Exploring the Relationship Between J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Originally written for presentation at the F. Scott Fitzgerald conference in Montgomery, Alabama, 2013)
At the start of the “Zooey” section of Franny and Zooey, J. D. Salinger writes,
“Somewhere in The Great Gatsby (which was my Tom Sawyer when I was twelve), the youthful narrator remarks that everyone suspects himself of having at least one of the cardinal virtues, and he goes on to say that he thinks his, bless his heart, is honesty. Mine, I think, is that I know the difference between a mystical story and a love story. I say that my current offering isn’t a mystical story, or a religiously mystifying story, at all. I say it’s a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated.”
This quote helps to explain how I really feel about reading Salinger and Fitzgerald, but in order to get there I have to backtrack a little (and then maybe do an end-around), because the critical conversation between Salinger and Fitzgerald (and Hemingway) begins with Holden Caulfield doing his best Harold Bloom at the conclusion of chapter 18 of The Catcher in the Rye:
“What gets me about D. B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That’s what I don’t understand. It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don’t see how D. B. could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that. I mean, for instance, I don’t see how he could like a phone book like that and still like that one by Ring Lardner or that other one he’s so crazy about, The Great Gatsby. D. B. got sore when I said that, and said I was too young and all to appreciate it, but I don’t think so. I told him I liked Ring Lardner and The Great Gatsby and all. I did, too. I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me. Anyway, I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it. I swear to God I will.”
Unfortunately for Salinger scholars everywhere, the real bomb that the passage dropped on the world was the stink-bomb of ridiculous criticism about Holden-as-literary-critic. As one critic observes:
“In Catcher . . . Holden labels Hemingway’s Lt. Henry . . . ‘a phony’ while praising Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. The seemingly inexplicable attack upon Hemingway’s extremely individualistic hero is puzzling until we recall that there is little approval anywhere in Salinger’s writing from those who enjoy sexual intercourse out of wedlock, reject the world, make a ‘separate peace,’ and do not allow the unfeeling world to defeat or destroy them. Gatsby, on the other hand, after creating his Long Island ‘dream world’ is amazingly circumspect in his relations with Daisy and does allow himself to be destroyed rather than abandon his dream. Salinger’s characters seem to agree with Nick Carraway that Gatsby is ‘worth the whole damn bunch of them put together.’
I share this long quote because I’ve read it over and over and still don’t quite know what to make of it. Though I will attempt to return to that part about Salinger and sex (even premarital sex) below, first, here is another critic’s bomb for Holden to fall on:
A number of readers have confessed to a certain uneasiness about Frederic, among them Holden Caulfield. [Frederic Henry] does not love Catherine as she deserves. He takes without giving. He withholds. By showing us these shortcomings in Frederic Henry and by implicitly repudiating his philosophical justifications, Hemingway distances himself from his protagonist, who is one of those first-person narrators whose opinions are not to be trusted.
Now, it’s true I’m picking on these particular critics to illustrate a point about the retrospective and (questionable) narration of Holden Caulfield, Frederic Henry and Nick Carraway, respectively. All three narrators experience their epiphanies after the primary actions have occurred in the respective novels. I would like to argue that none of these characters are to be “trusted” during the course of the events taking place—and if they are we are trusting them at our own risk. The working title of The Catcher in the Rye was “I’m Crazy.” Would you trust Holden Caulfield if you met him on the street? Holden tells us he is a “liar,” and one who is often complicit in activities with all the “other phonies.” Yes, Holden is cool, but is it enough to trust a liar because they are cool? Nick Carraway is not to be trusted—but we want to trust him because we are listening to him tell the story. The fact is that most of us would want to hang out on Gatsby’s blue lawn. Nick is the guy at the party we’d most likely overlook because he’s just so damn honest and sincere—and moral. We all want to hear the liar because he is far more interesting and bombastic. We want our morality delivered not from the pulpit but from the back of a train that is hell-bent for election. Gatsby’s blue lawn is one step removed from Willie Stark’s campaign trail.
