“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”- JD Salinger
One of America’s greatest voices of all time died this week, on January 27th at the age of 91. JD Salinger wrote with an air of fragile melancholy and delicate realness that was never before used and has not been replicated since. On June 19th, 1965 The New Yorker published “Hapworth 16, 1924”, it would prove to be the last work of Salinger’s to see the light of day. Or so it was thought. There has been a long seeded legend that Salinger never stopped working and more have over fifteen finished books and over one hundred complete stories ready for publication that he instructed to not be released until after his death. In 1974 he stated to the New York Times, “I like to write. I love to write. But I just write for myself and my own privacy." So it is quite possible that in the wake of this shadowy literary giant's passing a miraculous rain of prose might fall upon us, perhaps unlike anything we have witnessed before. Say what you will of Salinger, shut-in, recluse, madman, genius; there was something special about his writing, something real that we’ve all felt, and seek to see replicated on the heart sleeves of book jackets.
The Catcher in the Rye was the book that was the most censored in American schools for over twenty years. It features a young boy ditching school, smoking cigarettes, drinking liquor, getting prostitutes, swearing a hell of a lot, and goddam blasphemy. The word ‘fuck’ appears six times throughout the novel. Salinger said of Holden Caulfield, “The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.” The Catcher in the Rye has sold over 65 million copies and every year shifts some 250,000.
Although ‘Catcher’ is a momentous literary feat, many might argue that the legacy of the glass family is Salinger’s real magnum opus. It is a comparison not dissimilar to that of Beethoven’s piano Sonata No. 14 “Quasi una fantasia”, or “Moonlight Sonata” being his most well known masterpiece, but his true life’s work being his symphonies. Salinger told the tale of the Glass family through nearly all of the rest his non-Catcher work. “Nine Stories”, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction”, “Franny and Zooey”, and a number of other (New Yorker) published and unpublished stories contain the scathing story of the many Glass family members. They are all stretched out and non-linear so things become a little hard to sort out if you are not a seasoned Salinger scholar. I have taken the liberty of mapping out a sort of family tree of the Glass family for easy reference:
Les and Bessie are the Parents of the Glass family. They used to be vaudeville show-people. They had seven precocious children together, most of whom were featured on a radio game show for children called, “It's a Wise Child”.
The oldest son is Seymour; he was a sensitive genius who taught at Columbia before going overseas to fight in WWII. The war was too much for him and he suffered a nervous breakdown. After meeting and marrying a girl named Muriel, Seymour decides to kill himself after a day on the beach (Bananafish).
Buddy was born two years after Seymour. He is the storyteller of the bunch (‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’, ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, and ‘Zooey’). He is a Buddhist.
Boo Boo is the first girl born to the family. She marries and has children.
The twins were born next, Walt and Waker. Walt was the lighthearted Glass boy, but was sadly killed in Japan just after the war in a freak accident. Waker became a catholic monk.
Zooey is born, the youngest of the Glass boys, he is an offbeat introverted intellectual with handsome looks. He is an actor.
Franny is the youngest of the kids; she wants to become an actress but has a mental breakdown.
“That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.”
J.D. Salinger from Catcher in the Rye.
“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”
J.D. Salinger on death.
Goodnight JD, good luck, I toast a highball to you!
-Robert K.
