A man on a small motorcycle wearing a yellow hazmat suit took me to J.D. Salinger's house when I was 21 years old. Two friends and I had been driving around Salinger's mountain for a full day, and we were exhausted, irritable, and hopeless.
A different man, with a bagpipe on his hip and a black lab at his side, had taunted us for nearly six hours, alternately giving us clues as to which house belonged to Salinger and insulting us. "You think you're the first people to come looking for Mr. Salinger?" He said when we pulled alongside him in his driveway. "Go home." The next time around the bend, "You can't see his house from the road." Then, "If you admire him so much, respect his desire for privacy;" followed by, "I can comfortably walk the distance between our two houses;" and, "Long drive back to Florida. Better get started now."
Eventually, the bagpiper stopped responding to our questions about Salinger. And because we were lost, yet still committed to the hunt, we agreed to talk about other things in between bouts of goose-chasing. The black flies. The weather. The efficiency of the Cornish fire department. But never about Salinger. When we pulled up to the bagpiper's yard for the last time, he simply pointed to the barn across the dirt road. "I raised that barn myself," he said, then put the bagpipe reed back in his mouth and honked his way through his front door.
I had wanted to make the drive up to Cornish, New Hampshire, to see J.D. Salinger since a junior-high teacher scolded me for using curse words in my writing. The assignment was titled, "What Thanksgiving means to me," and in the course of 250 words I managed to employ no fewer than 20 "jesus christs" and half as many "fucks." The powers that were didn't let me off when I explained that I wasn't really taking the Lord's name in vain—hence the lower case lettering—and the "fucks" were art.
I got deep into what little Salinger you can buy, and read everything but Catcher In the Rye several times over (everyone has read Catcher, and I didn't want to be like everyone; a very un-Salingerian attitude considering his love for the sopa opera Dynasty). His stories stuck with me through junior high and high school, and in college, where I added Nine Stories to the syllabus of a first-year English course that I co-taught as an undergraduate.
A few months before graduation, I asked two friends if they'd travel with me to Salinger's house. There was a certain reward for us in simply discussing exciting and unlikely adventures, and I knew that if I changed my mind, or if my friends batted the idea around and then rejected it, the desire to make the trip would still stand for something.
I would like to say that a chill galloped down my spine, and that I was filled with an over-whelming nostalgia for Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenter when Matt and Brian jumped on board. But my first impulse was negative: the idea of a roadtrip exhausted me. So much driving; uncomfortable sleeping conditions; shitting in public restrooms; hundreds of dollars spent in fastfood establishments; squabbling; road stink. I ran a quick formula in my head: the amount of time that would pass before we could actually embark (two months) multiplied by the likelihood that we would irritate each other sick during the interim (high), divided by our ability to forgive each other (low, likely to decrease with time).
I figured the trip would abort itself in vitro, and that I risked next to nothing by appearing gung ho at the outset. I dismissed the possibility that Brian and Matt expected me to do what I was about to promise, shrugged at the consequences of such carelessness and said, "Sure, I mean it. Let's go."
Due to this indiscretion, I had no one to blame when I found myself in the front passenger seat of a white Toyota Camry, speeding through Jacksonville, FL, on I-95 in the dead of night; a stoned and excited person to my left, a stoned and excited person behind me, a stoned and excited person staring back at me from the rear-view mirror, all convinced that within a few days, we would be in the company of Jerome David Salinger.
* * *
Three days before we left, visiting Salinger mutated suddenly into a sensitive hybrid of business and pleasure. At the trip's end, I learned, there would be a job waiting for me in Washington, D.C., which meant we'd have to stop on our way up so that I could find an apartment. It was a reminder for me that this trip would probably be the last of its kind. Matt and Brian would soon move to other parts of the world, we'd all commit ourselves to work, to new friends and new pursuits.
After a quick tour of some of Northwest D.C.'s most economically depressed neighborhoods, I settled on a spacish one bedroom that my girlfriend despises almost as much as she despises me for choosing it, inked the lease, put down a few hundred bucks to hold the place until I could come up with money for a security deposit, and resumed the drive New Hampshire.
