Re: Salinger and Eastern Religions
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@hotpop.com)
Thu, 23 Sep 1999 17:50:56 +1000
Last night, in that vivid state of mental arousal I always experience
before sleep, I was reading the Hamilton Salinger biography (it's actually
the only Salinger bio I own so it serves for general purpose facts) and a
number of things occured to me - most of which have unfortunately slipped
out into the ether. However, the main one was a firm establishment of my
theories on Salinger's involvement with Eastern Religion.
To put it on a timeline:
1941: The New Yorker accepts `Slight Rebellion Off Madison', but doesn't
publish it til 1946.
1944: S. joins the war, having completed six chapters of his novel about
Holden Caulfield which is being `suspended' until further notice.
July, 1945: S. in hospital in Nuremberg with nervous breakdown.
September 1945: S. marries a German woman, Sylvia. The marriage lasts for
eight months; the bride is brought to America around May 1946 but soon
returns to Europe for a divorce.
It is at around this point that I propose Salinger's interest in Eastern
religion really began to hot up, and what better time? (As I pointed out
earlier, T.S. Eliot experienced a religious revival in almost identical
conditions, after the dissolution of his marriage and his nervous
breakdown). Such a move would seem in line with postwar dysphoria at large
and also accompanied a period of professional uncertainty (1945-47) ; S's
first publishing deal had just fallen through (he had been organising a
book of short stories called `The Young Folks') and no new stories were
published in this time. This obviously left Salinger with a lot of time on
his hands, until:
December 1947: Publication of `The Inverted Forest'
If we accept the theory that there is at least the residual influence of
Vedanta - even the subconscious influence, and it seems too significant to
be a coincidence - then this would put Salinger's artistic renaissance hand
in hand with his spiritual renaissance. It is most notable that Salinger
also recommenced work on a new draft of `The Catcher in the Rye' at this
point. I propose that perhaps Salinger abandoned the material as unwieldy;
the `drafts' we see in `Slight Rebellion off Madison' and `I'm Crazy'
indicate that very early on, Salinger knew what he wanted to say, but not
quite how he wanted to say it. I postulate that in the religious texts
Salinger has been reading he has found what has been lacking in his novel
all along - a clear structuring device, a final discovery of what Holden's
journey is `for' and what he is heading towards. It's impossible to say if
the similarities between Holden's story and that of both Gautama Buddha and
Sri Ramakrishna were there all along by coincidence or were added by
Salinger to tailor the novel to its new structure and purpose (oh for a
first draft !!!) but either way it would indicate that the interest was
there and that Salinger made the major epiphany of his book rhyme
resoundingly with Vivekananda's proclaimation that `when you step beyond
thought and intellect and all reasoning, then you have made the first step
towars God: and that is the beginning of life.'
Hamilton disagrees, earmarking `Teddy' (1952) as a product of `Salinger's
new Orientalised persona', demonstrating all the misplaced fervour of a
recent enthusiast. I disagree; to me Teddy seems the first effort to
crystallise the tip of an iceberg of a heck of a lot of thinking and
theorising. I see it more as the first attempt to put his learnings into a
publicly-digestable form.
(As an aside to DDS I note with interest that the author Leila Hadley
instantly recognised JDS in the early fifties as a dead ringer for JDS -
Jean De-Daumier Smith, that is. He was apparently good at sketching and his
room had a similar lack of chairs. (: )
A beautiful quote to end on: Salinger's pledge of allegiance to those
pieces of art that contain not `the craftsmanship critics are looking for'
but `the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds'.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Camille
verona_beach@hotpop.com