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Epilogue: Remembering J. D. Salinger and Robert B. Parker
by Mark R. Leffler
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” – Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye This past month has been one of great loss to the literary world, and I mean that literally. Like millions of readers and thousands of writers, I have been significantly influenced and entertained by authors J.D. Salinger and Robert B. Parker, both of whom passed away recently. I have read and reread Salinger more than any other writer. And Parker's fifty novels, most featuring his chivalric private detective Spenser, was the most consistently engaging and rewarding series of stories I've ever read. Both Salinger and Parker were masters of the first person narrative device. Salinger employed it most famously in his iconic novel of teenage confusion The Catcher in the Rye, which still sells about a quarter of a million copies a year and is said to be the most stolen book in public libraries. Parker adopted the narrative style of his main influence, the brilliant mystery author Raymond Chandler, who pretty much invented the hard-boiled American detective novel (along with Dashiell Hammett) with his PI Philip Marlowe. It was no coincidence that both sleuths shared surnames with English poets. The first person narrator speaks directly to the reader, and this can result in an astonishing sense of connection and intimacy. The reader often feels a deep personal connection with the author. Salinger commented on the passionate devotion of some of his readers in one of his later books noting that he had been “knighted for my heart shaped prose”. But he kept an arms length from the world, even his fans. One can imagine the horror Salinger must have felt when Mark David Chapman announced to the police, after murdering John Lennon, that everything he had to say was in The Catcher in the Rye, a copy of which he kept with him at all times. Salinger went to court more than once to protect his privacy from would be biographers. He refused all attempts to be interviewed and is reported to have instructed his agent to burn all letters from fans. Parker, on the other hand, took great delight in living in the world, enjoying the benefits that came with popularity, fame and fortune. He was married all his life to his childhood sweetheart, Joan, to whom he dedicated all of his novels. As prolific as Salinger was silent (Salinger's last new work was published in the mid-Sixties), Parker died at his desk where he wrote every single day except Sundays. Parker's style may have become somewhat streamlined and formulaic near the end, but he churned out novels at a pace of roughly three a year, branching out into Westerns recently with a well received series featuring two lawmen much like the heroes of his detective fiction. Those readers who never delved beyond The Catcher in the Rye have missed one of the most dazzling acts of high wire linguistic acrobatics ever attempted. A friend of Salinger's who knew him in the Fifties, spoke of him as “a profoundly serious guy on a search for God.” His later stories, especially those involving the Glass Family and their dear sainted dead older brother Seymour not only reveal this interest in religions and Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism, but manage to impart in the reader something akin to a “satori” or experience of enlightenment. One of his most popular books, Franny and Zooey, a combination of two long stories that were published a year apart in The New Yorker (which published all of his post-Catcher writing), provides the best example of this. Franny Glass collapses during a visit to her Ivy League boyfriend. Her visit reveals a fascination with The Jesus Prayer, and a book entitled The Pilgrims Way. In Zooey, we meet her mother Bessie and brother Zooey, who are both concerned about her breakdown which has left her camped out in her parents' living room. In an amazing final scene, Zooey manages to impart a sense of peace and serenity in his sister, a scene that staggers the reader even in multiple readings. No mean feat. Salinger is criticized, even by some of his greatest fans, for his increasing obsession with The Glass Family, Seymour and all things metaphysical. He complained in Seymour: An Introduction that any use of the word God “except as a healthy American expletive will be confirmation of my professional undoing.” He made light of his reputation for a fascination with “an entity we shall call The Old Man in the Mountain”. While his personal belief system was hardly Christian (Sri Ramakrishna was a friend and a great influence on his spiritual outlook) his writing showed great interest in the teachings and moral lessons of Christ, discussed at great length in Franny and Zooey. Salinger honed his writing skills with the short story form, becoming a successful published author in the heyday of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers which ran scores of short stories and paid handsomely. He even had a short story featuring Catcher's Holden Caulfield accepted by The New Yorker before World War Two erupted, leading to Salinger's enlistment in the U.S. Army in the intelligence arm of the service. Salinger took part in the D-Day landing at Utah Beach and was involved in The Battle of the Bulge. During this time he was one of the first soldiers to see the Nazi death camps, remaking later that “you never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.” Near the end of the war he also suffered a nervous breakdown, partly described in his classic short story For Esme, with Love and Squalor. That and eight of his best stories are collected in Nine Stories, which showcase his mastery of the form. The war changed him from a successful commercial fiction author to an deeply serious and profoundly spiritual artist, insistent upon achieving a life and type of artistic success without regard to the normal American standards of success or popularity, reaching out to each new generation of confused, failing and flailing adolescents desperate for knowledge and understanding and adrift in age of angst and nihilism. He spoke the language of youth, an act of artistic ventriloquism especially impressive for a mature adult who had lived through the horrors of war. Norman Mailer once dismissed him as “the greatest mind that never left prep school.” But Salinger wrote with love and compassion for the trials of adolescence. And the criticism too easily dismisses his later works, most of which involved serious adult issues. While Salinger withdrew from the world and particularly the world of book publishing, Parker became a bestselling author whose popularity soared when his crime novels became the basis for the Eighties TV show Spenser For Hire, starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks as Spenser and his morally idiosyncratic partner Hawk. His first novel, The Godwolf Manuscript, involved murder and intrigue on a college campus, a world he knew particularly well, having taught while pursuing his graduate degrees. He received a Masters and PhD from Boston University, writing his thesis on the role of the chivalric hero tracing its appearance from Arthurian legends up to the American Western and the detective fiction of the Forties. The success of his first five Spenser novels allowed him to quit his teaching job. He once remarked that the infighting among faculty on campuses is so intense and bitter "because the stakes are so small." His love and familiarity with Chandler's writing let to him being asked by the Chandler estate to finish a barely begun unfinished manuscript. The resulting book, Poodle Springs, was followed by another Marlowe story, this one completely original, Perchance to Dream, a sequel to Chandler's The Big Sleep. The popularity and quality of crime fiction had waned considerably in the Age of Aquarius, and Spenser's wise cracking tough guy with a heart of gold reinvigorated the genre. No romantic loner, like Marlowe or Sam Spade, Spenser, like Parker had a longtime love who figured prominently in the novels. His friendship with Hawk showcased one of the first great African American characters in detective fiction, albeit one with a preference for solving problems by killing people. Persons of various ethnicities and sexual preferences were portrayed with sensitivity, wit and charm (Parker and his wife have two sons who are gay). Bestselling author Harlan Coben told an interviewer once: “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”
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