Miles David Moore

The passing of J.D. Salinger has caused readers from 17 to 75 to moan for their lost youth, and literary agents from New York to Nanking to salivate over the putative unpublished (and undestroyed) manuscripts that must, they assume, be lying in lovely and squalid piles all across Cornish, N.H. I too have read "The Catcher in the Rye," and of course I read it at 16, the same age as its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Holden will always be 16, whereas I am nearly 55; on the other hand, unlike Holden, so far I have eluded the shrinks.

I liked "The Catcher in the Rye," but it wasn't a life-changing experience for me. Holden moved me in some ways, but his experiences did not particularly resonate with me. I can't really explain why; they just didn't. I disliked "Franny and Zooey," the only other book by Salinger (not that there are that many) that I have ever read. I read the rather charming interview in the Washington Post with Roger Lathbury, proprietor of the tiny Orchises Press in my current home town of Alexandria, Va., about how he almost became Salinger's last publisher. Salinger dropped Lathbury the way he dropped everyone else in his life, without apology or explanation. I look at the one picture of Salinger the author ever allowed to be released to the public, and see an unpleasant, Mailereseque combination of physical and intellectual bully--the kind of guy who'd beat you up in the parking lot and add a few withering insults from La Rouchefoucauld for good measure.

Personally I was much more affected by the news of the death of Jean Simmons, who would have turned 81 tomorrow. Whereas Salinger for me was The Catcher in the Rye, Jean Simmons was Black Narcissus, Elmer Gantry, Spartacus, Young Bess, David Lean's Great Expectations, and Olivier's Hamlet (to which, of course, Holden Caulfield famously and dismissively refers). Although I was never exactly a rabid fan of Jean Simmons, she was much more a part of my mental landscape than J.D. Salinger ever was. Simmons was the last of the breathtaking trio of beauties who graced Black Narcissus (the other two, Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron, have already been eulogized on this blog). Of the three, Simmons possessed the most delicate and heartbreaking beauty; with her sloe eyes, high English cheekbones and delicate creamy skin, she had a face on which men could write whatever fantasy they chose. It was her great misfortune that one of those men was Howard Hughes, who repaid her rebuff of his sexual advances by hobbling her career. She was never quite as famous as she deserved to be, partly because of Hughes' treachery but also partly because she did not have the sort of talent that called attention to itself. She was not a diva, just an actress of great sensitivity, nuance and charm. As one critic said, Simmons was so good from such a young age that audiences took her excellence for granted.

I have no particular thoughts to sum up this entry, just an image: a crew-cut teenager in raincoat and deerstalker cap, huddled in an Upper East Side moviehouse, watching a girl in blonde pigtails as she floats in a stream near Elsinore, the water soaking her long velvet dress.