Jerry and Holden

J.D. Salinger died a week ago. He was 91. My friends  kept texting me as if I’d lost a parent. They were right, in a way: during the most miserable time in my life I survived by writing short stories, and I learned to write stories by imitating him. Sometimes I wonder if the voice in my head really is mine, or an impression of the Glass children.

The obituaries all mentioned Salinger’s influence on popular culture and how the nut who killed John Lennon was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Wonderful. Way to honor his memory, linking him to a murder committed by a fan who read his  most famous book but didn’t understand it. Catcher is not about destroying phonies, it’s about loving human beings even if they are phonies. Read the book, for Chrissakes: he’s sorry for them. He can’t help it. Despite his pitiless appraisal of other people, Holden Caulfield is kind.

“She was blocking up the whole goddam traffic in the aisle. You could tell she liked to block up a lot of traffic. This waiter was waiting for her to move out of the way, but she didn’t even notice him. It was funny. You could tell the waiter didn’t like her much, you could tell even the Navy guy didn’t like her much, even though he was dating her. And I didn’t like her much. Nobody did. You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.”

And he’s the first to admit that there’s something good even in the lousiest jerk you’ve ever met. “He’s conceited, but he’s very generous in some things. He really is,’ I said. ‘Look. Suppose, for instance, Stradlater was wearing a tie or something that you liked.

Say he had a tie on that you liked a helluva lot—I’m just giving you an example, now. You know what he’d do? He’d probably take it off and give it to you. He really would. Or—you know what he’d do? He’d leave it on your bed or something. But he’d give you the goddam tie.’”

He knows he’s no prize himself: he keeps calling himself crazy, immature, “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.”

What many obituaries didn’t mention was that Salinger was among the American soldiers who liberated the death camps in World War II. He was one of the first to witness the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, and he himself was half-Jewish (and half-Irish, like the Glass children). They did mention that he was at Utah Beach on D-Day, that he was assigned to counter-intelligence (an experience that led to the story For Esme, With Love and Squalor), and had a breakdown.

Salinger’s wartime experience shaped his work, made it sad and funny as hell. He already had the basic elements of Catcher when he was sent to Europe; war bound them into the novel that generations of teenage readers have read with a shock of recognition. “How can he know what I’m feeling?” Because, if you really want to hear about it, many young people feel that way. The feeling isn’t original, the writing was. World War II produced The Catcher in the Rye, just as WWI produced The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia. After witnessing so much brutality, their writers were drawn to the innocence and simplicity of childhood. Both works are steeped in longing for a world that has been lost and can never be regained. The Elves must leave Middle Earth, Holden must get off the carrousel. The Fellowship goes on a quest in a world blighted by evil; everywhere they are greeted by the ruins of fallen civilizations. Frodo returns to the Shire, but he knows things can never be the same again.

Holden Caulfield’s quest takes him to the places of his childhood — the school he’d attended, the museums with the Indians and the mummies, the merry-go-round in Central Park. He wants to return to the purity of childhood, but he can’t. So he thinks of running away and pretending to be a deaf-mute, but that won’t work, either.

What he really wants to do is to be that guy in the Robert Burns poem he misquotes. He pictures thousands of little kids running around a big field of rye by the edge of a cliff, and he himself standing on the edge, ready to catch anyone in danger of falling off. In the end it’s his kid sister Phoebe who saves him.

For 59 years readers told J.D. Salinger that he’d saved them. Just how much he enjoyed hearing about it can be gleaned from his total withdrawal from society. No public appearances, no interviews, no photos, and above all, nothing new published since 1965. He went and did what Holden Caulfield wanted to do: he ran away to Cornish, New Hampshire and became a virtual deaf-mute. How much of Catcher’s reputation rests on the fact that its author had chosen to disappear?

By obliterating himself he brought Holden to stunning life.

What would the writer have made of the drippy tributes of the past week? One almost dreads going online for another dose of schmaltz. Of course it can’t be helped: Catcher is the adolescent’s classic, and adolescence is the schmaltziest time of your life. The irony of J.D. Salinger’s fame is that he turned his back on the world, and the rejected world responded by adoring him.