While I'm not trying to tick off Feodor, my guess is this post will, so I consider that an added bonus.
The usual cliche that we shouldn't speak ill of the dead is one I try to honor. Along with the old saw, "If you don't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all." In the case of the reported death of author J. D. Salinger, however, since I am going to focus solely on the effect his literary output had on a generation of young American readers, I comfort myself with the notion that I'm not saying anything bad about him personally. Since I did not know him (did anyone these past, what, three or four decades?), I think I'm free and clear.
From a technical standpoint, and cultural standpoint as well, there is no doubt that J. D. Salinger was a great, important literary figure. Perhaps the single most influential post-WWII author, at least for adolescents. Thematically, he seemed to mirror another, earlier, post-earlier-war writer, Ernest Hemingway. Both wrote stories whose major themes were death, the personal struggle for authenticity and its ultimate futility, and a kind of anti-heroic nobility in the decision to end one's life. Of course, Hemingway lived that out, along with struggling to keep his demons at bay throughout most of his life by an over-exaggerated masculine pose. Salinger retreated to solitude in New England, a solitude jealously guarded, a silence that spawned tens of thousands of speculative words that will probably never have an adequate answer.
His Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye spoke to a generation of adolescents suddenly aware that, unique in our history to that point, they were not only numerous, but potentially bore a tremendous deal of social and cultural power. Yet, they were also unique as the first generation of young people born in to a world that faced the very real possibility of the destruction not just of their country, but perhaps of much of the planet through nuclear war. Powerful and powerless, struggling for an identity separate from other cohorts - they saw their parents, the so-called "Swing Generation" as sharing unique historical experiences that bound them together (Depression and War) - Salinger's writings boiled that struggle down to a kind of internal struggle, most especially in Holden Caufield, whose fruitless efforts at heroism, occasional bouts of scatological juvenile delinquency, and ultimate surrender to his own sense of powerlessness became a kind of model for teen agnst, brought to screen life by James Dean, gave a whole generation a touchstone for defining themselves as separate.
And what a pernicious influence it had.
The entire pose, "no one understands me", the anti-hero as victim, that sense of generational uniqueness and solidarity all combined to provide the social-psychological backdrop for much of the social turmoil of the sixties, and the retreat from social and political activism in the 1970's. Having an entire generation, the most populous, most prosperous, eventually most powerful generation in the history of the planet, spend much of their adulthood whining about their powerlessness and the general lack of understanding of their psychological vulnerability and the social pressures they faced - it grew tiresome.
I am not suggesting there weren't real social and political issues that the various mass movements of the 60's and early 70's didn't need to address, or shouldn't have addressed. Rather, much of the psychological backdrop - and one can detect it easily enough, reading the literature of major figures - can be traced, should one so choose, at least in part, to the pose of Holden Caufield as the thwarted, misunderstood hero.
Consider the sad end of Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman, whose real talent was in self-promotion (born a generation earlier, he would have been a hard-drinking but successful ad executive or PR man), discovered new causes in the 1980's - South African divestment. The failure of the larger society to grant him the attention he seemed to need to validate his life, however, led him to commit suicide not long after attracting attention for having a very famous co-worker, Amy Carter. None of this is to downplay what was, in all likelihood, a lifetime struggle with various personal demons. It is only to suggest there might just have been a bit of Holden Caulfield in the arc of Hoffman's career.
Salinger became the most famous writer who stopped writing. There were a trickle of reports over the years that he was working on something new, that he had been spotted here, there, or pretty much anywhere. Yet, it never came about. Silent, in his retreat not just from his art but from a world waiting to hear more from him, his death leaves many questions.
While his influence will always exist, even as new generations of teens set out to discover themselves, my hope is the lesson they draw from his stories is there is nothing heroic in accepting futility and failure as the final answer; there is nothing noble about surrendering to the world's demand to remain silent, to conform.