The rest of the pilgrimage was spent smoking pot, listening to good tunes, and playing a game we created called the Salinger Hypothetical, which one of us would start when the others were feeling like the trip was a waste of time. Working off the trivia we knew about Salinger—the pee-drinking, the refusal to evacuate his home during a massive fire, the regular visits to Friendly's for ice cream, the obsession with young women, the interest in homeopathic medicine—we psyched ourselves out by creating even stranger Salingers. Every sentence began with "What if Salinger" and ended in an absurd theory: What if Salinger hasn't cut his fingernails in 50 years? What if Salinger's home is staffed by Southeast Asian slave labor? What if Salinger answers the door in a dress? What if Salinger has been dead for years, and his wife too, and no one knows because he's a recluse? What if Salinger answers the door in a Marilyn Monroe wig? What if Salinger is a huge pothead? What is Salinger answers the door naked? What if Salinger doesn't remember having been a famous writer?
We played the game through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. We stopped at Milford Reservoir in Connecticut, waded out to a large rock, and played the game while sunning ourselves. We played the game in Massachusetts while wandering high and buzzed through Roxbury, and while waiting in line for tickets to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, which made us wonder if Salinger would answer the door with a bullwhip in hand. We played the game high and terrified while waiting in line for a state trooper checkpoint in Vermont, only to be waved through when the troopers saw a car packed to bulging with migrant workers. We probably played the game several times an hour every hour for the three days it took us to drive to New Hampshire.
But there was one hypothetical none of us asked: What if we can't find Salinger?
* * *
We flagged down the man on the small motorcycle wearing the yellow hazmat suit because we thought, for just a second, that he was Salinger. The game had conditioned us to think of Salinger as a spry, delusional—and yes, dangerous—dandy; not an 89-year-old hermit. The three of us were covered in black-fly bites, visibly tense, wet, and muddied from sliding into a creek bed to get high, and we must have inspired some sympathy. "Do you promise not to bother him?" The man asked us. We nodded. "Follow me."
The motorcycle was surprisingly quick. The man took us around some familiar curves and down roads we'd seen 20 times that day. But then he made a sharp right at a fork that we must've missed earlier, and pulled over.
"Last house on the right," he said as we idled beside him. "There's a barn across the road. Can't miss it."
Bagpipe man was right: We couldn't see Salinger's house from the road, and the distance there was walkable, assuming one had an hour or so to kill. From the row of trees that surrounded Salinger's house, you could look down a grassy slope and see nothing but trees for miles. The mailbox out front had a lock on it, unlike the other homes on the mountain, and the entrance to the driveway was plastered with signs that read "NO TRESPASSING" and "NO LOITERING." From the road, we spotted a SUV with a Cornish Fire Department bumper sticker—had Salinger or his wife put it on the car after the fire in the late 90s that almost destroyed the house? And was that an herb garden near the front door? The tension was so palpable that Brian and Matt broke out the weed and we smoked another joint to steady our nerves.
"Are you going to knock?" Matt asked me after we'd had a few hits.
It was my trip, after all. I tried walking up the driveway a few times, got close to the front door twice. But both times, I turned around. I'd read everything that had ever been written about finding Salinger, including Ron Rosenbaum's Esquire story and message board anecdotes in which fans detailed the lengths to which they'd gone to enter Salinger's home disguised as handymen. I even heard a story second-hand about a group of students our age who had banged on the door while yelling that they'd just been in a car accident. No one had answered them.
"Maybe the bagpiper is right" I suggested to the guys. "We've found the place, maybe we should just leave him alone."
The guys shrugged. "Your trip," Brian said.
We stared at the barn. Walked up and down the driveway a few times. Took pictures. Scribbled an adulatory note to Salinger and wedged it in the gap between his mailboxes. And then we left.
* * *
I still don't know if I was scared of being rejected, or if I wanted to prolong the meeting in order to prolong my youth. Both of these theories crossed my mind as the Friendly's in Lebanon where Matt and Brian and I stopped for dinner before heading back to Florida. While the guys compared notes and drew conclusions from the herb garden and the bumper sticker, I sipped quietly on a cup of coffee. Our waitress overheard their conversation and intervened.
