Through the Rye

A tip of the hat to reclusive author J. D. Salinger, who died today at 91. This was one tormented dude. The Catcher in the Rye has sold over 60 million copies over the years. It has been required reading, banned reading, and reading blamed for motivating assassins. It was about teenaged angst. It was Rebel without a Cause before Rebel without a Cause. It was The Breakfast Club before The Breakfast Club.  Soon after it came out in 1951, Salinger retreated into the New Hampshire mountains where he shunned contact and sued anyone who tried to publish him. His last published material was a short story in 1965.

I remember reading it in high school English class. I found it neither inspirational nor particularly insightful. I thought it was rather boring and badly in need of, you know, like a plot. Whatever. I wasn’t really that troubled as a teen. Maybe you were and it resonated with you.

Although he loved children, he didn’t seem to be very loving toward his own. In 2009, his daughter, Margaret Ann Salinger published a memoir of growing up with the author entitled Dream Catcher. In it she claimed that ”he was an angry man to live with, and he regularly belittled members of his own family.” It seemed to her that he preferred the characters of his literature to the real human beings in his life.

According to Joyce Maynard, a young writer who had a rather creepy relationship with Salinger when she was 18 and he was 53, “He loved certain TV programs — The Andy Griffith Show, The Lawrence Welk Show — and had reels of old Hollywood movies that he projected at home. He wrote every day, but the unpublished work was stored away in a large safe that occupied a good part of one bedroom.” Translation: get ready for his heirs to get into a real catfight over publishing his stuff postmortem.

Apparently, he didn’t die of severe iPad disappointment, but of natural causes. Here’s hoping J.D. finds the kind of peace and solitude in death that he fought so hard for in life. In the meantime, I wouldn’t suggest sending flowers.

“When you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”   (from The Catcher in the Rye)