Greetings, lit geeks - and welcome to...wait for it....
...
...
THE LAST EVER INSTALLMENT OF THE HOLDEN & I SERIES!!!!
I don't know who's more excited: you or me! And as much as I want to get straight into today's topic - a miniature biography of Salinger and a mild psychoanalysis of his affinity for women half his age (yep, you read that right!), all in the context of
Catcher - I promised over
Twitter yesterday that a full explanation would be provided. So, without further ado...
THAT is what I did yesterday! For a girl who's deathly afraid of heights, that's pretty impressive, isn't it? It's a high-adventure course inside the Jordan's Furniture in Reading, and it was completely and utterly awesome, for lack of a more Salingerian word. At first, I've gotta admit: I was being a total pole-hugger and I was scared to walk on anything that didn't have hand ropes. Once I got used to being 12 feet up in the air, though, and kinda got my "air legs," it was actually really fun!
So, that's why I didn't write yesterday. Jealous? Disappointed? Hoping my answer would be something more like "Orca Attack" or "Field Trip to Hogwarts"? Yeah, me too. Well, the truth is always somewhat boring, isn't it? For real life, I've gotta say: yesterday was probably about as good as it gets!
Now, for the real reason you're here (unless you just saw my tweet and really, really wanted to know what happened. In which case, that's cool, too - welcome!): J.D. Salinger, Joyce Maynard, and Holden Caulfield, with guest appearances from Ernest Hemingway and Nabokov's Lolita.
As always, a few brief disclaimers: firstly, I don't own Catcher in the Rye. Obviously, though that would be pretty cool. Secondly, I aim to please, not to plagiarize, so please do e-mail me at chicklitkitchen@gmail.com if anything about my work seems a little fishy, so I can update my citations! Last but not least, I wouldn't plagiarize you, so please don't plagiarize me! A citation in MLA format is available at the bottom of the article for your convenience...so USE IT!!! I mean, come on guys; I've literally handed it to you.
Whew, that was a lot. Let me stop and breathe first....
Okay, I'm good. Ready, set, CATCHER! Cue the bittersweet, histrionic intro music.
WARNING: This post
contains spoilers!
Jerome David Salinger was born in New York on January 1,
1919 to a fairly normal childhood. The only major disturbance in his early
years was – gasp! – finding out that his mother was actually a closeted
Catholic (he grew up believing he was 100% Jewish, like his father). (
the Daily Mail)
It was not childhood that corrupted Salinger’s innocence – “popped
his cherry,” so to speak – as adolescence and adulthood. First, it was his
doomed love affair with Oona O’Neil in 1941: the 16-year-old girl he once
wished to marry eventually ran away to wed Charlie Chaplin (
the Daily Mail).
And then, of course, there was the Second World War: the reason Salinger’s
relationship ended in the first place, and the reason for all of the emotional
and psychological turmoil that haunted him – and Holden – ever since (
New York Magazine).
We learned in class that J.D. Salinger saw more combat than
perhaps any other classic American writer. While Ernest Hemingway and Tim
O’Brien were as cozy as one could be stationed in WWII and Vietnam
respectively, Salinger fought on the front lines, stormed the beaches of
Normandy on D-Day, and liberated Nazi prisoners first-hand. Salinger touted the
first pages of
Catcher in the Rye through
much of the combat (
Vanity Fair).
With the harsh realities of war branded onto his brain, it’s
unsurprising that both Salinger and Holden aimed to become “Catchers in the Rye”: preservationists
of innocence; protectors and shields from the stark evils of the adult world.
Salinger knew even more so than Holden what predators lay in wait for kids who
grew up too fast – the draft, for one. War. Death.
It’s no wonder, then, that Salinger developed severe
depression. On May 8, 1945, as the rest of the Western world was celebrating
the end of the Second World War, Salinger sat on his bed, staring at a pistol,
contemplating suicide. Fortunately, the literary genius was smart enough,
diligent enough, and humble enough to seek help. Like Holden, Salinger checked
himself into a mental hospital, where he passed time sassing the staff, writing
letters to his good friend Hemingway (whom he met in Paris during the war), and
generally trying to save face, for he feared the implications of his
psychological turmoil on the reception of
Catcher
in the Rye. (During the 1940s, the stigma surrounding mental illness was
considerable.) (
Vanity Fair)
Salinger’s
Catcher in
the Rye was published on July 16, 1951 by Little, Brown – a Boston company,
might I point out!
Catcher was also
banned almost immediately, for its “shocking” use of the f-bomb and candid
sexual dialogue, among other matters we high schoolers today would probably
consider trivial. (
Vanity Fair)
No doubt in relation to his history of mental illness, fame
didn’t sit well with Salinger, and so he essentially became a recluse, holing
himself up in his house like a hermit in a way that – or so I am convinced –
all writers must do at least once (
Dead Caulfields).
While he did publish later works such as
Franny
and Zooey, such works were simply republications of. After his death, three
short stories of his have been leaked on the internet – none of which I have
read; all of which I am sure live up to his high standards of quality narration and intricately-crafted characters.
Ironically, Salinger himself ended up becoming one of the
adult dangers that parents and “Catchers” might try to keep children from. As I
touched upon briefly in my first post, Holden & Sexuality, J.D. Salinger
was a bit of a creep. He had a fascination with innocence that translated
appropriately into his writing and inappropriately into his sex life. He preyed
on young girls long into his late life by luring them to his home through letters.
