Salinger mocked Oona O’Neill for being superficial (“little Oona is in love with little Oona”), but what he loved about her was her stunning beauty, and of course he was at least as narcissistic himself (as he acknowledged). It’s significant and revealing that he carried a lifelong torch for a relationship that apparently was never consummated. Endlessly revisiting pre-Fall Oona, he would replicate this break time and time and time again with Jean Miller, Claire Douglas, Joyce Maynard, and many other young women; with Maynard, Salinger was nearly the same age as Chaplin when he met Oona, and Maynard was exactly the same age as Oona when she met Chaplin. The eighteen-year-old girl, the mirror self, the triangulated relationship, the love-hate investment in Hollywood, innocence over experience, chastity: Oona was the movie always in his mind.
CONDITION 3: WAR
What if he had never gone to war and instead spent 1942–46 on the Upper East Side? We probably would not have heard of J. D. Salinger. He would certainly not have become an icon. The war, destroying him, created him.
In 1944 the New Yorker editor William Maxwell, rejecting yet another Salinger story, judged the author to be “just not right for us.” Salinger got right for the New Yorker by getting wrong in the head, by getting his soul ripped to pieces. War gave him the emotional ammunition to fulfill his Valley Forge dream: he not only published in the New Yorker; he became the magazine’s marquee attraction.
For several magnificent years—from the publication of “Bananafish” in 1948 to “Esmé” in 1950, Catcher in 1951, Nine Stories in 1953, and “Franny” in 1955—Salinger converted his war wounds into the bow of timeless art. “Writing as an art is an experience magnified,” he advised A. E. Hotchner; here was experience not only magnified but distilled into essence, crystallized, caught forever in exquisitely, almost painfully perfect art. The success of Catcher has to do in part with its encapsulation of adolescent rebellion; it’s also a dissection of damage, and a slightly hidden reason that so many people connect with the book is that we are all damaged. (In adolescence we tend to be most self-conscious about this damage, want to wallow in it.)
In The Veteran Who Is, the Boy Who Is No More, Andy Rogers says about Catcher, “Holden’s voice is Salinger’s, but it is also his silence, and his silence about the war renders his voice as the most appropriate literary voice after World War II. Resurrecting Holden was exactly what Salinger had to do to not only avoid writing about the war, but more importantly, to write about the war.” And Nine Stories, as we have argued, is the war novel Salinger said he was looking for: full of the “glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret.”
In a note written when he was nearly eighty, Salinger was still trying to convince himself and Paul Fitzgerald that it was good that they had survived the onslaught. The final sixty-five years of Salinger’s life were a series of increasingly futile attempts to wipe the slate clean.
And yet Salinger’s war damage carried deep into his later life, into the end of the twentieth century. The bullet that entered Seymour’s brain in 1949 kept traveling through American history, all the way to John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and beyond. Catcher is so saturated with war damage that sociopaths can see it, as if with X-ray glasses; the mayhem continued. The assassinations and attempted assassinations are not a coincidence; they constitute frighteningly clairvoyant readings of Catcher—the assassins intuiting the underlying postwar anger and violence in the book.
CONDITION 4: VEDANTA
Remember the statement released by Salinger’s family upon his death, which is an explicit articulation of Salinger’s renunciation of the world, the fourth and final step of the Vedantic way. He had already quite purposefully fulfilled the other three stages: apprenticeship, family life, and withdrawal.
Until his bar mitzvah, Salinger thought both of his parents were Jewish. From childhood onward, he was confused about his religious identity; he knew only that he was not truly Jewish or Catholic. After the war, his life became above all a search for religious healing and religious identity; he was a broken man seeking glue. It’s impossible to fathom Salinger without understanding how central religion was to every aspect of his life from 1948 onward.