"You were right there," she told us.
"Right where?"
"Right at Mr. Salinger's house. With the barn across the road? On the hill? That's Mr. Salinger's house," she said, beaming. "Most people can't find it."
"How do you know that?" I asked. And internally, Why the fuck weren't you playing the bagpipes earlier?
"I used to babysit Margaret," she said, "and Mr. Salinger sometimes comes here for ice cream."
She paused.
"So close," she said, a sympathetic frown on her face.
"So close," I parroted back to her in a hollow voice.
That night, after convincing one another that Salinger would be there waiting for us when we finally worked up the courage to knock, we left for Florida and our new, more adult lives. The bagpipe man was right. It was a long trip.
I suppose the best part is that I didn't actually know what Ayn Rand looked like before I saw that picture.
I just saw this post about ascendency and godhood and following it there's this woman, this... grotesque woman, and I could only think of the one author it could be.
And it was.
Ayn Rand.
Welcome to now knowing that Ayn Rand looks like a slightly female Napoleon.
Sometimes I think that people must not get Catcher in the Rye, which kind of surprises me because it isn't that difficult, but I guess there are a lot of dumb bastards out there who were forced to read it in high school and never forgave their English teacher for thinking they would like it.
Seriously, I can't remember the last time I had a conversation with someone who genuinely liked Catcher in the Rye, or talked with anyone who had read the Glass novels.
Catcher in the Rye was terrible. I did not like reading 276 pages of pure whining and moaning and bitching, where one thing would happen in a single sentence and then there'd be two full pages of whining about that thing.
That is not a good read. If I want to read whining I have plenty of resources available online.
yeah he should have counted on the Internet audience in 1951
I suppose the best part is that I didn't actually know what Ayn Rand looked like before I saw that picture.
I just saw this post about ascendency and godhood and following it there's this woman, this... grotesque woman, and I could only think of the one author it could be.
And it was.
Ayn Rand.
Welcome to now knowing that Ayn Rand looks like a slightly female Napoleon.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
GameGrrl on
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
edited January 2010
The only reason I disliked reading Catcher in the Rye was because the teacher that assigned it to us was way to into the damn book. Like it was a direct reflection of his life, and by damn the rest of us better have the same spiritual epiphany reading the book that he had or we suck.
After that he had us read Dune, so he wasn't all bad.
Well, he also made us read Walt Whitman that year so fuck him in his candy ass.
he's pretty majorly celebrated for his short stories
This is news. Based on my (apparently poor) education, I had reached the conclusion that Catcher was his primary, and only major, work.
Maybe I'll hunt them down. Unfortunately I don't think there's a library within 20-some miles that would even have a chance of having them.
EDIT: Christ trying to post with anything approaching speed is nigh impossible when your computer decides that it wants to be refreshed a very very large number of times just to reach the next page. Let alone actually post something.
He didn't publish anything for decades, but he wrote his entire life. Everything is going to be published now.
As for it being a terrible piece of literature: Plot, structure, and convention-wise? Pretty bad.
As a "Hey guys, we may want to do something here"? Excellent (even though it kinda got co-opted). While I don't like it, and got Holden's shtick within the first 10 pages, I do understand it's significance in the literary world.
So for all the reasons I read literature, it's pretty bad.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
It was written in 1951, for starters.
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HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
I'm really not sure what he was trying to do with Catcher. It's a mysterious book to me. Sometimes I think that Holden is a sort of "before" picture; Holden is what happens to you if you don't have Seymour and Buddy to give you advice.
Sensitive people get paralyzed and resentful when they see ugliness around them, and though they're not wrong, they're also not doing themselves or other people any good by trying to give up on life. A lot of the Salinger stories seem to be about that. They take seriously why you would want to give up -- why you would want to kill yourself, or retreat to childhood, or whatever -- and sometimes the characters find a reason to keep living and trying after all, and sometimes they don't. I think he wanted it to be an open question.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
He's not a manchild, he's a child. Were you sane at fifteen? I sure as hell wasn't.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
He's not a manchild, he's a child. Were you sane at fifteen? I sure as hell wasn't.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
He's not a manchild, he's a child. Were you sane at fifteen? I sure as hell wasn't.
