The most extraordinary thing about Salinger might have been the breadth of appeal his most famous book 'Catcher In The Rye' possessed. Let's face it, it inspired David Mark Chapman to murder John Lennon. Perhaps because of this murder I've always had a dim view o the book - and at the time of Lennon's murder I hadn't read the damn thing yet. It was a distaste more in line with the sort of distaste a young girl has for foreign cuisine she is yet to taste "Yuck!"
At the time of Lennon's death, you could read any number of analysis of how the book might have related to the murder or how Chapman may have misunderstood the meaning of the book. It's always a little weird when a literary work gets dissected by journalists instead of critics because the Who-What-Where-When-How demands of journalism inevitably strips the work of its fine ornamentation. I have to say there's a side of me that thinks that such condensation and reductio ad absurdum of a text is in of itself interesting.
I finally read the book when it was given to me when I was nineteen. A girl I loved dearly thought I was like Holden Caulfield. Some people might find that flattering. Most of my friends thought it was hilariously wrong. Having read the book I was dismayed. At the time I felt Holden Caulfield as a character was a nonstarter, determined not to start anything meaningful. I was a dude waiting to do a myriad of things with my life. I couldn't have been more dissimilar to Holden. Suffice to say, she liked Holden, she liked me, and she was projecting Holden on to me - a mot unlikely target - which kind of explains why we busted up.
After my bust up with the said girl, I threw away the book. I've never really wanted to read it again out of distaste for the whole experience - Lennon/Chapman and the girl were enough to put me off it for life. But Salinger kept popping up even in fiction.
Ray Kinsella wrote 'Shoeless Joe' and he had this to say this week.
"When I was writing the novel I was a fan of Salinger," said Kinsella, who lives in Canada but earned a master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1978. " 'Catcher in the Rye' was the quintessential book of growing up male in North America."
In Kinsella's book, the main character - Ray Kinsella - takes Salinger to a baseball game to discover why he was called to build the field of his dreams.
"What if - which is what authors spend their time considering - what if Ray got into this adventure when he goes off to wherever he goes off to," author Kinsella mused Thursday.
The ball field, today a tourist attraction outside Dyersville, and the movie's lines ("If you build it, he will come," "Is this heaven? ... It's Iowa") are now firmly part of Iowa folklore.
Kinsella said the working title of the book was "The Kidnapping of J.D. Salinger."
After a name change and publication of "Shoeless Joe," Salinger's lawyers wrote Kinsella, outraged about the portrayal of the world-wary author.
"Salinger made a career out of being publicized for not seeking publicity," Kinsella said. "It was controlled and planned, and it kept his name in the media for 50 years."
But the lawyers had a warning: "In a legalese way, they basically said we don't have enough money to sue you but we will (expletive) on your wish to use it in a movie," Kinsella said. That's why, in the "Field of Dreams" movie, Ray Kinsella seeks out fictional author Terence Mann.
Of course, the voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones would play Terence Mann and deliver that famous speech about baseball. And it has to be said that the transformation the Terence Mann character makes in the movie is a stirring moment in the film, so much so that I liked him better than Salinger who just kept being a recluse. Yes, Ray's vision about Shoeless Joe and the field in the cornfield and all that is literally corny. Yet if I had to side with Kinsella or Salinger about the dynamic of the American personae, I think I'm in Kinsella' corner. The impulsive intuitive dynamism of Ray is so much more understandably American (in a Captain Kirk kind of way, I might add) than Salinger's introverted depressive misanthrope in Holden Caulfield. Is Kinsella a better writer? Probably not. But he's more on the money about the pulse of the world he lives in; and let's not forget, he's not the one who is a recluse.
Quite frankly, most of us men don't want to be Catchers in the rye. We want to be Thirdbasemn at Yankee stadium; or a Beatle; or an astronaut in space; or something. The fact that so few get there makes life poignant and so interesting. I don't think not even making a run at it is terribly great or a literary virtue.
Salinger's most prominent characteristic as a man of letters may just be his reticence to offer anything beyond the book, which makes him the great unknowable. So much has been written about Salinger's retreat from public life that I guess Salinger himself has become a cultural cipher without much reference other than his book. People are projecting all sorts of things on to him through their experience of his book and the dearth of information on the man has helped create a mythic void in the middle of 20th Century American Literature. He may as well have been dead all these years so it took me by surprise to find out he died, aged 91.
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