I was fascinated by J.D. Salinger before I’d ever read a word of his prose.

In retrospect, I missed a lot of the touchstone authors that are greedily consumed by literary-minded adolescents. When I was supposed to be reading Vonnegut and Salinger as a salve against the tumbling indignities of high school, finding solace in voices that served as echoes of my own detachment and societal disdain, I was instead tracking through the works of John Steinbeck when I wanted something pulpy and smart, and the works of Stephen King when I just wanted something pulpy. The authors that were formative for others were mere abstractions for me.

Salinger had a special allure, though, completely aside from his efforts preserved on the printed page. There was the somewhat unsettling part, spurred on by the widely reported detail that Mark David Chapman was carrying Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with him when he shot John Lennon, later asserting that reading the book would give anyone interested entry into the workings of his own mind. I was ten-years-old when that happened, and the thought that a piece of literature could help inspire an act of homicidal violence was confusing, troubling and as plausible as anything else in a world of warped motivations that increasingly seemed to exist outside the boundaries of logic. As I grew older, I was able to understand Chapman’s pronouncement as evidence of a damaged mind rather than a genuine diagnosis of how it got damaged, but the association stuck. Between that and the book’s reputation as one of the most commonly banned, The Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger’s work in general, seemed especially dangerous.

Then there was Salinger’s retreat. Having written one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century, having toiled away on the stories of the Glass family, having developed an anxious following, he simply stopped. He was tagged a recluse, a word that will crop up over and over again in the obituaries and the appreciations. But that seems an faulty descriptor, more telling about the perverse nature of American public life, where the default assumption is that everyone craves fame, than it is of Salinger. Sharing words–wanting readers for your writing–isn’t the same as seeking celebrity. A disinterest in the spotlight was commonly reframed as some sort of strange pathology. He had to be a freak or a hermit. Under no circumstances could he be viewed as a normal person who reached the point where his success prevented him from continuing in his public field with the same sort of anonymity that most of his peers enjoyed, and so he retired, taking advantage of the permanent financial stability that his success provided. He became just another resident of Cornish, New Hampshire. I found this fascinating. In a college creative writing class, I wrote a short story about an author modeled after Salinger.

And when I wrote it, I still hadn’t read any of his writing. That didn’t happen until after college. I was a late bloomer in every way. A good friend, perhaps appalled at my ignorance, gave me a stack of J.D. Salinger’s paperbacks, including a copy of The Catcher in the Rye with the famous red cover. I read it with mounting admiration, the historical figure transformed into what he should have always been to me: a writer. The legend still lingered in the memory, but the prose took its place at the forefront of my consideration of Salinger. It was punchy and lean, filled with personality and offhand, veiled insight. I didn’t find myself in Holden Caulfield as many others did, but I knew well the feelings that had been rapped out on the page. There were distorted echoes of things I had felt, or knew my friends had felt. Salinger’s work was wildly evocative, and vibrantly free. It reminded me that fiction was truly a realm of possibility, not always manifested through fantastical elements, but sometimes through storytelling that slides into crevices unexplored, or even spaces so dark that illumination seemed impossible before some unassuming author figured out the way to turn on the lights. It took me a while to find these words, but the wait didn’t make them any less valuable.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)