I'm really not sure what he was trying to do with Catcher. It's a mysterious book to me. Sometimes I think that Holden is a sort of "before" picture; Holden is what happens to you if you don't have Seymour and Buddy to give you advice.
Sensitive people get paralyzed and resentful when they see ugliness around them, and though they're not wrong, they're also not doing themselves or other people any good by trying to give up on life. A lot of the Salinger stories seem to be about that. They take seriously why you would want to give up -- why you would want to kill yourself, or retreat to childhood, or whatever -- and sometimes the characters find a reason to keep living and trying after all, and sometimes they don't. I think he wanted it to be an open question.
Sensitive people get paralyzed and resentful when they see ugliness around them, and though they're not wrong, they're also not doing themselves or other people any good by trying to give up on life. A lot of the Salinger stories seem to be about that. They take seriously why you would want to give up -- why you would want to kill yourself, or retreat to childhood, or whatever -- and sometimes the characters find a reason to keep living and trying after all, and sometimes they don't. I think he wanted it to be an open question.
And this should really end the goddamn discussion.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
It was written in 1951, for starters.
Not sure what that has to do with my post.
In the sense of fairness, I'll expand on this a bit.
I was mostly responding to your last sentence. You are looking at the novel in a modern context based on your limited experience on this planet. To properly appreciate its importance, you need to consider it in the historical context of when it was written.
Slack-jawed, complaining teens are considered commonplace especially in the modern, urbanized, instant-gratification world we're in now. People get shit whenever they want and fill their lives with an endless stream of information and distraction. You can't look for the relevance of the book in that context. I think a good place to start would be to look at the things that Catcher inspired, especially in the cultural revolution of the 60s. Take a look at the Graduate, for example. The story of a guy going through a phase in his life and wondering if there are other options besides what everyone has always done before and what everyone expects from him. That kind of narrative is ingrained in the culture today because of Catcher and the things it inspired.
That's a really loose explanation, but I guess it works. I think the better question is whether the book is still relevant today. I suppose it is more so if people haven't been exposed to a lot of the derivative stories and concepts.
Sensitive people get paralyzed and resentful when they see ugliness around them, and though they're not wrong, they're also not doing themselves or other people any good by trying to give up on life. A lot of the Salinger stories seem to be about that. They take seriously why you would want to give up -- why you would want to kill yourself, or retreat to childhood, or whatever -- and sometimes the characters find a reason to keep living and trying after all, and sometimes they don't. I think he wanted it to be an open question.
And this should really end the goddamn discussion.
I'm really not sure what he was trying to do with Catcher. It's a mysterious book to me. Sometimes I think that Holden is a sort of "before" picture; Holden is what happens to you if you don't have Seymour and Buddy to give you advice.
Sensitive people get paralyzed and resentful when they see ugliness around them, and though they're not wrong, they're also not doing themselves or other people any good by trying to give up on life. A lot of the Salinger stories seem to be about that. They take seriously why you would want to give up -- why you would want to kill yourself, or retreat to childhood, or whatever -- and sometimes the characters find a reason to keep living and trying after all, and sometimes they don't. I think he wanted it to be an open question.
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I Went to J.D. Salinger's House
A man on a small motorcycle wearing a yellow hazmat suit took me to J.D. Salinger's house when I was 21 years old. Two friends and I had been driving around Salinger's mountain for a full day, and we were exhausted, irritable, and hopeless.
A different man, with a bagpipe on his hip and a black lab at his side, had taunted us for nearly six hours, alternately giving us clues as to which house belonged to Salinger and insulting us. "You think you're the first people to come looking for Mr. Salinger?" He said when we pulled alongside him in his driveway. "Go home." The next time around the bend, "You can't see his house from the road." Then, "If you admire him so much, respect his desire for privacy;" followed by, "I can comfortably walk the distance between our two houses;" and, "Long drive back to Florida. Better get started now."
