HOLDEN CAULFIELD, 1919-2010

I heard the news on NPR radio yesterday while driving home in my car. JD Salinger died at the age of 91. Did we know this man? Hardly, but I remember Holden Caulfield, the young protagonist of Catcher in the Rye. It gave my generation our loner preppie attitude, but did little to prepare us for later events that would inform our lives … the civil rights struggle, the assassinations of Kennedy, King, and Kennedy, the Vietnam war, and the never-ending epoch of Tricky Dick.

The voiceover who read the obituary was accompanied by Professor Phony of No-Ho University, whose real names I can’t recall for good reason. “How exciting,” intoned the Professor, “this opportunity to find unknown stories that [Salinger] may have written for himself.”

How dreadful, I thought, to wish someone dead in the interest of academia and necrophilia, to sneak into a deceased man’s underwear and sniff his posthumously defenseless crotch.

About a writer’s relationship with his characters, who lives more vicariously through whom? A fictive character thinks the unthinkable, achieves the unachievable, does the impossible, and travels through space-time defying all laws of the Universe. When the time comes to wave a final goodbye at the dock, perhaps the more fitting tribute is to remember the hero, and give the recluse his due.

If anyone bothers to ask, I would prefer to be remembered as Octopüß and keep my shell middens hidden.