J.D. Salinger, With love and squalor

7th Feb 2010

When the news was bro­ken last Thurs­day that the Amer­i­can author J. D Salinger had died at the age of 91, it was as though a great friend, but one I had lost con­tact with, had just passed away.

Salinger is a name almost every adult and teenager will know of, and unlike Shake­speare or Austen, he com­mands a cer­tain respect from the ado­les­cent sphere. Salinger is a name syn­ony­mous with the feel­ings of teenage angst and of dis­il­lu­sion, naivety and con­fu­sion that are so embod­ied by his most famous char­ac­ter, Holden Caulfield.This char­ac­ter, the pro­tag­o­nist of The Catcher in the Rye, reaches out of his fic­tional bound­aries and inte­grates him­self in the minds and bod­ies of the male teenager; iden­ti­fy­ing with them in such a way that resulted in Salinger becom­ing one of the most loved and pop­u­lar writ­ers of post-war Amer­ica. How­ever, what makes Salinger such a won­der­ful writer is that ele­ments of his unruly char­ac­ter can be recog­nised in most teenagers across the globe. He had such a rare tal­ent for under­stand­ing and cap­tur­ing the most hid­den and dark­est of feel­ings. Indeed, when Mark David Chap­man, the mur­derer of John Lennon was arrested he stated that The Catcher in the Rye would explain his bru­tal actions and essen­tially his inner turmoil.

Despite the fact that Caulfield is such a beau­ti­fully con­structed char­ac­ter, Salinger’s other poignant sto­ries must not be over shad­owed. In the col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, For Esme – With Love and Squalor, Salinger momen­tar­ily focuses on the lives of sol­diers who are suf­fer­ing from what would now be diag­nosed as post-traumatic stress; some­thing Salinger fell vic­tim to after work­ing in the Amer­i­can army. So gen­tle are the sol­diers and so del­i­cately are they depicted that the sto­ries, in par­tic­u­lar A Nice Day for Bananafish, despite being short, main­tain a heart­break­ing pathos that I can­not find matched in any other story of such size.

Per­haps it is a lit­tle mor­bid that this first edi­to­r­ial should include such news but, as I said, Salinger is some­thing of a friend to the lost teenager inside of me and for that rea­son, this is some­thing of a homage to his work and to his memory.