Tunneling deeper into his wounds, further away from the taint of the real, he disappeared into the solace of Vedantic philosophy, entering a more and more completely abstract realm. Salinger’s work tracks exactly along this physical-metaphysical axis. Catcher could not be more embodied in the world. Nine Stories is underpinned by the war, even as it gestures, in later stories, toward increasingly religious epiphanies. In “Teddy,” many of Teddy’s observations are explicitly Vedantic. Franny and Zooey is the precise pivot point; “Franny” is located in the world, but it yields, through The Way of a Pilgrim, to the spiritual teaching of “Zooey.” Similarly, the meticulously rendered 1942 in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” gives way to Seymour’s rather pious diary entries, resulting in the religiomysticism of “Seymour: An Introduction.” In “Hapworth 16, 1924,” Seymour describes Ramakrishna’s disciple Vivekananda as “one of the most exciting, original and best equipped giants of this century.”
There are two critical demarcations in Salinger’s life: pre- and postwar, and pre- and postreligion. The war broke him as a man and made him a great artist; religion offered him postwar spiritual solace and killed his art.
CONDITION 5: CORNISH
After experiencing the nightmare of the war, Salinger gamely tried to reenter the world, impersonating Hail-Fellow-Well-Met in New York City, but such a performance had no chance of succeeding: such a person, if he had ever existed, had been killed on the battlefield. After the war, Salinger’s mind was now full of those “glorious imperfections,” “trembling,” “teetering.” The secular, materialistic life of postwar Manhattan seemed to him grotesque. Having written Holden’s dream of leaving New York for rural isolation—running away with Sally Hayes—and after semiseriously asking a woman at a book party to run away with him to bucolic splendor, he went about the business of fulfilling the dream, moving in 1952 to Cornish, which bears shocking topographical similarity to the Hürtgen Forest.
These were, he knew, his “working years” (fewer than hoped for). This cutoff, disembodied existence was exactly what he, as someone who was now a celebrity, needed and exactly what he, as an artist, didn’t need. An inward-turning man turned ever more inward. The signal from the world got considerably fainter; the signal going out to the world got increasingly faint. It was as if, by his late thirties, he already wanted to cease existing as an actual person. In a later letter, he wrote, “We’re not . . . persons at all, but susceptible to myriad penalties for thinking we’re persons and minds.”
CONDITION 6: WIVES
Salinger wasn’t temperamentally inclined to become a husband or father, but Vedanta’s second stage is to create a family, which he dutifully went about doing. He loved his fictional characters, Holden Caulfield and the Glass family, in exactly the way he wanted to but couldn’t love humanity—especially his own family. How could his wife and children possibly compete with the Glasses, in all their doomed, fictional, idealized perfection?
Again, “avoid woman and gold”: Salinger avoided sex with Claire except for procreation, and once she’d become pregnant, he found her repellent. One of Claire’s grounds for divorce was that her husband refused to communicate with her. In his loyalty to abstract principles, he ignored Claire, as if she didn’t exist. In “Raise High,” we’re informed that “marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve.” Salinger found it difficult to embody these verbs in real life. He hated people who were “not-nice,” which was pretty much everyone, including, especially, himself. He didn’t admire anyone except dead people, which also included, crucially, himself. The bunker was a tomb in which to bury himself so as not to have to walk around in the daylight worl
d of flesh and blood.
CONDITION 7: CHILDREN
In “Raise High,” Salinger wrote, “[Marriage partners are to] raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected—never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.” And yet when Margaret was acutely sick as a young woman, her father sent her a letter containing not money but a Christian Science pamphlet. When she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion; she had, he informed her, no right to bring a child into the world.
He could hardly have invented two more perfect embodiments of two parts of himself than Matthew and Margaret. Matthew was compliant, reverential, caretaking, appreciative; he is now the executor of the Salinger estate. Margaret was the iconoclast, bringing home a Native American boyfriend, playing basketball, questioning the great man, writing a book that deeply undermined the myth and caused her to be estranged from her father for the rest of his life. Matthew was the part of him that was dutiful, Ivy League, respectful, “preppy,” “Eastern Seaboard regimental”—he and his father attended Dartmouth College football games together; his father, registered as a Republican in 1960, was snobbish, misogynistic. Margaret was an equally alive part of Salinger that was in full flight from that, mad with fury, antiestablishment, existentially lost.
