RIP: JD Salinger

Author: Jauretsi | Posted: January 29th, 2010 | Filed under: Things We Like | | 1 Comment »

Wow. JD Salinger is gone. I feel like everyone should go and buy a book of his, similar to how one revisited Michael Jackson’s body of music after his death… to listen with fresh ears. Death makes us recalibrate, forcing us pause a moment, and look at the fingerprint people behind.

In my 15 years of working in Entertainment and writing magazine articles, I can honestly say Holden Caulfield is the one literary reference mentioned most in my interviews. The alienated, misunderstood protagonist serves as healing balm for frustrated youth (and confused artists) since it was published on July 16, 1951. The celebrity list is too long to “name-drop”. Plus this post is about JD, so let’s focus on the original man.

“My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book”, said Salinger in a 1953 interview. “It was a great relief telling people about it.” The story is about a 17 year old kid from New York City who gets expelled from an elite prep school. Salinger, like the boy in his book, lived a reclusive life. Up to his last breath, JD turned down all screenplays to bring Holden Caulfield to life — rejecting Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg offering to make big Hollywood productions. His character, Holden, would remain pure and precious, left to the readers imagination.

One of his ex-girlfriends, Joyce Maynard (who dropped out of Yale to be with him when he was 53 years old) said “the only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger.” She went on to write several books herself.

(Joyce Maynard’s Published book in 1973. JD Broke Her Heart.)

This Wednesday, January 27th, Salinger died of natural causes at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. He had published a ton of short stories in journals and magazines, but his published book collection was a total of 4 — The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

If you have not read Catcher in the Rye, read it now. If you have already read it, go buy it for a misunderstood teenager, or young writer looking for the real deal inspiration.

Below are excerpts from Catcher in the Rye.

“She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls, if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hands all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we won’t quite till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 11)

“People always clap for the wrong things.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 12)

“Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 4)

“Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re Catholic.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 15)

“The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs – if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t. You think if they’re intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don’t give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do. It’s one of the reasons why I roomed with a stupid bastard like Stradlater. At least his suitcases were as good as mine.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 15)

“Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. 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.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 20)

“I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 10)

“The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl, she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never really know whether they want you to stop or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 13)

“I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoyed the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 14)

“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 7)

“Then she really started to cry, and the next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over…”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 11)

“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 17)

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
– (Mr. Antolini in Chapter 24)

“What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
– (Holden Caulfield in Chapter 3)

RIP JD Salinger
January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010

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