SALINGER'S AUDIENCE:
AN EXPLANATION
'Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.' I mean that's
what it is. ... Anyway, the starets tell the pilgrim that
if you say the prayer over and over again . . . then
eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self–
active.
-from
Franny
. . . I found out a good many years back practically
all I need to know about
my
general reader; that is
to say,
you,
I'm afraid.... You're a great bird-lover.
-from
Seymour: An Introduction
Being neither staret nor bird-lover, I find myself some–
what excluded from the immense circle of
J.
D. Salinger's admirers, and
more than ready to admit that he writes for a special (or even, as he
might say, Special) kind of reader, and that it is his sensitivity to the
needs of this special reader that has sustained his book of two short
stories at the top of the best-seller list. It seems probable that Salinger's
audience is composed mostly of college-educated white-collar Americans,
since that group makes up the largest part of the trade book reading
public. I have observed both in conversation and in the violent letters
which appear wherever a reviewer has the temerity to hint that Salinger
may not, after all, be the greatest writer of our time, that Salinger's
fans defend him with a remarkable intensity, as though they were de–
fending themselves, their ways of life, and their sensitivity as people and
as readers. The slick magazine world treats Salinger as though he were
some sort of divinity.
Time,
for instance, reports that "His face, after
six years of struggle, shows the pain of an artistic battle whose outcome
still cannot be seen. The battle surely involves the matter of Seymour's
sainthood and suicide." In fact,
Time
finds "... broad hints, for those
who care to take them, that Salinger has set himself to writing an
American
R emembrance of Things Past."
