By Jason Schwalm
Emboldened by alcohol and dubious company, I once struck up a conversation with a beautiful woman who was pursuing a master’s degree in literature. An English major myself, I was certain that I would dazzle her with insightful, pithy remarks on J. D. Salinger.
She was not impressed. I then proceeded to spill bourbon on her friend’s head.
My limited social graces notwithstanding, J. D. Salinger is a difficult writer to talk about. His prose is confusing and his subject matter esoteric. The novella “Seymour: An Introduction,” opens with two fairly heady quotes from Kafka and Kierkegaard: not exactly the kind of epigraph that makes a reader feel welcome. While all of this could also be said of James Joyce, what is unique about Salinger is that he is so widely beloved.
Despite his rambling style and compulsive parenthetical asides (or, more likely, because of these things), J. D. Salinger readers find his writing to be deeply, hauntingly personal. In a collection of letters to the author, no sentiment was echoed more frequently than, “I felt like you were writing just to me.”
His legend is only compounded by his seclusion. More than forty years have passed since his last published story, and by now Salinger is etched into our cultural memory.
By many accounts, Holden Caufield stands as the Huckleberry Finn of the 20th Century. Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon while nursing an obsession with “Catcher in the Rye.” The overcrowded dusty house and reconciliation of siblings long estranged in “Franny and Zooey” is the lifeblood of Wes Anderson movies, like “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Salinger is a cynical moralist, a sophisticated idealist, and forever in pursuit of the divine. Holden’s rants about the “phonies” and Seymour’s mystic spirituality are part and parcel of Salinger’s larger authorial project: charting the thinking person’s quest to balance the head and the heart. “All we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next,” his most autobiographical character, Buddy Glass, intones.
This melancholy giant of American letters has, perhaps, chosen to be underappreciated and misunderstood. While no definitive biography of the man exists, reports of his behavior range from the comically sad to the bizarre, and he seems to have little interest in correcting them.
However, one can hardly blame him. Every foray into the public eye has ended in spectacular disaster for Salinger. Both his daughter and ex-wife have written books about him. Joyce Maynard, the ex-wife, also once auctioned fourteen of the author’s love letters to her. Mercifully, they were purchased by a philanthropist who then returned the letters to Salinger.
Throughout all of the newspaper articles with intrepid titles like, “In Search of J. D. Salinger,” it is striking that few self-proclaimed fans ever express a simple wish for this very talented, very troubled man’s peace of mind. “A Baudelaire’s poem is not worth his grief,” said Jack Kerouac. “I would have preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he’s left us.”
Personally, I wish we could have just left the poor guy alone.
Jason Schwalm is a first-year law student at the Brandeis School of Law. E-mail him at opinion@louisvillecardinal.com.
