On Salinger and "Catcher"

There's an argument to be made for the idea that by completely removing himself from public life and not publishing a single word after the age of 45, J.D. Salinger actively enhanced the mystique and distinction of his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye; that all those years he sat rotting away in a small New Hampshire town, he was acting as an offbeat marketing scheme, promoting and maintaining his work's cultural relevance.

I'm not saying that this was his intention. In fact, I'm almost completely sure it wasn't. If Salinger ever realized this — and I suspect he did — I’m sure it bugged him to no end. But people almost always want things they can't have as a direct result of those things being unattainable. That's why Flyers fans are miserable assholes, why everyone, at some point, falls for someone who’s already accounted for, and why there was never a Beatles reunion.

Catcher certainly is a great book; you’d be hard-pressed to find a logical argument to the contrary. It was one of the first American novels to accurately capture the angst, longing and searching nature of the American teenage consciousness. It was remarkably edgy for its day, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s extraordinarily well written. But how much of the enduring fanfare for Catcher is attributable to the fact that its author ultimately snapped?

Initially, Salinger was receptive to readers — especially students and young people — who wanted to discuss the book with him. But as Catcher accumulated a cult following, Salinger decided that fame wasn't really his thing, and withdrew himself from society, moving from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire, then ultimately cutting off most of the rest of the world.

Everyone who writes puts something of themselves into their work. There is some element of autobiography in every single work of literature ever published, and Catcher is no different. Salinger acknowledged that Catcher contained these elements in a 1953 interview, saying, “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... [I]t was a great relief telling people about it."

Telling people about it might have been cathartic for Salinger, but that effect obviously didn’t last too long. You don’t have to be a literary scholar to draw the parallels between Holden Caufield’s dismissal of most adults as phonies and Salinger’s straight up rejection of the adult world. Even in the years after he wrote and published Catcher, it’s abundantly clear from what we know of Salinger’s life that he wasn’t ever too far from his wayward protagonist — compulsively experimenting with different religions, having a series of failed relationships, and, according to some sources, writing as many as 15 unpublished novels — the intellectual equivalent of taking your ball and going home.

Salinger received numerous offers over the years from Hollywood moguls who wanted to get their hands on the film rights to Catcher, and he always relented. Salinger’s former lover, Joyce Maynard, once said, "the only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger.”

For all we seem to think we don’t know about Salinger as a result of his reclusiveness, his signature work and what we do know his life might tell us all we need to know. This is someone whose premiere character was an autobiographical self-reflection; angry, depressed, searching. His reclusiveness in the wake of the novel’s immense success sends a pretty clear message: J.D. Salinger did not write The Catcher in the Rye for you. He didn’t write it to connect with people or help people in situations similar to his understand themselves or their predicaments any better. He wrote it for himself.

And when the phony-ass world co-opted it and collectively nominated it as the novel of a generation, he reacted to it in the same way Holden Caufield probably would have: he said “fuck it,” and ran away. He kept it real. And he spent 46 years keeping it real. While it’s great for teens to have a book like this that they can identify with, perhaps Catcher’s long-term cultural value is best ascertained from examining it within the context of its author and his life.

Salinger got married, he had a few kids, and he supposedly wrote up a storm. But all signs point toward him being someone who never really grew out of the juvenile worldview that allowed him to write this book in the first place. While Salinger and his work will probably always be culturally relevant, perhaps the best lesson to take away from the end of this 50-year saga is that whether you like the world or not, you have two options: you can grow and adapt and work to change it, or your can take your ball and go home.

With the mind Salinger had, it’s a shame he chose the latter.