J.D. Salinger tribute
The influence of the Catcher In the Rye author on youth counter-culture.
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“I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it,” says Holden Caulfield in Catcher In The Rye. “It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it…”
It’s the classic door-slamming, tear-jerking reason you do most things when you’re an angsty teen. That is, for no reason at all. But rarely are writers able to capture the wild emotions of adolescence like J.D. Salinger did - by the time most writers have acquired the skills, they have also lost touch with the spirit.
But not Jerome David Salinger. Born in Manhattan in 1919, his career as a professional writer was always uncertain. His short stories were initially rejected a number of times by The New Yorker and after a brief stint of work in the 1950s, Salinger was published for the very last time in 1963. But he had done enough, in that short time, to secure his voice as that of disaffected youth everywhere.
When news of Salinger’s death leaked out into cyberspace on January 28, so too did a furore in youth across the world. Critics were quick to argue that his take on adolescent angst was outdated and irrelevant to the ‘twitter generation’. But the kids fought back, in forums and on blog posts, re-affirming Salinger’s status as a torchbearer for outsiders and the disenfranchised.
“Adults were once young and disillusioned themselves, but they’ve grown out of it, and they assume the rest of the world has grown with them,” said one teen in response to a New York Times article and, “[Technology] doesn’t mean that we are in any way less complex, confused, ‘anxiety ridden’ and generally lost than you were when you were our age,” said another.
Tributes popped up on cultural institutions like the Family bookstore blog and Spike Jonze’s We Love You So blog as well as on the forums of skateboarding magazines Thrasher and Slap. Surfing Magazine even tweeted: “RIP J.D. Salinger. If you don’t know who that is, well, that’s like saying you hate Dane Reynolds.”
Salinger’s influence in the surf/skate/snow community may seem strange as he never wrote about those things specifically. But truth is, he did much more than that. Salinger was able to channel the sense of rebellion at the core of the subcultures and managed, better than anyone before or since, to immortalise it in words. And that is the legacy Salinger leaves you.
The language may change; maybe you say ‘kook’ instead of ‘phony’ or ‘shit’ instead of ‘goddam’, but the sense of youth and desire to drop the bullshit remains the same, to be passed down from generation to generation. “Just two weeks ago, my 13-year-old, Emmet, finished The Catcher In The Rye,” says Girl Skateboards art director Andy Jenkins in a eulogy on his Bend Press site. “And we had a great discussion about Holden Caulfield… Thank you for that, sir.”
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J.D. Salinger tribute (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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