The Life and Death of J.D. Salinger, Essay Example

When J.D. Salinger died on January 27, 2010, there were countless articles written about his nearly mythic reclusiveness, his rejection of the fame and notoriety brought about by his one and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and the endless fascination, bordering on obsession, by those who loved and admired his work.  Millions of teenagers and college students fell in love with the book and its hero, Holden Caulfield, with his combination of innocence and cynicism that was described by some as a modern-day version of Huckleberry Finn. Although Holden Caulfield is an American, his appeal was universal.  The book has been translated into more than 30 languages and has sold more than 65 million copies throughout the world.  An international assortment of critics expressed “a sense of wonder” about the way Salinger so accurately portrayed their sense of themselves as adolescents. (Krupnick.)

During the 50 years in which he lived in Cornish, New Hampshire, there were constant attempts to violate Salinger’s privacy by sneaking onto his property, loitering on the road leading into the town where he lived, and just hoping for a glimpse or a tidbit of information about him.  What made J.D. Salinger such a figure of enormous fascination, speculation and even idolatry?  This paper will discuss aspects of Salinger’s life and work as described by various writers and which made him a subject of unlimited interest to the public, especially those who were profoundly moved by his published works.

Although Salinger was considered to be one of the most important American writers to arrive on the scene after World War II, he turned his back on all the success and admiration and became “famous for not wanting to be famous” (McGrath.)  This appeared to contradict his earlier desire when as a young college student, he boasted about his literary abilities and his intentions to become a successful writer.  However, once the enormous success of The Catcher in the Ryebecame apparent, Salinger quickly became disenchanted with the spotlight, even insisting that his picture be removed from the dust jacket of the book in all future printings
(McGrath.)  As a result, the picture that accompanied all of the obituaries following his death shows the Salinger of 50 years ago, young and still a participant in the world.

J.D. Salinger was born in New York City on January 1, 1919, and after attending city schools for elementary grades his parents sent him to a private school in the city for high school education.  A mediocre student, he was expelled from his secondary school after two years because of an indifference to his studies.  At the age of 16, he was sent to a military academy in Pennsylvania and graduated two years later.  Indeed, many of Holden Caulfield’s observations about” phonies” and other objects of his contempt in the academic world were likely a direct result of Salinger’s experiences with students and teachers from his elementary and secondary education.

After graduating from military school, Salinger enrolled at New York University but dropped out after one year.  It was then that his father gave him money in order to travel to Europe so that he could refine his language skills and learn about food imports, which was what his father was involved in professionally.  For approximately five months, Salinger remained in Europe, spending most of his time in Vienna, but to his father’s chagrin, he showed little interest in food markets, or in the politics that were about to completely engulf Europe.  He left Vienna about one month before the Germans annexed Austria in March, 1938.

When he returned to the United States, Salinger enrolled at a Pennsylvania college that preached the doctrines of the German Reformed Church.  He spent one miserable term there, before returning to New York and finishing his higher education by taking a night course at Columbia University.  This became a pivotal event for him because the course was taught by a prominent editor of a magazine that specialized in publishing short fiction, and who also earned a reputation for discovering new talent.  The encouragement that Salinger got from his teacher resulted in his publishing short stories in well-respected magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers.  By the age of 21, Salinger had one of his stories published by Esquire and was determined to have his work published in the New Yorker as well.

Unfortunately, the timing of Salinger’s career launch occurred just as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor; he was drafted into the Army and served from 1942 to 1944.  At first, he had a relatively easy experience stationed on Army bases in the United States.  However, in March, 1944, his unit was preparing for the Normandy invasion.  During his time in the military, Salinger finished six chapters of the novel about a character that very much resembled himself as a teenager.  This became the prototype for Holden Caulfield, one of the best known and best loved characters in American fiction.

Although Salinger was a counterintelligence officer, he witnessed much of the carnage involved in the liberation of Europe, including the Battle of the Bulge.  He continued to write while serving in the Army, and his letters and short stories that were written at this time make it clear that his experience in the war had traumatized him (Krupnick.)  His earlier writing had demonstrated his emotional vulnerabilities as a student, and his later work, including two stories printed in Nine Stories, describes the post-war emotional problems of men that would now be regarded as post-traumatic stress syndrome.  These stories depict soldiers who have come through the wars physically alive but emotionally scarred in profound ways.

Salinger suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for a short time when the war ended. In 1945, he met and married a German woman named Sylvia after knowing her for only a few weeks.  In later years, Salinger’s daughter Margaret, a product of his second marriage, described in her memoir that Sylvia was a member of the Nazi party whom her father had been planning to arrest.  Salinger’s second wife, Claire, later acknowledged that Salinger told her that Sylvia was an evil woman who passionately hated Jews, and given that Salinger’s father was a Jew, their volatile, intense marriage ended after only eight months.

