J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [128]
The award from Valley Forge highlighted a number of contradictions evident in Salinger’s character. There is no reason to believe that he was not flattered by the presentation, and his thank-you letter appears sincere. Yet he was also relieved to have been out of the country when the award was given. Ironically, the academy was rewarding him for his success with The Catcher in the Rye, a book that mocked the school. It’s doubtful that the academy realized it at the time, but Salinger certainly did, and he would not have risked repeating the Olivier dinner experience on such a grand scale.
While Salinger was away, Dorothy Olding resumed negotiations with Little, Brown and Company over publishing a short-story collection. By the first week of July, they had reached an agreement, and Salinger wrote to Jamie Hamilton to offer him the British rights. He also offered Hamilton the source of his own epiphany, what Salinger called “the religious book of the century,” The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna. Confident that Hamilton would be as inspired by the text as he had, Salinger promised to send a copy of The Gospels to London and urged the publisher to read it and consider releasing an unabridged version in Britain.
The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna record the conversations of the Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna with his devotees. Written by an ardent disciple known only by the pseudonym “M,” The Gospels were published in 1897 and brought to the United States by Swami Vivekananda. The collection is long and intense and the philosophy both sublime and complicated. Salinger doubtless studied the text for many months, perhaps years, before assimilating its tenets.
According to the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York, where Salinger first encountered his teachings, the life of Sri Ramakrishna was “literally an uninterrupted contemplation of God.” The beliefs espoused by Sri Ramakrishna are known as Vedanta, and through The Gospels, the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna introduced Vedantic thought to the West. According to the center, “the four cardinal principles of Vedanta may be summed up as follows: the non-duality of the Godhead, the divinity of the soul, the unity of existence and the harmony of religions.”
First and foremost, Vedanta is monotheistic. It teaches that there is only one God and that God is present in all things. In Vedanta, God is the ultimate Reality, and the names and distinctions that human beings apply to the things around them are illusion. These distinctions do not exist because all is God. In Vedanta, therefore, each soul is holy because it is part of God, and the body is merely a shell. The aim of Vedanta is to see God, to become one with God, by looking beyond the shell and perceiving the holiness within. Sri Ramakrishna called this form of enlightenment “God-consciousness” and taught that it could be obtained only through personal experience. Vedanta is a tolerant philosophy, accepting all faiths as being valid as long as they lead to the recognition of God. Without God-consciousness religion becomes sterile and loses the power to transform individual lives.23
Sri Ramakrishna espoused many beliefs that Westerners rarely associate with Hindu philosophy. Vedanta asserts that truth is universal and all humankind and existence are one. Rather than defy beliefs that Salinger already held, Vedanta supported and enhanced those beliefs and was especially in concert with Zen Buddhism. From 1952 until the end of Salinger’s publishing career, Vedantic thought became entrenched in his work. The challenge that lay before him in 1952 was how best to introduce such an Eastern philosophy to American sensibilities without preaching