Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Almost all writers play by the rules of the game, which have evolved in the publishing-industry establishment—they do so, of course, because they want to stay in the good graces of the publishers, the people who make the rules—but, in a career that has spanned over half a century, J. D. Salinger has refused to comply with even the most basic of those rules. Only once—teaching a class at Sarah Lawrence—has he appeared before an audience at all. He has made phone calls to journalists and has had chance encounters with some; he has sat for a deposition or two, but he has never done a traditional interview. After the initial printings of his first book, he soon refused to allow his publisher to use a photograph of himself on the dust jacket of any of his books. He has never communicated with his readers; over the years he has even gone so far as to instruct his agents to throw away his fan mail without even bothering to show it to him.

  But there’s more. At one point in his career, he decided he didn’t want his stories reproduced in anthologies; then he demanded that the four books he did publish between 1951 and 1963 could remain in print in paperback only if each edition featured the text between two plain covers and nothing else—no advertising copy on the front cover, no glowing blurbs on the back cover, no biographical information about the author anywhere, nothing resembling the trappings a publisher uses to sell and promote an author and his work. Finally, after 1965, even though he has often gone out of his way to let the public know he was continuing to write, he stopped publishing his work in either magazines or book form. By doing this, Salinger has achieved a kind of perverse celebrity: He has become a famous writer who writes but doesn’t publish.

  Consequently, Salinger’s reputation, at least in the latter part of his life, is based not on the books he has written but on the books he allowed to be published. Of course, The Catcher in the Rye is his major work. “Salinger is a writer of great charm and purposefully limited scope and a perfection within that narrow compass,” says Harold Bloom. “The Catcher in the Rye struck a nerve for one generation but it seems to appeal to sensitive young people in later generations as well. Its sensitivity fits the sensitivity of young people who are going to develop a consciousness and a distrust of the adult world. Probably it will survive.” Tom Wolfe agrees: “The Catcher in the Rye captures the mood of the adolescent who wants desperately to fit in but doesn’t want to seem as if he does, who wants to act flippantly but who, underneath that flippancy, has great sorrow.”

  Certainly, the slender novel, published in 1951, afforded Salinger the career he has had. If he had not been the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, published in 1953, surely would not have been as successful as it was, even though it contained three short stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” and “Teddy”—that are now considered by many critics to be models of the form. If he had not been the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey—two long stories previously published in the New Yorker that Salinger released as a book in 1961—would not have been a runaway New York Times best-seller, a publishing event deemed so noteworthy Time magazine put Salinger on its cover. If he had not been the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, a book of two more long New Yorker stories Salinger collected in 1963, would not have been a best-seller either. Then again, without question, the publication of these books increased the sales of The Catcher in the Rye, which had sold 3.5 million copies by 1961, 10 million copies by 1981, and 15 million copies by 1996. In late 1997, forty-five years after the paperback edition first appeared, the novel was still listed in the mid-seventies on the USA Today Top 100 paperback best-seller list.

  All of this was helped considerably, at least from the standpoint of promotion, when in 1953 Salinger became a recluse. By cutting himself off from his audience, Salinger ensured that any contact he did make with the public merited coverage by the media. As a result, through the years he was able to see news reports about some of the most mundane events in his life—a photograph in Time of his going to the grocery store or an item in Newsweek about his showing up at the retirement party of an Army buddy. It has been argued that Salinger became famous for wanting not to be famous. However, simply because he turned into a recluse does not mean he didn’t want fame. In fact, one could argue that by taking the position he did—and keeping it—he ensured he would remain famous for being a recluse. In short, whether he contrived to or not, Salinger has stayed in the public eye by withdrawing from it.

  At some point one has to ask the obvious: Why did Salinger go into seclusion and remain there? Did he want to avoid attacks by critics and colleagues, such as the one Norman Mailer made against him in his 1959 essay “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” when Mailer dismissed Salinger as being “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”? (The remark itself would become notorious.) Or this one from Joan Didion, which appeared in the National Review: “What gives [Franny and Zooey] its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.” Or did something else motivate Salinger too? Did he arouse in his reading audience expectations he could not fulfill? Did he burn out? Was he never fully able to function in an adult world? Or, another theory, did he feel some drive within himself—emotional, sexual, or psychological—about which he wanted as few people as possible to know at any cost? Was there some instinct he had that was so troubling to him he was willing to alter the very way he lived his life to keep it secret?

