If originality is, as Vladimir Nabokov suggests, the true measure of greatness in an artist, then the argument can be made that J.D. Salinger towers over most American writers of the past half-century. Few writers anywhere have ever been more widely or more passionately read. Fewer still have so fiercely resisted the temptations of fame, while creating readily accessible work that can hold its own, syllable for syllable, with the surprise-filled precision of not only Nabokov, but Chekhov and Tolstoy.
Salinger’s exceptional popularity derives from his subject — youth — and his literary voice, which is unique and yet universally potent. Whether he is operating through the slangy, sarcastic mask of teenager Holden Caulfield, who narrates TheCatcher in the Rye,or weaving the complex but uncannily sturdy arias that comprise the discourse of Buddy Glass, who narrates the body of work as a whole, Salinger’s gift is hypnotic and beautiful, yet never flashy, never avant-garde in any overt, fashionable way. Instead, he comes to the party dressed in the conservative suit and tie of a social observer, an heir of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
“She stared back at me, with those house-counting eyes of hers,” writes Sergeant X of Esme, a 13-year-old girl he encounters in an English tea shop, two months before D-Day. The story is For Esme, With Love & Squalor:
“You seem quite intelligent for an American,” [she] mused.
I told her that was a pretty snobbish thing to say, if you thought about it at all, and that I hoped it was unworthy of her.
She blushed — automatically conferring on me the social poise I’d been missing. “Well. Most of the Americans I’ve seen act like animals. They’re forever punching one another about, and insulting everyone, and — you know what one of them did?”
I shook my head.
“One of them threw an empty whiskey bottle through my aunt’s window. Fortunately, the window was open. But does that sound very intelligent to you?”
My own passion for Salinger’s work begins with this story, which I first read at age 22. I’d read and loved Catcher while still in my teens, but went out of my way to reject it, out of a refusal to be influenced. Salinger had so caught the voice of American adolescence, just as Mark Twain had a century earlier in Huckleberry Finn, that I was damned if I was going to write my teenage opus in the first person. (Updike’s infectious use of the present tense in Rabbit Run was another temptation to be hotly avoided, on the same grounds.) I chanced across Esme in a short-story anthology, where Salinger’s light, exquisite mimicry of a British teen and his (seemingly) much breezier, (definitely) more elastic use of the first person to create Sergeant X made me see his achievement with Holden in a stronger light. Remove one word of narration from the above, and there is measurable loss of life. Add a word, and there is loss of energy. The same is just as true of The Catcher in the Rye; that book, which looks so juicily chaotic and intuitive on its surface, is as impeccably constructed, phrase by phrase, as a haiku.
The four books Salinger published between 1951 and 1963 — The Catcher in the Rye; Nine Stories; Franny and Zooey; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction — can be freely enjoyed as independent entities. Yet taken together, as I later discovered when I reread them all in a marathon sitting, they also interlock as a single narrative, a rich assortment of stories within stories. Most of which center on a brilliant family spawned by two vaudeville entertainers, Les Glass and Bessie Gallagher, yet even The Catcher in the Rye operates as part of this unified field.
Much as neither Holden, his kid sister Phoebe nor any of Catcher’s many other characters — a dead older brother, Allie, and a surviving brother, a writer named D.B. — ever show up again by name in Salinger’s later fiction, they are (so to speak) reincarnated as the Glass family. Buddy (“D.B.” backward?) is also a writer. His kid brother Zachary, aka Zooey, is (like Holden) a sarcastic rebel whose closest confidant is his kid sister Franny. All of the Glasses share, and bear, the burdensome memory of their tragic older brother Seymour, a holy man of Buddha-like dimension who didn’t quite die in the war, but committed suicide in response to it.
When Buddy tells us in Seymour, an Introduction that he’s the author of a novel whose young hero speaks “fluent Manhattanese,” Catcher is not only incorporated into the Glass saga as a specimen of Buddy’s literary talent; it is given a deeper reality. You are free to see Zooey Glass as the “real-life” model for Holden Caulfield, and thus Holden’s story continues beyond the parameters of his native book, but in such a mysterious state of metamorphosis that the original integrity of that book is never violated.
