Dr. Metablog

I had great hope that I would love to read The Naked and the Dead. Although Norman Mailer is quite a few years older than I, he's a Brooklyn boy who became a somebody. Mailer went to neighborhood schools, then on to Harvard and the Army, and made a quite a splash. (As a matter of fact, he attended P. S. 161 in Crown Heights, a school that we at P. S. 217 regularly trounced in the summer softball league.)  But The Naked and the Dead was less fun than I had hoped. It is 721 exhausting pages long. It has too many words, too many characters, too much flashback, too much repetitive talk. It's not epic; it's just long.

The profusion of detail swallows an exemplary story: on a south Pacific island, a platoon of soldiers is assigned to perform an impossible task. The platoon suffers deaths, injuries, wounds, tensions, and a variety of psychic traumas, even though, unknown to any of its members, by dumb luck and superior numbers, the American forces have long since broken through the Japanese lines and the battle for the island has been won. 

The novel had a huge impact in 1948 and throughout the fifties and it started Norman Mailer on his astonishing and perplexing career. It was much discussed in the P. S. 217 schoolyard not only as a hot book (lots of talk about sex and a superabundance of "fugs") but also as a scary account of life in the United States military.  It certainly frightened me. 

It's hard to believe that fifty years have gone by I last read The Naked and the Dead. I still admire its ambition and I'm impressed that Mailer was just twenty-five years old when it was published, but I'm deeply offended by the want of economy, the lack of discipline, the narrow perspective, the philosophical incoherence, the plot lapses, and especially by the reliance on shallow ethnic stereotypes. I can't help thinking that, if Mailer had had patience and wisdom and, most of all, restraint, The Naked and the Dead might have been not a seven-hundred page monster but a two-hundred page masterpiece.

But I doubt that P. S. 161 put much emphasis on the virtue of restraint.  In storytelling, Brooklyn guys choose hyperbole over litotes.   

J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is an anti-bildungsroman — a "novel of education" without the least shred of moral, intellectual, or spiritual growth. Holden Caulfield, the novel's naive yet jaded narrator, learns absolutely nothing either about himself or about life. Unable to profit from his various encounters, he dismisses almost everyone he meets as "phony." The incessant drumming on that one particular adjective leads a reader to hope that Holden will find authenticity somewhere in his horizon, but The Catcher in the Rye is not a novel that rewards optimism. It concludes with a vision of Holden's pre-pubescent sister Phoebe going "round and round" on a symbolic carousel — going nowhere, it would seem — and in a brief coda Holden himself has been institutionalized and placed under the care of an unsympathetic psychoanalyst. Nor does the whiff of Humbertism in the relation between Holden and young Phoebe contribute any last-second learning or cheer.

Even in the 1950s, The Catcher in the Rye enjoyed a cadre of fiercely loyal partisans who powerfully identified with Holden Caulfield. I didn't believe then, and certainly don't believe now, that Holden Caulfield mirrored the anguish of my own particular soul. I was not a true believer, and I was not entranced by Holden. For me, the novel was nothing more than a better-than-average coming-of-age story — although a dispiriting one because Holden does not mature but instead remains stranded in perpetual, painful adolescence.

A novel without hope, The Catcher in the Rye has become an inspiration for the hopeless. In Los Angeles, in 1989, twenty-one-year-old Robert Bando shot and killed a young actress whom he had been pestering with trinkets and messages. In a nearby alley, police found a .357-caliber handgun, a bloody shirt, and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Two years later, John Hinckley shot and crippled James Brady and almost succeeded in assassinating Ronald Reagan. Hinckley had fantasized that killing the president would impress the actress Jodie Foster, whom he imagined that he was wooing. In his pocket he carried a well-read, tattered paperback of — you guessed it —The Catcher in the Rye. In 1980, on Manhattan's West Side, Mark David Chapman, concealing his pistol under a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, shot John Lennon five times at point blank. He had inscribed his copy of the novel with the words "To Holden Caulfield from Holden Caulfield" — Chapman had tried to legally change his name to that of Salinger's troubled narrator. From jail, the proud murderer issued an endorsement: "My wish is for all of you to someday read The Catcher in the Rye." At his trial Chapman asserted that he had killed Lennon because the singer had become "phony," and at his sentencing he read to the judge the section of the book in which Holden tells his sister Phoebe that he imagined himself in a field of rye with "thousands of little kids" whom he must prevent from falling off "the edge of some crazy cliff." 

The Catcher in the Rye still sells well (15,000,000 copies in print by 1996) and has become a fixture in the high school and college classroom, where successive generations of adolescents can calibrate their degree of angst against Holden's. But increasingly, and paradoxically, attention has turned from the novel to Salinger himself, who has not published anything since 1965 and, secluded in his Cornish, New Hampshire retreat, has become the world's most notorious hermit since St. Simeon Stylites mounted his pillar in sixth-century Antioch.

Although he is a hermit, Salinger is anything but a saint. In 1987, in a bizarre echo of Holden–obsessed stalkers, Salinger, then sixty-eight years old, flew to California and barged onto the set of the TV show Dynasty in search of one of the series's starlets, Catherine Oxenberg, with whom he had apparently fallen into long-distance electronic infatuation. He was "escorted" off the set.

