— J.D. Salinger, one of contemporary literature’s most famous recluses,
who created a lasting symbol of adolescent discontent in his 1951 novel
“The Catcher in the Rye,” has died. He was 91.
Salinger died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in
Perhaps no other writer of so few works generated as
much popular and critical interest as Salinger, who published one
novel, three authorized collections of short stories and an additional
21 stories that only appeared in magazines in the 1940s. He abandoned
publishing in 1965, when his last story — “Hapworth 26, 1924” — was
published by The New Yorker. Rarely seen in public and aggressively
averse to most publicity, he was often called the Howard Hughes of
American letters.
His silence inspired a range of reactions from
literary critics, some characterizing it as a form of cowardice and
others as a cunning strategy that, despite its outward intentions,
helped preserve his mythic status in American culture. Still others
interpreted his withdrawal as the deliberate spiritual stance of a man
who, shying from the glare of celebrity, immersed himself in Eastern
religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedantic philosophy.
His stories — heavily autobiographical, humorous and
cynical — focused on highly idiosyncratic urban characters seeking
meaning in a world transformed by the horrors of World War II, in which
Salinger was a direct participant.
His stellar fictional creation was
the teenage anti-hero of “The Catcher in the Rye,” who was, like
Salinger, unsuccessful in school and inclined to retreat from a world
he perceived as disingenuous and hostile to his needs.
A prototypical misfit, Caulfield apparently became a fixation for the criminally disturbed, including
But Caulfield also cared about children and other innocents, exhibiting
moral outrage and a compassion for underdogs that resonated with the
generation that came of age in the 1960s.
When renowned psychiatrist
early 1960s, “scarcely a day went by that Salinger’s name wasn’t
mentioned,” he recalled in an article for
legislator who read “Catcher” as a teenager, called Caulfield one of
several “alternative cultural models,” along with novelists Jack
Kerouac and actor
“Catcher” began to appear on college reading lists in the 1960s along with
among other analysts, would later conclude that in “acting as a
transcendental Special Prosecutor of Adult Values and making straight
the way for the protest movements of the ’60s,” Salinger led the way.
In the ensuing decades “Catcher” became one of the
most-banned and most-taught books in the country. Salinger also created
the neurotic Glass family, who first appeared in stories published in
the 1940s and ’50s. Among the best-known are two long pieces published
in The New Yorker in the 1950s and later combined in the book “Franny
and Zooey” by Little,
An unauthorized collection, “The Complete
Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger,” was mysteriously published
in 1974 and went out of print after some 25,000 copies were sold. It
contained 21 pieces that originally appeared in magazines in the 1940s
but that Salinger never wanted reprinted. The bootlegged edition so
outraged the author that he broke two decades of silence when he sued
to stop its sale.
In a rare interview, Salinger not only condemned the
pirating but tried to explain his extraordinary reluctance to share his
writing with readers.
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” he told
in 1974. “It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my
privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself
and my own pleasure.”
In 1997, the announcement by a small literary press
that it would reprint his last work — the novella-length “Hapworth 16,
1924,” which was originally published in 1965 — caused excitement among
a legion of hungry Salinger devotees. But the book never materialized,
its cancellation as mysterious as the author who had led a hermitic
life on a 99-acre estate in
Fans regularly traveled to the remote
hamlet to find Salinger but rarely made contact. He lived on a hill
behind high walls, where a sign warned trespassers to keep out. He
steadfastly ignored almost all interview requests and aggressively
discouraged biographers’ efforts to examine his life. He would not
allow his photograph or personal information to appear on his book
jackets. He even refused fan mail. “He just doesn’t want anything to do
with the rest of us,”
Jerome David Salinger was born in
changed her name to Miriam when she married Sol Salinger, a well-to-do
importer of meats and cheeses. Jerome, known as Sonny, and his sister,
Doris, who was eight years older, grew up on the fashionable
Sonny attended several public schools and the private
McBurney officials offered this withering appraisal when they kicked
him out: “Character: Rather hard-hit by (adolescence) his last year
with us. Ability: plenty. Industry: did not know the word.”
In desperation, his father sent him to
It was there, holding a flashlight under the covers of his dormitory
bed, Salinger first began to write. His grades improved, and in 1936
Valley Forge awarded him what was to be his only diploma.
He attended
to learn about the family import business. Meanwhile, he was writing
stories, sending them off to magazines and collecting rejection letters.
