"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where i was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
When J.D. Salinger died last week at 91, it marked the passing of one of the 20th century's most influential, beloved and fiercely private authors. Since his move to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire in the early '50s, he erected a fortress of solitude, one that's only occasionally been breached by journalists, fans and frustrated biographers. He hasn't published anything since the mid-'60s and hasn't given an interview since 1980. Google images turns up the same few pictures, the most recent of which must be decades old. His picture doesn't even appear on his books, nor do cover images. This seems to be the way he liked it. He may go down as the most notoriously reclusive author in American history. At least Pynchon drops a book every once in a while. Revealingly, Salinger said, "A writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years." The English writer Ian Hamilton, whose book about Salinger, In Search of J.D. Salinger, is as much about his frustration trying to write a biography as it is about Salinger himself, said, "He was famous for not wanting to be famous." Whether he intended it or not, his hermit-like retreat from the world and refusal to publish anything new did as much for his image as his writing and gave him an almost mythic dimension. Something new from him would have been greeted like a third testament, but he wisely knew that it would compromise his withdrawal. This isn't to say that he stopped writing. In 1974, he said "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."
His solitude wasn't impervious. He was married three times and has two children, one of whom, Margaret, published a memoir called Dream Catcher, which featured a picture of her and her father on the cover. Perhaps, most famously, Joyce Maynard, 18 at the time, moved in with him for a period in the '70s. She later published a book as well and discussed his interest in Eastern thought and odd diets. More recently, he barred an Iranian film version of Franny and Zooey from being shown in the U.S. and stepped in to halt a Swedish author who tried to publish an unauthorized "sequel" to The Catcher in the Rye called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, an idea that is only slight less dumb than a Hamlet sequel.
The facts of his early life are at least clear. Jerome David Salinger was born on New Year's Day 1919 in Manhattan. He was a mediocre student who went to several schools before graduating from Valley Forge Military Academy, which may have been the model for Catcher's Pencey Prep. He took classes, but never graduated from college. Perhaps his most significant post-high school education was an evening writing class he took at Columbia. He was in World War II and saw action at Omaha Beach; the war shows up in one of his best short stories, "For Esme-With Love and Squalor." During this time he met Hemingway in Paris and the older writer said "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." Salinger began submitting stories to The New Yorker, which subsequently published much of his work. Catcher, published in 1951 made him one of the first famous post-war authors.
We don't have many common cultural touchstones anymore and The Catcher in the Rye may be one of the few remaining shared literary experiences, a book that spans generations. It's a book about coming of age (a "bildungsroman" in fancy lit terms) that has become a rite of passage, its bland white cover conveying an almost totemic power. Like two other seminal coming of age books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, it offers up a youthful voice that it utterly convincing, individual, funny and distinctly American. Despite his bad language and cynicism, Holden is also an innocent, adrift and alone in a world colder and more confusing than he can handle, already nostalgic at 16 and suffused with a sense that life is, at best, bittersweet. Significantly, his dream is of keeping children in a field of rye from falling off a cliff: "I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be".
The Catcher in the Rye is not only a literary classic and a staple of high school English classes, but a bestseller and a pop culture milestone. It's sold over 65 million copies and is one of the most banned books in history. Protagonist Holden Caulfield originated in a short story that was published in The New Yorker, "Slight Rebellion off Madison," which sounds like a Dylan title. Salinger later described it as "semi-autobiographical." Perhaps to his chagrin, Salinger and his books infiltrated the culture for decades. Winona Ryder cited Catcher as her favorite book, a character in Chasing Amy is named Holden, the Beastie Boys rapped "I've got more stories than J.D. got Salinger" and, most ominously, John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman became obsessed with Catcher. Even Axl Rose, who knows a thing or two about withdrawing from the public and expectations, titled a song on Chinese Democracy "Catcher in the Rye," although none of the lyrics suggest he's read it. Billy Wilder and Steven Spielberg are among the filmmakers who have expressed an interest in filming Catcher, which would be nothing short of a travesty.
Until Salinger, few writers dealt seriously with young people, the subject of most of his writing. He may not have invented the intelligent, disaffected, sardonic, sensitive, lonely and adrift protagonist, but he perfected it and Holden is one of the genuinely iconic characters in American literature, a character who has become an archetype. Salinger is also the rare author who has steered cinema, a partial list which includes The Graduate, Dead Poet's Society, Whit Stillman's films, about 70% of Gen X movies ever made and, most notably, Wes Anderson, whose The Royal Tenenbaums, about a family of washed up geniuses, is clearly influenced by Salinger's Glass family stories. Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer in Rushmore may be the closest we get to an onscreen Holden.
Like many, I read Catcher in high school. The controversy that surrounded it was part of the draw, but I was quickly swept up by his voice and by a book that I could actually relate to. Years later I taught (or tried to teach) the book to bored high school students. Maybe it does seem dated to the kids, but it was gratifying to at least expose them to it. We read much of it out loud and the book was both funnier and sadder than I remembered. Though it is a novel that you resonate with and that "gets you" as a teen, it is also one, like The Great Gatsby, that really can only be appreciated when you're older and have had more experiences of loss and regret. I revisited it in college when I read it for an American lit class and decided to read all his other books too, something that's not too difficult to do, as he only has three other published books, none of them very long: Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction and Nine Stories. The total pages of his output can't be more than 700, a stark contrast to a contemporary like John Updike, who never stopped publishing.
As the articles and tributes have flooded in, it becomes clear that Salinger's impact is indisputable, but that he remained aloof and enigmatic to the end. And his death seems to make the end of something. Though he was probably not an easy man to live with, in a culture where people fight for the merest scrap of celebrity, where we are bombarded with every banal detail of banal peoples' lives and where writers begin their careers with self-revealing, self-serving memoirs, I can admire, if not always understand, Salinger's passion for avoiding the spotlight and letting his writing speak for itself. It comes across as a kind of integrity, if somewhat perversely. It's doubtful we'll ever agree on another writer the way we agreed on Salinger and I hope that he'll still resonate, still send out that thrill of discovery when the next generation reads him.
"If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told you about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
by Lukas Sherman
