Remembering Salinger

Even though he almost never left the reclusive sanctuary of his home in Cornish, N.H., J.D. Salinger was an American icon. As the man who gave voice to a generation fed up with “phoniness” and the creator of the inimitable Holden Caulfield, it goes without saying that his work will outlast his life, which ended last week. In order to commemorate such an important figure in 20th century literary history—and one of our favorite writers from our own angsty adolescence—we solicited the help of several faculty members and students who know his work well.

Steven H. Biel, Senior Lecturer on History and Literature, Executive Director of the Humanities Center

Among American novels, maybe only Huckleberry Finn rivals Catcher in the Rye in luring readers to imagine the young character’s "life" that follows the book’s end. Twain teasingly ventured in his autobiography that Huck became "a justice of the peace in a remote village in Montana and was a good citizen and greatly respected." An essayist in Time conjured Holden at 40 as a Columbia alum who left his PR job to become a country club golf pro; divorced and remarried with two daughters, he ended up teaching at a prep school in dangerous, dirty 1970s New York. For the many of us who’d identified with Holden in our adolescence, it compounded our horror to learn that John Lennon’s murderer carried a copy of the novel in his pocket when he pulled the trigger and imagined himself as the Holden who lived past the last page. Last week my nephew, a college freshman, posted “RIP Holden Caulfield” on his Facebook page.  But Holden will survive his creator.  He’ll be just fine if he lives on, always 16, to keep offending book banners who, generation after generation, see him as a corruptor of American teenagers.

Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History Chair, Committee on Degrees in History and Literature

One Story about Nine Stories

When I was a kid, my best friend always called me Esmé.  We’d be in Algebra class, taking a test, and she’d pass me a note, and it would read, on the outside, “For Esmé.” And, inside:

Es,

Oh Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ.  What the hell is a polynomial?  Jesus Christ.

—With Love and Squalor

We had never heard of The New Yorker.  We never knew anything about how Salinger lived in New Hampshire and was a hermit.  We couldn’t have cared less, either or, we’d only have liked that about him, the secrecy. I always figured he was dead, gone the way of Seymour. Everyone whose books I liked was dead. I didn’t want to meet him. I just loved him, the stories.

Brittney L. Moraski ‘09, former Crimson editor

The first time I came across Salinger, I swore in my head for a week. My ninth-grade English teacher assigned us to write fairy tales in Holden’s voice, and she was taken aback by my willingness, sweet little 15-year-old and all, to adopt Holden’s goddam style right down to the goddam word.

The first time I came across Salinger, I swore in my head for a week. My ninth-grade English teacher assigned us to write fairy tales in Holden’s voice, and she was taken aback by my willingness, sweet little 15-year-old and all, to adopt Holden’s goddam style right down to the goddam word.

The second time, I returned to Holden to write my thesis on post-war “breakdown” novels. Holden's voice, along with Esther Greenwood's and Deborah Blau's, was in my head for months.  But read alongside other Cold War novels of anxiety and depression, Holden became something far more than the sum of his choice words: he was the first of several young protagonists to describe what it was to feel lost and aloof—and to be treated by the medical establishment for having such feelings.  It’s never exactly clear whether Holden is sent to an asylum for “craziness” or for just being “run down,” but Salinger opened the way for future writers to begin to describe young characters who, young as they were, were telling stories of themselves looking back from a “breaking” point.

We still have those novels today, but we also now have Prozac.  But there’s not since been a voice quite as irrepressible as Holden’s.

Goddam, my dear friend.