I read Catcher in the Rye again after 21 years… I wanted to understand the nature of JD Salinger’s hold on the teenager who lives on in my middle-aged heart… I think people go back to prison again and again because they find out how easy it is to live behind walls. If you mind your own business, and fight just enough to establish your own space, people don’t bother you much. There’s plenty of time to read and brood; all in all, not a bad place for ducks to spend the winter.”
— Robert Keene, How The Catcher in the Rye Ruined My Life, 1987 Prison Writing Contest (PEN America website)
In his years as the quiet neighbour who kept to himself in Cornish, New Hampshire (pop: 1,700), I’m not sure whether the late JD Salinger ever read Keene’s riff on Catcher in the Rye. The author died at the age of 91 last week, 30 years after he gave his last public interview, 45 years after his last published work (Hapworth 16, 1924) appeared in print. He continued writing, for himself, free of the need to have readers discover his work, allowing himself a lament to Lillian Ross about the death of the private reader.
The places where Salinger was — and is — read are all in outlier territory. In the US until as recently as 2006, Catcher in the Rye regularly made it to the list of books that attracted demands for bans — on the grounds of bad language and profanity, on the grounds that Holden Caulfield was not a suitable role model.
It remains the book you must discover for yourself at 15 or thereabouts, one of the few adolescent classics that you will just as surely outgrow once your passport has been stamped at the border of adulthood. It’s hard to imagine a reader in their thirties or forties discovering Catcher, resonant with Holden’s hatred of phonies, his misanthropic rejection of a world that he secretly hopes will surprise and delight him despite all the evidence, in the same way that most of us discovered Catcher in our youth. To move on from the alienation and sweet sadness to the more complicated discontents and discoveries of the Glass family — Franny, Zooey, Seymour and all the others into whom Salinger breathed life — is another kind of rite of passage; most critics, and readers, make that leap early.
The history of Catcher’s readers has been unfairly dominated by the fact that the book has appealed to the unstable and the violent: Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, the Son of Sam were all obsessed with the novel. It is read in the lonelier places of the world — rehabs, jails, mental hospitals — and perhaps that is why it continues to gather in readers traversing through the loneliest terrain of them all, the sometimes vicious landscapes of adolescence. Most of these readers continue into a normal adulthood, not outgrowing Catcher so much as placing it among other outdated treasures of the teenage years, to be looked at again through the lens of nostalgia.
Perhaps Salinger left behind a wealth of unpublished masterpieces — some accounts say that he racked up 15 complete works in the years when he abandoned the public, but not the private, life of the writer. He never meant them to be read, though if they exist, perhaps they will be dragged out into the glare of the light.
Consider the alternative life of Salinger, if he had not made the decision to retreat into a community that valued his privacy as fiercely as he did himself. He was fascinated, at different stages, by the philosophy of Swami Vivekananda and some of the yoga scriptures, by Dianetics, urine therapy, macrobiotic diets, orgone therapy — even a basic list makes him sound like a superannuated hippie.
Salinger could well have continued writing well-turned (or impenetrably obscure) short stories for the New Yorker; in his sixties, he might have appeared on television debates over alternative medical therapies; by his seventies, been a fixture in the travelling circus of literary festivals; be cited in his eighties for sundry controversies as he called out younger contemporaries for being phonies.
In an age obsessed with celebrity and readership, with being seen, honoured and discussed, Salinger’s ascetic adherence to his values was quixotic, even deranged. Perhaps his determination to be a writer for himself is completely against the nature of story-telling itself; perhaps it was a kind of protest over what he saw as the growing debasement of reading and writing. But he did his job before he covered himself with a blanket of silence; he gave us that one great, near-immortal classic and at least a handful of disturbing but beloved short stories.
Digging up his literary bones against his express wishes, raiding his dustbin in the hopes that it might contain another Catcher is for phonies. Despite the inevitable curiosity, I’d prefer to live with the legacy Salinger wanted us to have, and leave his unpublished masterpieces undisturbed.
