Salinger and Starting Over

I suppose it is time for an apology. It has been ages since I was active on this blog – over two years to be exact. In that span, I have had two additional concussions (one collapsing from medication that was supposed to help, one from splitting my head open on a low-hanging wooden beam). I have returned to and left from my teaching job again, learning in the process that middle and high school teaching is not compatible with my long term brain health. Consequently, I applied to seventeen different MFA programs in creative writing, hoping to receive admission to a single one given the ludicrously selective admission acceptance rates. Surprisingly, I received seven acceptances and will begin my studies this fall at Columbia University in New York City, perhaps the least Matthew Kimball place I can imagine. As my girlfriend tells me, however, magic only happens outside of one’s comfort zone.

I admit to being fearful of the transition. In truth, it will be the first time I have had to conquer the world on my own, without the help of loved ones. For full disclosure, my concussions have rendered me dependent on family and significant others for my entire adult life, and this development will push me in the extreme to become thoroughly self-sufficient. It is a prospect that I find terribly daunting, and I have many doubts surrounding my own capabilities and preparedness to confront this new challenge. I have made tremendous progress since the nadir of my mental health struggles, but I still have plenty of ground to cover. I am doing my best to enter the program optimistically, though my success on that front varies by the minute at times.

Buried underneath my relatively substantial layers of doubt and fear, however, is the nascence of a powerful ally: hope. I am putting myself in this position in an attempt to restructure my life in a happier, healthier way, while doing what I love most in the world: creating. Moreover, these creations stand the chance to make a profound impact on the world if executed well. The pieces I will be trying to complete while in this program include a memoir of my mental health journey (I am currently over 100 pages into a first draft), a collection of poems about my trauma, a novel about baseball (a game that may have saved my life), and whatever artwork I can manage to create in my free time, assuming I can create a workspace to draw and paint in my new 787 square foot, one-bedroom apartment. As a typical creative, I have more ideas than I will be able to execute, so I expect this program to be an exercise in prioritization.

In preparing for this program, I have gotten back into pleasure reading, an activity that my teaching job largely left me too cerebrally spent to tackle. My girlfriend always tells me that books find us at the right time, and time has proved her right again and again. When I began having suicidal ideations again, I picked up Plath’s The Bell Jar and took strength from her old brag. When my PTSD flashbacks were at their worst, I stumbled upon The Things They Carried and reveled in Tim O’Brien’s indisputable understanding of my condition. When I realized that my novel was actually a veiled memoir, I sped through Kay Redfield Jamison’s gripping memoir titled An Unquiet Mind, a narrative of her Bipolar Disorder, a condition with which I had recently been diagnosed. Now, as I prepare to hurl myself reluctantly into the storm that is New York City, I find myself revisiting an old favorite, a book that I have taught, and a novel that changed dramatically in my eyes after my PTSD diagnosis: Catcher in the Rye.

Interestingly, Salinger carried the manuscript for the novel while serving in World War II. Also interestingly, Salinger himself had a “nervous breakdown” that later fits quite nicely with the clinical definitions of PTSD. Upon reading the novel after my own diagnosis, the book morphed from an exceptional novel into a heartbreaking account of post-traumatic stress. After all, on the very first page of the novel, Holden ambiguously tells the reader or a psychotherapist that the novel will be a chronicle of “this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.” The word madman obviously carries extreme connotations of mental health disorders, and “out here” sounds progressively like a mental health institution as the novel unfolds. Given Holden’s myriad traumatic experiences (his brother Allie’s death, expulsion from multiple schools, detached and neglectful parents, the suicide of a classmate while wearing Holden’s clothes, potential sexual assault by his old teacher Mr. Antolini…which Holden claims “happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid,” on and on and on) as well as Salinger’s own trauma, I can’t help but read the book as a narrative of trauma. In an odd sort of way, the book speaks to my own trauma in a voice of understanding and sympathy. Coincidentally, it also takes place largely in New York City, my soon-to-be home.

The ending of the book is perhaps one of my favorites of any novel I’ve read, rivaling The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, and Blood Meridian. For those unaware, the title Catcher in the Rye comes from a misremembered-by-Holden Robert Burns poem. Holden fancies himself the catcher in the rye, saving children before they run off a cliff that symbolizes the vulgarities of adulthood. For the ending of the novel, Salinger chose for Holden to go to Central Park with his sister Phoebe, who wants to ride the carousel. He watches her climb onto a horse but grows uncomfortable as she begins reaching for the rings.  He considers warning her, essentially playing the role of catcher in the rye to prevent her symbolic fall, but thinks better of this course of action. He observes that if children “want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” For Holden, this moment symbolizes his coming to terms with his own trauma, a realization that for many, even most perhaps, trauma is inherent in the process of maturation. There is a tranquility in his observation that I have yet to master – an acceptance of his own trauma that radiates into his acceptance of trauma in general. I can’t say that I have reached that point in my recovery yet, but I am moving in the right direction. Maybe when I arrive in New York, I’ll venture to Central Park and take a ride on the carousel in an attempt to glean some of his success. I’ll reach for the rings, being careful not to fall and give myself another concussion of course, and see how it feels to live another’s conquest of trauma, even if he is fictional. With a bit of luck, the symbolic gesture may very well be the catalyst I need to thrive, at last, on my own.