Eventually, the bagpiper stopped responding to our questions about Salinger. And because we were lost, yet still committed to the hunt, we agreed to talk about other things in between bouts of goose-chasing. The black flies. The weather. The efficiency of the Cornish fire department. But never about Salinger. When we pulled up to the bagpiper's yard for the last time, he simply pointed to the barn across the dirt road. "I raised that barn myself," he said, then put the bagpipe reed back in his mouth and honked his way through his front door.
I had wanted to make the drive up to Cornish, New Hampshire, to see J.D. Salinger since a junior-high teacher scolded me for using curse words in my writing. The assignment was titled, "What Thanksgiving means to me," and in the course of 250 words I managed to employ no fewer than 20 "jesus christs" and half as many "fucks." The powers that were didn't let me off when I explained that I wasn't really taking the Lord's name in vain—hence the lower case lettering—and the "fucks" were art.
I got deep into what little Salinger you can buy, and read everything but Catcher In the Rye several times over (everyone has read Catcher, and I didn't want to be like everyone; a very un-Salingerian attitude considering his love for the sopa opera Dynasty). His stories stuck with me through junior high and high school, and in college, where I added Nine Stories to the syllabus of a first-year English course that I co-taught as an undergraduate.
A few months before graduation, I asked two friends if they'd travel with me to Salinger's house. There was a certain reward for us in simply discussing exciting and unlikely adventures, and I knew that if I changed my mind, or if my friends batted the idea around and then rejected it, the desire to make the trip would still stand for something.
I would like to say that a chill galloped down my spine, and that I was filled with an over-whelming nostalgia for Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenter when Matt and Brian jumped on board. But my first impulse was negative: the idea of a roadtrip exhausted me. So much driving; uncomfortable sleeping conditions; shitting in public restrooms; hundreds of dollars spent in fastfood establishments; squabbling; road stink. I ran a quick formula in my head: the amount of time that would pass before we could actually embark (two months) multiplied by the likelihood that we would irritate each other sick during the interim (high), divided by our ability to forgive each other (low, likely to decrease with time).
I figured the trip would abort itself in vitro, and that I risked next to nothing by appearing gung ho at the outset. I dismissed the possibility that Brian and Matt expected me to do what I was about to promise, shrugged at the consequences of such carelessness and said, "Sure, I mean it. Let's go."
Due to this indiscretion, I had no one to blame when I found myself in the front passenger seat of a white Toyota Camry, speeding through Jacksonville, FL, on I-95 in the dead of night; a stoned and excited person to my left, a stoned and excited person behind me, a stoned and excited person staring back at me from the rear-view mirror, all convinced that within a few days, we would be in the company of Jerome David Salinger.
* * *
Three days before we left, visiting Salinger mutated suddenly into a sensitive hybrid of business and pleasure. At the trip's end, I learned, there would be a job waiting for me in Washington, D.C., which meant we'd have to stop on our way up so that I could find an apartment. It was a reminder for me that this trip would probably be the last of its kind. Matt and Brian would soon move to other parts of the world, we'd all commit ourselves to work, to new friends and new pursuits.
After a quick tour of some of Northwest D.C.'s most economically depressed neighborhoods, I settled on a spacish one bedroom that my girlfriend despises almost as much as she despises me for choosing it, inked the lease, put down a few hundred bucks to hold the place until I could come up with money for a security deposit, and resumed the drive New Hampshire.
The rest of the pilgrimage was spent smoking pot, listening to good tunes, and playing a game we created called the Salinger Hypothetical, which one of us would start when the others were feeling like the trip was a waste of time. Working off the trivia we knew about Salinger—the pee-drinking, the refusal to evacuate his home during a massive fire, the regular visits to Friendly's for ice cream, the obsession with young women, the interest in homeopathic medicine—we psyched ourselves out by creating even stranger Salingers. Every sentence began with "What if Salinger" and ended in an absurd theory: What if Salinger hasn't cut his fingernails in 50 years? What if Salinger's home is staffed by Southeast Asian slave labor? What if Salinger answers the door in a dress? What if Salinger has been dead for years, and his wife too, and no one knows because he's a recluse? What if Salinger answers the door in a Marilyn Monroe wig? What if Salinger is a huge pothead? What is Salinger answers the door naked? What if Salinger doesn't remember having been a famous writer?
