J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn RIP
J.D Salinger
There was a gag on 30 Rock a while back on how celebrities always seem to die in pairs. By the standards of literature and academia, J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn were larger-than-life, known as much for their personalities as their work.
Lazy journalists love to link these celebrity deaths. When Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died the focus was on their charitable work; with Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett it was the price of fame. I’m not that great at lazy journalism (or any other kind) since I’ve spent 30 minutes trying to connect Salinger and Zinn. The best I could come up with was that I thought both changed my life forever when I was a teenager but never read them after college.
If I would compare Salinger to anyone, it would be Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts. Both wrote for adults but found their core audiences in adolescents and teenagers. I wonder if Salinger became a recluse and Schultz bitter and defensive because they thought their works were not given due seriousness. Schultz was a semi-shut-in and in his occasional interviews vented against his publishers, his fans and even his high-school sweetheart. Salinger never gave any interviews so we’ll never know what he thought of his fans but I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt much the same. As it is, Salinger was so reclusive his death serves only to make him slightly more unapproachable.
Howard Zinn, though, was a master of promotion, both for himself and the Leftist cause. He hobnobbed with rock stars (Pearl Jam appropriated his famous line, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train” in one of their songs) and made CDs of his speeches with intros by celebrities.
If there is anyone who should be contemptuous of his adoring fans, it is Zinn. His academic work was purposely skewed to provide facts and perspectives that were ignored by mainstream historians. This didn’t mean that Zinn invalidated the works of other historians, rather he filled in the gaps in their work. Edward Said once lamented that his seminal work, Orientalism was used to justify the exclusion of dead, white, racist authors from literature courses when that hadn’t been his intention at all. Zinn’s works have been misused similarly to denigrate conventional narrative works of history.
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“Both wrote for adults but found their core audiences in adolescents and teenagers.”
that’s so true. It’s interesting, actually, the first person that comes to my mind when thinking of someone to compare to Salinger is Brian Wilson (another person who spent many years as a recluse). Brian Wilson described one of his albums as a “teenage symphony to god” a term which reminds me a bit of the style of Salinger’s narrators.
That’s a great comparison. The difference between Wilson and Salinger is in the quantity of their output. Late-period Beach Boys albums and Wilson’s solo stuff (I guess Smile would qualify as both) are willfully ‘difficult’. I’m sure if Salinger kept writing he would have had a similar career path. Salinger gave up writing (or at least publishing what he wrote) after he became a hero to teenagers while Wilson tried his best to alienate them.
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