I’m A Loner Dottie, A Recluse
J.D. Salinger, the author of one of the greatest and most influential novels of all time, The Catcher in the Rye, passed away yesterday in his Cornish, NH home at the age of 91. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that he passed away in his home since for the last half century, give or take a few years, he had chosen to seclude himself in that home, disdainful of even the faintest whiff of celebrity or adulation.
Salinger will go down in history as one of the most baffling and inexplicable figures in all of literature; in actuality he’s more interesting that the fictional characters of most novels. The man wrote exactly one novel, The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, and had three collections of short stories published between 1953 and 1963. The last time he published anything was 1965, yet as a writer he remained well known and popular to this day, hell, he’ll probably be more popular now that he’s passed on. Most of the revered authors in history have been incredibly prolific; some great authors have published over twenty novels in addition to countless scores of short stories and articles, yet Salinger had an incredibly limited body of work. But, that body’s sheer brilliance was enough. The Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite novels and deserves every bit of praise it receives and while I haven’t read his other works (I bought Nine Stories a long time ago and consistently forget to actually read it) they have garnered mounds of acclaim over the years. In the last interview he gave, which was thirty years ago, Salinger said that despite his self imposed banishment he continued to write daily and had, at the time, at least fifteen novels finished. I have no doubt that if those novels were ever to be published they would be huge successes, regardless of their literary worth, though really there’s no reason to assume they’d be anything other than exemplary like the rest of his work, but given Salinger’s lack of desire to have them published while he was alive, saying “I write for myself”, there’s no reason to believe that they ever will be published.
One of the things they teach you when you study Literature is to separate the author from the work, and generally I take that approach to it’s fullest. I’m really not that interested in the people who do the writing. Sure, I personally think of Kurt Vonnegut as a spiritual grandfather, but I love him for the fiction he created, not for the person he was. At the end of the day I don’t really know anything about who Kurt Vonnegut the person was, only who Kurt Vonnegut the writer was. The problem with Salinger is, you just can’t do that, because Salinger the person is so fascinating. How can someone make something as classic as The Catcher in the Rye and then, for all intents and purposes, completely shun the world, even the people who would welcome him anywhere with open arms? We’re a society that feeds off of attention and fame, deep down inside we all desperately want our fifteen minutes, but this man didn’t even want one minute. And it’s not just that he shunned the spotlight, he threw great big rocks at it then beat it with a bat in an effort to make sure no light could ever spot him again.
Because Salinger the person was so fascinating it really does become impossible to separate him from Salinger the author and that notion is taken even further as most want to see Holden Caulfield, the teenage anti-hero protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, as a literal representation of who Salinger the person was. And while every Lit professor I ever had would say this isn’t an association that should be made, it works so perfectly. Holden is an utter misanthrope; he’s caustic, hateful toward the world and people in general, and talks numerous times of wanting to extricate himself from the world, even to go as far at to pretend he was a deaf mute to prevent himself from ever having to talk to anyone. Considering that Salinger did extricate himself from the world, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that he felt exactly how Holden felt. Holden has been seen as the epitome of adolescence, a mass of frustration toward a world that seems pointless and, above all else, someone who had absolutely no desire to be forced to grow up. Considering that Salinger’s exile, combined with the wealth he acquired from the massive success of the novel, meant that he was able to avoid the adult world, to be free of the rule of the responsible, basically free of anyone’s rule, it’s further clear to see how Holden can be taken as a direct analog for the author.
Those who don’t revere The Catcher in the Rye have pointed out that Holden Caulfield isn’t the kind of grand anti-hero that so many think he is, rather that he’s a spoiled, childish brat who eschews responsibility not out of moral objection but out of sheer immaturity. They see him as nothing more than a rich whelp, which he certainly was, the novel centers around his absconding the prestigious private boarding school he was attending and carelessly playing around in New York City, who is only able to have his outlook on life because his family was rich enough that he didn’t have to worry about the business of actually making a living. Frankly, all this could probably be said about Salinger as well. He came from a well off family, attending private school in the middle of The Great Depression, and his world view probably wouldn’t have been the same if he had been standing in a bread line rather than sitting in a classroom. Well, it could have been the same, but it likely would have come across differently.
Holden Caulfiled’s true essence, and thus Salinger’s, is probably somewhere between the view of him as a bastion of adolescent frustration and that of him as a tower of privileged immaturity. He probably was as much the everyman teenager as he was the ungrateful rich kid. But, even if the character is bit conflicted, the fact remains that Salinger’s great work has resonated with young readers, mostly male, for nearly sixty years. I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was twenty-two, which is close to how old Salinger was when he wrote it in the early 40s, and I felt like he had somehow got inside my mind, taken my thoughts, and printed them out, all while mastering time travel so that he could do it forty years before I was born. The book that’s spoken to me the clearest in my life is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, but the only book that I’ve ever felt could have been written about me was The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not novel in feeling this way, in fact I’m trite and hackneyed, but it’s the truth nonetheless. As fascinatingly odd as his life was, and as surprisingly bare as his collection of works was, J.D. Salinger deserves to be praised because no one has ever captured the essence of what it feels like to be an adolescent male better than he did. Others have done it well, brilliantly even, but no one did it as perfectly, as masterfully as Salinger.
It’s sad that he chose to keep himself from the world for so long; there are no doubt many terrible things that can come with fame, as Salinger knew all too well, with the grand example of Mark David Chapman naming The Catcher in the Rye as the reason he murdered John Lennon, but there are many nice things that come with notoriety as well. It couldn’t have hurt for him to occasionally have heard how his novel positively affected people. The effect that The Catcher and the Rye has had on the world is incalculable; it’s influence is so broad and far reaching that it has likely personally affect just about everyone who has ever been exposed to popular culture in any way. We should all be thankful that J.D. Salinger chose to engage in the world for the short period that he did and be doubly thankful that he’ll finally get the complete level of isolation that he craved.
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