I don’t think I would be in publishing if it wasn’t for Salinger. -Ben

Today is a sad day. A man who has essentially been dead to the rest of the world for nearly fifty years has actually gone and died. For real this time.

My introduction to J.D. Salinger, like I’m assuming most other people’s, came with the assignment of Catcher in the Rye in a high school English class. I was, at the time, aware of the book’s mark as a passage from childhood to adolescence, a secret handshake for disaffected youth.

But I didn’t love Catcher in the Rye like I hoped I would. That, I was expected to by my teacher Mr. Ihle, who, if I’m allowed a bit of conjecture would have figured me for the exact kid who would love that book.

It might have been where I was in life, maybe I was already too alienated and desperate to not fit in. Maybe I didn’t like Holden because in some stupid way, I looked at him as competition. In any case, I wasn’t moved the way I was supposed to be by Catcher in the Rye.

Four or five years later I was at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as an English major. I’d already gone to college for a year, taken a few semesters off to move to Dallas, moved back to Madison to work in a warehouse, to install carpet, to busy myself with all of the trappings that come with post high school kid trying to find a place in the world. I’d fallen in love. I’d had my heart broken. I had energy, but no real direction or faith or, if I want to overanalyze it—no sense of my place in the world.

During the spring semester of 1998 I took a literature class at UWM. On the first day the syllabus was handed out, I took a cursory glance at the list of books we would be reading, rolled my eyes dismissively (as most 22 year old boys who can’t be satisfied with anything do), and let out a sigh when I saw that Salinger was on the list—this time for his two novella/short story collection Franny & Zooey.

Because I was never an exceptional student, I put off reading every book on the list until the very last second, and in most cases, I probably didn’t even read the book as much as skimmed it. When I initially cracked open Franny & Zooey the technique wasn’t any different.

From Amazon.com’s description of Franny & Zooey—

Volume containing two interrelated stories by J.D. Salinger, published in book form in 1961. The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger’s short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the “Jesus prayer” as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the “Jesus prayer” is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.

Though the elevator pitch probably wouldn’t go over all that well in today’s publishing environment, the book itself hit me harder than any other before or since.

**

I’m not one for celebrity worship. I try to respect that we’re all people and really when the planet finally turns to dust, none of our names are going to echo in the wind. In my time in the publishing industry I’ve had an opportunity to meet best selling authors and other recognizable faces in the music and movie world.

Sometimes I’ve found myself feeling sorry for people, because it’s clear they’re so used to being pulled every direction to sign things and smile for cameras, and if you talk to them for even a second and you listen you can hear the exhaustion. I can only imagine what it was like for Salinger after the publication of Catcher in the Rye. It’s not hard for me to understand how a guy could start daydreaming about disappearing, especially when everything else seemed to be a distraction from what he really wanted to do—write.

I would have loved to had an opportunity to meet the guy, sure. But I have the feeling I’d only come away disappointed. Our heroes have a way of being molded by us, independent of their actual realities. I’m content to have a little less space on my bookshelf because of the things he wrote.

The importance of Salinger’s works on my life can not be overstated. They are not only my favorite novels and the basis for my intense love of language, but they are the very framework for whatever spirituality I may have—a mishmash of Christ and the Tao and a resilient but often dented faith in people’s inclination to do right.

I often cringe when I hear people dismiss books as an afternoon’s entertainment—as though the beginning and end of its potential impact is a few forgettable hours on a Saturday. I realize that we all read for different reasons and that I’m probably in the minority at this point, but I want to believe that a book’s impact is forever. And I want to buy into the myth when I get done reading that if I only found the right phone book, I’d very well be able to find the folks I’ve just been reading about and that I could have them over for dinner.

The appeal of the last four novellas/short stories is in the depth of the Glass family. But that depth was not without its detractors.

John Updike said, “Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.”

I would move that it was this hyper devotion to the Glass family that made them unique in the pantheon of literary characters, and what made the books so much more powerful and lasting to me, and I’m sure others. What is most remarkable, perhaps, is Salinger’s dedication to eschew all other things, apparently, in pursuit of the realization.

It is also because of that devotion to creating and defining them, that makes me, as a reader, care and believe in what is being said so much so that it became a quasi-religious experience.

Towards the very end of Zooey there’s a conversation between Zooey and Franny—who is in the middle of a nervous breakdown because of the intersection of God, her decision to quit acting out of frustration with the audience, and perhaps a tinge of the same thing that is bothering Holden in the other book—and Zooey says,

“One other thing. And that’s all. I promise you. But the thing is, you raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddamn ‘unskilled laughter’ coming from the fifth row. And that’s right, that’s right—God knows it’s depressing. I’m not saying it isn’t. But that’s none of your business, really. That’s none of your business, Franny. An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you. Not in any real sense anyway. You know what I mean?”

What, if nothing else, was Salinger doing but shooting for perfection on his own terms without listening to the critics—deafened as he was by the distance from the world he fled when he famously retreated to his 90 acre compound in Cornish, New Hampshire.

A few pages later, Zooey and Franny talk about something that Seymour, the oldest Glass brother had said to both of them on different occasions. One time, before going on the air for a radio program, Seymour told Zooey to shine his shoes. Zooey, stubborn and unsure why it mattered what his shoes looked like for a radio program asked why in the world he should do it. Seymour told him to do it for the Fat Lady. In another instance he told Franny, who was on the same radio program to “be funny” for the Fat Lady. Both Franny and Zooey worked up their own images of the Fat Lady.

Said Zooey, “This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know.”

I’m almost done here, indulge me for one more second if you will. This last little bit was the flipping of the Gestalt Switch for me. When anybody asks what the most important thing I ever read was, this is, inevitably what I will point to.

Zooey continues admonishing Franny for her frustration with the audience,

“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most suburned looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?…Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”

I’ve bought copies of Franny & Zooey for my artist friends, my religious friends, and the aged Holden Caufields of the world still looking for direction. It is the closest thing I have to a holy book.

Thank you, Mr. Salinger.