We played the game through Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. We stopped at Milford Reservoir in Connecticut, waded out to a large rock, and played the game while sunning ourselves. We played the game in Massachusetts while wandering high and buzzed through Roxbury, and while waiting in line for tickets to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, which made us wonder if Salinger would answer the door with a bullwhip in hand. We played the game high and terrified while waiting in line for a state trooper checkpoint in Vermont, only to be waved through when the troopers saw a car packed to bulging with migrant workers. We probably played the game several times an hour every hour for the three days it took us to drive to New Hampshire.
But there was one hypothetical none of us asked: What if we can't find Salinger?
* * *
We flagged down the man on the small motorcycle wearing the yellow hazmat suit because we thought, for just a second, that he was Salinger. The game had conditioned us to think of Salinger as a spry, delusional—and yes, dangerous—dandy; not an 89-year-old hermit. The three of us were covered in black-fly bites, visibly tense, wet, and muddied from sliding into a creek bed to get high, and we must have inspired some sympathy. "Do you promise not to bother him?" The man asked us. We nodded. "Follow me."
The motorcycle was surprisingly quick. The man took us around some familiar curves and down roads we'd seen 20 times that day. But then he made a sharp right at a fork that we must've missed earlier, and pulled over.
"Last house on the right," he said as we idled beside him. "There's a barn across the road. Can't miss it."
Bagpipe man was right: We couldn't see Salinger's house from the road, and the distance there was walkable, assuming one had an hour or so to kill. From the row of trees that surrounded Salinger's house, you could look down a grassy slope and see nothing but trees for miles. The mailbox out front had a lock on it, unlike the other homes on the mountain, and the entrance to the driveway was plastered with signs that read "NO TRESPASSING" and "NO LOITERING." From the road, we spotted a SUV with a Cornish Fire Department bumper sticker—had Salinger or his wife put it on the car after the fire in the late 90s that almost destroyed the house? And was that an herb garden near the front door? The tension was so palpable that Brian and Matt broke out the weed and we smoked another joint to steady our nerves.
"Are you going to knock?" Matt asked me after we'd had a few hits.
It was my trip, after all. I tried walking up the driveway a few times, got close to the front door twice. But both times, I turned around. I'd read everything that had ever been written about finding Salinger, including Ron Rosenbaum's Esquire story and message board anecdotes in which fans detailed the lengths to which they'd gone to enter Salinger's home disguised as handymen. I even heard a story second-hand about a group of students our age who had banged on the door while yelling that they'd just been in a car accident. No one had answered them.
"Maybe the bagpiper is right" I suggested to the guys. "We've found the place, maybe we should just leave him alone."
The guys shrugged. "Your trip," Brian said.
We stared at the barn. Walked up and down the driveway a few times. Took pictures. Scribbled an adulatory note to Salinger and wedged it in the gap between his mailboxes. And then we left.
* * *
I still don't know if I was scared of being rejected, or if I wanted to prolong the meeting in order to prolong my youth. Both of these theories crossed my mind as the Friendly's in Lebanon where Matt and Brian and I stopped for dinner before heading back to Florida. While the guys compared notes and drew conclusions from the herb garden and the bumper sticker, I sipped quietly on a cup of coffee. Our waitress overheard their conversation and intervened.
"You were right there," she told us.
"Right where?"
"Right at Mr. Salinger's house. With the barn across the road? On the hill? That's Mr. Salinger's house," she said, beaming. "Most people can't find it."
"How do you know that?" I asked. And internally, Why the fuck weren't you playing the bagpipes earlier?
"I used to babysit Margaret," she said, "and Mr. Salinger sometimes comes here for ice cream."
She paused.
"So close," she said, a sympathetic frown on her face.
