The Sunday Times
January 31, 2010
JD Salinger’s silent rebel yell

The author of The Catcher in the Rye, who died last week, was the voice of teenage angst, but the words he never published are almost as important

He stopped publishing in 1965 and retreated from the world but his influence continued, stretching beyond literature to the worlds of film and rock music

Stephen Amidon and Robert Collins (interviews)

JD Salinger was never just a writer. From the moment his debut novel, The Catcher in the Rye, started being passed around by angst-ridden American teenagers in 1951, it became clear that the book’s influence on a world that its author so clearly mistrusted would be immense.

Over the next half-century this story of a teenage prep school dropout named Holden Caulfield would echo far beyond the classrooms where it was both the most assigned and the most banned book of its time. Salinger has spoken like no other author to the fringes of society, from indie rockers to cutting-edge film-makers to deranged assassins. Beloved by people who might not ever read another novel, he was the poet of youthful alienation before youth really knew what that was.

Anyone who doubts the breadth and depth of Salinger’s influence need only look at the roster of gunmen who found warped inspiration in Caulfield. Mark David Chapman had practically learnt The Catcher in the Rye by heart by the time he killed John Lennon in 1980.

After the shooting, Chapman reportedly sat on the pavement and began to read the book inside whose cover he had inscribed the words, “This is my statement”. John Hinckley, who shot President Ronald Reagan less than six months later, was also obsessed with the novel .

While it would be unfair in the extreme to say that Salinger deliberately inspired killers, The Catcher in the Rye, which has sold more than 65m copies since publication, certainly speaks to the wounded, estranged sensibility that seems to exist primarily in teenagers — and in those who cannot let go of being teenagers.

All Salinger’s characters are brilliant, hypersensitive outcasts who think they can see through the world’s phoneyness even though this clarity brings them nothing but pain. Caulfield in particular captures the bewilderment of adolescence better than any American character since Huckleberry Finn.

“Salinger’s voice as a writer seemed to confirm the reality of adolescence for me,” says Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist. “This was a guy who homed in on a particular dismay that can exist in people who are between childhood and adulthood. I think he made poetry of that.”

“He saw the teenager,” Hanif Kureishi agrees. “The teenager was always going to be there in the post-war period and he was the first person to put his finger on it, to exemplify it.”

Salinger’s influence was perhaps at its strongest in the 1960s, when youthful rebellion was still finding its voice. Nowadays, when teenagers are practically expected to run wild, there is less hunger for his work.

“I read him when I was a teenager and a young man, in my teens and twenties,” claims Martin Amis. “It was like someone shining a torch on your own thoughts … I think it was a very pure voice he had. There was no one like him.” Amis, however, admits to not having looked at Salinger’s work in years. Indeed, there is something of a childhood romance about this infatuation among writers. It has been said that The Catcher in the Rye has influenced more first novels than any other book but has never inspired a second.

“I very much loved his books,” says Will Self. “I loved them obsessively. And then I repudiated them. I think I understood even in my teens that Salinger was essentially a case of the genius as arrested development, that there was something sentimental and pretentious about his writing.”

Salinger’s influence in other genres defies these limits. Rock bands from the Cure to the Beastie Boys have acknowledged deep debts to his work.

Salinger also wielded a powerful influence over the film world, even though the only movie directly based on his work is the forgotten My Foolish Heart (1949), which is based on Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, a short story published in The New Yorker in 1948. Salinger hated it so much that he never permitted a film version of The Catcher in the Rye. This did not prevent it being one of the most sought-after properties of the past halfcentury. Actors from Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire hungered after the role of Caulfield, although no one seemed to want it more than Jerry Lewis, a fact that makes Salinger’s reluctance understandable. Then there’s the film-maker Wes Anderson. The protagonist of Anderson’s movie Rushmore, a failing student with a broad interest in extracurricular activities, is clearly based on Salinger himself. Anderson’s oddball masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums is inspired by Salinger’s stories of the Glass family, whose seven siblings share the same intelligence and piercing cynicism as the Tenenbaum kids. Legend has it that Nicholson’s haunted writer in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, who goes mad as he retypes the same sentence, is a gloss on Salinger in his later years. Which brings up a less tangible but equally profound influence that Salinger exerts over the imagination of rebels — his silence. Almost as important as the words he has published are those he has not. In her essay The Aesthetics of Silence, Susan Sontag claims silence “is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter and distorter of his work”.

Salinger’s silence is one of his most powerful artistic statements. “There is a marvellous peace in not publishing,” he once claimed. “I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” He stopped publishing in 1965, retreating to an impenetrable New England compound. Its numbing isolation was described by Joyce Maynard, his teenage lover, in her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, which pictured a manipulative, health-obsessed recluse who ate frozen peas for breakfast.

Salinger’s silence was further bolstered when he stopped Ian Hamilton, the British writer, from publishing a 1986 biography in a lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. The novelist Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is a haunting study of a burnt-out writer, clearly based on Salinger, who is at work on a “dead” novel that occupies an entire room of his fortress-like home.

What will be uncovered when the safes where Salinger reportedly kept his later work are opened is one of the most tantalising mysteries of contemporary writing.