Salinger Is Dead: At Last

by Thomas Wood on January 28, 2010

J.D. Salinger has died at 91. I, for one, am relieved. My relationship (if you can call it that) with the infamous recluse has been one of abandonment: I’ve wanted more. I’ve waited for a sign. Picture the kid who doesn’t know if his father is alive or dead. His life goes on, sure, but there’s always the mystery tugging at his earlobe. As the story goes, one day, he went for a pack of cigarettes…

I didn’t read Cathcher in the Rye, at least not right away, and, truth be told, it wasn’t my favorite of his works. What got me to Salinger was boredom, plain and simple. I was bored in English class. Most public English school classes have stacks of unread books piled up in closets and corners, remnants of curriculum’s past. “Nine Stories” was one of these books, and I picked it up one day, hoping my teacher wouldn’t notice I wasn’t following along with “A Separate Peace.” I still have that copy.

From there, his books, scant as they were, shaped much of my drive as a reader and, eventual writer. “Nine Stories” pulled me from bull-lt poetry into respectable, if not a touch elaborate, prose. Just in time, too. My teenage journals were thankful. “Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenter/Seymour, An Introduction,” with its page-long sentences and parenthetical bouquets, showed me the beauty of indulging all the qualifications of your thoughts, showed me the potential of my own thoughts. It was a reading akin to hearing your instructor expertly play Zepplin on a guitar which you had assured him was broken. For me, though, “Franny and Zooey” will always be the one. I think it’s the brooding or, more accurately, it’s the seeing someone brood better than you. It’s that sobering effect of seeing someone who reallyhas problems. The book matched the others for style, but had the special advantage of being exactly the right level of angst, curiosity and intellectual longing for exactly the right angsty, curious, intellectual time in my young life. I carried it with me on my travels abroad. As it fit snugly into my walking coat, I read it, again, in pubs.

His style was strictly prose, with qualification after qualification. He made an art of the after-thought. He glued emotions with a comma. Mostly, his work showed me the potential delight of really looking into one’s own perspective. As I read him, here and there, a line would get me, make me pause. They were the kind of lines that were funny, but only so much as they were a reflection on my own inner monologue. It’s that kind of deeply personal amusement that comes from being curious and enjoying the world; it’s also from being the type of person who is accustomed to keeping most of one’s curiosity to themselves for fear of being ostracized, as in, “Shut up, Thomas. You’re always saying such weird things.”

“…She happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.” This line, from the short story, “The Laughing Man,” about sums up my impression of his writing, as well as its impression on me. It’s one of those lines that I read again and again, dissecting it, noting the cadence, trying to discern its apparent effect on me. The line follows a scene in which a college age girl joins a group of young boys playing baseball. She doesn’t fit. She sticks out. It’s written from a boy’s perspective, a boy trying to figure out the world around him, and trying to reconcile this girl who he knows, socially speaking, he should shun. For me it’s a show of the disparity between social walls we go along with and that inner curiosity that let’s everything in. I love it. It makes me laugh, every time.

“The unpublished work of Salinger”

Four books is what we got from Salinger and I, if I avoid my natural selfishness, think they are enough. Still, there have been moments where I thought there might be some secret novel, some as yet unpublished work. I had that same thrill today when my friend, Petetia posted a piece of art she created as tribute. I didn’t see it as art. I only saw an unknown title, something called “May Your Soul Soar,” and felt the rush of possibility at getting my hands on an unknown work. Just as quickly, the thrill subsided. It was just a piece of art, afterall.

Like most impressionable readers/fans, I’ve wanted more. I begrudged his reclusiveness but, like so much of his writing, it brought me a beautiful irony of having to grow up on my own, to finish the work myself. One of my first short stories was about a young man getting an opportunity to interview a notoriously reclusive author, an elegant hurricane of a man, all passion and arms. I wrote it about a year after my own father had died, when I was still sorting out what it meant to be a man without guidance. I think with that story there was always a feeling of something missing, some answer to a mystery not made public. The answer was my own writing and its want to develop. Maybe now I can finish it.