In 1939, he entered
where he wrote drama reviews and a humorous column called “The Skipped
Diploma” for the campus newspaper. He pulled average grades but dropped
out after nine weeks.
Back home in
of the stories Salinger, then 21, had written for the class. A year
later, a Salinger story appeared in
In
In 1944, Salinger, who was serving in counterintelligence, landed with the
at Normandy on D-Day and stayed on through some of the war’s bloodiest
campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge. According to unauthorized
biographer
that he faced the possibility of a psychiatric discharge; he was
presumed to have earned a regular discharge before returning to
civilian life in November of that year.
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Stories Salinger published around this time
concerned soldiers on the verge of emotional collapse, including the
first story narrated by
Just before he left the
married a French woman named Sylvia, about whom little is known. She
was thought to be a doctor with Nazi ties who, according to the
author’s daughter, Margaret Salinger, “hated Jews as much as he hated
Nazis.” The eight-month marriage ended in mid-1946 during a vacation in
Considered one of his finest stories, it features the sage but mentally fragile
with his bride, and ends in an inexplicable tragedy. The same year that
his marriage ended, Salinger received welcome news: The New Yorker had
finally decided to publish a story of his that it had been holding for
five years. The main character of “
was Caulfield, again in the middle of a nervous breakdown. “Slight
Rebellion” later became the basis for a chapter in “The Catcher in the
Rye.”
Salinger soon began to write exclusively for the New
Yorker. Among the pieces that appeared there during the period leading
up to 1951 was “For Esme — With Love and Squalor,” narrated by a man
very much like Salinger. The main character is a counterintelligence
officer who seeks temporary refuge from World War II by taking tea in
an English establishment. There he meets and is deeply affected by a
precocious teenage girl named Esme and promises to write a story for
her. The rest of the story seals his promise and brings a gift of
redemption. It is one of Salinger’s most beloved works, reportedly
eliciting more reader response than any other story he had written.
Then, in 1951, came “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Salinger spent 10 years writing the novel, which opens with 17-year-old Caulfield in a
after flunking out of school for the third time. The rest of the book
shows Caulfield as he heads for collapse in a series of adventures and
misadventures that veer between the screamingly funny and the
desperately sad.
The novel is written entirely in the vernacular of
an upper-middle-class, adolescent Manhattanite of the era. Caulfield
litters his sentences with a lazy “and all” (as in how his parents
“were occupied and all before they had me” or how they were “nice and
all”) and is generous with obscenities. He is kind to children but
distrusts most everyone else, calling anyone or anything he dislikes
“crumby” or “phony.”
The book quickly earned a spot on
Time magazine also praised it, noting that it
offered “some of the most acidly humorous deadpan satire since the late
great Ring Lardner.” Similarly,
in The New Yorker, said Salinger’s humor made the book “one of the
funniest, expeditious (novels) in the history of juvenilia.”
But
Christian Science Monitor condemned it as “not fit for children to
read” and said Caulfield was “preposterous, profane, and pathetic
beyond belief.”
adopted a voice similar to Salinger’s protagonist when he wrote that
the book “gets kind of monotonous. And (Salinger) should’ve cut out a
lot about those jerks and all at that crumby school.” A memorable barb
came from
Instead of basking in the glow of celebrity, Salinger went to
to remove his photograph from the book jacket. Future editions would
rank among the plainest in publishing history. In 1953, he left
Salinger’s interest in Zen Buddhism deepened, and
there were indications that he considered becoming a monk. The first
literary manifestations of Salinger’s Buddhist influences appeared in
the collection “Nine Stories.” Each story is a puzzle, like the Zen
koan that Salinger chose to open the volume. It reads, “We know the
sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand
clapping?”
said that in “Nine Stories” Salinger displayed “the equipment of a born
writer — his sensitive eye, his incredibly good ear, and something I
think of no other word for but grace.”
separation of the child from the adult, as though they were of
different species, not merely different ages.”
Despite the mixed reviews, the collection spent three months on
In this later period, Salinger focused on the
various members of the eccentric Glass family, which consisted of
Irish-Jewish vaudevillians Bessie and Les and their seven brilliant
children: the tragic Seymour; his brothers Buddy (whom Salinger called
his “alter-ego and collaborator”), twins Walt and
Zooey; and his sisters Boo Boo and Franny, the youngest of the brood.
Fans lined up at newsstands whenever a new Glass story was published in
The New Yorker. “I love working on these Glass stories,” Salinger wrote
in an author’s note when the book “Franny and Zooey” came out in 1961.