Did Catherine Oxenberg have a precursor?  She did, indeed she did. Several, in fact, including Joyce Maynard, described as "the Lolita of all Lolitas," who was eighteen and a freshman at Yale in 1972 when Salinger, at the age of fifty-three, initiated a romance by sending her a fan letter.

These and other even less savory details about Caulfield-Salinger's life can be found in Paul Alexander's thin, amateurish biography Salinger (Los Angeles:  Renaissance Books, 1999), which does not propose, although it might, that J. D. has learned as little about life as his most famous character.

In my daughter's basement I found a dried-up, stained, pages-hanging-out 1959 paperback edition of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On the cover: "Copyright 1954." "Over 4,450,000 copies in print." "Sixty-second impression." "Now Available For Students And Teachers: the Casebook Edition  containing the full text of the novel, critical essays, notes, and bibliography." Lord of the Flies leaped into public prominence in the mid-1950s and quickly became a classroom staple. A quick googling found half a dozen websites designed to help high school students generate reports on the novel's "symbolism," etc.

I didn't like Lord of the Flies when I read it back then and it's become less likable– and less worthy of respect– over the last half-century. It's a variation on Robinson Crusoe, except that this time a score of boys land (how? and not a one of them injured!!) on an uninhabited island in the Pacific. They very quickly degenerate into savages, murder two of their own number, and are hunting down the last boy who possesses a modicum of civility when a naval officer (nauta ex machina?) arrives to take command. Lord of the Flies is a dyspeptic, dystopian novel; it's also, according to the websites, a story of the contest between civilization and barbarism and,– guess what?– it's barbarism by a country mile.       

Robinson Crusoe himself was no perfect model of psychological health, but Defoe's story has been admired for centuries (it's the most reprinted novel in history) at least in part because it asserts that a resourceful human being can triumph over a bad situation. Crusoe reads his Bible, keeps a calendar and a diary, domesticates goats, develops a working agricultural system, learns pottery, carpentry and other crafts, and builds himself both a summer and a winter domicile. Lord of the Flies, on the contrary, is entirely pessimistic about human capabilities: its flat, book-less, unskilled characters devolve rapidly into war-painted, violent tribesmen. Robinson Crusoe embodied Age of Reason optimism; Lord of the Flies is a post-Nazi novel in which there is no culture, government is nothing more than incipient dictatorship, and religion deteriorates into cruel scapegoating.         

Why was it imagined that Lord of the Flies had something of value to say about about human nature? It's a sure thing that if Golding had written a novel in which an isolated group of people behave like reborn Crusoes and work cooperatively to tame the forest and create a communal utopia, he would have been derided as a simpleton. No room in the Cold War inn or on the best-seller lists or in high school curricula for optimism! 

Golding arranges it so that the descent into barbarism appears to be not circumstantial but inevitable. He banishes from his island women and therefore any need for reciprocity in social institutions. (Violence without heterosexual sex–just what's needed in the high school classroom!) Moreover, the boys who land on the island are not a representative set of human beings: they are English public school children who've already internalized poisonous notions of hierarchy, hazing, power and class. When, at the outset, they choose a chief, they're really selecting a head boy for whom lesser creatures will "fag." Of the island's inhabitants, the only one with more brain than earwax is the physically repulsive Piggy, while the only boy whose instincts are democratic is slow, tongue-tied, and indecisive. Meanwhile, Jack, to whom Golding grants leadership abilities, is a slick soulless demagogue. The author may appear to be impartial, but in fact he's stacked the deck so that the emergence of a proto-fascism appears "natural." Golding, both a student and a teacher in English public schools, seems to think that adolescents of his own circle somehow represent common humanity. His analysis of culture is therefore as shallow as a parking-lot puddle. And because it's so shallow, the novel is a treasure-trove for the kind of teaching where the identification of "symbols" substitutes for genuine thought, or emotion, or aesthetic revelation. It's a convenient opportunity — a casebook — for the kind of bad reading that has damaged generations of students. 

Golding's island abounds not in intelligence but in absurdities. Is it credible that three or four pre-adolescent boys armed only with sharpened sticks could a) confront a wild boar and b) actually bring down a mature sow, and that the sow would lie still, or allow herself to be held to the ground while one of the boys repeatedly stabs and eventually kills the animal with a penknife, and c) that the same boys, using no other tools than the single penknife, could quickly skin, butcher and behead the sow, and then d) cut and drive into the ground a post stout enough on which to mount that head?  Or e) that a few boys could dislodge and push a rock that is "as big as a tank." Or that f) there could exist an uninhabited Pacific atoll so small that a group of boys could systematically search every inch of it like beaters on a hunt, but yet so large that, without experiencing much in the way of rain, it could have streams and pools of fresh water and, in addition, g) an inexhaustible supply of wild pigs (indigenous? feral?).

If Lord of the Flies is an allegory, then perhaps such howlers don't matter. Yet even an allegory should not cause a reader to guffaw at inappropriate moments.