- The Incidental Dream
There was this old American geezer (UK slang for, ‘man’) called Jerome D. Salinger. He wrote this book called The Catcher In The Rye – the book Mel Gibson keeps banging on about in the movie Conspiracy Theory. Anyways, about a week ago he died – he was 91.
I read Catcher a coupla years back. Following the author’s recent death, I read up on him via Wikipedia (the lazy-mans encyclopedia). I read his Wikipedia page while systematically assuming 30% of the information I was absorbing was inaccurate (a trick anyone who gleans information about the world via Wikipedia should perform). But even so, I still came to the same conclusion…
He was a miserable old git (British parlance for, an unpleasant or contemptible person). Fancy not returning friends calls, letters and emails. Fancy not going out; turning your back on the world; rejecting friends and fans to become a recluse. Fancy not letting elite “Hollywood” directors like Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg adapt your best selling novel for millions of dollars, and not sharing that American Dream with us for the price of a movie ticket. What a twat, what a miserable old git!
Then I had a thought.
What if he knew something we didn’t. Something that Hunter S. Thompson, Earnest M. Hemmingway and Richard G. Brautigan didn’t…or if they did, they knew too late. What if he realized people, friends and fans were a potential series of killers. Killers just as deadly, to him at least, as serial killers such as David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy and Richard Speck are to us. Not so much that the friends, people and fans were out to intentionally kill him per se, but that his interaction with them had the potential to activate the lone gunman within himself. It’s possible that from his perspective, they [the friends, people, fans] could unknowingly affect something within Jerome D. Salinger that would lead him to precipitate his own self-destruction (suicide). Perhaps – and this is mere speculation too – realizing this, he [Salinger] chose to LIVE selfishly rather than to die selfishly. Having served in (and survived) World War II, I like to believe he had a better understanding of the concepts of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” than most.
Wherever you may be J. D. Salinger, I take my hat (a red hunting hat) off to you – for suggesting an alternative to the bright lights and gaudy colours of success’s carousel. A selfish life perfectly shared by virtue of the masterpiece that is The Catcher In The Rye, and the true masterstroke of its author – to have survived its success.
They say, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield [the protagonist and narrator of the novel] would have been J. D. Salinger." Then maybe he did play him…play him on the most important stage of all.
I choose life and failing that, I choose Salinger/Caulfield’s life. After all these years, come to find out, they both have a happy ending.
- Cheyelle Omar
COPYRIGHT ©2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: CHEYELLE OMAR
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