J.D. Salinder is Dead at 91

By Sharon Autenrieth
Special to the Post-Dispatch
My senior year of high school I swapped favorite books with my friend Nancy. She read my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and I read her favorite, The Catcher in the Rye. So began my J.D. Salinger period. Like millions of other teenagers from 1951 on, I felt that someone - finally! - understood me in my uniqueness. The irony that millions of us were all feeling unique together seems beside the point. Salinger gave voice to that particular combination of precocity, egoism and vulnerability that so many of us pass through as we grow up, and he did it better than anyone before or since. Somehow immersing ourselves in the lonely, miserable world of Holden Caulfield made us feel less miserable and alone.

J.D. Salinger died yesterday at the age of 91. He was famously private and hadn’t published a new work since 1965. But The Catcher in the Rye is still the most of famous piece of coming-of-age fiction in the world, and sells 250,000 copies a year.

In the movie “The Royal Tenenbaums”, Owen Wilson’s character, Eli, remarks of growing up a neighbor of the Tenenbaums, “I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” I understand what Eli meant. The Tenenbaums were clearly based on J.D. Salinger’s Glass family who appeared in many of his short stories and in the novel Franny and Zooey. The Glass children were all prodigies (like the Tenenbaums) who struggled mightily to live successfully as adults (again, like the Tenenbaums). During my college years it was the Glass children, rather than Holden Caulfield, who captured my imagination. Just today I’ve pulled out several pages of notes I took in college as I read Franny and Zooey and Salinger’s short story collections (Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction). On those pages I found words I’d written down to look up later, and I’m happy to report that I actually did look them up and wrote in definitions for words like “cavilling” and “panegyric”. I also wrote down names mentioned in the books so that I could research them, from Betsey Trotwood to Vivekananda. Mostly, though, I wrote down passages from the books, from the sublimely absurd (”…evidently Mrs. Felder has been haunted for days by my remark at dinner one night that I’d like to be a dead cat.”) to the simply sublime (”I’ve never know sickness-or sorrow, or disaster for that matter-not to unfold like a flower or a good memo. We’re required only to keep looking. Seymour once said, on the air when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best in the Bible was the word WATCH!”).

At a college chapel service one of our religion professors once read a passage from Franny and Zooey. I was in tears by the end. I was moved partly by the professors courage. In a conservative evangelical climate, letting J.D. Salinger teach us about living incarnationally seemed to me a brave move. But at it’s center, Franny and Zooey is a deeply spiritual story. The Glass family is Jewish/Catholic (one of the brothers has become a Carthusian monk), but they are also heavily influenced by Eastern spirituality. Talk of detachment and Christ-consciousness sits alongside discussion of biblical characters like Moses. Salinger didn’t hesitate to draw on various religious sources, but that doesn’t mean that he treated religion flippantly. In one of my favorite passages in Franny and Zooey, Zooey scolds his younger sister for using the Jesus Prayer to try to achieve spiritual enlightenment, without having a proper regard for Jesus.

I can’t see -I swear to God I can’t - how you can pray to a Jesus you don’t even understand. And what’s really inexcusable, considering that you’ve been funnel-fed on just about the same amount of religious philosophy that I have - what’s really inexcusable is that you don’t try to understand him….If you’re going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you’d like him to have been.”

It was not that passage but the final counsel that Zooey gives Franny that our professor read in chapel years ago, a passage that I won’t print for fear of spoiling the book for those who haven’t read it. I will only say that while it can be understood in more ways than one, spiritually speaking, I find it one of the loveliest expressions of devotion to Christ ever put in print.

J.D. Salinger was a source of frustration to his most ardent fans. He was almost never interviewed, and said that he wanted to write only for himself and not for publication. Perhaps, for him, writing was not a profession but a religion, as he said of one of his characters. Despite his long silence and the small body of work that he shared with the public, I still feel we’ve suffered a loss. I think it’s time to get out my Salinger paperbacks and read them again.

“Seymour said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.” - Seymour: An Introduction