Margaret demonstrated the spunk that Salinger venerated in, say, Franny. Matthew behaved as Salinger himself behaved in real life. And we know Salinger’s scathing assessment of himself. As an adult, Matthew said that he wished he saw his father more often and that they could see a few more Red Sox games together; for him, paternal detachment worked. Margaret was so desperate to connect with her father she wrote not a letter but a 450-page, heartbroken love song. Didn’t matter. He was a million miles away in his tower.
CONDITION 8: GIRLS
Take a look at photos of Miriam, Doris, Sylvia, Oona, Jean, and Joyce when each of them is eighteen years old. It’s impossible to miss how stunningly similar all these young women are. They are, for all intents and purposes, to Salinger’s imagination, the same woman, the same girl, the same healing mother, the same ministering sister-angel, the same second self, the same ideal and idealized childhood playmate (until, of course, they mature). Why was Salinger obsessed, in his work and in his life, with girls on the cusp of their sexuality? Why, in his work, do so many of his male protagonists express their ardor toward girls by worshipping and cradling their feet? Salinger’s was a prejudgment physicality, a pre-Fall sexuality, pre-Oona, prewar (after which he could never view the human body as anything except ravaged). The girls were self-torture racks, through which he endlessly revisited that time before his body could be viewed as wanting, before Oona, before the war turned all bodies into corpses for him.
Throughout Salinger’s life, he repeated this pattern over and over and over again with girls-on-the-verge-of-becoming-women. He was forever replaying the Oona-Chaplin-Jerry triangulation, repeating it between himself and his second wife, Claire, and her then-husband, Coleman Mockler, and Maynard and the world he said she loved and he didn’t. Many of the girl-women are Jewish or half-Jewish or “Jewish-looking” innocents on the edge of uninnocence; upon consummating his relationships with them, they are not only immediately undesirable to him but also immediately repellent and just as immediately eliminated from his life.
When Peter Tewksbury said to Salinger that Esmé is poised at the exact moment between an intake and an outtake of breath, Salinger—who almost never agreed with anyone, especially an artistic man from his own generation—said, emphatically (that Salinger word), “Yes.” Salinger came tantalizingly close to making a film of “Esmé” with Tewksbury, but the project came to naught when the girl whom Salinger wanted to play Esmé edged ever so slightly into adolescence. Throughout his life he was fixed upon this pivot point between childhood and adulthood. He called his local market, Purity Supreme, “Puberty Supreme.” At age ninety he was a regular attendee of Dartmouth College women’s basketball games.
Salinger convinced Joyce Maynard to drop out of Yale and leave a promising writing career in New York City for an isolated life with him in Cornish. What was he trying to save her from? Experience. He was obsessed with innocence; in many ways, it was his deepest or at least most persistent subject. Maynard wore an oversized men’s watch in her photo for the cover of the New York Times Magazine. He loved childhood, wanted to canonize it, couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t want to enter what the French writer Michel Leiris called “the fierce order of virility”; one of Salinger’s early “lost” stories is called “Men Without Hemingway.” He was wedded to ceremonies of innocence and yet also wanted to drown these ceremonies, was devoted to sullying innocence. If he never got to be innocent, no one else would, either.
It was a Holdenesque impulse to invite Maynard to Cornish, because only one Jesus child is allowed per family. Two solipsists can’t occupy the same writing desk. It couldn’t work and didn’t work for very long. He seems to have been hoping, somehow, to deprofessionalize her writing—make her forever a journal-keeper, a diarist, a Franny-poet, a person without a life before her life had really even begun. He didn’t want to implant his seed into Maynard; he wanted to pour Salinger—see his five-thousand-word letters to her on the most abstruse of subjects.
