Raise a Glass for J.D. Salinger. But Not a Wine Glass.

My thoughts about J.D. Salinger’s dying are almost infinite, he probably influenced me as a stylist more than any other writer. I’ve read everything he has ever published, and even spent a day in my early 20’s deep in the library stacks of bound journals gathering copies of his New Yorker stories that were never republished in book forms. But because the subject of this blog is drink and drinking, and Salinger often used drink and drinking in his work, I’ll confine myself to that. Let’s consider three instances of drink and drinking in Salinger’s work. First, the Tom Collinses in “Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters” (1963), second the unspecified “highballs” made with “soda” (likely whisky and soda) in the short-story “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut”, and finally the scotch and sodas of the Lavender Room and Wicker Bar scenes in “Catcher in the Rye” (1951).

So, why no wine? Well, as established in my book “Drink This” (2009), America’s wine-culture was essentially obliterated by Prohibition, 1920 – 1933, and only really got re-established in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, when some of the wealthier members of the Greatest Generation left their first, money-making careers and took up winemaking, and other members of the Greatest Generation started drinking their wines. J.D. Salinger was born in 1919, and so most of his early years would have been during Prohibition, I think all of us can identify with the profound effect whatever is popular when you’re 14 has on the rest of your life, and when Salinger was 14 years old Prohibition was repealed, and America took to the streets to celebrate. But what were people drinking, specifically, when Prohibition was repealed? The same thing they were drinking during Prohibition; Cocktails, that is, glasses filled with bad-tasting booze, and lots of good stuff like bitters, ice, soda, juice, and so on to make the bad-tasting booze taste good. (The booze tasted bad because it was made by amateurs in the woods, or was good stuff from Canada cut and repackaged by mobsters. From what I’ve read it was very easy to get booze during Prohibition, but very hard to get good booze.) And so cocktails, and highballs, were what Americans drank all during Salinger’s important early writing years. And knowing your way around cocktail culture, in the 1950s, was the same as knowing your way around wine culture today. In the Lavender Bar scene in Catcher two of the hick-girls at the bar “were drinking Tom Collinses – in the middle of December, for God’s sake. They didn’t know any better.”

Where am I going with any of this? I don’t know. I’m sort of mourning on the page, mostly. But when I think of J.D. Salinger it’s as a product of his time, I think of him as a Modernist with a big M coming out of the tradition of John Dos Passos, trying to get American language and American culture into written prose. And he succeeded so wildly that most people don’t even see that — his written style, or his specific moment in time in American history. Instead people seem to see him as some sort of God who let us down by not continuing to write God-like books. Which I’d argue seemed God-like because they were written the way we Americans really hear language inside our heads. But now he’s dead. And I have tears in my eyes as I type this. I probably won’t raise a glass to Salinger this weekend because it’s too fresh and I’d cry, but sometime in the next few months I will. When I do it will be a scotch-and-soda made with a blended scotch, because that’s what they drank then, or a Tom Collins. And I’ll think of a real man, a real working writer developing a style, and a time, and I’ll say thank-you and good-bye.

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