When I was at school, I remember one year when we were about 14 that our set book in English was Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. It is the story of a small boy living with his aunt who learns to ride and to hunt foxes. There are many humorous episodes including a wonderful cricket match. It ends with the hero joining the regiment and into the First World War. It is part of a trilogy on the War, the other two volumes being Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress.
It tells the story of an idyllic childhood that was to end with descent into the trenches, and perhaps it is because of that dreadful juxtaposition that that book has haunted me all of my life. There are events and facts that are as vivid now as they were back when I first read the book in the 1950s. The aunt, for example, who could play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, but only the first two movements. The third was too fast for her.
I thought of this book earlier today when I read of the death of J. D. Salinger, the author of the most famous of all school set books, Catcher in the Rye. I confess that I do not like such books. Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and above all Catcher in the Rye. Whether or not they were written with this intent, they seem to me just too much written with an eye to adolescent essays on the meaning of life and race and sex and religion and whatever it is that kids are forced through. I am sure they are all worthy and all of that, and I whose whole life has been reading and writing am very glad that kids are made to read something as an alternative to watching TV or playing video games. But give me real books like Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man any day of the week.
I think this rather sour post has really been occasioned not by the death of Salinger but by the death of another author, Louis Auchincloss. He was the very prolific teller of tales about upper-class New Yorkers, the people in the first part of the 20th century who lived in brownstones, the males of the species often working in prestigious law firms, and who had summer places up the coast in Connecticut or Rhode Island.
I imagine Auchincloss is not very fashionable today. I suppose for the average member of a department of English to admit a liking for his novels would be the equivalent of a philosophy department member admitting to respect for Will Durant, the author of The Story of Philosophy. But I confess that, although it is long since I read any of Auchincloss’s work, there was a time when I read it with eagerness and that I still look back on it with fondness.
Above all I liked what I suppose is his best-known book, The Rector of Justin, about a man who founds a prep school in New England. Narrated supposedly at the beginning of the Second World War by a young teacher, it reveals through the eyes of others — the wife, the successful student, the woman who loved him, and others — the true nature of the founder, both his strengths and his weaknesses. It seemed to me back then both a fascinating psychological portrait of a complex man, and at the same time well written and above all a very good read.
There were other books by Auchincloss that I also read and enjoyed. I guess in retrospect it must have been a limited pleasure because it must be 20 years since I last read one of his books. But tonight, while the rest of you are indulging in an orgy of mourning for Salinger, I shall quietly be shedding a tear and wearing a smile for another author who gave me much pleasure and I think some real insights into human nature.
(New York Times Photo of Louis Auchincloss by Andrea Mohin at nytimes.com)
8 Responses to Call Me a Philistine but …
dank48 - January 29, 2010 at 9:02 am
When did it become a competition? Especially a competition with room enough for only a few winners?Salinger, Golding, Lee, and every other writer whose works are routinely assigned today didn’t write their novels as “set pieces,” any more than Shakespeare wrote plays so high school students could be tested on them. As it happens, Auchincloss and Salinger came into this world within a couple years of each other and departed it within a couple days of each other. I for one have enjoyed the works of both writers, although Auchincloss was harder to keep up with, simply in terms of output. But I can’t understand dismissing works for the simple reason that they have been considered worth assigning to students. It doesn’t seem to me much of a tribute to a beloved writer that one hasn’t read him in twenty years. I’ve gone back to novels I once enjoyed, only to find that a few years have changed either them or me and that what I once admired no longer works–for me at least. I can’t imagine that Ruse or anyone else will find this to be the case with Auchincloss. But rather than sneer at the more widely read (because he is assigned, as if that were his own damn fault) Salinger’s best-known novel, Ruse might have a look at “Hapworth 16, 1924,” that wonderful letter home from summer camp, in which precocious Seymour Glass confesses to his brother Buddy, “I admire Great Goethe, but I love Conan Doyle.”Seems to me to say a fair amount about people and books in not too contemptible a fashion.
akafka - January 29, 2010 at 9:29 am
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bunch_of_phonies_mourn_j_d?utm_source=slate_rss_1
maw57 - January 29, 2010 at 9:56 am
I doubt *Catcher in the Rye* speaks to many adolescents these days, even though they are still made to read it in many high schools. No criticism of Salinger: the book certainly spoke powerfully to several generations, including mine; but I think that moment has passed, and I doubt very much Catcher will survive the way some earlier novels of youth (non)growth have. Probably it is heresy to say Catcher doesn’t speak very far beyond its mid-century moment, but ask a teenager who’s had to read it, and you may be surprised.
charliemarlow - January 29, 2010 at 10:25 am
In the TV comedy Community, Chevy Chase’s aging Baby Boomer character has a fantasy of a young female student dancing in front of him and saying, “Tell me about Sputnik and Woodstock…”Great literature goes beond the time it is written about, but there is very good literature that, while stuck in its contemporary context, teaches much about that context and people’s responses to it. And there are good reads.
johntoradze - January 29, 2010 at 11:29 am
I read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager. I thought the protagonist was an idiot and a whiner, which is pretty much how most kids today seem to react. Lord of the Flies is one of my favorites, it still speaks to the behavior of men in the world.
goxewu - January 29, 2010 at 11:32 am
Notice that Prof. Ruse (of whose writing on “Brainstorm” I am a fan) likes the novel about the guy who RUNS a prep school better than the one about a kid FORCED TO ATTEND one.
dank48 - January 29, 2010 at 2:19 pm
On rereading, my line “It doesn’t seem to me much of a tribute . . .” comes across as harsher than I intended. Sorry.
rmelton5 - January 29, 2010 at 5:42 pm
I’m the literature librarian at one of the larger of the UC campuses. My library has 5 copies of Catcher in the Rye. They have circulated a total of 520 times in the past 12 years, with 161 renewals; two of the five are checked out now. And I don’t think it is because our students are required to read it. White male authors, even those just recently dead, are not on many professors’ syllabi. Not a single one of Auchincloss’s novels has circulated more than twice; The Rector of Jusin hasn’t left the stacks since 1997.