RIP J.D. Salinger

“D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”  – The Catcher in the Rye

Blogging being one of the most self-indulgent mediums of self-expression currently in existence, I thought I’d share, along with everyone else on the internet, why the news of J.D. Salinger’s death saddened me so much.  I have no idea why, as I generally don’t think that I share very much personally, or at least I try not to, but today really got to me.

Probably like most everyone else, I was once an irreverent teenager who felt lost and bitter and angry at the world for not understanding me and also for seemingly not even pretending to care what I thought or how I felt.  Maybe it didn’t, maybe it still doesn’t.  At the time, I questioned my place in the world, in a school in which cliques were prevalent and “friends” manipulative, where music and art education weren’t encouraged but sports certainly were.  I felt as though I’d been the product of a sociological experiment gone awry, including living in a biracial family with older siblings who weren’t always so kind and parents who were pulled in too many directions, family members with suicidal ideation, a schizophrenic, a drug addict, a felon, an abuser, and I had too much responsibility for a burgeoning adolescent.  I just wanted to enjoy being young for a while before I was required to think and act like an adult, but no.  I felt as though I had no one to relate to, and as a result, I questioned myself constantly, not exactly wanting to fit in but also not wanting to feel so… different.

I remember the day my class was assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye by our high school English teacher, someone who became and who has remained to this day both a mentor and a real friend.  I remember reading Holden Caulfield’s wry take on the world and thinking “yes! finally, someone gets it too! but why can’t this Holden person be real?”.  I was fighting a battle that I would eventually lose at that time, playing tug-of-war with Adulthood at a really young age, desperately clinging to my side of the of the rope, clenching it, digging my nails into it, planting my feet into the ground, twisting my palms, my forearms, my elbows until they were swollen and red, blistered and burned.  I wanted Childhood to win.  It didn’t.

And Holden, he knew it, he told it like it was.  There was no bullshit, no dancing around the answer to Why People Just Can’t Be Nice Sometimes; they’re morons and phonies and assholes, and most of the time, they’re searching for something they’ll probably never find.  There were no excuses proffered for overbearing Adults and all of their lies.  There were so many “Fuck You’s” in this world that even if you wanted to, you could never fully erase them all, so fuck it all.  He was so self-aware, and yet not self-aware at all.  He was like me.

I remember how our teacher would have us sit around in a circle on the days that we’d discuss our assigned reading, and the conversation on Catcher went from utter silence in the room to a dialogue between me and him, something along the lines of:

“How do you think Holden is feeling when he says ‘x’?”

“I think he feels different, like people don’t understand him. That he sees and feels things differently.”

“And how do you think that feels”?

“Lonely.”

Maybe I was projecting a little from my personal experiences at the time, and I’m also not translating that class discussion very well, but, for me, that day transitioned into The Day That Maybe Some Adults Do Understand; maybe they were once teenagers who felt the same way; maybe others currently feel this way.  It became the day that part of my bitter, adolescent angst receded just a bit, that I removed a stone from the wall.  Maybe Adults aren’t all bad, and maybe not all people are either.

There’s a part in the book where Holden’s English teacher, Mr. Antolini, tells him:

“I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall.  But I don’t honestly know what kind…. It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college.  Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’  Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.  I just don’t know.”

It’s a passage that didn’t fully register with me at the time, but it certainly does now (it also registers with me every time I stumble upon the rants of seemingly miserable people on the internet).  Mr. Antolini goes on to explain that this kind of “fall” that he envisions is experienced by people who cannot deal with the environment around them because they refuse to grow up.  But by interacting with others, Holden might learn that there are others who feel similarly disturbed by the world and the human condition, and in turn, he might learn something about his own mind as well.  It’s a different kind of  attempt at “catching” someone than Holden’s determination to protect people (and himself) from adulthood.

There has been a lot of criticism of Holden Caulfield’s character — that he’s the real phony, a disillusioned, spoiled brat who had all things going for him but he refused to see past his myopic view of the world.  I think that’s true, and it’s kind of the message of the book. Holden lives in a world of disillusionment, with an idealized view of childhood and an oversimplified understanding of adulthood in order to justify his withdrawal from and disdain for society.  But he’s also a fragile creature (character?) whose little stability that he has remaining depends on him maintaining such an oversimplified view of the world — he cannot tolerate motives that might be ambiguous.  He resists intimacy with others because the complexities of real-world relationships threaten to collapse his overly simplistic perspective on things.  So he shirks.

I think this discussion with his teacher causes Holden to begin to realize the trap of loneliness and isolation he has created for himself by his self-imposed alienation and withdrawal; it forces him to see his problems as well as the ambiguity and complexity of what Adulthood means.  In retrospect, this is very much what happened to me that day with my teacher, though I wasn’t fully cognizant of it at the time.  What I did realize was that I’d found an Adult who would believe in me and who supported and encouraged me to wade into the tumultuous waters of Adulthood with my chin held up, knowing full well that the person I was at school was very different from the person I was at home and that no one would know and that’s the way Life is sometimes; it doesn’t necessarily mean you must become a bitter, older person because your childhood was basically a joke.

I struggle with the “fall” that Mr. Antolini alludes to, often yearning to recede into my own isolated world because it’s easier that way — just Me, Myself and I to deal with, which usually isn’t so bad.  Often, I do.  But I’ve realized that the happiest I’ve been and the most I’ve ever grown was a result of me letting down my guard, even if for just a short while.

I’ve wondered what led Mr. Salinger to live his life in seclusion, given what I thought was the message of Catcher.  Maybe I missed something; maybe the joke is on all of us.  Either way, I feel sad in probably a very self-indulgent way today because I am reminded of my childhood and the time when I became an Adult, and I mourn it; I long for it because it represented an entirely new beginning, a new world of possibilities, and unchartered oceans.  I mourn that time when the people I love and care for were younger and death seemed so foreign and distant, a ship moored far off at sea.  I selfishly feel sad that I wasn’t able to read more from this enigmatic writer who seemed to have real insight on meaningful issues that I might have benefitted from.  And I feel embarrassed that I am being self-indulgent in a manner that would have likely offended him.