J.D. Salinger
By Michael Silverblatt
KCRW Bookworm
The only significant thing a writer leaves behind is his work. Despite the roar of rumors that beset him after he retired from public life, despite the assassins who read his work and said they shot because of it, despite the memoirs (from a girlfriend, from his daughter) that depict him as an eccentric and sometimes cruel man all we have of J. D. Salinger are four small, beautiful books.
How many times have I read The Catcher in the Rye? Seven. Nine Stories? Five. Franny and Zooey? Two. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters? Three or four. Seymour: An Introduction? Over and over and over. It’s a secret favorite. It contains the most moving advice to young writers I’ve ever found. I’ve got the dates of re-readings written inside the cover of each book.
I’ve read the famous never-republished materials many times as well, especially the enormous letter Seymour Glass writes home from summer camp, which was the last work that Salinger made public (it was in the New Yorker). In it, Seymour, lonely at camp asks his family to send his favorite books, cartons of favorites. He names them all, and comments on why he loves them -- passionate, personal literary criticism which became a private model for me. You can be sure I went and read all his favorite books.
My re-readings began in graduate school, in Baltimore, when I found myself thinking that The Catcher in the Rye could not possibly be as good as I remembered it. I reread it all the next day, and I cried the first really hot tears I can remember crying. They were syrupy tears, ran down my face wetting the pillow.
Since then, Salinger has been a writer I love to return to. I remember re-reading Nine Stories for my friend Art Spiegelman’s son Dash. He was working on a high school English paper about the final story, “Teddy,” about a child Zen-master. Dash, a bit of a Zen-master himself, told me more about the story than I could tell him. I realized that the best reading of Salinger is always your first one.
Salinger’s often the first writer you read who you feel is talking straight to you. (Holden Caulfield is talking straight to you.) You can’t believe there’s another person in the world who understands the things you understand. For many readers Salinger becomes a secret friend, no wonder so many of us tried to visit him in his isolation.
Though his work is of various quality, I would love to read more of it, and have another shot at a first-time Salinger reading. I hope and pray there is more.
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