Salinger's Obituary, As If Holden Wrote It

Jerome David Salinger was a perfect bore, to tell you the truth. He wrote one lousy book and suddenly he's the talk of the whole goddam planet. For someone who's called a literary genius, he sure didn't write much. He only published five lousy books, and they were all short little things that you could read in a day anyway. I suppose you're going to want to hear about his life and all that crap. It's not terribly interesting. He was born in New York, which if you ask me seems like a terrible place to have a kid. It sounds like the most goddam annoying thing in the world. Having a kid I mean. New York's a loud enough place with all its cars and music and angry drunks wandering around without adding a kid crying for his mother all the time into the mix. You'd think his family would have learned their lesson, since they already had one kid. Some babe, her name was Doris. She wasn't much of a looker, if you ask me. Her arms were too skinny, and she had a funny way of smiling. It never looked like a real smile, it was more like her mouth was hanging open. I'm not kidding, it looks like her mouth is just dangling wide open for everyone to see. So this Salinger guy, his dad was a rabbi or something. But the funny thing is, his dad also sold cheese. That kills me. Here's someone who's supposed to be saving souls or something, and he's selling goddam cheese. It absolutely kills me.

Jerome went to a few different schools. He flunked out of the first one, and his cheese selling dad was hopping mad at that. So Jerome was shipped off to a military academy or something. He sure did a lot at those schools though. He worked as a manager for the fencing team for a while, and helped out with the yearbook there. He also acted in plays. Something you should know about this Jerome guy was that he was a terrific actor. He was at this summer camp or something and performed in hundreds of plays, and got some kind of award for it. I don't understand how such a terrific actor can be called a genius. Seems to me that if you're such a fantastic actor who's so good at pretending to be someone, then you can probably write all your pretending into a fantastic book. A real crowd-pleaser. Then you can walk around listening to people talking about how insightful this book is or how relatable such and such character is and oh my God the writing style is so funny. It's pathetic, for Chrissake. He's just another phony. He writes a nice sounding book that people eat up, and then he can talk about the war or something in interviews and make it sound like he's a real tortured soul, all to sell his phony book and make people care about his phony life story.

I should probably talk about the war he was in. It was a big one, that war, and Jerome did a lot in it. He was with the army I think. The guys that run on the ground and shoot. He fought in a couple of big battles, like the time where the army stormed that one French beach. Jerome could speak French and German, so he was later moved to a part of the Army that spent most of their time asking questions and interrogating prisoners. Seems like a waste of time to me. Who the hell cares what the enemy has to say? You're just supposed to shoot them before they shoot you. Seems like a better way to fight a war to me. Anyway, something that really kills me about Jerome in the war is that he lugged a typewriter everywhere with him. A typewriter, for Chrissake. Apparently he wanted to perfect his writing or something, but I know it was just a way for him to look more distinguished. I mean, come on, lugging a goddam typewriter around when people are shooting at you doesn't make any sense. You're in the middle of a war, for Chrissake, not the library. There's no good reason to be lugging around a typewriter if you have any kind of sense, unless you wanted to act superior about yourself, telling others you were a literary genius or something. The bastard managed to fool some other writer while he was in the war. His name was Ernest I think, and Jerome, clever bastard, managed to convince this Ernest moron that he had some God-given talent for writing. I'm not kidding, Ernest even called up Jerome after the whole war was over to talk shop and discuss writing. Jerome really must have been some actor to pull a fast one on Ernest like that. It makes you feel sorry for the other morons he managed to swindle.

After the war, Jerome was apparently suffering from combat stress or something, and had to be taken to a hospital and everything. I'm not kidding, he got the full treatment there. I guess the combat stress helped add to his image, because when he published his book, there was quite a fuss about it. Lots of people ate it up and heaped praise on Jerome. And then of course, the goddam New Yorker agreed to publish his next story. I don't know how the bastard managed to pull that one off. I don't know how Jerome actually pulled any of it off, to tell you the truth. Everyone seemed to realize how phony his stories were when he tried making one into a movie. It was awful. Terrible. The worst goddam movie ever, and everyone knew it. Yet somehow nobody seemed to think his books were the problem. People are stupid like that sometimes. Anyway, Jerome died when he was about one hundred, alone in his sleep. Like I said, he's not terribly interesting.