I this book is somewhere on the shelves in my house....
I have to confess two things.
First, when one of my editors read off the wire alert that J.D. Salinger had died, my immediate response was, "How could they tell?"
Yes, Dorothy Parker said the same thing when informed of the death of President Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge. It still gets a graveyard chuckle, though.
And it's about as appropriate. Salinger last allowed something to be published -- the long and rambling "Hapworth 16, 1928" -- in 1965. The few times he made any sort of public statement in the decades that followed, he would often say he was writing all the time, but that it was strictly for his enjoyment and he didn't care about any of it appearing in print.
The second thing: I've never read "The Catcher in the Rye."
I own a copy, of course -- the old, russet-covered Bantam paperback with which most of the members of my generation are familiar. I dug it out once some years back with the idea that I'd give the thing a try, but other books got in the way.
I did read and enjoy "Nine Stories," which may be Salinger's best book.
And while I never read the book that made Holden Caulfield an iconic character of 20th century American literature, I did read the story in which he first made an appearance.
In 1981, Esquire magazine ran a piece on the 30th anniversary of "The Catcher in the Rye," that included a short description of Salinger's story, "Last Day of the Last Furlough."
It had been published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1944, and tells of a soldier preparing to be shipped out to combat during World War II. Salinger later dismissed the story as one of his "commercial" stories, but it has been described as the seed from which "The Catcher in the Rye" came.
The story certainly has some personal touches -- the main character's serial number in the story was Salinger's own. And then there is the main character's friend, Vincent Caulfield, who shows up because the two of them will be leaving together.
When Vincent is asked about his visit to New York, he replies:
"No good, sergeant. My brother Holden is missing. The letter came while I was home”...said Vincent. He pretended to look through the pages of the book in his hand. “I used to bump into him at the old Joe College Club on Eighteenth and Third in New York. A beer joint for college kids and prep-school kids. I’d go there just looking for him, Christmas and Easter vacations when he was home. I’d drag my date through the joint, looking for him, and I’d find him way in the back. The noisiest, tightest kid in the place. He’d be drinking Scotch and every other kid in the place would be sticking to beer. I’d say to him, ‘Are you okay, you moron? Do you wanna go home? Do you need any dough?’ And he’d say, ‘Naaa. Not me. Not me, Vince. Hiya boy. Hiya. Who’s the babe’ And I’d leave him there, but I’d worry about him because I remembered all the crazy, lost summertimes when the nut used to leave his trunks in a wet lump at the foot of the staircase instead of putting them on the line. I used to pick them up because he was me all over again.”
Something about that brief description of this story hit me, and I ended up spending a day or two paging through the University of Oklahoma Library's bound copies of the Saturday Evening Post for 1944 until I found the story. I still can remember the look of that magazine page, reading what was at that time an almost 40-year-old story, and wondering what audiences in 1944 thought of this sweet and strange tale -- and if any of them remembered the comment about the brother Holden who had gone missing when they cracked open "The Catcher in the Rye" six years later.