My real point here is that so many of Salinger’s critics got Holden’s reading of Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrong. D.B. is the one that they should be listening to. D.B. went to the war and knows something about the world and life. Holden will understand Hemingway’s novel when he gets older and understands the world a bit better, just as Nick does when reflecting on what he has come to understand about Gatsby when he comes “back from the East,” after the fall (Holden also begins his memoir in the West looking back on the East). What does Holden tell us that he loves about Gatsby?—the most superficial of qualities—the way he talks: “I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.”
But, to balance out the critical heritage, I’d like to give Frederic Henry the final word here with regards to all three narrators and their respective rights of passage. Early on in A Farewell to Arms, Frederic recognizes that there was a Priest who, he later realizes, “had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.”
Or, as The Faces put it in their song “Ooh La La,” “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.”
Of course my own gripe with my brothers, the critics, is echoed by a wonderful post-script in Salinger’s famous letter to Hemingway (after he lost his mind for a bit in Nuremburg, Germany after the war). Salinger writes,
“Edmond Wilson published a kind of scrapbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald (a dirty idea), calling it ‘crack up.’ Malcom Cowley reviewed it for The New Yorker, or reviewed Fitzgerald himself in the damn superior way critics review dead men. It’s so easy to write a ‘good’ review of Fitzgerald. All his shortcomings stick out so obviously, and, if a few don’t, Fitzgerald himself points them out. It seems so apparent that anybody who would write a book like Gatsby could never possibly ‘develop.’ His craftsmanship, or his beauty, was only applicable to his weaknesses, don’t you think? I don’t believe, as his critics seem to, that The Last Tycoon would have been his best book. He was ready to give it a Gatsby twist. It’s just as well he didn’t finish it, I think.”
For his part, Hemingway addresses Wilson (or Bunny) and his book on Fitzgerald in a letter to Cowley (a letter that also includes a recollection of meeting Salinger during the war).
“Have you seen Bunny’s book on Scott? I tried to get it from Max and have it ordered but they say it is temporarily out of print. All of the things about Scott you can’t write as long as Zelda or, I suppose even young Scotty live. The way it really was. I knew him better than almost anyone but Bunny never even asked me for a letter from him. Mainly because he said such things about Bunny I guess. Bunny surely tries to fit people into his procrustean (correct me) bed whether they are suited to it by what really happened. Once his is committed to a theory on a writer nothing that writer does can ever change it. You might write a hell of a book that you’d prove the whole story false. But it will be dismissed in a footnote.”
This meditation could proceed along the lines of critics and phonies and literary gossip, but I’d like to get to move on to touch upon war, sex and sports.
But one last note on critics and phonies.
According to Harold Bloom:
“Despite his personal relationship with Hemingway, Salinger derives from Scott Fitzgerald. Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass are clearly in the visionary mode of Jay Gatsby, and Holden’s first person narrative owes more to Nick Carraway than to Huck Finn. A comparison to Fitzgerald is dangerous for Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye is hardly of The Great Gatsby’s aesthetic dignity, nor will ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ quite survive side-by-side reading with ‘Babylon Revisisted.’ This is not to depreciate Salinger but to indicate his limits; his narrative art is shadowed by Fitzgerald’s.”
(When asked how his critical art is shadowed by, Bloom,naturally responded that he shadowed and was indeed limited by, of all people, himself).
Even a cursory look at Salinger’s work reveals Fitzgerald’s influence. Salinger does not attempt to hide this influence, and one of his first stories, published in The Saturday Evening Post, “The Last Day of the Last Furlough,” contains a direct allusion to Gatsby. Salinger and Fitzgerald share a love for New York City that helps to guide their fiction as they explore the moral and historical implications of the American Dream. The closer we look, the more correspondence we see in the fiction. Although a number of critics have observed that the suicide of Seymour Glass at the conclusion of “ A Perfect Day for Bananfish” made it practically impossible for any writer to conclude their story with a suicide again, Salinger seems to have borrowed the ending, as Kathy Gabriel observes, from Fitzgerald’s story “May Day.”
From “May Day”: “Then he took a taxi to the room where he had been living on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table that held his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just behind the temple.”
From “Bananafish”: “Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet though his right temple.”
Both stories use the backdrop of war to anchor the emotional undercurrent of the actions, and both contain cryptic moral signifiers regarding whether sex is “fun or hell.”
