J.D. and Me

I first met J.D. Salinger back in the 7th or 8th grade; can’t remember exactly. Not the author, of course, but his (perhaps) alter ego, Holden Caulfield, the catcher in the rye. It would have been around 1953,4. Ike was President. “I Like Ike,” said his campaign buttons, but my family, being good New York Democrats, liked Adlai; not much rhyme there.

The Korean War, which wasn’t a “war” despite the fact that lots of people fighting in it were dying, was either winding down or over, as I recall. It made the news sporadically, and it was only newspapers and radio in those days, TV not yet ubiquitous. The so-called Cold War was going on, and we learned about using the subways as air-raid shelters, and practiced ducking under our school desks in case the Russians had decided to drop a nuclear bomb on us – as we had on the Japanese. It was an uncertain time in the country and in my own life as well. And then Holden, his cap on backward, came along.

I went to a private school in NYC, my hometown, from the 2nd grade through the senior year in high school. The 2nd grade class I first entered was small. I don’t think there were more than 15 kids in it, probably fewer, and all boys. Private schools, usually called prep schools, were segregated by sex, economic class and racially as well, though there might be token minorities from wealthier families, or scions of well-off families from Latin American countries. But, like Holden’s prep school, these were (almost) all white, all same sex, middle and upper class bastions of privilege, and all were rigidly hierarchical. Acceptance of and obeisance to authority was the mind-set of the day, as was so in the past and would remain so for some years to come.

Coming into this school in the 2nd grade I was a newcomer. Most of the others had been there since kindergarten. It took awhile to make friends, not being an outgoing type, quite the opposite in fact, but I did fall in with a small clique of boys, three or four of them. We connected through sports, which I always loved and still do. We remained a tight coterie for five years, until the 7th grade. Then there was a falling out among this band, and they kicked me out of their midst. It seems so trivial now, almost 60 years later, but at the time it was quite devastating. I went from five or six close friends, kids I’d known since the 2nd grade, to no friends in a class of about 30 by then. Not a fun time. Then I met Holden and we became friends.

He said out loud what I’d only thought. He explained my inchoate thoughts and feelings to me: the resentment, the longing to stay a child though on the cusp of adulthood, or feelings of tenderness or longing that could never be allowed expression no less even harbored. He spotted the phonies, of which I’d been one, and he felt things that weren’t permitted in the world I knew, where authority wasn’t questioned and hypocrisy wasn’t made evident. No one said what he or she felt or what he or she really thought. We’d been programmed entirely differently. And Holden walked into my isolation and alienation and unexpressed longings, and in a sense saved me. It saved me from being alone, knowing that someone out there knew and understood an adolescent’s misery. A catcher in the rye.

J.D. Salinger died this year, 2010, an old man in his 90s, an enigma and self-imposed recluse. I read recently that early on, when he and his books first became renowned, he enjoyed his celebrity. That may be true, but it didn’t stay that way for long. For most of his life, Salinger eschewed celebrity, notoriety or accessibility. In fact he jealously guarded his privacy and remained outside and apart from any need for attention; certainly a rare bird in today’s world of desperate “Look at me!”

I’ve read his books, more than once, and as so many others waited for the next one that was never to come. Rumors abound that he continued to write even after he’d stopped publishing, that there are books and other manuscripts secreted somewhere where he lived in New Hampshire or some other place, and perhaps may get published some day. But that’s all just speculation as of now. Maybe in death J.D. will stay as mysterious and as inaccessible as he did in life. Maybe he just no longer needed acclaim, or felt the desire to express what he thought and felt. Perhaps his Buddhism had brought him to that place of detachment and unconcern with achievement or recognition or any of the morsels ego feeds on. Whatever his motives for reclusion, or need to be apart from the world’s goings on, will probably stay a mystery unless it’s revealed in some future publication of his writing; if in fact there is any.

So one is left to sit and wonder what becomes of Holden, or Franny, or Zooey and the whole Glass family. Which one was Salinger, or was he more likely all of them? Why did the teacher quit teaching? Was he fed up with us; with himself, what he saw all around him in the news of the world? It must have seeped through his fortress of solitude. Then a thought comes up – if he truly wanted anonymity why not live in another country? Why burrow in rural New Hampshire where, sooner or later, some will seek you out? Or was that part of the plot? Was he saying, “If you want me, truly want me, you’ll have to come and get me?” It seems that some did, and he was a man with a wife and family, so he was known to a privileged few. What he was like as an ordinary person is anybody’s guess, but I’ll always admire that he chose ordinariness and what must have been a plain existence in isolated countryside. Life comes down to routine and immediate relationships in such slow changing settings, and the distractions constantly dangled before us can be shut off, or at least limited,

I have a hunch he continued to write. Where his thoughts took him, what he wanted to observe, how he wanted to construct a story, what he thought he might say to us is, again, anybody’s guess. But I, for one, want to know.

This guy, in the guise of a disillusioned teenager, had entered my life, crossed my path, and made me see things differently. I was spoken to by someone I felt in league with, and who understood what a shitty place the world could be sometimes, and who would easily comprehend your pain. At the same time he sparked the rebellion and resistance you felt but kept at bay. He unlocked the resentment and anger that lay just under the surface, about being shoved forward, competing for some prize that must be had, or following some path that had to be taken. There was this driving pressure to become something, someone, when what you wanted was to slow down and find out who you were. Holden understood this. He understood me. It’s become a life-long pact this connection to the character and the author who fathered him. Enough of Holden rubbed off on me then to last a lifetime, and for that I’m grateful. But, oh, how I’d love to know what old J.D.’s been thinking about all these years.