Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger (Part One)

"Go on-Take my hand,
Not my picture…"

I suppose he would have wanted us to just look away, go about our business like any other day and pretend he wasn't there in the first place.

For the title of this piece I suppose he would have called me a clichéd little dumb-shit, and told me to fuck off.

But the past few days have proven that, despite his enduring wishes for privacy(the ones he fought for armed with verbal venom and threat of legal action) it has been just as impossible for us to leave well enough alone in death as it was during J.D. Salinger's life.

His wasn't a unique request, but one we have all made from time to time to our friends, husbands, wives and receptionists alike:

"Remember now, if THEY come calling, I'M NOT HERE."

What could sour a man's taste for success and curtail his grand ambition for literary gravitas so much as to take him from that cocky nineteen-year-old for whom an NYU curriculum was a waste of time; that young writer who then stood brazenly at the doors of the New Yorker demanding entry like Achilles at the walls of Troy; a mind and a talent too great to waste on the family business that fed, clothed him and awarded him an upper-class living in New York; from prophesying his own status as a great novelist, the catalyst for the next phase of American literature; a handsome man with dark features and forlorn eyes, a literary Humphrey Bogart who had no trouble drawing the stares of beautiful women and blending in with New York's upper crust; An overnight ascension up the publishing world's A-list; to an introverted societal expat in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, where beyond occasional niceties towards neighbors, he refused to share anything more of himself with the world.

…

Salinger was, to my mind and probably many others, the founder of the postmodern "New York" novel. Literary critic James Wood once said of that proposed genre:

"...And besides, the "New York novel" - as opposed to the novel set in New York - is a genre of no importance at all."

But New York was clearly more than just a backdrop for Salinger's novels and stories. He was the voice of upper class disillusionment, a torch he unanimously inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abdicated his seat, joining other east coast writers as they drank themselves into debt and made their ill-fated exodus out west to a land of sunshine, orange groves and statutes on drinking water--the land of that pubescent and promising new media goddess, Hollywood.

Ernest Hemingway once described Fitzgerald as a 'whore' for career moves like this. A term Holden Caulfield uses to describe his brother D.B. in The Catcher in the Rye, who also writes for film...

(F. Scott = D.B.?)

In "The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway graduates from the insular familiarity of his Ivy League world into the corrupt world of bootlegging and 1920's opulence-the world of Jay Gatsby.

Fitzgerald's New York reflected the 1920's, the prosperity following the Great War just before the jugulating grip of the Great Depression; Olympus before the fall, the last fleeting snapshot of America's socialite aristocracy. At the time The Great Gatsby plays out there was a slow but steady social class restructuring that gave birth to the American middle class. Salinger's work traced those changes. If men like Thaw, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt had been royalty, with the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Arnold Rothsteins the nobility, then burgeoning families like the Caulfields and the Glass' represented the new 'gentry', the earls and viscounts of New York: affluent though not rich, people of note but not newspaper-worthy, all set against one another, vying for advancement at the king's court.

Holden Caulfield is a progeny of those gentry: talented, directionless and bored out of his mind.

So what was it about one spoiled and, lets face it, often whiny prep-school kid and his inability to count his blessings like the rest of the trust-fund brigade? Why have so many with each passing generation, myself included, resonated so much with the narrative of Holden Caulfield?

After Salinger’s death, a blog on the New York Times website showed collected thoughts and reflections about the man and his work. One Leslie from England had THIS to say:

“Catcher in the Rye” was about a self-absorbed, privileged, ungrateful little snot and the two-dimensional female stand-in of a character. The only thing more depressing than that book is the fact that it apparently resonates with most of America. This is telling."

If Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a self-absorbed, ungrateful little snot, and if those tenets are so telling, what words would Leslie use to describe Joyce's Steven Dedalus...