  Although he published stories during the 1940s and became internationally famous during the 1960s, Salinger is an icon of the 1950s. The country had endured two world wars, and the legacy of those wars, represented most painfully by the fact that almost every family in the nation had been touched by them in one way or another, defined the fabric of American culture. It was no coincidence that for most of the decade the president was a former five-star general, Dwight Eisenhower. It did not help that Americans now had to debate whether or not the country should enter the conflict between North and South Korea. In the end, of course, it was decided that to stop the spread of Communism the United States should fight alongside South Korea, and the nation’s resulting entrance into the Korean conflict served to promote patriotism and to create a powerful growth of conservatism.

  Joseph McCarthy cashed in on the public’s fear of Communism and launched a campaign that was supposed to rid the nation of the Red Menace. One group targeted by McCarthy and his supporters was American Jews; another, broader group was the creative community. The extreme positions the conservatives took demanded that to defend the sanctity of the country the government had to oppose anything that could be considered liberal or free-thinking. So, in the middle of this stifling, reactionary period there was the sudden emergence of a singer like Elvis Presley who challenged the status quo by injecting blatant sexuality into his singing and live performance. There was the similar emergence of an actor like James Dean who reinvented the Hollywood icon by infusing in his art a raw individualism and a studied sexual ambivalence.

  Salinger spoke to a generation in the same way that Presley and Dean did, and he used as the vehicle for that communication a sixteen-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. When Salinger’s initial audience encountered Holden, they instantly identified with what Holden was saying: Society was full of hypocritical people who held false beliefs and stood for nothing—“phonies,” to quote Holden. This theme of phoniness resonated with Salinger’s readers, especially those who came to the novel later in the decade. For they could look at the figures on the national scene at the time—McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and others—and know that what these figures were saying was not even genuine, much less true. Because Holden Caulfield so passionately articulated the phoniness represented by these men, The Catcher in the Rye would become a seminal document for the genera
tion that came of age in the 1950s.

  In the biography of a writer, there exists, for all practical purposes, two biographies. One consists of the writer’s “actual” everyday life; the second grows out of the work he produces during his career. With a writer of any reputation, one biography cannot exist without the other, since audiences would not be interested in the writer if he had not created his body of work. Moreover, in many cases, the writer cannot necessarily divorce himself from the work he creates. The obsessions that dominate his life often present themselves as subject matter for his work. He may not write about the obsessions in absolute firsthand terms, he may filter them through the lives of his characters, but they are there nevertheless.

  Naturally Salinger had his own obsessions that played themselves out in his prose. Of course, he was interested in the hypocrisy of human nature, yet he was also drawn to the urbane, affluent lifestyle of the WASP. Ordinarily, writing about this segment of society would not be unusual, since it has often been the subject of writers like John Cheever or John Updike. But Salinger, born into a half-Jewish, half-Irish, middle-class family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, did not share the traits of the characters he created. Because of this, one must ask what exactly was behind his drive to write about the world of the WASP? Why did he not write about the community he was born into, that of the Eastern European Jews who were making new and successful lives for themselves in America? Did Salinger not wish to be a part of that Jewish subculture? Would he rather have been a part of the East Coast country-club set? Salinger’s grandfather was a rabbi. Salinger’s father, while culturally Jewish, seems never to have practiced Judaism. There is no evidence that J. D. ever had a bar mitzvah.

  These issues are reflected in some of his work, though rarely addressed head-on. However, Salinger had an obsession he did acknowledge in his own words—the lives of “very young people.” To see just how Salinger dealt with this and other obsessions, and how they played themselves out in his prose, one must look at the details of his life. In fact, in Salinger’s case, the two histories, the history of the man and the history of the work, are clearly intertwined. Obsessions that are present in the life show up in the work, and vice versa. Look at the life. It is there one can find the obsessions that manifest themselves in the work. Look at the work. It is there one can find the clues to the specifics of the life. Comparisons are difficult, but it seems true that with Salinger, his characters and stories are much more closely connected to his experiences than is usually the case with other writers.

  Sonny

  1

  If Salinger was so consumed with the subject of youth, what was his own youth like? Was there something about it that made him unable to leave it behind?

