JD Salinger vs Wally Shawn

“Rather than reject Salinger’s derogatory depiction, Shawn leans into it… He dismisses the Gregory/Salinger aesthetic and lifestyle as fantastic, illusory, arbitrary and magical.”

Any mildly competent Intellectual History of the US post WW II would have to recognize the contributions of J.D. Salinger (JD) and Wallace Shawn (Wally). (Although we’ve never met, I feel as though I grew up, culturally, alongside Mr. Shawn so referring to him as ‘Wally’ does not seem irreverent.)

JD, of Catcher in the Rye fame, is known for his eccentricity, his physical isolation, and his meagre, if cherished, literary output. Wally, on the other hand, seems to have two fingers in every cultural pie.

Actor, director, author, critic, and TV celebrity, Wallace Shawn is an iconic member of the post-War literary scene. Respecting your time, dear reader, I will mention just a few of Shawn’s many credits: My Dinner with Andre, Vanya on 42^nd Street, The Princess Bride, voice roles in Toy Story and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and of course, the olive in every martini, Young Sheldon. He’s collaborated with everyone from Woody Allen (6 films) to Louie Malle (Atlantic City), Bill Cosby (The Cosby Show), and Noam Chomsky.

Nor did the apple fall far from the tree. For several decades, Wally’s father, William Shawn, edited America’s literary magazine of record, The New Yorker. During that period the elder Shawn was close friends with Salinger and they dined regularly at the Algonquin.

JD was not yet 25 when Wally was born. It is likely that he followed his maturation closely and was no doubt aware of his emergence as a cultural icon in his own right. How JD felt about that, however, is unknown, at least by this commentator.

In 1961, in the third of his four published works, Franny and Zooey, Salinger gives Wally a cameo role that I don’t think was meant to be flattering. JD presents Wally as unmemorable, as someone who looks, talks, dresses and acts like everybody else. He has the sort of face that you keep seeing, but not seeing, in every crowd. Salinger presents Wally as a charmer and a gossip, one who drops a name only to disparage its nominee. 

“It’s not just Wally…it’s everybody. I mean everything everybody does is so…tiny and meaningless,” says Franny Glass, JD’s anti-hero. According to Franny,  Wallace Shawn is a poster boy for banality; but worst of all, Wally is introduced to us, and to Franny, as a friend of Lane, Franny’s foil, a shallow, entitled, prep-school frat boy living a life utterly devoid of authenticity.

20 years later (1981), almost to the day, the world got Wallace Shawn’s reply in the form of a full length feature film, My Dinner with Andre (Louie Malle, director). As you know, the film consists almost entirely of conversation over dinner between Wally and fellow director, Andre Gregory. Trust me, you’ll be on the edge of your seat for the full 110 minutes.

There is no direct connection between Gregory and Salinger, except for a shared eccentricity that borders on the anti-social and a total disdain for the ordinary and the everyday. However, there are certainly notes of similarity between Salinger’s version of Wally and Malle’s kinder, gentler treatment. That said, Wally’s apparent identity across 2 decades begs us to seek a parallel identity between his interlocutors, Salinger and Gregory.

In a style fully suggestive of Salinger, Gregory savages the mundane. For an hour and a half, Gregory holds court, only briefly interrupted by the baffled Shawn and their slightly annoyed waiter. But reminiscent of Molly in Ulysses, Wally gets the last word with a 10 minute virtual soliloquy that shreds the Gregory/Salinger aesthetic:

“I’m trying to earn a living. I’m trying to pay my rent and my bills… I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook, and I enjoy going through my list and carrying out the responsibilities and doing the errands and then crossing them off my list… I don’t feel the need for anything more than this… A delicious cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake, why is it necessary to have more than this or to even think about having more than this?

“You seem constantly to be finding a significance in these things that to me are just facts…that things in the universe are there for a purpose, to give us messages. Whereas I believe that things in the universe are just there. They don’t mean anything.”

Here, Wally is aligning himself with such luminaries as Epicurus, Voltaire (“tend your own garden”) and Solomon (traditional author of Ecclesiastes):

“I know that there is nothing good for man (sic) except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive. Moreover, that a man should eat and drink and enjoy himself in return for all his labors is a gift of God…

“Go to it then, eat your food and enjoy it, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for already God has accepted what you have done… Whatever task lies to your hand, do it with all your might.”

Rather than reject Salinger’s derogatory depiction, Shawn leans into it. He turns vice into virtue and in the process he dismisses the Gregory/Salinger aesthetic and lifestyle as fantastic, illusory, arbitrary and magical.

Truth to tell, there is much to admire in the works of Salinger and Gregory… but no more than in the work of Wallace Shawn. Ecclesiastes can be read as a commentary on Deuteronomy: “I set before you life and death…” becomes “I set before you the fantastic (nihilism) and the mundane (quietism); therefore choose…”

What world do you live in, dear reader? ‘Wally World’ (Solomon & Shawn) or its ‘Anti-World’ (Salinger and Gregory)?