The Catcher In The Vanguard

A number of musicians I have known felt a connection with J.D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield. This is from my biography of Paul Desmond:

Paul thanked his father for recommending The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s novel published a year or so earlier. “It’s not only practically perfect,” he wrote Emil, “but it’s the closest thing I’ve yet seen to the way you’d write, if you wrote, which you should, and I’m rapidly going broke buying copies of it for miscellaneous friends here and there.” Salinger’s half-comedy, half-tragedy about a young man’s self-destruction resonated with Desmond’s view of the human condition, particularly his own. He gave me a copy of it shortly after we met. I was happy, years later, to respond with Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, that beautiful novel about loneliness and grace, in which Paul found a reflection of himself.

Thanks to Terri Hinte of Fantasy Inc., for a link to the writer James Isaacs’ autobiographical reflections on Salinger and Bill Evans. Isaacs’ radio musings were inspired by the new CD box of Evans’ 1961 Village Vanguard recordings. Holden Caulfield knew plenty of loneliness, and so did Issacs when he was a teenager. In his audio essay for WBUR in Boston, Isaacs talks about the day he wandered into the Village Vanguard and found solace coming from Bill Evans’ piano.