“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
Yes, it’s true — and cliche — and belated — I, like the rest of you, was a Catcher in the Rye kid. I read it sophomore year of high school and fucking loved it. I read all the other books/stories too (even, thanks to Karfunkel, “Hapworth 1964”) but am a bit of a purist for Holden and “old Phoebe.”
I enjoyed reading the Times’ obit of J.D. Salinger. There were a couple of juicy quotes from John Updike, whose work I’d never read (except for the occasional review or story in the New Yorker) until after his death exactly a year earlier than Salinger’s, and who basically can do no wrong for me:
- Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”
- “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.” (Updike on later Salinger)
It is strange that the words of one dead author-hero should strike me the most in an obituary about another. But the second I started thinking about these two I thought about Vonnegut (a chain reaction of author-hero loss). Actually I thought about him saying “I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.” Which is like the pang I feel each time someone like this goes away for good — even Salinger, who hasn’t written anything in forty or fifty years.
Loving an author is strange that way. When alive, they are vivid, hovering, real, stronger than just words — as though they might add a comment or footnote in the midst of your reading. And then when they die, it is not the words that are diminished (the emotion/meaning stays) — only that ghost presence, which was never real, is missing; it becomes less real when they are dead.
What a bust.
