They Head South

Dear Diary,

When I heard the news about old J.D. Salinger I felt so damn depressed, I had this crazy urge to bond. I was up late drinking coffee with Dali and William Blake. "Didn't you just love Holden, didn't you, didn't you?" I pleaded. Blake didn't care for his attitude, and Dali couldn't get past the old man's bumpy chest (on page 7, for chrissakes).

Salinger may not have gotten out much, but last autumn I did happen to spy a tall, dignified nonagenarian in a red hunting cap at Dan & Whit's General Store in Norwich, Vermont. Thankfully his bumpy chest was bundled in a crazy old sweater.

Next day at the office, I still couldn't let it go. The nutritionist sighed. "I read Catcher in the Rye so long ago--it's about baseball, right?" I needed to get my hands on a copy, but none of the book dispensers in downtown Berkeley had one--including the public library. (These indie booksellers whine about Amazon, but they practically force you to go online.) But before resorting to that I hit up Analog Books, the only shop hip enough to stock my fix.

I finished Catcher on the subway, and re-told the ending as I pulled off my Vans. He's wandering around, cold, wet, bloody, drunk, crying, lost, and do any grown-ups help him, or even notice? Is it because he's so tall? "It's Harold and Maude," says Dali. He has to go up in flames before his mother even sends him to a shrink. Only Harold loves an old lady, and Holden loves a little girl. You never even see Holden's parents; they're like the Wah-wah-wah-wah voices on Charlie Brown. All the adults lecture at him in a loop, the same old rap about what a fuckup he is, when what he really is is lonely.

Finally at my Wednesday soiree I find a former Manhattanite and of course he loved Catcher in the Rye. A Midwesterner sipping California wine said, "Too bad he didn't write any other books," and I said, "He did! -- in fact, I'd planned to name my daughter Zooey." Then on the phone, my dear friend Colette, just back from France, gushed (like Sally on the Luntzes), "Oh, I just adored the Glass family!" Bringing to mind The Royal Tenenbaums. Salinger was dead set against sending Holden to Hollywood, but he couldn't be stopped from inspiring a raft of quirky cult films.

Speaking of rafts, I got Dali to read the first page, and he said, "It opens like Huckleberry Finn." (He is a genius, indeed.) In a total nod to Twain, the first-person storyteller addresses the reader directly in an authentic vernacular, skimming over past events to get to the heart of the action. Huck and Holden share a disdain for the phony/civilized mores of their times and try to run away and live naturally, instinctively. Both narrators are compulsive fibbers and sensitive souls, questioning the way the world works, but no one listens or engages. If slavery is good, why do I feel so bad? And where do the ducks go in the winter? Maybe, if they want to be heard, they should stop all that damn CUSSING!

Hit the river, hit the road, escape the constraints, man--let's give Salinger credit as The First Beat Writer. Catcher was published in 1951, the year Kerouac wrote On the Road. Holden's frantic last hours as a preppie feel like they coulda been written on Benzedrine, too. Tie-wearin' Holden was railing against the "phonies" before the term "anti-establishment" was first used, in 1958. He dreamed of hitch-hiking out west, but the Phonies had beat him to Hollywood. Perhaps, like that Gerry Rafferty song, we're all searching for an unspoiled little town -- Quincy? Nevada City? -- or have the Yuppies ruined everything?

Holden flunked everything but English--in fact, he spent his last Saturday night writing a composition for a Princeton-bound jocko who was out making time with Holden's best girl. Kinda the way Nick Carraway watches in the wings as Gatsby woos Daisy. Salinger picks up Fitzgerald's torch when it comes to fakes: just as in Jay Gatsby's library, Holden notices whether the books on a shelf have been read. He cares about good writing, which is why he's so despondent when his literary mentor, big brother D.B., becomes a "prostitute." I wonder if J.D. blamed Hollywood for the descent of the sensitive F. Scott. Interesting how Catcher ends with D.B. in the pictures, and Holden in some loony bin like Zelda.

Catcher may be the anthem for disaffected youth, but what of grieving, loneliness, and the difficult path of a writer's life? Are the same people who are put off by "the language" also likely to be irritated by my post-party depression? As the book opens, Holden has just lost two brothers--one to leukemia, and one to Hollywood. His elder brother, the short-story writer, had been his role model, and the younger, the best person he knew. He doesn't know how to express his sadness in a way that people can hear it. He doesn't know how to forge ahead as a writer true to his craft in a world that rewards pot boilers.

Holden's sinking, but no one will tell him where odd ducks go to survive. As Erich Maria Remarque writes of young recruits sent into the field, "they have very little idea of cover, and ... have no eye for it." It's post-war again, and PTSD hasn't been invented yet. Before Hemingway's set began self-referencing their generation, Remarque had summed it up: "We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial--I believe we are lost."