The death of J.D. – Jerome David – Salinger is sad in its way: the day that any great artistic figure switches off the light of life reminds us that even the mighty are only passing this way for a short time.
But Salinger had reached a towering age – 91 – and had spent most of his last six decades reclusively hidden away, obsessively avoiding the glare of interest that his books – certainly his debut novel – generated and, in the main, managing to remain a hidden, barely-known personality.
In an era when national or international publicity frequently accompanies the rise of nobodies with no identifiable talent, it seems almost other-worldly that a man who wanted to share his craft and his ideas – at least his fiction – should so want to shun the attention of critics, journalists, photographers, biographers, academics and certainly fans.
In fact, such privacy is a relic of another age. You could not seek publication today without some commitment to helping with the promotion of a new title. It would be unthinkable to assume that a text had genuine – or at least potential – value without the willingness of a would-be writer to at least accede to Oprah’s – or Richard and Judy’s, to be more parochial – cooings.
I know there are those who have turned down that huge US show but, along the way, it’s generated its own up-profiling stream: ‘The man or woman who said “no” to Winfrey’, a headline-seizing story in its own curious right. Doubt that Salinger ever thought literature would come to this.
But I do actually resent his isolationism: humans are human – they want to converse and debate and chatter and exchange ideas. Why should this individual deny the world some answers to questions – not invasive or scurrilous or voyeuristic questions, but ones that would genuinely interrogate the writer about his art and his talent, his creative approach and attitudes.
I also resent him in an irrational way for what his most notorious reader ever did. When Mark Chapman gunned down John Lennon outside the Dakota Hotel in Manhattan in December 1980, he carried with him not only a venomous desire to murder our greatest rock legend but also a copy of Salinger’s most widely-known work.
Had Chapman seen, in the adolescent resentments of Holden Caulfield, a model? Had Chapman cultivated bitterness of such a posionous kind based on seeds sown by the alienated and isolated literary protagonist whom Salinger launched on the world in 1951.
This may be a thought without plausible justification but I sort of feel that if Salinger hadn’t been such a determined and misanthropic hideaway then, somehow, Chapman might also not have become a gun-toting madman on that terrible night.
Maybe, just maybe, if Salinger had been more open, more forthcoming, had discussed the motivations behind Caulfield, explained the notions behind The Catcher in the Rye to a broader forum, perhaps if he had shared some of his analysis and intelligence instead of shielding himself away for all that time, possibly the disturbed Chapman would have understood the book – and life, too – just that fraction better and his criminal intent would not have expressed itself in that horrifically wasteful manner those 30 years ago.
Taken from this post:
Salinger and Lennon: A fatal distraction
3 Responses to Salinger and Lennon: A fatal distraction
I don’t know, Simon, I tend to agree with Andrew (commenter on your personal blog) that Mark Chapman’s deranged desire to kill John Lennon likely wouldn’t have been mollified by a more openly expressive J.D. Salinger. Chapman had long since imagined what he wanted about “The Catcher in the Rye” to justify his murderous intention, which seemed to date back to Lennon’s Beatles-are-more-popular-than-Jesus remark in 1966.
A Beatles-related parallel can actually be found in Charles Manson’s claim that their White Album, specifically the song “Helter Skelter,” contained coded instructions to instigate the race war he lusted to start. I don’t know how anyone could deduce that message from the White Album myself, even playing it backwards on acid, but Manson did, because he WANTED that “justification” to be there for his lunatic fantasies. If the White Album hadn’t come out right at that time, Manson likely would have found the same message in some other equally-innocent source.
It’s hard for me to imagine J.D. Salinger cooperating in explicating his books, no matter the circumstances, as I recall him as pretty close-mouthed even before went into seclusion and stopped publishing back in the 1960′s. He came from that generation of writers who grew up with the idea (nurtured by the “New Critics” of the time) that their books should speak entirely for themselves, without any provision of the author’s own human background. I still recall how radical it seemed to read Norman Mailer’s first-person confessions in those same 1960′s, as he would admit to lust for success, his competition with fellow writers, and other such solipsisms heretofore considered beneath the dignity of “serious” novelists.
I share your outrage over Chapman’s murder of Lennon, Simon, and in my own irrational way, I’ve always tended to connect 3rd-party blame to Ronald Reagan rather than J.D. Salinger — Reagan was elected president just a month before the killing, and then a whole string of tragedies that directly affected my life occurred early on his watch: Creem publisher Barry Kramer died in 1981, Lester Bangs died in 1982, both of my parents were diagnosed with fatal diseases, etc., etc.. I can’t link Reagan to any of those events, of course, but they just seemed of a piece with the poisonous zeitgeist he released into Amerika then. And John Lennon’s murder was the first tragedy in that chain. I’m with Yoko Ono when Chapman comes up for parole again.
As ever, Richard, thanks for your interesting retort. Didn’t realise that JDS was influenced by the New Criticism in that way. When we think of the Beats and their confessional engagement – often beyond the pages of books: on stages, on TV, on demos, particularly Ginsberg but also McClure, Ferlinghetti and others – that’s find I find the closed-door approach so disconcerting.
But yr comments on Chapman, on Manson, on Reagan, do put my feelings – personal feelings which I confessed in the blog were of the gut rather than cerebral ones – in a wider context. Thank you for sharing those thoughts.
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