The recent death of JD Salinger, at the age of 91, has brought to a close one of the strangest chapters in modern American letters. No twentieth century American novel had more impact on the public imagination than The Catcher in the Rye, but once Salinger had written it, at a relatively young age, he spent the next five decades as a recluse, unwilling to accommodate intrusions into his private life from academics, biographers and other literary vultures. His solitude was ironically appropriate since one of the central themes of his work was a distrust in the disguises we all use to keep up social appearances. In his unsurpassed rendering of teenage alienation, Salinger’s anti-hero, Holden Caulfield sees right through the adult “phonies” around him – people who refuse to admit their shortcomings, or to acknowledge the world’s cruelties, irrationality and confusion. The book anticipated the counter-cultural tendencies of the sixties by a decade and for this fact alone deserved its remarkable critical and popular success. In addition to crafting a brand new voice for American fiction, the novel also had the distinction of both articulating and shaping the sensibility of an entire generation.
One of Salinger’s early breakthroughs as a writer came when he visited Paris after serving in the US army during the Second World War. There he met Ernest Hemingway, the legendary war correspondent and literary lion, and profited from his advice and encouragement. Soon afterwards, Salinger found his own, unique voice and went on to inspire a different school of American fiction. Decades later, it is still easy to see why. Salinger reintroduced an emotional range and unsentimental candour to American writing which had all but disappeared with the terse masculinity of Hemingway’s spare prose, and in many ways his was a necessary correction. Up to now, most American writers find their voices through an apprenticeship to one style or the other. Even more importantly, perhaps, decades of close reading and analysis in classrooms and universities, have placed Salinger’s fiction on the same footing in the American literary canon as The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. So although he never published a second novel – there were several collections of outstanding short stories – Salinger’s work exerted an enduring, and wide-ranging influence over the style and content of modern American fiction.
In each generation, only a handful of authors have the talent and ambition to write like Salinger, and even when they manage to live up to their promise, lasting success is far from assured. Ever since Gutenberg, literary taste and the whims of publishers and critics have played an inordinately large part in any book’s reception. In the Caribbean, this problem is compounded by our general indifference to serious literature. Within the last fifty years, several of our most important writers have treated the West Indian experience with imagination and sensitivity which can be compared with Salinger’s, but most of their work has been ignored by the societies that it describes. For example, any shortlist of the West Indian canon would probably contain Derek Walcott’s Another Life, VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin – but only a tiny fraction of us have read Walcott’s poem, and not many more are familiar with the novels.
Although the West Indian diaspora has produced dozens of successful writers for foreign markets – the Wikipedia page for “Guyanese Writers” currently lists 55 entries – almost none receive the attention they deserve locally. Part of this failure is educational – in the Caribbean we no longer read like we used to, and literary fiction simply doesn’t have a large enough audience to be commercially viable, but some of it is also connected to our fragmented cultural identity. Many of us are willing to read foreign authors for their insights into the human condition, but we routinely deny local writers the same authority to transcend their origins. Even though their work is firmly established in foreign landscapes and cultures, we assume that literary titans like Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulker tell us about “Life,” but we read Lamming’s G. and Naipaul’s Biswas as nothing more than examples of African or Indian Caribbean “experience” instead of facets of our shared humanity.
One reason that West Indian writers find a much warmer reception abroad is that the diaspora experience tends to disprove our casual assumptions about race and class, and expatriate audiences find it easier to see themselves in the writing. As far back as the mid-fifties, books like Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners dismantled the myth of separate racial existences, as have hundreds of books and plays since then. But within the Caribbean, identity politics still tends to trump the literary imagination. Old habits of pigeonholing ourselves according to island, race, class or religion persist, trapping our writers in a curious inversion of Salinger’s fate. Silent and secretive, he was read obsessively and re-interpreted by a generation of readers and writers. By contrast, our writers barely get noticed, even though they are writing from the heart of our societies. As a result, much of our best writing is published, and read, everywhere except where it is most relevant. Given the economics of publishing literary fiction, this state of affairs will not change soon.
“Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” warns Holden Caulfield, from inside a mental hospital, in the last line of Salinger’s great novel, “If you do, you start missing everybody.” The line is usually read as his admission of defeat. In effect he is saying, Don’t waste time explaining yourself, because it hurts when you get no response, and the pain of narration only makes losses harder to bear. Unfortunately those sentiments could easily serve as an epitaph for a generation of West Indian writing.