harlem river to river clyde
As the last post on this month’s chosen city, New York, it seems fit to present an alternative viewpoint on the just-deceased J D Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye. Naturally this links perfectly with Burns’ night just past on the 25th. Apologies in advance for being so downbeat but it did seem pertinent.
I’m writing this less than 35 miles from Alloway, Robert Burns’ birthplace. This doesn’t help at all, even if it is the rural location near the metaphorical Rye fields. We need to go to Edinburgh to set the context for Salinger’s New York visitor, Holden Caulfield, and the beginnings of the beat generation; and also its end in 1980.
Holden’s effective role model, Burns, is a precocious, cautious young celebre who speaks his mind on the Edinburgh literary circuit in 1786 – but not mature. He’s driven by the sexual energies and moral abandon of youth which he finds completely natural – bawdy – despite the severe calvinist attitude of his contemporaries – the mirror of Holden’s “phony” all-american family values of the 1950s. And Burns, like Holden, is actually interested in relationship and intimacy – they verbalise it constantly; Robert in love and full of emotion for his muse via lovers; Holden in empathy and care for his siblings via the protectorate of the edge.
Both uncover fear and repression within themselves, horrified yet distant, telescoping their candour into the psyche of male teenage angsts everywhere – Caulfield in his people shooting hat, taking on those he feels have misled him (Mark Chapman). These are not allegories. They are constants in male sexual and power mentalities. This is Trocchi, McIlvanney, Vettriano – people despised and revered at the same time here in the west of scotland – a kind of tartan creative mafia, wannabe De Niros revelling in the underclasses / debauched upper classes as surely as any standard middle-class crimewriter that knows their audience.
As one of momus‘ anonymous commentators posits on momus’ Salinger post, the monologue by the conman Paul in the film Six Degrees of Separation correctly analyses the force majeure of the disaffected, juvenile male – a nice boy, always reading catcher in the rye…
