“Had anyone, she asked, ever heard of a little dickeybird that dared to sing his charming song without first opening his little beak wide, wide, wide?”
— For Esmé— with Love and Squalor, from Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
I guess it’s hipper nowadays to hate J.D. Salinger and his seminal, defining work, The Catcher in the Rye. I however, love Salinger’s writing (Catcher being, I believe, one of the most important novels in the English language) and feel the same bite of loss with his death today as I did when Kurt Vonnegut passed away a little less than two years ago.
Salinger is probably responsible for the shaping much of present-day literature. His body of work gave us our first real taste of what it means to be people with every advantage in the world that, nonetheless, drift through their days full of anxieties and an omnipresent guilt created by virtue of our having. Epitomized in Holden Caulfield and repeated through other protagonists like Franny and Zooey Glass, Salinger painted a distinctively post-war portrait of a society that felt burdened by the simple act of being alive — a people that were made into a sickening echo of their parent’s 1920s excesses.
His insight into North American society after the conclusion of WWII is no less valuable than the interwar years commentary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Salinger reminded his contemporaries that existentialism was bred from an acknowledgment of human cruelty and that, with the paradigm shattering detonation of atomic bombs in Japan, the post-war years would herald a descent into a new, unthinkably complex human condition that exists to this day. As Fitzgerald defined the Modern novel, Salinger provided the building blocks for Post-Modern literature.
Holden Caulfield, like Gatsby‘s Nick Carraway, is an observer (and participant) in the active, numbing activities of his time. Carraway could run away at the end of his story. Caulfield has to have a panic attack and end up (most likely) institutionalized. That The Catcher in the Rye was considered a book worthy of extensive censorship should be of no surprise. It was a wake-up call that offered no real solution for the problems it presented. Its issues are the same ones that we still grapple with today.
Both tonally and stylistically, J.D. Salinger gave literature a new way to move forward — to try to process the irresolvable nature of modern horror and the impossibly altered nature of modern beauty. He paved the road that led to Hunter S. Thompson’s groundbreaking journalism. He set out a foundation that (maybe the world’s greatest living writer) Haruki Murakami continues to innovate upon.
More than anything else, Salinger showed us the potential for a new literature: one that let us experiment with strange voices and write with a passion that reads like someone screaming at the top of their lungs. His legacy is one that made, and continues to make, me want to write. His books are an example of the perfect fusion that ecstatic prose and careful thought can create for amateur and academic critics alike.
J.D. Salinger died from natural causes in his New Hampshire home today, January 28th, 2010, at the age of 91.
— Reid
[...] I admire keep dropping like flies. A while back it was J.D. Salinger. Now it’s Harvey [...]