One of his conquests – benignly (and inaccurately) referred
to as “muses” by most online sources - claimed that he broke up with her just
after taking her virginity: all-too earnest testimony of Salinger’s obsession
with the pure, the untouched. The director of the movie “Salinger”, Shane
Salerno, perfectly explains how Salinger’s PTSD-driven pursuit of innocence
manifested itself in his sex life: the girls he sought “[replicated] a pre-war
innocence for him…[he] used very young girls as time travel machines back to
before various wounds.” (
the Wrap).
A second theory attributes Salinger’s sexual insecurities to his lack of a
second testicle, but I think I’d rather believe the first one, so I can take at
least a little pity on the poor man (
Salon).
Most famously, Salinger pursued the eighteen-year-old writer
Joyce Maynard after reading her article in the New York Times, “An 18-Year-Old
Looks Back on Life” (
the Daily Mail).
He was so moved by her piece (and by her pixie-like appearance in those
photographs, no doubt) that he wrote her a fan letter cautioning her against
the dangers of fame (
New York Magazine). They
exchanged about 25 letters before, in a spectacle straight from a whirlwind
Hollywood drama, Maynard forsook her second year at Yale to move in with
Salinger, who would trample her heart years later by crushing her dreams of
having a family and essentially kicking her out (
New York Magazine).
Maynard is frequently referred to as Salinger’s “Lolita,”
which lends a curious and inappropriate (I think) shade of literary artistry to
their relationship. Their sexual relationship was at first stagnant, later
almost nonexistent; its foundation was oral sex, both because Maynard had a
condition that made penetrative sex painful and because Salinger feared having
more children (he wed his wife Claire, who was sixteen years his junior, in
1955 – he forced her into isolation when she became pregnant, and she gave
birth to a daughter, Margaret, and a son, Matthew) (
the Daily Mail).
The women in Salinger’s life described him as “sexually
manipulative,” “pathologically self-centered,” and “abusive” – yet many former
“muses” also describe their relationships with Salinger as weirdly nonsexual,
up to a point (
New York Times).
He was, apparently, also an early New Age philosopher, obsessed with
homeopathic medicine, acupuncture, dieting, Zen Buddhism, and Scientology
(ibid). If he hadn’t died more than five years ago, Salinger probably would
have fit right in with the all-natural health fads sweeping the nation today – I
imagine that he and a young Beyonce might have e-mailed over green juices and
spin classes. Or would Queen Bey have been too much of a feminist for him? Hmm…
With all the effed-up things he was doing (and that had been
done to him), Salinger was understandably desperate to protect his privacy. To
be completely fair, the world had been cruel to him – and so he knew it would
only continue to become crueler. The one time he let his guard down was in
1953, when he agreed to let a group of local teenagers interview him for what
he thought was a small school newspaper. When the article was published as a
large feature editorial, Salinger felt so betrayed that he built a six-foot
fence around his property and never spoke to the press again. Not only was
Salinger privy to his privacy, but apparently he also had tremendous
capabilities for holding a grudge. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)
In his not-so-fine late years, Salinger was known to wield
shotguns at strangers on his porch and sue authors for writing his biography (
New York Magazine).
He died at 91 - bitter, alone, and in no physical pain - in January of 2010 (
New York Times).
Today, people are still arguing incessantly, uselessly about
whether or not Joyce Maynard was the exploiter or the exploited, when I think
we all know the answer to that one (
New York Magazine).
If you’ve read John Green’s
the Fault in
Our Stars, you probably won’t be surprised to find that J.D. Salinger makes
me feel a little bit like Hazel Grace felt about Peter van Houten. Like van
Houten, Salinger was “a good writer but a shitty person.” Although I will never
be able to simply “forgive” Salinger for his pedophilic victimization of
teenage girls, it breaks my heart to wonder why he did it. Was it a result of
his wartime trauma? His long history of mental illness? Or was his lifetime of
seclusion simply becoming too much? Was J.D. Salinger lonely?
No matter what way you swing it, the fact of what Salinger
did remains the same: he nearly committed suicide. He checked himself into a
mental institution. He threatened the press. And he harassed girls a quarter of
his age. As much as we all want to romanticize our literary idols, the fact of
the matter is that had Salinger not been so tormented, so distraught by the
shattered pictures of innocence he saw in the world around him, the Catcher in the Rye probably would
have been a thin, flimsy piece of mass-marketed literature hardly worthy of sitting
on the shelf next to Fitzgerald.
They say it takes one to know one: Salinger was Holden Caulfield. He couldn’t accept
that he would never become a “catcher in the rye” and so he tried to
vicariously recapture his youth through his pint-sized lovers. Through writing
the character of Holden, Salinger inadvertently became Holden: a man desperate to hold onto his innocence even
after he knew it was gone – a man who could not let go of his juvenile
fixations. Two boys defeated by death, conquered by loss, and shattered by
mental illness. Two boys who felt strongly that “you should never tell anybody anything.
If you do, you start missing everybody.” If that doesn’t explain Salinger’s
self-imposed exile, I don’t know what would.
Well, that's it for me and Holden, Holden and me - or Holden &
I, I should say. It was fun while it lasted, 99.9% of the time (the other 1% I spent procrastinating on giant ropes courses and swearing at Salinger under my breath). Welp.
Stay tuned here on the Chick Lit Kitchen for my next big event, coming real soon...my brand-new
30 -Day Challenge! Eek! Whatever could it be about? My lips are sealed. I've locked them and thrown away the key...so you'll just have to keep checking back to find out >:) mwahahaha! How else do you think I'd keep you coming back for more? Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Oh, I'm only teasing - it's been a long day! You know you love me, deep down inside.
XOXO, Haley
To cite this post (in MLA format):
The Chick Lit Kitchen. Holden & I, Part III: Holden & Salinger. Blogspot, 2 Mar. 2015. Web. Date you accessed this post.
