Like most disenchanted young people, I was obsessed with the novels of J.D. Salinger. It began, typically with Catcher in the Rye and I became convinced that the man behind this book was the patron saint of teen angst. Hell, I wanted to lose my virginity to Holden Caulfield at one point.
When I turned twenty I explored the brilliantly dysfunctional Glass family in Franny & Zooey and some of the Nine Stories. I’m a little frightened by how much of a kinship I felt with the Glass kids, particularly little Franny.
And every so often I imagined what I’d say to Salinger if I ever stumbled accidentally on his lair while berry picking on an abandoned farm somewhere in Maine. I even deigned to think he might invite me in for tea or whiskey. More likely, he’d have hucked pinecones at me. And to be honest, that made me admire him even more. In an age where everybody broadcasts the squickiest details of their personal lives on television or the internet, we hear of fewer and fewer genius hermits.
So yeah, I was sad when he died last week, even if he did live to the ripe old age of 91.
Though I’ve grown a lot less disenchanted over the years (thank you J.K. Rowling!) I still live with the bad brain chemicals that first bitch-slapped me around puberty. Though Salinger’s characters tended not to be gifted happy endings (especially poor Seymour), I still find it oddly comforting that even clever people from dynamic well-to-do families can end up telling their story to a shrink.
From time to time I wonder what sort of man Esme married. Did she end up in squalor and was it as romantic living in it as it was speculating about it? What if I had grown up in a family of geniuses living in Manhattan. Would I have ended up on the same anti-depressants or wound up in a mental institution?
As for J.D. Salinger, I hope he found peace and happiness giving the rest of society the finger. I’m glad his early success allowed him to live out his life writing for no one but himself.
I can’t even begin to fathom how he lived his everyday life or whether he threw pine cones at groupies who tried to approach his house. But I do hope that the phonies leave him alone in the afterlife.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/books/01/28/salinger.obit/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn
