On the Death of J.D. Salinger, 1919 - 2010

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in the fourth grade. I finished it just as the M79 pulled into the 79th and East End Avenue bus stop, completing my hour-long commute from Broadway to the East River. I stuck the book in my overstuffed backpack, thanked the bus driver, and thought about the book as I walked up to 84th Street.

Huh?

At age 10, this was my only response to J.D. Salinger's iconic coming-of-age novel. I lived in New York and was familiar with many of the same places and types of people Holden Caufield himself knew, and yet Holden's world seemed a universe away to my ten years of city life. The story had seemed out of control, like existentialist angst with no grounding, and I simply didn't see what all the fuss was about.

Sixteen years later, I named my first daughter after the title character in one of Salinger's other works, For Esme, With Love and Squalor. Clearly, my feelings about Salinger changed over the course of those sixteen years. I read Catcher in the Rye again at the prompting of my husband, who declared it one of the most moving books he'd ever read and ate up Salinger's short stories as well. But most importantly, I read For Esme because my mom let it drop -- sometime around the time I was fifteen or sixteen years old -- that she had always loved the name Esme and had considered the name for me. Intrigued, I found the story in my short story anthology and devoured the whole wholloping thing.

For Esme is not so much a story of unfolding events as it is a character portrait: the portrait of a twelve-year-old British girl who comes in to a coffee shop after school with her nanny and little brother, Charles. In the shop, she meets an American GI serving in World War II who describes his meeting with the precocious, angle-voiced little girl. The innocent power and childlike love that permeates that meeting follows the GI into combat (the "squalor" part of the story) and offers him emotional salvation from the ravages of war.

Why not name a daughter after this mini-person of goodness? As with all of Salinger's works, there is plenty of rough language and grittiness, but the power of For Esme comes precisely because both love and squalor coexist, making us appreciate one because of the other and brightening the one because of the darkness of the other. As with all great short stories, it is a microcosm of a real world condition in a few packed pages. 

As we prepared for Esme's birth, I scavenged around eBay until I found an original copy of the April 1950 issue of The New Yorker in which the story had first been published. I delicately made color photocopies of the worn pages, tied them with a ribbon, and handed them out to anyone who came to celebrate our new baby. Esme knows where her name comes from, even though she'll often glance up at me when sharing the information with others to make sure she pronounces the author's name correctly, and I look forward to the day when she too can enjoy the realness of his writing. It might not be in the fourth grade, but hopefully by the time she has children of her own she will understand the truth of both love and squalor and will have firmly chosen the side of her namesake.

Comments

[Kristen]

Oh, wow. This is the first I've heard of his passing. The Glass family mean so much to me. Thank you, Neylan.

[Barbara C.]

I love this explanation of why you chose "Esme". Reading "Catcher in the Rye" and "getting it", and then nerdily sharing that with my classmates, was THAT MOMENT for me--when I realized how much I loved the power of fiction to convey ideas that can be almost unexplainable. Thank you, Salinger.

[yanni]

A wonderfully moving piece, Neylan. When i as in college, I kept on hoping to bump into JD Salinger, knowing that he lived in proximity of the Dartmouth campus, but always remembering the quote from Catcher - "What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

[Kelly Lee]

Great writing Neylan, I just discovered this lovely website of yours and promptly wasted 1 productive hour of Tess's nap, catching up on your great writing! I never knew where you got Esme's name, what a great story. I Look forward to checking back here often to get my "Neylan Fix".