One of the crucial ways Maynard and Salinger connected was their love of old-timey TV shows: I Love Lucy, Andy of Mayberry, The Dick Van Dyke Show. One of his favorite movies, Lost Horizon, offered the same salvation that he sought in time travel back to prewar folly and innocence, although in truth he was too broken down for any such deliverance. Salinger’s love of movies and television shows, his love of actors and acting, his addiction to the fairy-tale world of the midcentury New Yorker and its infantilization of its writers, his unpersuasive insistence upon the absolute separation between his life and his art—all of this, everything in his life and work, everything bespeaks damage, survivor’s guilt, wished-for and never achieved oblivion.
CONDITION 9: SECLUSION
Salinger sent out, through Catcher, an SOS, and when the world answered the distress call with swooning love, he immediately put up a DO NOT DISTURB sign. Salinger didn’t love the world—he loathed himself, which he reframed as hatred of the world—and he needed the world to prove that it was unworthy of his love. And the world managed to fulfill that role very nicely for him on a daily basis.
Outside the compound were critics, Catcher-reading assassins, and, in a way worst of all, would-be acolytes, who meant nothing to him because he knew he had nothing to give them.
He was thought to be indifferent to publicity, but he ferociously monitored every blip on the radar screen and cared hugely about his reputation—for instance, seeking out all the reviews of Catcher after telling Little, Brown he didn’t want the publisher to send him the reviews. He refused to talk to the press, but whenever the press had forgotten about him for too long, he interacted with journalists, especially when they were extremely beautiful women—talking on the phone to the New York Times’s Lacey Fosburgh for half an hour and not only wanting to see what red-haired, green-eyed Betty Eppes looked like but answering her questions and even, at one point—although we weren’t able to include this detail in Conversation #5—inviting her to dinner.
Salinger detested dealing with the avalanche of mail he received, but he bemoaned that there was no mail delivery on Sunday.
Presenting himself as a hermit, he was certainly more secluded than most people, even than most writers, but in fact he maintained lifelong friendships through extensive travel in the United States and abroad, and through letters, phone calls, and frequently hosting visitors to his house. He controlled the communication, the narrative. He wasn’t opposed to investigations; he just wanted to be the one conducting them. There’s no member of the CIC like a former member of the CIC.
As Paul Alexander says, Salinger
was a recluse who liked to flirt with the public to remind them that he was a recluse. Complete withdrawal from society is not only the fourth step in Vedanta but also, quite conveniently, the perfect publicity strategy: by being invisible to the public, he could be everywhere in the public imagination.
CONDITION 10: DETACHMENT
Zooey: “You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment.”
In real life, the religious life played out like this:
Salinger’s sister, Doris, said, “I hate to say it, but he’s a bastard. What can I say? I was all alone when I had my heart attack and he’s been useless to me. Visited two, maybe three times. Hardly a phone call. When I had my heart attack, I was sick and alone. That’s a terrible thing to be, sick and alone. But anything that interferes with his work is dismissed.”
His daughter, Margaret, wrote, “He is detached about your pain, but God knows he takes his own pain more seriously than cancer. . . . There is nothing remotely detached about my father’s behavior toward his own pain, in his hemorrhages about anything personal being known about him. . . . It finally dawned on me that my father, for all his protestations and lectures and writing about detachment, is a very, very needy man. . . .”
Salinger spent his life trying to maneuver himself out from under his body, but the cure never took, because he was the disease. The wound was so deep and so multiple that he wanted the reader to concentrate entirely on his art. The only way the art was going to rescue him was if it couldn’t be tied back to war wounds and the body-wound. The wounds made him; for nearly a decade, he transformed the wounds into agony-fueled art, and then—because he could not abide his own body, himself, his own war-ruined mind, the attention, the criticism, the love—he came to revile the world, so he disappeared into Vedanta. The pain was severe and profound, and he couldn’t fully face it or alleviate it. Desperate for cures, he destroyed himself: withdrawal, silence, inward collapse. The wounds undid him, and he went under.
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