I read JD Salinger well into my 30s the way that others read him: as a spiritual and psychological guide for the sensitive. He said the world was full of hypocrisy– phoniness– and shallowness, and you had to shun convention to find out who you were. Some of his guidance was to writers. He told writers to write with all their stars out, if I recall the phrase right, meaning that you should hold nothing back that you care about, not store anything away, give everything to the reader. He dedicated Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter in part to the "amateur reader." He meant people who read with joy and without pretense; and the same went for writing. He loved to write, he hated professionalism and grubby careerism (though god knows he had pushed for fame as a young man, and greased the New Yorker as hard as he could), and he took those feelings out on anyone who wanted to use his literary reputation to advantage, in lawsuits and rages. Given his incredible success, he could afford to be disdainful.
I stopped reading Salinger because there was a ton of stuff that Salinger couldn’t guide anyone about. He couldn’t write about adulthood, marriage, politics, modern social arrangements, foreign countries, the world. He had withdrawn from the world and wanted nothing to do with it. His hysteria about the publishing business was indicative of his inability to handle, let alone report on, countless other grownup universes.
One piece of advice they give ambitious writers is to drive all the way into your weirdness and explore it, and Salinger did that; and his weirdness fastened on to innocent unconscious childhood. Maybe his greatest story– and the stories are his achievement– A Perfect Day for Bananafish is about a man who has sexually-laden exchanges with a young girl on the beach but can’t face the bedroom with his bourgeois nattering wife, and kills himself. Catcher in the Rye involves a lot of pimply sexual feelings, if I remember right (it’s hard to read). My favorite short story of his is For Esme with Love and Squalor, and it involves a soldier’s squeamish-making love for a young English girl.
Salinger walked his talk. He had trouble with marriages; he went for at least one adolescent woman (in Joyce Maynard). His resistance to adulthood spilled over into viciousness. The boozy smoking suburban women in Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut (again, as I remember; I’m done reading Salinger) are cruelly caricatured. The “flit” in Catcher in the Rye is another mean portrait of compromised adulthood. The child is the holy fool in that novel, the adolescent story on which Salinger’s reputation is based; and "It’s a Wise Child" is the name of the Glass children’s radio quiz show.
The quiz Salinger leaves us with is, Why did he withdraw? Why did he turn his back on the world? A man of such incredible gifts—why did he never turn his lights on worldly adult subjects?
I’d say that the war played an important role. Salinger was in his early 20s when he was drafted and shipped off to war, and if the portrait of the spiritually-broken soldier in For Esme with Love and squalor is any guide, it was a horrifying experience. He saw things he didn’t write about, adult things. In the Times, Chip McGrath reports that Salinger saw a lot of action and had a breakdown. The war caused him to turn against the world, into his head. It’s there in the background. One of the suburbanites from Uncle Wiggly was dating one of the Glass boys, Walt I think, who is killed in the war in an accident–which comes up in Franny and Zooey too. The gun that Seymour uses in Perfect Day for Bananafish, which enters the story in the last line or so with devastating specificity, is an Ortgies 7.65 automatic, which was a German military pistol.
So that is my answer. Salinger was a sensitive artist who was spiritually maimed by the war. He had it with all adult social sophistication early on, and as soon as he was able to, he beat it.
