom. Where Cassady moved on easily into the hippie and acid era with the Grateful Dead and Tom (not Thomas) Wolfe, Kerouac retreated, as it were, from fame into the personality of his father.

Which is why the last three pages of this novella, beautifully written, are so touching. Peter and his father have hit their point of political agreement, on the value of the working man, la pauvre peuple, the French-Canadian father's good if narrow side. Peter goes to his room, and lights his pipe (a teenaged track star) and looks out his window as 'a tender shroud was being lowered on this life'. I read 'this life' as being the comfort of the world he knows and the uncertainty of the world to which he aspires, which stretches well beyond that comfortable cocoon. 'With the darkness, and with the smell and feel of it, would come the old sounds of the suburban American summer's night...a boy's special nighttime cry and the cool swishing song of the trees: a music sweeter than anything else in the world, a music that can be seen—profusely green, leaf on leaf atremble—and a music that can be smelled, clover fresh, somehow sharp, and supremely rich.'

That is the foretaste of Kerouac at his best. Happy Birthday, Jack.