The catcher in the wheatgrass?

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. — Holden Caulfield

What else could possibly be written about Jerome David Salinger? Everything posted by fans since his passing away last week at age 91 — as private and reclusive as he chose to be since closing his Cornish, New Hampshire, door to the world in 1953 — seems like projection: a way of insisting that Salinger spoke to this or that fan in a highly personal manner.

In our online public-display-case society, dusting off relics from the past — like dormant affection for Michael Jackson, who passed away last year — and conferring upon these items trophy status is merely a way of showcasing our likes and dislikes, of course. That’s what social networking is all about. Come to think of it, Salinger’s most enduring creation, Holden Caulfield, had a collector side to him as well: he collected favorite movies, things deemed Caulfield-worthy, like Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, The Great Gatsby and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Holden liked little things, like the guy who played the kettledrum in the orchestra, waiting patiently through an entire symphony to rattle his padded drumsticks just once (he hated the showy jazz piano player at the Wicker Bar). In fact, Caulfield was no less a trumpeter of likes and dislikes than this generation is, even without Facebook. It’s just that he enjoyed far fewer things in the world, and often questioned whether he liked them for the right reasons. No wonder he cracked up.

It’s worth noting that not everybody was a fan of Holden Caulfield, or Salinger. Taking up The Catcher in the Rye in an English class in my freshman year, one of our classmates, a Southern girl, got noticeably agitated when we discussed the book’s protagonist. “What’s so great about Holden? Why should we identify with heeyum?” It was a legitimate question, one our professor tried to address: Holden’s voice was written in then-modern vernacular, so Salinger’s style could be said to be the gateway to either embracing or rejecting Holden. It was like a secret code that adolescents got, parents didn’t. (Another thing you notice, especially in Nine Stories, is that most parents in Salinger’s world seem peevish, impatient, practically on the verge of violence. “I’ll ‘exquisite day’ you, buddy.”) But this girl was a Georgia Baptist in the late ’80s; apparently, she was already as uptight as her parents.

Right after Salinger’s death was announced, someone passed around Twitter comments from ’80s writer Bret Easton Ellis, who really should have known better. (“Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-f***ing-ever. Party tonight!!!”). The twisted glee of such tweets suggests that Salinger’s enduring influence had been an oppressive cloak over generations of writers. Or maybe Ellis is just bitter at never having achieved Salinger’s enduring fame. For such writers, perhaps, Salinger was like the father figure who never grew up, but still cast a very long shadow. As each generation sought to carve out a voice, something that spoke of their times in their vernacular (Brat Pack writers, anyone?), Salinger always came looming back, like a monolith, capable of crossing generations, speaking directly to new readers.

There were those who liked Salinger too much: Mark David Chapman, toting his copy of The Catcher in the Rye after shooting John Lennon in NYC, 1980. There are the hordes of indie directors who throw about Salinger references as though they were the first to ever pick up a copy of Franny and Zooey. Even actresses named “Zooey” and “Phoebe” have that long shadow cast over them since birth.

Then there is the work. Randomly picking up Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction a few months before Salinger died, I got hooked again: I had to start from the beginning, retrace the Glass family saga, only to realize more than ever how cross-referential all of Salinger’s public output (slim as it is) was designed to be. Buddy’s stories mentioned in Seymour: An Introduction turn out to be partly culled from Nine Stories; an oblique reference is made to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Other events in the Glass saga cross over from Franny and Zooey. There’s even a Caulfield mentioned in Raise High the Roofbeam, probably a distant cousin.

Then there is the unwieldy Hapworth 16, 1924, the final Glass installment that appeared in The New Yorker June 19, 1965 issue, but was never published elsewhere — until Salinger himself expressed brief interest in releasing it through a small publisher in 1996. He eventually thought better of this, and — picking up the copy I found floating around the Internet and had printed out, bound in a cheap cardboard folder with a metal clip — I can see why. If there’s a crucial insight into Seymour Glass here (depicted as a precocious summer camp kid dashing off a 70-page letter to his parents), Salinger must have kept it very well encoded indeed.

Then there is the question of Salinger’s unpublished work. Speculation, conjecture, brief field reports from live-in companions like Joyce Maynard (who mentions two completed novels) and daughter Margaret Salinger (who inventories a detailed filing system for manuscripts — red marks for “publish as is,” blue for “edit first”) all tell us different stories. Judging by Salinger’s spiritual path, pre-seclusion, we can guess that he was heading away from self-conscious craft. Perhaps the “magic” of developing his own style and voice, and using it not just to gain attention and fame (which he quickly tired of) but to convey a developing “message” to readers, became cumbersome; maybe he was moving beyond conventional narrative tricks — character, dialogue, humor — into something much more like Hapworth (though we hope not). Maybe, as my wife suggests, he spent the last five decades writing about obscure Eastern religions and diets. (“The Catcher in the Wheatgrass”?)

For now, it’s all conjecture. There was that brief literary scandal last year, the appearance of a Swedish “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye written by a certain Fredrik Colting using the pseudonym “J. D. California.” His book, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, is, at the moment, blocked from publication in the US, though ultimately it can tell us nothing of what really went on in the head of Holden Caulfield’s creator.

What’s clear is, for whatever reason, Salinger gave up on the conventional rhythm and pulse of society. He must have had his reasons. He probably kept on writing, because he enjoyed writing, not because he hoped to be judged on his continuing output. In a world where Bret Easton Ellis shares his mind rot publicly with Twitter readers, I can see why Salinger never felt much desire to jump back into the ring again and pronounce.