When Salinger returned to New York in 1946, he was on shaky ground emotionally when he tried to continue a career as a writer.  In 1948, the New Yorker accepted three of his stories and he became forever linked with that magazine.  In addition, he began expanding his stories about Holden Caulfield into a longer, more substantial work than anything he had set out to do previously.

When The Catcher in the Rye was published, it received mixed reviews; the majority of critics were positive but there was a segment of the critical community that attacked the book as “subversive and immoral.” (Krupnick.)  Holden was described as a repellent character and several reviewers gave voice to the fear that it would result in producing more of his ilk in the population.  A movement began to have the book banned from all schools and libraries.  Another strain of thought pertaining to the book viewed Holden as an innocent who is searching for something purer and more honest than the cruelty and phoniness of the world at large.  Some devout fans of the book have seen Holden as a saint, and have viewed the plot as a spiritual journey.

Regardless of the various reactions of the critics, The Catcher in the Rye achieved a level of notoriety that made Salinger cringe.  Since its publication in 1951, it has become a manifesto of disenchanted youth (Lacayo.)  In fact, this has included people who were mentally ill and destined to commit violence in the name of the book, such as when Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon in 1980 and claimed that his motive had been to promote the reading of Salinger’s book.  Not long afterwards, when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to kill President Reagan, he left a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his hotel room.  In any event, for the millions of people who read the book but were not crazy, Holden Caulfield, who some considered to be manic-depressive, represents the original angry young man.  What made him so irresistible to so many was that he was considered to be extremely vulnerable yet cynical. Holden was born at a moment when the culture of American teenagers was being born as well, creating a whole generation of rebellious teenagers and young people.

After The Catcher in the Rye was published, J. D. Salinger’s pace of writing slowed down considerably.  He had discovered Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism and was spending much of his time meditating.  In addition, he began eating a macrobiotic diet, was receiving acupuncture and utilizing homeopathy.  In 1955, however, Salinger resumed publishing when Franny appeared in the New Yorker.  This story, although only 40 pages, became almost as much of a classic for young people as The Catcher in the Rye had been, and became even more of the object of a cult because it was so hard to obtain until it was reprinted in 1961 in a collection of short stories, Franny and Zooey.  That book quickly became the number one book on the New York Times bestseller list, and it marked the height of Salinger’s popularity, causing much more of a stir than his first book had a decade prior.  His picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine and the debate about the quality and worth of his fiction was widely debated among many circles.  This coincided with the new youth movement and Salinger became somewhat of a symbol of this angst-ridden population.

Salinger’s next three major subsequent works were all novellas and were all about members of the Glass family, who had first appeared in Franny and Zooey.  Mr. and Mrs. Glass had been stars of vaudeville, and their seven children were all memorable and unique in extroverted ways.  This book found a loyal and affectionate audience among his younger readers but by 1960, Salinger’s work was being scrutinized by well-known academics and critics and generally, they were not kind to him.  Salinger had always been extremely vulnerable to critical opinion and he was extremely injured by the attacks on his work by such influential authors as John Updike and Mary McCarthy.

Salinger published Hapworth 16, 1924, in 1965, an 80 page novella in the New Yorker and when it was attacked almost uniformly by critics, his response was to continue his writing but to stop having anything to do with publishers or the commercial literary environment.  It was then that he moved from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire, undoubtedly to further make his point. He largely withdrew from the world and from that point on, the nature and agenda for his life and work appeared to be his attempts to frustrate journalists and fans who were completely intrigued by his life, and the apparent autobiographical aspect of his fiction.

Salinger’s apparent distrust of the world in general occasionally presented a contradiction such as when in 1955, at age 36, he met and married a 19-year-old Harvard student named Claire Douglas who also happened to be the daughter of a distinguished art critic.  He imposed on his household an eccentric Eastern religious regime and he concentrated exclusively on his work so that the marriage was destined to fail.  It did, however, produce two children, Margaret and Matthew.  Claire filed for divorce in 1967, however, being close to a nervous breakdown herself.  The divorce settlement awarded the house to her, but Salinger built himself one only a mile away so that he could be closer to his children.

During the next year is, Salinger began relationships with a series of very young women.  The most notable of these was one with Joyce Maynard, an 18-year-old freshman from Yale University who attracted Salinger’s attention when she wrote an essay called An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back on Life and which was published in the New York Times.  Salinger contacted Maynard via a fan letter and soon afterwards, she left college to move in with him.  Their relationship lasted for about one year and in 1998, she wrote a memoir in which she described her time with Salinger as a period in which he had been emotionally abused and finally discarded with complete apathy.  Needless to say, her very personal descriptions of their relationship angered Salinger, who experienced her book as a betrayal.

