J.D. Salinger Forever

In addition to being a flat-out genius writer, the late great J.D. Salinger was the embodiment of rock & roll alienation before rock & roll existed. Reading Michiko Kakutani's brilliant appraisal of Salinger in the New York Times today, I couldn't help but think of John Lennon.

"Mr. Salinger’s people tend to be outsiders — spiritual voyagers shipwrecked in a vulgar and materialistic world, misfits who never really outgrew adolescent feelings of estrangement. They identify with children and cling to the innocence of childhood with a ferocity bordering on desperation... Such characters have a yearning for some greater spiritual truth, but they are also given to an adolescent either/or view of the world and tend to divide people into categories: the authentic and the phony, those with an understanding of 'the main current of poetry that flows through things' and those coarse, unenlightened morons who will never get it — a sprawling category, it turns out, that includes everyone from pompous college students parroting trendy lit crit theories to fashionable, well-fed theater-goers to self-satisfied blowhards who recount every play in a football game or proudly wear tattersall vests."

Many Lennon songs, including "Rain" and "Working Class Hero," encapsulate the Salinger "Us vs. Them" ethos perfectly.

But none more so than The Beatles' 1967 masterpiece "Strawberry Fields Forever." Strawberry Fields, as any RT reader should know, is the name of an orphanage in Liverpool. Lennon never did any time there, but he saw the orphanage and its lovely name as an apt metaphor for loneliness and innocence lost. It is truly the song of "a spiritual voyager shipwrecked in a vulgar and materialistic world... who never really outgrew adolescent feelings of estrangement."

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.


It's important to note that Salinger came from a prosperous New York City family and was well-educated, and that Lennon was a world-famous multimillionaire when he wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever." But for both of these gifted artists, no amount of success could make these feelings go away. And that's what made them who they were.
Tragically, Salinger's work also played a major role in Lennon's death. His assassin, whom Rock Turtleneck will not dignify by name, was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he gunned down the great Beatle, often referred to himself as Holden Caulfield, and told police that all the reasons for his horrible act could be found within the book's pages. In any case, as this surprisingly moving singalong on Lennon's birthday in Central Park's Strawberry Fields demonstrates, voices like Lennon's and Salinger's can never be silenced. RIP, gents.