Which JD Salinger Character Are You? Holden may be the most familiar. But what about Seymour? Did he? ...see more than the rest of us? And what was it like to live in the Glass family houses amidst a world that likes to throw stones.
If you don't alread know JD Salinger wrote a series of books with characters from the Glass family. Franny and Zooey were the youngest of the brood. Seymour was the eldest brother, revered and respected by his younger siblings. Buddy, the second child, was the writer and he tells us all the stories of the family.
A generation of readers have known and loved the koan of of the man JD Salinger, but seemingly very few actually know anything about the man himself. Lets talk about him.
Its fun to imagine which character Salinger himself would declare best acted out his persona. My guess is Buddy, because it was Buddy who, after all, told us all about the family and the stones being dodged or recovered. Anyway, the person of Jerome David Salinger was a product of Manhatten a hundred years ago. Born just after World War I, he was just the right age to be sucked in to soldiering during World War II. But before that happened he dated a girl who married Charlie Chaplin, not him. He worked on a cruise ship. He was said to be mediocre and slightly above average in his school records- apparently.
But what JD Salinger readers likely agree on is this descriptive phrase given in a review of a book about him. In the midst of the maybe true maybe not true opinions about the man this line is key.
"He was so familiar we forget we never really knew him."
Exactly.
Quote is from a review by James Atlas on the back of the book JD Salinger -A Life, by Kenneth Slawenski.
I say, whatever you have heard about JD Salinger, -let it go. Read his work and create your own relationship with him personally. No one really knew him, only his characters. And we have long been in love with them, obsessed with them, and therefore also the man who was their creator. The writer of their stories wrote of the illusions and disillusions we pass through as we become our own character creator.
In my book it takes only two words to state admiration and respect. He Knew. He worked the lead of the times he lived and left us his gold. Or at least characterization of the process.
I think I have read Franny & Zooey at least 5 times, and at different phases in my life. My early 20's - the decade when I think we can, most of us, grasp the breakdown of Franny as she is in her early entry into adulthood. Re-reading and remembering the book after varied experiences and multiple phases of life have broadened my own insight to each of these characterizations of youth, post war soldiers, the fall of simplicity and rise of complex deceptions.
Franny and Zooey, Adam and Eve, Laurel and Hardy, -the show must go on is what I think Zooey would say. Don't you know that goddam secret yet, as I like to remember him saying, and I would add, .. the show must go on... After all, we are all the players in the Greatest Show On Earth. We are the characters we love, and the characters we love to hate.
Here is where I will hang up the phone on my end as Zooey does at the end of his story. But you can be Franny, and let the dial tone linger ... a little longer.
Maybe we will puzzle over Seymour and Buddy another time.