However, the story that first made me recognize Fitzgerald’s influence in Salinger’s work is the short story, “The Laughing Man.” When teaching the story I was drawn to Salinger’s use of baseball, and the more I read the more I saw Fitzgerald. More than anything else, though, in the story, sex (even premarital sex) is (mostly) fun!
“The Laughing Man” is closest to Gatsby: in the story a self-made man John Gedsudski (The Chief), from Staten Island, falls in love with a girl from an upper-class home in Long Island, Mary Hudson. The narrator of the story (which is once again told in a retrospective narration) meets Mary as a member of the Comanche Club group that Gedsudski leads everyday after school. The narrator observes their relationship though the lens of the baseball diamond and Salinger infuses the language of the story with sexual overtones:
“Mary Hudson batted ninth in the Warriors’ lineup. When I informed her of this arrangement, she made a little face and said, ‘well hurry up, then.’ And as a matter of fact, we did seem to hurry up. She got to bat in the first inning. She took off her beaver coat—and her catcher’s mitt—for the occasion and advanced to the plate in a dark-brown dress. When I gave her a bat, she asked me why it was so heavy."
“"The Chief left his umpire’s position behind the pitcher and came forward anxiously. He told Mary Hudson to rest the end of the bat on her right shoulder. ‘I am,’ she said. He told her not to choke bat too tightly. ‘I’m not,’ she said. He told her to keep her eye right on the ball. ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Get outa the way.’ She swung mightly at the first ball pitched to her and hit it over the left fielder’s head. It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it—standing up.”
“When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. He didn’t so much seem to be standing behind the pitcher as floating over him. He was a completely happy man. Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself even if I wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.”"
“The rest of the game, she got on base every time she came to bat. For some reason, she seemed to hate first base; there was no holding her there. At least three times, she stole second.”
I’d like to argue that Mary Hudson is Salinger’s version of Daisy Buchanan. Her waving from third base is Salinger’s green light at the end of Daisy’s dock . . . a dream so close that John Gedsudski can hardly fail to grasp (and which the narrator will struggle to grasp the meaning of for the rest of his life). And Salinger employs baseball—America’s past time—as a moral guide in “The Laughing Man” in the same way that Fitzgerald employs the fixing of the World Series and Jordan Baker’s breaking the rules on the golf course. And like Gatsby, Gedsudski’s imaginative wish fulfillment ends tragically and invokes the paradox of the American Dream. Fitzgerald’s “fresh green breast of the new world” and “vanished trees” are echoed in Salinger’s Central Park and the allusions to the American Indians and (Henry) Hudson (who was a fur trader). Another point worth remembering when connecting the two works is that Nick Carraway states, “Gatsby turned out all right in the end,” and adds, “it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men.” These words could just as easily be placed in the mouth of the narrator of “The Laughing Man” concerning Gedsudski. Like Gatsby, or Jay Gatz, Gedsudski might be said to grant the narrator of the story (and the rest of the Comanches) with an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
Another story I found myself thinking about when considering “The Laughing Man” is “The Freshest Boy.” In the story, Fitzgerald explores how the successes and failures on the athletic field shape the life of Basil Lee. When he becomes the most despised boy in his school, he is saved by the seemingly simple act of a popular boy giving him a nick-name as they play basketball one day. Fitzgerald writes that the nick-name is “poor makeshift, but it was something more than the stark bareness of his surname or a term of derision.”
The moment in the story is the one that leads me back to Salinger and Fitzgerald because of the suppressed emotional core at the center of the story that in their best work helps me to better understand the world and my place in it—works, that, to borrow a phrase from Salinger, make me love and miss everyone.
In 2010, after Salinger passed away, the filmmaker Wes Anderson quoted the penultimate passage from “The Freshest Boy” as a way of articulating what Salinger’s work meant to him:
“He had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.”
“--and it occurred to me,” Anderson writes, “that more than everything else—more than all the things in his stories that I have been inspired by and imitated and stolen to the best of my abilities—THIS describes my experience of the works of J. D. Salinger” . . . and to Anderson’s words I’d add, respectfully, F. Scott Fitzgerald.