"So close," I parroted back to her in a hollow voice.
That night, after convincing one another that Salinger would be there waiting for us when we finally worked up the courage to knock, we left for Florida and our new, more adult lives. The bagpipe man was right. It was a long trip.
Welcome to now knowing that Ayn Rand looks like a slightly female Napoleon.
I mean I guess it was realistic to have a character that didn't develop or grow at all
Seriously, I can't remember the last time I had a conversation with someone who genuinely liked Catcher in the Rye, or talked with anyone who had read the Glass novels.
e: "the you just didn't get it" argument isn't very compelling
Maybe, but I can't otherwise understand how someone would think it was a terrible piece of literature.
yeah he should have counted on the Internet audience in 1951
Especially because of the fire in her eyes
The fire fueled by way too many amphetamines
See
I read it cuz they made is read it in school
I probably wouldn't've read it on my own
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Maybe I didn't get it? I mean: Holden is a manchild. He's stuck at an age where he wants to do great things, but can't put up with the more mundane and humbling experiences of what it means to actually be an adult. So instead he's just forever stuck the way he is, drifting and seeing the cold realities of living as an adult as an affront to his personal sense of right and wrong. It is pretty much the same innocence to experience story that every other author writes about youth, but in this the novel never gets to the 'experience' side, Holden never develops past his weak-willed douchebag stage. I'm guessing Salinger wants to highlight this as being some-sort of tragedy, and leaves the question up to the reader whether holden will ever actually grow up or not.
So I read it, rolled my eyes a few times at the main character being a flake, and then asked 'so what?' there are lots of whiny teenagers out there, most grow out of it.
After that he had us read Dune, so he wasn't all bad.
Well, he also made us read Walt Whitman that year so fuck him in his candy ass.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
He didn't publish anything for decades, but he wrote his entire life. Everything is going to be published now.
As a "Hey guys, we may want to do something here"? Excellent (even though it kinda got co-opted). While I don't like it, and got Holden's shtick within the first 10 pages, I do understand it's significance in the literary world.
So for all the reasons I read literature, it's pretty bad.
It was written in 1951, for starters.
No, it just sucks.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
Sensitive people get paralyzed and resentful when they see ugliness around them, and though they're not wrong, they're also not doing themselves or other people any good by trying to give up on life. A lot of the Salinger stories seem to be about that. They take seriously why you would want to give up -- why you would want to kill yourself, or retreat to childhood, or whatever -- and sometimes the characters find a reason to keep living and trying after all, and sometimes they don't. I think he wanted it to be an open question.
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
i am singing a song of myself right now
I'm going to call Maurice and he's going to pimp slap that stupid off you
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
Not sure what that has to do with my post.
i understand where you are coming from
Damn.
He's not a manchild, he's a child. Were you sane at fifteen? I sure as hell wasn't.
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
holy shit
boy howdy callius
he is between a man and a child
I think he was 17 or 18.
make your mother sigh
SE++ in a nutshell.
And this should really end the goddamn discussion.
In the sense of fairness, I'll expand on this a bit.
I was mostly responding to your last sentence. You are looking at the novel in a modern context based on your limited experience on this planet. To properly appreciate its importance, you need to consider it in the historical context of when it was written.
Slack-jawed, complaining teens are considered commonplace especially in the modern, urbanized, instant-gratification world we're in now. People get shit whenever they want and fill their lives with an endless stream of information and distraction. You can't look for the relevance of the book in that context. I think a good place to start would be to look at the things that Catcher inspired, especially in the cultural revolution of the 60s. Take a look at the Graduate, for example. The story of a guy going through a phase in his life and wondering if there are other options besides what everyone has always done before and what everyone expects from him. That kind of narrative is ingrained in the culture today because of Catcher and the things it inspired.
That's a really loose explanation, but I guess it works. I think the better question is whether the book is still relevant today. I suppose it is more so if people haven't been exposed to a lot of the derivative stories and concepts.
Also, Field of Dreams, man.
but every author does this
every author tells this exact same story
especially if they have a youth character
I like you and what you write.
I'm going to write this down.