As a teenager growing up in Israel I had it hard. I felt isolated and lonely and I didn’t belong. I felt trapped with nowhere to run or hide. And after high-school I got enlisted in the army when I wasn’t up for it.
The worst part was the frustration of lacking a means to express myself. All I had going for me in those days was a terrible anger. You can ask my parents.
I can remember how I longed for a means to release my anger. I was without talent for music, I didn’t play an instrument and all I could do was listen to other peoples music; angry music, sad music, teenage music. ‘If I could only play the guitar’ I thought. Listening to other people expressing themselves didn’t help. Besides, the same music was often the soundtrack to parties to which I felt an uninvited guest. It made me feel even more inadequate. I hated sports because before I enlisted I didn’t have the physique so I hated the guts of those who had, because it got them girls.
Had I then known the comfort of reading, it might have spared me a lot of sorrow. But I didn’t read and when I tried to write it was immature and angry and full of cliché’s, so much I understood.
—
It was sometime during my early twenties – back in Holland with Israel behind me – when I first read Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and I remember immediately rereading it for a second and third time. It was an immense experience. I carried the book with me for days as a close friend. I felt deeply for the main protagonist Holden Caulfield. Holden was from a wealthy family living in Manhattan and couldn’t have been farther away from my family background, but it felt as if I understood him completely. It felt as if I wandered with him through Manhattan with no place to go like the ducks in Central Park during the winter. His little sister Phoebe was like my twin sisters, young and untarnished and with a bond which was unconditional.
I long wondered about my connection with Holden. I knew I was one of many millions who felt the same. Yet the feeling was sincere and immediate. Then I thought that what we shared was an anger and frustration and difficulty coping with the real world. I shared his concern with phonies and hypocrisy. I shared his concern with change. I didn’t think him crazy. The thought never once occurred to me. Was anger and dissatisfaction with the world the reason I felt so close to Holden? It sounded like an awful cliché, not that I cared, he was my friend.
It was only much later that I read Salinger’s other works and it was only when I read Kenneth Slawenski’s biography about the writer J.D. Salinger that many pieces fell together. I learned to appreciate the man who created Holden. I learned about his life and what an extraordinary talented person he was. And I learned about his role in WWII. I discovered that the man who gave life to Holden was a sensitive and fragile man scarred by terrible experiences. When he couldn’t handle the fame after publishing ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ he retreated from society and lived the remainder of his life as a recluse. It left me with a tremendous admiration for the person that was J.D. Salinger.
It was when I read his latest biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno (2013) that I found the answer to my question about what I shared with Holden. It was in a chapter titled ‘Is the Kid in this book Crazy?’. Here the biographers quote writer Andy Rogers who offers his theory about ‘The Catcher’. According to Rogers it was a war novel:
Holden Caulfield, has more in common with a traumatized soldier than an alienated teenager. His prematurely gray hair serves as fodder for teasing and insecurity, but it also symbolizes something rather obvious: Holden is an old man in a young man’s body. This places Holden in an estimable literary lineage of characters who feel that their youth has been lost in the war.
and further on:
Salinger will never be the boy who went to prep school again, thus Holden is Salinger and the Salinger who will never be again.
It hit me. Holden was angry and seemed frustrated and misunderstood and I felt the same. But what we really shared and what I recognized was the underlying trauma. The anger and frustration was just a result of the trauma, a cover for the pain and sadness. Suddenly I wept.
And it was then that I made the decision to write no matter what. The biographers quoted psychologist Jay Martin:
One of the processes we see in creativity is that the creative person solves a problem, That is, he’s depressed, he’s anxious, he’s uncertain, he’s mourning, he’s grieving. He writes, and in the process of writing, he doesn’t necessarily cure himself, but he gets some perspective by writing. By putting one sentence down after another, you get a perspective on your own disorder… I would guess that if Salinger was depressed, he found a way to rid himself of his depression by giving it to someone else. It’s almost like black magic, in which you put your anger or hatred into a character and discharge it there.
It really does help.
Leave a Reply