Salinger's premature sense of doom finally grows up

J.D. Salinger is dead at 91. Who knew that Holden Caulfield would live so long? The story was broken by Salinger's agent, Harold Ober Associates, whose job since the early '60s has been to cash checks and discourage biographers. The author hadn't published anything new in years.

There was always an atmosphere of doom about J.D. Salinger -- to the point where readers (this one, at least) subconsciously put him into the same dead-by-30 category with James Dean and Shelley and Keats. Of course, he didn't die young; he just disappeared. Maybe he left part of himself behind in Europe, or at Valley Forge Military Academy. By the mid '50s Salinger had already hidden himself away in upstate New Hampshire, a kind of literary Garbo, occasionally glimpsed but seldom heard from. Authors were now supposed to be public personalities, and he'd have none of that.

His last piece, appearing in the New Yorker magazine in 1965, was titled "Hapworth 16, 1924." Although there were rumors about other stories with similar cryptic titles, none appeared. One imagines his house filled with boxes of stories and novels that he hated as soon as he'd written them. Maybe he burned them to warm the house during the New England winters. His slender oeuvre finally consists of one famous novel, "The Catcher in the Rye," and three story collections -- unless his executors discover additional material among his effects. (It could happen.)

His most famous creation was the personality of Holden Caulfield, the angry kid expelled from prep school who spends Christmas in New York City. I'd be curious to know how many Ph.D.s have been awarded to people trying to explain what it means to be a catcher in the rye. What would Holden Caulfield have thought of that?

Salinger grew up in New York City, where his father was an importer of kosher cheese. He attended a military academy in Pennsylvania. Biographers working from scarce material and no cooperation from the subject describe an apt student, popular in a smooth and superficial way, and not particularly disillusioned. He wrote for the school newspaper and thought about becoming an actor. He attended NYU, then spent a year in Austria learning about the imported meat business. (He decided not to become an importer of meat.)

In 1941 he dated Oona O'Neill, the daughter of the famous playwright; she soon broke up with him and began dating Charlie Chaplin. Salinger and a friend got jobs as recreation directors on the cruise ship M.S. Kongsholm. Their duties included arranging deck tennis tournaments and dancing with unescorted women.

He'd already begun submitting stories to the New Yorker. Seven of them were rejected that year. Then he wrote a story about a kid named Holden Caulfield, titled "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." The New Yorker bought it and planned to run it in one of the December issues, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the aggravations of a prep school kid in New York suddenly seemed trivial. They pulled the story. Salinger was 22.

He joined the army, and landed in Normandy in the fifth hour of D-Day. He met Hemingway in Paris and spent Christmas 1944 fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He celebrated his 26th birthday in deep snow, under enemy fire. He came home and went back to work writing stories.

From then on it seemed as if the characters in his stories had been under fire too. They inhabited New York apartments and vacationed in Florida, but the war still rang in their ears. They broke down at an alarming rate, most famously in the story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Salinger only wrote the one novel, but that was enough. He became, in a way, the Roger Maris of American letters.

Holden hated phonies and Salinger didn't want to become one. I suppose he knew an old man writing like an angry youth would have seemed phony, and writing like an angry old author would disappoint.

"The Catcher in the Rye" inspired teenage rebels and at least one assassin. Its narrator pontificates about everything but the book contains few answers.

In 1999 one of his young disciples, the writer Joyce Maynard, wrote a memoir about their year-long relationship a quarter century earlier. She was 18 in 1972 and had won a writing contest sponsored by the New York Times Magazine. Salinger wrote to her, she wrote back. Then she dropped out of Yale and went to live with him in his farmhouse in New Hampshire. He was 53. His children still lived with him and were nearly her age.

Maynard later sold his letters at auction for $156,000. So it isn't hard to understand why he became a recluse. The experiences of war and hero-worship are corrosive in different ways.

It's remarkable he lived so much longer than the people in his stories. Being in New Hampshire and living on a farm might have helped. His Cornish neighbors protected him as carefully as his agents did.

Now, I suppose, more stories will come out, by him as well as about him (unless his neighbors report a large bonfire out behind the family home), which should mean a fuller biography than those already written. We are curious about people who make a difference in our lives, and authors influence us at crucial moments and impressionable ages. Salinger is a touchstone, not only because his famous narrator pretended to know the difference between phoniness and authenticity, but because he cared about such differences and got genuinely angry about deception.

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Eric Hanson, Minneapolis, is author of "A Book of Ages."

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