Last week J.D. Salinger passed away. We all heard the running eulogies on NPR and read them in the papers, and I had a mixed feeling when I heard he had passed.
There have only been a few people who’ve told me they could hear Holden Caufield in Blue Like Jazz, and that surprised me. The truth is I read Catcher in the Rye about fifty times while I was writing it. I’d sit and read for an hour and then open up the computer and start typing. I suppose the prose was imitation, but all good writers imitate somebody. Salinger was imitating Borges and so many others, for instance. The trick is to get the writers voice in your head, then write through it to find your own, or at least one that can’t be identified as pure imitation.
Phillip Yancey was the only one who really called me out. We met at a reading and later he read Blue Like Jazz and e-mailed me only a couple lines that said You were reading Catcher in the Rye by Salinger and Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott when you wrote this.
And he was right. In fact, those were the only two books I was reading when I wrote Blue.
In the movie Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson plays a man with psychological problems who collects copies of Catcher in the Rye. The movie played on the fact Mark David Chapman had a copy of the book on him when he shot John Lennon, and John Hinckley Jr. left a copy in his hotel room the morning he shot President Reagan. I always thought those were an unfair associations. Statistically, the likelihood of anybody committing a crime with a copy of Catch on them is rather high. The book has sold 65-million copies. The Joy of Cooking has been left behind at many a kitchen fire but nobody makes spooky correlations about that.
If you visited my home, you might think it odd I have about ten copies of Catch. I have one of the old hardback books, then about nine copies of the infamous black and white cover. But that’s not because I’m crazy. While I was writing Blue, I was traveling a lot, and anytime I had a writing session on the road and had forgotten the book at home, I’d walk down to the local bookstore and pick up another copy.
That solid-color cover that has lasted through the years is not a ploy by the publisher to have the book stand out on the shelf. It’s actually the only cover they can contractually use. After the book came out and sold a bunch of copies, Salinger wanted it pulled from the shelves. He didn’t like the attention. The publisher wouldn’t do it, and made him stick with the contract he had signed. So when they came to him after a few years wanting to revamp the cover, he told them no. He made them use a solid color with an off-color text, hoping the book would die away. I wonder if the cover will change, now. The publisher switched to black-and-white a few years ago to make things spicy. Who knows what’s next.
I’ll spare you the details about Salinger’s eccentricities. I read a few biographies about his life and none of them were kind. He was a recluse, but would sometimes grant interviews with young high-school girls, at least one of whom later became his wife and the father of his child. He would leave them alone and miserable for days while he was down a path on his property, locked in a cinder-block room, hammering away at a typewriter, all work he would never publish. According to his biographers he was a selfish man. I personally think he couldn’t take the criticism. J.D. Salinger is a man who wanted things his own way and wouldn’t accept anything else. It is rumored there are works of genius in that cinderblock cell, now, of course, being leafed through by his family, but I honestly doubt it. Perhaps he was doing great work fifty years ago, but without criticism, my guess is most of the stuff in the last thirty years will be obscure. But that’s just a guess.
There is no debate about whether Catch is a work of genius, though. It is, without question. The book has very little arc, and very little character development, and yet it maintains our interest. We are not inside an adolescent’s head as the voice is far too sophisticated for that. Instead, we are in the head of that pesky adolescent who lives within us. Holden Caufield is our inner child, our inner cynic, our authentic self that hates the phonies around us. To flawlessly capture that voice seems a nearly divine accomplishment. Who didn’t cry reading that book? And who knew why they were crying? I did, and I still don’t know why.
I actually find the book annoying now. Perhaps because I’ve read it so many times, or because I’ve grown up a bit. I had to read Blue for the audio version a few years ago, and I felt the same way when I read it aloud as I do now reading Catch. I wanted the writer to grow up, to stop hiding behind cynicism, and to get over his superiority complex.
Perhaps Salinger felt the same way. He certainly didn’t want you and I to read the book. But I’m glad he didn’t get his way. RIP J.D. Salinger.
{ 46 comments }
