Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and J.D. Salinger are forever linked in my mind because of a trip I took some years ago to see the American West. It was during that trip that these two men, so different in their public personas, became two of the writers I most admired, I most wished I could be, and that I most loved.
There is an aspect of the work of these two men that ties them together as well, and for Salinger it’s not as celebrated as it probably should be. And that is the humor which infuses their work.
Two examples:
From Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, possibly the coolest and most-admired drop-out of all-time, writes on his history exam:
“The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as well know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere.
The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century.”
From “Welcome to the Monkey House” by Vonnegut, which takes place way, way in the future:
“America had changed in many ways, but it had yet to adopt the metric system.”
[[Pause for audience laughter.]]
It is really hard to write comedy in fiction without coming off either as trying too hard, or as seeming simply incompetent. To achieve the necessary blalnce takes a master’s touch. I know, because I’ve often tried and failed miserably at it in my own work. I remember this one time in my freshman composition class, back when I was going to school and trying to figure out what I would be all at the same time, I tried for a joke about orange peels in one of my stories. The professor, this balding windbag named Professor Robinson, came up to me when he was handing the graded stories back to us and said, “Were you trying to be funny with that thing about orange peels?”
“Uhh, well, I guess so, uhh, yeah,” I said, forever smooth.
“Well, it wasn’t funny,” Professor Balding said. “Don’t do that.”
I think humor, executed properly, is a powerful way to bond the reader to the story. Which probably explains, to some extent, why so many people are so passionate about Vonnegut and Salinger. And why their absences from this world are responsible for so much pain.
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One of the best essays on Salinger I’ve read lately (and there have been a lot lately), even though it was written before the man passed: The Catcher in Cornish by Sam Buntz
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“The Big Trip Up Yonder” by Vonnegut will appear on the website on Tuesday…
Frank Marcopolos
Like books-on-tape, but different
http://frankmarcopolos.com
