Art Wortd Coop

By tomorrow there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of blog posts about J.D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye is an American classic that seeped its way into the culture, overtook the minds of young people, stole their hearts, spoke their voices . . . For me, it was no less.

Literature is always in flux, the trends come and go. But some books seem to never go out of fashion. Their place in the history of literature is defined by each generation's new perspective. Granted, many of us were younger when we read Salinger. But those experiences of reading his novels and short stories were often so powerful that we continue to reflect on them with nostalgia. Sven Birkets, in a book I highly recommend called Reading Life: Books for the Ages, writes beautifully about his memories of reading Catcher in the Rye:

And now we've all become phony adults. Not quite. But we're aware that we're living in a different reality, of how things work, and what people are like. My adulthood continues to be wildly irrational sometimes, but nothing like when I was 18 or 19. By writing down my adolescence I am able to distance myself from that world. I can reflect on the person I am now versus the person I was then.

Birkets writes:

There is so much wisdom in this. The fact of Holden couldn't be more solidified as we read the parallels that are now made to the author himself in the New York Times and other newspapers. Salinger was Holden Caulfield, maybe not in the literal sense but in the self-portrait of the author. After the success of the novel, Salinger's desire to remove himself from society altogether is evidence of this. The world was too phony for him too.

Some writers commit suicide, Salinger stayed alive and miserable until today. What's strange is that I don't feel a close connection to the actual man who wrote these books. It's the author in my imagination that I admire, that I sympathize with, that I want to honor with this blog post. It's no secret that Salinger was not a happy man. His daughter has said he was abusive. Whatever the case, I feel a connection to the man who wrote these books, not the shell of the man who lived afterwards.

But it wasn't Catcher in the Rye which had the biggest impact on me as a young writer. It was the collection of short stories, For Esme-with Love and Squalor. It just occurs to me that while I was in Spain, living out the drama I recount in The Novel of Life, I was reading this collection of short stories.

I now recall carrying the book of short stories through the subways of Madrid. The blue cover faded, the spine breaking apart at the top, the words on the binding creased and unreadable. It is the same now as it was then.

I loved these stories that Salinger wrote. They amused me, entertained me, but also taught me matters of the heart. Of course, I admired the crisp, ebullient sentences, and that Salingeresque voice which is inimitable and immediately recognizable. There is intelligence in every word, and a particular attitude that almost never goes away. Salinger critiques society from the oddest angles, with detached humor or a kind of palatable morbidity.

The paradox of J.D. Salinger is apparent in the writing. It's a love/hate relationship to the world, and we can all identify with it. It's just too bad that he spent so much time on the other extreme during the second half of his life. With any death of a celebrity or a major figure, we have our own private meanings, our secret connections. Perhaps, then, it is us, the readers, who finally get to love the author.

He wants to get, as it were, behind those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants to hear that voice applying itself to every possible proposition, to every possible topic; he wants to see those characteristic gestures against every possible background. Of the question of the sex instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings--by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in passing--that I think it might be left out of the calculation. I don't mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation.

That seems to me a commonplace and to be therefore a matter needing no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its accidents, that must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take it for granted that the characters have their meals with some regularity. But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves.

He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

So, for a time, if such a passion comes to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows across sun-dials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will have become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned to many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

Ford Maddox Ford, from The Good Soldier
(qtd. Sven Birkerts, The Reading Life: Books for the Ages)