J. D. Salinger died

He is one of those authors whose work is both inspirational and weak, because it speaks to a very specific segments of the population. I was discussing Salinger yesterday with a colleague, he a bit younger than me, and he read the book two years ago – he was singularly unimpressed by the prose, topic and pace of the story.

I read Catcher in the Rye at university, and I then wholly agreed that the story is trivial, and generally boring, but I forgot to whom this story was speaking too: teenagers in general and teenage boys in particular. I read Salinger as part of a course I took a McGill University on the 20^th Century Novel. The teacher was Hugh MacLennan, a writer in his own right and by then a raconteur long past retirement age (he was by then in his late 70s), he died a few years after I graduated, I believe that mine was the last class he thought at McGill. I was a young French Canadian kid, switching from the French school system to English so that I could eventually attend a top American or English university (it was also 3 blocks away from the paternal home). In discussions with my parents they suggested that exposure to 20^th century literature would help me get a feel for the language, its pace and format. Until then my exposure to literature was very different: Zola, Gide, Prouste, Camue Celine (I guy buy the way), Malraux, were my anchor points. I knew nothing of English language literature. I had never heard of Foster, Maugham, Yeats, Joyce or Eliot (never mind Shakespeare or Donner).

I was a perfect specimen of Montreal’s famous Two Solitudes, as described in Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 book of the same name. More difficult now to have such barriers with the internet…then again one is always surprised! Looking back today, I would love to sit in Professor MacLennan’s class. I was too young and inexperienced in any kind of English literature to fully benefit or appreciate the privilege of listening to one of the 20^th Canadian literature giants. Born in 1907 he knew most of the authors personally, which made for very entertaining classes. I guess that’s what education is all about – I suspect now that his was the equivalent of the Master Classes you can sometime catch on PBS (e.g. Domingo does Opera, McKellen does Shakespeare).

This class led me to discover several things: first I never had heard of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, second never volunteer! Introducing himself to the class Professor Maclennan asked the assembled class if anybody in the class hadn’t read Catcher. I raised my hand, the only one to do so, in a class of more than 100 kids – there was general laughter, and marked me to professor MacLennan for the rest of the year (several classmate later admitted that they too hadn’t read to book…). I also discovered that Montreal is really a divided city along language lines (also to a certain extent religious lines – most French speakers are Catholic most Anglophones are protestants – but that less important today as Eastern Canada is largely agnostic/atheists). The cultural division between the two segments of Montreal had never read struck home until about 4 years ago, when discussing the stupidity of a salesman in a shop to a colleagues (and mentioned that it was like being in the dead parrot sketch). Blank looks all around, my colleagues were very well read but their education had bypassed Month Python completely – they had never heard of these guys, and their impact on comedy (even here)..

Going back to our story (sometimes I think I ramble like the Two Ronnies) Some of my French Literature heritage has been ruined forever, especially Zola’s Germinal – it was used for a whole year in French class for semantics (I still get chills). Others, I just didn’t get, very much like Salinger, many French writers were writing for very specific age groups. The most famous is/was Marcel Prouste a 19^th century French writer who wrote the epic 6 volume series; In Search of Lost Time. I’ve read maybe a 100 page out of 5,000 he wrote, and I kept putting the first volume down. My father told me that he faced the same problems, having bought the entire works in his 20s. He finally read the series cover to cover in his 60s. .

So this is my remembrance of the life of J.D. Salinger