“I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly
decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and
all-available skill.”
“Franny and Zooey” spent six months on
bestseller list despite some of the harshest reviews of Salinger’s
career. Some critics found his obsession with the Glasses unhealthy.
“To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and
lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool,”
Critic
Glasses too “cute,” but he acknowledged that their creator had a gift.
“No American fiction writer in recent memory has given so much value,
by way of his hypnotized attention, to the little things that light up
character in every social exchange,” Kazin wrote in 1973. “Salinger has
been the great pantomimist in our contemporary fiction.”
been entered in the correctly unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the
direction (Salinger) has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a
direction, and the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk
excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists
from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of
us all.”
Salinger’s last published word on the Glasses came
in the long and rambling “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Consisting largely of a
letter from camp written by an unbelievably precocious, 7-year-old
Seymour, the story met with much critical disdain.
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Nonetheless, the announcement more than three
decades later that the story would be republished as a book made
headlines across the country. It prompted
was “a sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.”
Shortly after her essay appeared,
publishing company that had planned to reissue “Hapworth,” announced
that publication had been indefinitely postponed. The author, as usual,
had no comment.
Salinger was tall (over 6 feet) and darkly handsome. He married his second wife,
Margaret Salinger, who became a lay minister, penned a stinging memoir called “
published in 2000. In it she describes an extremely lonely childhood.
“My father discouraged living visitors to such an extent that an
outsider, looking in, might have observed a wasteland of isolation.” To
fill the hours, her mother read stories to her, she said, while her
father “spun tales of characters, both animal and human, who
accompanied us throughout our day.”
Douglas, who became a Jungian psychologist, sued for divorce in 1967, and Salinger did not contest.
In addition to his son, daughter and three grandchildren, Salinger is survived by his third wife,
whom he was believed to have married in the late 1980s. Little is known
about her except that she had worked as a nurse and was about 50 years
younger than Salinger.
The most infamous of his liaisons came in 1972, when the then-53-year-old author began corresponding with
Although rumors of the affair had been widely
circulated, Maynard, who eventually became a columnist and novelist,
did not go public with it until two decades later.
She devoted several chapters of her 1998 memoir, “At
Home in the World,” to their relationship, writing of their inability
to have sexual intercourse due to a medical condition of hers, his
absorption in homeopathy and his devotion to Reichian therapy.
According to Maynard, Salinger also regularly induced himself to vomit
after eating pizza or other foods he deemed unhealthy, and he taught
her to do the same.
Their relationship ended after a
reporter obtained Salinger’s unlisted phone number and asked him to
comment on a story about Maynard, who had a book coming out. Salinger,
apparently incensed by this intrusion, kicked her out of the house a
short time later.
In 1999 Maynard put 14 of his letters to her on the
auction block, explaining that she needed the money to pay her
children’s college tuitions. The correspondence was purchased for
A decade earlier, Salinger had successfully barred biographer
Salinger.” But Salinger’s lawsuit ironically resulted in broad public
access to the very correspondence he was trying to suppress: In order
to protect his letters, Salinger had to place them on file in the
copyright office in New York, where anyone could read them for a modest
fee.
In a deposition for the Hamilton case, Salinger
stated that he was still writing fiction. According to Maynard,
Salinger had completed at least two books by the early 1970s but kept
the manuscripts in a safe, far from prying eyes and publishers. He told
Maynard that publishing was an “embarrassment.” “The poor boob who lets
himself in for it might as well walk down
What critic
called “The Salinger Industry” — the curiosity and speculation
surrounding the enigmatic author and his works — continued to thrive
into the early 2000s, when some critics felt compelled to pronounce
that Salinger was no longer relevant, that “Catcher” was a “minor
classic” at best, or that “Franny and Zooey” was the more skillful
work. “Zooey,” writer
Other writers were inspired by him, such as
that “Mao II,” his 1991 novel about a reclusive novelist, was born in
the instant that he noticed a tabloid photograph of Salinger with a
haunted look on his face.
Novelist
Salinger for permission to reprint one of his stories in an anthology.
Salinger actually wrote back, Gold recounted in the 2002 book “Letters
to J.D. Salinger,” edited by
Gold lost the letter but 40 years later still remembered Salinger’s enigmatic last words on refusing a place in the anthology:
“I have my reasons.”
—
(c) 2010,
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