First, you realized that “Holden Caulfield” wasn’t innocent anymore; then, that he was old; then, that he is dead.  J.D. Salinger was 91 when he passed away recently in Cornish, New Hampshire, and that means not only that he had been disappeared and aged for a long time, but that he never was young even when we got to know him.  Salinger was born in 1919—he was a grown man when World War II began, and the real story of his life has to do with D-Day, the Hürtgen Forest, and Bastogne.  When he wrote “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) and “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” (1950), he was writing, though not always obviously, about the psychic wound of brutality, innocence lost.  The regression of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was so nicely turned that, 65 million copies later, there’s not much point in attempting any evaluation of that text, because it is its own reality and even cult.

For my own part, I owe a debt to Salinger because of the way I ran into him.  I heard my father and one of my uncles talking about Nine Stories and the novel, and the next thing I knew, I had copies of both.  I was considerably younger than the “sixteen” of Holden Caulfield, but I learned some things from his creator: A writer gathers his stories, and he writes a novel.  A writer is a man walking around now.  And he thinks about some of the things you think about, or he teaches you to.  I absorbed a lesson: I learned to value appeal and charm and vivacity in composition for their own sakes.  And I learned, contradictorily, to value intuition and insight over reason: an error that implied its own correction.  In other words, I was confirmed in my youthful impulses to overestimate my own emotions.  To appreciate Salinger, I had to relish his style; but I also had to outgrow him, and I did.  After Franny and Zooey appeared in 1961, I never read him again.

Neither did I forget him or various well-known passages.  The ones I recall best are striking because the text is a text of texts.  Holden has been in so many schools that he never finished The Return of the Native, yet he has something to say about it: “I’d rather call old Thomas Hardy up.  I like that Eustacia Vye.”  Right, Holden; but later I learned about Eustacia myself, and I can attest that you would have liked her even better, Holden, if you had been named “Damon Wildeve.”  But such bravado follows a more challenging thought: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.  That doesn’t happen much, though.”  No, indeed it does not.  But of course, one of the reasons that the author, not the narrator, of those lines secluded himself and quit publishing was the problem that many entertained such a sentiment about him.

War isn’t the only brutality, of course—there is always the publishing industry and attendant publicity.  And if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.  So then Salinger was compared with Greta Garbo, though better comparisons might have been with Frances Farmer or Jean Seberg.  Salinger was or became a “sensitive” like James Dean or Montgomery Clift.  The images are of celebrity, not of authorship, and that’s just the point.  The logical move was to die, because to live on was to remain forever a target, but death would not come—until recently.

Because he was the object of a cult, Salinger was not altogether responsible for the damage he did.  The cult of childhood innocence is theologically and even psychologically unsound; the cult of Eastern mysticism is theologically and culturally unsound; the 60’s showed that much more is unsound; and later on, John Hinckley, Jr., and Mark David Chapman showed us the final logic of Holdenism—or is that Caulfieldism?  But we can be grateful to the author of unforgettable sentences, such as “All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”  And “Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot.”  And “I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”  And “Don’t ever tell anybody anything.”  And grateful as well for the citations of Charles Dickens, Isak Dinesen, Somerset Maugham, and Ring Lardner, as acknowledgments of the true sources of writing, in reading and the imagination—as distinct from neurotic affectation.