Translated material
Youth as retribution
In memory of David Salinger
Jerome David Salinger has passed away.Another classic.
Was there a classic?
Not a prophet, not a fighter, not a preacher... Not even a Master.
Actually, nothing at all has been published, a volume or two, no more. The main thing is the famous “Catcher in the Rye” (1951), “Nine Stories” (1953), “Frennie” (1961), “Higher than the rafters, carpenters!” (1963), several more stories.
And a sudden, irrevocable departure from literature - into complete seclusion, with no new publications, no contacts with journalists; silence and the occasional scandal over the lawsuits he filed from his lonely hillside citadel in Cornish, New Hampshire, for any attempt to invade his privacy. And also the periodically renewed guesses of the public, greedy for all kinds of near-literary PR happenings: what does Salinger’s silence mean?
Of course it was an event. He had just won great world fame, become, as they say now, a cult figure, and suddenly buried and walled up his talent, which was gaining strength and maturity. This is despite the fact that even during the war, serving in the army counterintelligence and participating in the landing of allied forces in Normandy, Jerome carried a typewriter with him.
I once had to write about the significance of his silence, and I must say that my opinion has not changed: his silence is worth a lot. In an era of total devaluation of the word, the collapse of the most important meanings and values, as well as the bazaar-like literary bustle, it spoke volumes. I don’t know if it was a conscious strategy to attract attention, a creative crisis, a religious conversion, a basic desire for silence, or something else. One way or another, his seclusion became symbolic.
Sometimes they try to narrow its readership to teenagers and students. This is unlikely to be the case, although the intellectualism of his child prodigy heroes, it would seem, could only alienate many. But there is no doubt that Salinger’s main reader is precisely from this age group. Yes, the writer did not move beyond his youth - all his main characters remained in it. Neurotic, crazy, with big pretensions, with all sorts of quirks, at the same time trusting and suspicious, kind and embittered, naive and wise, open and arrogant, they try to adapt to modern reality and are torn to death by it. It was Salinger who managed to capture the spiritual torments of youth, to express its maximalism, its unquenchable thirst for sincerity and purity, its traumatic experience of growing up and self-affirmation. However, if the matter had been limited to only this, it is unlikely that his “clever men” - the rebel Howfield, the seer Teddy, the entire fantastic Glass family - would have received such a response and such recognition.
Salinger was able to feel and express the mood in the air of the era. And the point is not only in his notorious passion for Zen Buddhism, which just at that time, and not without his assistance, was becoming fashionable in the West. He is not the only contemporary writer, contrasting naturalness, simplicity, enlightened acceptance of life and death (life-death) with cold rationalism and dull pragmatism, turning his gaze to the mystical East (remember Hesse or J. Kerouac). The writer, with his quest for human authenticity, helped the individual to spiritually define himself in the post-war world, overwhelming not only with its complexity, harshness and alienation, but also with the triumph of vulgarity and routine.
But did it help you survive? The results of his search are sometimes puzzling. His smartest and most authoritative hero, Seymour Glass, an unrecognized poet who sees purpose solely in the creative process itself, calls for seeing the deepest meaning and poetry in the most ordinary, most everyday manifestations of life. And he voluntarily leaves this life, leaving those around him to guess about the reasons.
Salinger's tragic paradox, the inability of his heroes to find themselves in ordinary everyday reality, their readiness for spiritual insights and escapism - all this has by no means lost its relevance today. As Blok wrote, youth is retribution. We can only guess what the writer, who lived for 91 years, left behind and whether there is something of general interest and truly artistic value in his legacy.
One thing is clear: it is impossible to imagine twentieth-century literature without this name. If Salinger didn't exist, he would have to be invented.