Revisiting Salinger After His Death

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your whole life."
~Holden Caufield in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye

"I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete--that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everyone else's values, and just because people rave about me doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash."
~Franny in Salinger's Franny and Zooey


As one who attempts to teach elementary literacy, I've learned that the experiences we have allow us to "connect" with literature in a way that increases comprehension. When I was a sophomore at Culver Academies, I read J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. Along with John Knowles' A Separate Peace--himself a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy--Catcher is THE boarding school book to read, so I ate it up at the time.

A lot can be said of Holden Caufield's cathartic stream-of-consciousness, but his endless darts at the "phonies" appealed to me, even if so many of the book's themes and allusions undoubtedly escaped my own analysis.

I liked the book so much at the time, I decided to include it in my senior thesis two years later, which explored (quite vaguely I might add) male coming of age in American fiction, namely Holden's, Huck's in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Ponyboy's in S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Having reread my paper recently, I can say with a lot of confidence that it was naively interpreted and poorly researched, but the spark of interest was definitely there. One New York Times obituary called Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn two of the three "perfect" American novels (F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was the third), so perhaps there was some wisdom after all in my selections (as if there is some sort of standard measuring the perfection of novels).

Along with a few friends, I read Catcher a third time recently after Salinger's recent death. Apparently everyone else in the world had the same idea because when we checked the library stock online immediately after Salinger died, there was a good fifty copies available; when we checked a few days later, every copy in the Jacksonville Public Library system was checked out. Naturally, we bought a few copies from Chamblin's Bookmine. It was interesting to read the novel this time with different eyes; I am sure if I read it ten or twenty years from now the same would be true.

In his blog, memoirist Don Miller pointed out that though Holden's attitudes are perhaps immature or even juvenile, his insights are adult ones. Salinger himself was known as a stealthy recluse, and sued others who adapted and recreated from his work.

***

I also recall--during my sophomore year of college--a friend of mine recommending Salinger's Franny and Zoey. She had recently experienced a pretty significant family tragedy, so there was a certain weight to her recommendation, but it regretfully eluded me anyway. I bought the book (a bad habit of mine at the time) and enabled it in growing a blanket of dust for the next five years. Until Salinger died, and I reread Catcher. So I finally actually read Franny and Zoey, a work that is "more moving" in the words of one my friends than Catcher is. Due to his resistance to fame, there is a limited amount of Salinger's work in print, so to read something else from Salinger is not the same as to read one more book from John Grisham.

If Catcher included some cultural critique of the upper class elites then Franny and Zoey--published a few years after--finished the job for Salinger, and, in my opinion, offered more insight. In one memorable monologue of sorts, Franny--a depressed college student--raved:

"I think that knowledge--when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway--is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly. I don't know it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while--just just once in a while--there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge."

It is an unlikely (and yet, articulate) source for the developing philosophy of education within myself. Franny's rebellion--right or wrong--against it all entailed the reading and practicing of a sort of prayer that came from a book and was supposed to meet the "pray without ceasing" standard that Paul of Tarsus writes about in one of his Epistles.

Though Franny and Zoey--like Catcher in the Rye--is a quick read, upon finishing I was left with the same sense about Salinger that so many others feel and have felt: I wish he would have given us more. And I wonder: did he or would he have stretched beyond his typical themes at all? How did Salinger in 2005 stack up against Salinger in 1955?

Sure, there is his Nine Stories still to look forward to and apparently another piece in The New Yorker, but for a man whose books sold and continue to sell so well, he gave us relatively little to work with.

I can't decide whether that's more tragic or refreshing.