The following year, however, Maynard outdid herself regarding exposing Salinger’s interpersonal problem issues when she auctioned off the letters he had sent her during their relationship.  For years, Salinger’s attorneys had been able to prevent the publication of excerpts from Salinger’s letters because the quotations had not come directly from the recipient of the letters.  Maynard’s situation was different, however, because she was clearly the owner of the letters.  More recently, Salinger launched a legal effort against the author, publisher and distributor of a proposed sequel to Catcher in the Rye, and in which he prevailed.  Each of his victories to prevent material from being published became paradoxical, however, because they tended to attract more attention than ever simply because he guarded his privacy so vociferously.

Despite his reputation for being a recluse, according to the people who live near him in Cornish New Hampshire, Salinger was a visible member of the community, attending church dinners, library functions, and making small talk with town residents.  He was seen going to the local stores, and by all accounts appeared to be more comfortable talking with the children in the neighborhood then with the adults.  After he died, the townspeople in Cornish maintained a code of silence to protect one of their own, saying little to reporters or visitors and certainly nothing to the countless admirers of Mr. Salinger who made the trek annually in search of their hero.  People in the community knew him as Jerry, a man who wrote a thank you note to the fire department after they extinguished a fire that threatened to destroy all of his possessions including his huge trove of writings (Zezima.)  By all accounts, he was an active member of the community, voting in elections, attending school council meetings, and each day visiting the general store to purchase a newspaper and other items.  All of these descriptions by the people who knew him so well over the last half-century run completely counter to the popular image of Salinger as a cynical, irascible man who wanted nothing to do with people in general.

There is much to admire when reading the works of, as well as about the life of J.D. Salinger, in particular the way he was able to capture the emotional life of the young generation of Americans both during the time he was writing as well as currently.  The combination of innocence with cynicism, hopefulness with skepticism are universal traits of young people everywhere.  The fact that he was able to so accurately portray a representative of the malaise of the teenage years when it came to their reactions to the academic world as well as the adult world makes him one of the most, if not the most important writers of his generation.  Holden Caulfield is one of the most beloved, complicated, troubled and endearing characters appearing in literature all over the world.  People still endlessly debate whether or not he is bipolar, or he is telling his story from inside a mental institution, whether he is mentally stable and whether, in fact, adolescence is in itself a borderline state.  The book is both required reading as well as banned in various institutions around the country, a true testament to its importance and the value of discussing its relevance and the values it imparts.

While some people feel that JD Salinger deprived of the public of all of the writing he is speculated to have produced during his years in isolation, there is another way to regard this: he loved writing for its own sake, and the fact that he was not interested in making more money by selling his material speaks volumes about what was important to him.  He was not interested in being in the spotlight, detested the celebrity status that his novel earned him, and was not able to tolerate the hurtful and negative reviews that were tossed in his direction.  It would be wonderful to think that at some point, Salinger’s unpublished work that he produced in the last 50 years would make its way into the public venue so that from a literary standpoint, we would all be in a position to discover what this man produced in the last decades.  If that never happens, however, Salinger is no less admirable because of that commitment to what was most important to him: the joy of writing.

Most of what is known about J.D. Salinger and his biography is not in dispute; the facts are there for all to see: his family background, his mediocre performance in schools both elementary, secondary, and college, his stint in the armed services and the way he was traumatized by the horrors of war.  Nor is the uniqueness of The Catcher in the Rye as a work of art in dispute.  What is left for the individual to determine is whether or not the fact that he withheld all of his literary endeavors from the public for decades because of his loathing of the spotlight was an act of selfishness or of nobility.  The latter possibility appears to be the one that is the most enduring legacy of J.D. Salinger and his gift to the world.

References

Krupnick, Mark. “JD Salinger obituary.” 28 January 2010. guardian.co.uk. 20 August 2010 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/28/jd-salinger-obituary>.

Lacayo, Richard. “J. D. Salinger dies: hermit crab of American letters.” 29 January 2010. Time.com. 20 August 2010 <http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957492,00.html>.

McGrath, Charles. “J. D. Salinger, literary recluse, dies at 91.” 28 January 2010. the New York Times. 20 August 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html>.

Zezima, Katie. “JD Salinger a recluse? Well, not to his neighbors.” 31 January 2010. The New York Times. 20 August 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/us/01salinger.html?ref=newhampshire>