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I married right out of college. Old Sally Hayes, of course. Even though I said, "I didn't even like her much," I also admitted, "I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to God I'm crazy. I admit it." We horsed around in an apartment in the East Village that had a fireplace and what she called "tons of charm." My father got me a job in a public relations company. I built images, including my own, and took to preceding all my sentences with "Actually."
You remember Mr. Antolini talking to me? Just before I went to sleep and woke up with him touching my hair and making me jump about a thousand feet? He said: "I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall ... It may be the kind where at the age of 30 you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer." I chose all three. I hated jocks, grimaced at grocery stores with signs selling APPLE'S, and I threw paper clips at stenographers. Then I threw myself. The old Caulfield Charm. I couldn't believe what was happening to me. But then I could never believe what happened to me—in life or in lit.
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Of all the lorn, adolescent souls kicking around the bestseller list, why did 7 make the existential leap to Required Reading? I was writing a mad letter, not a petition. How did it acquire so many signers? I mean not just kids, but critics. Because I think they felt, as I did, that uncertainty was the American state of mind. Old Gertrude Stein on her deathbed sighed, "What is the answer?" And topped it with "What is the question?" You could go to literary distinction with that kind of exit line, and in a sense, that is where Salinger took me.
In a senescent epoch, even the young are senile. America in the '50s was undergoing adolescence. Again. I was its sudden, unbidden spokesyouth. But surely there have been free alterations since 1951. Nonfiction is in the bucket seat and drives mankind. By now I should be a literary footnote. But no: the paperback sold more than 3,000,000 copies between 1953 and 1964. And even more between then and now. How do you figure that? I mean, those glancing insights, those adolescent knight-errantries, aren't they old news? Haven't our tastes altered 180 degrees?
Probably not. Inside every man (all right, and every woman) there is a poet who died young. The youth who read me grow younger each day. You had to read The Catcher in the Rye at Andover, for instance. And the new audience is never very different from the old Holden. They may not know the words, but they can hum along with the malady. My distress is theirs. They, too, long for the role of adolescent savior. They, too, are aware of the imminent death in life. As far as the sexual explosion is concerned, I suspect a lot of what you've heard is just noise. "Sex is something I really don't understand too hot," I said. It still remains a mystery to the adolescent. I have no cure, only consolation: someone has passed this way before.