  On January 1, 1919, in the Nursery and Child’s Hospital on West Sixty-first Street in New York City, Jerome David Salinger was born to parents who, because of who they were and the heritages they came from, created in him a sense of conflict about himself that was present from the very beginning of his life. His father, Sol Salinger, had been born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1888; he was not only a Jew but the son of a rabbi—a rabbi who became a doctor. One family member later stated: “[Sol’s father, Simon,] was a rabbi with a congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. But though he had a wife and five children, he had wanted to become a medical doctor. He sought and received permission from his congregation to enroll in night courses in medical school while retaining his pulpit; it took many years, but he ultimately achieved his goal, gave up the rabbinate, and practiced medicine for the balance of a long and productive lifetime.”

  As a young man, Sol lived in Chicago and worked at a company called J. S. Hoffman, an importer of European cheeses and meats that made and sold products under the names Hofco Family Swiss Cuts and Hofco Baby Goudas. Though he may not have been a practicing Jew, religion became a problem when he met the woman he would marry—Marie Jillich. Marie’s family came from Scotland and Ireland and Marie was Christian. There is every reason to believe that the Salingers did not approve of the marriage for that reason. As a result, not long before the wedding, Marie made the most fundamental—and telling—move she could make to appease her future in-laws. She changed her name from the Catholic-sounding Marie, to the Jewish-sounding Miriam. It was a dramatic gesture, yet afterward there is no evidence that Miriam either studied or practiced Judaism.

  Perhaps the Salingers’ ambivalence about Miriam was still in evidence in 1912, even after Sol and Miriam had had their first child (a daughter, Doris, was born in 1911) or perhaps Sol was simply longing for a city where he could have greater financial opportunity. Whatever the reason, during 1912 Sol and Miriam moved themselves and their baby daughter from Chicago to New York. There, Sol became the general manager of J. S. Hoffman’s New York operation. Jerome Schuman, a colleague, later remembered Sol: “[He] was an excellent businessman and a very good general manager. He ran a tight ship, but at times he was dominated by the chairman and president of the corporation, Harry Hoffman in Chicago, who often used Sol as a whipping boy Nevertheless, he was markedly successful in his operation. He was also an excellent public speaker. Considering that he probably had a limited education, he was extremely articulate and used the English language well. He was intelligent and dynamic.”

  By 1919, the year the Salingers had their second child, Jerome David, whom they nicknamed Sonny, Sol was doing well enough that he moved his family from their apartment at 3681 Broadway in northern Harlem to an attractive, upscale building on the corner of 113th Street and Riverside Drive in the neighborhood where Columbia University is located. Then, between 1919 and 1928, the Salingers moved three more times before they ended up in a pleasant apartment on West Eighty-second Street. It was here they would live for the next four years. During these years, Sonny was described by observers outside his family as “solemn” and “polite” and more than willing to take long walks by himself. As for school, he attended a public grammar school, where one year it was determined he had an IQ of 104, a number which tended to indicate that Sonny had little more than an average intelligence. His grades also suggested that Salinger was mediocre. He made mostly B’s the year his IQ was tested, except in arithmetic, a subject in which he did much worse. In fact, that year the only area of his schooling in which he performed worse than arithmetic was deportment, which was assessed by his teachers as “poor.”

  While he was growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan during the 1920s, Sonny was in many ways an average boy—not at all like the sometimes troubled teenager he would soon become, when he started to resemble characters he would later create as an adult, characters such as Holden Caulfield. In his younger years, Sonny had a stable family life and was, according to family friends, unusually close to his mother, who loved her children, but who was also, to quote a family acquaintance, “overshadowed by Mr. Salinger.”

  During the summer, as many city children did, Sonny went to camp. In the summer of 1930, he attended Camp Wigwam in Harrison, Maine. At age eleven, he was good at tennis and adept at making friends, but one development that took place at Camp Wigwam gave some indication as to the interests he would foster in the coming years. Based on the work he had done in the camp’s dramatic production, Sonny was voted Camp Wigwam’s “most popular actor” of 1930.

  Up to this point Sonny had lived a decidedly ordinary life in New York City. “As a boy,” William Maxwell later wrote in an essay that dealt in part with Salinger’s youth, “Salinger played on the steps of public buildings that a non-native would recognize immediately and that he never knew the names of.” Macy’s and Gimbel’s, Maxwell continued, were “apotheosized” landmarks to the young Salinger—as they were to many New Yorkers. Sol moved his family to Park Avenue—another kind of landmark—in the fall of 1932. Specifically, he selected a spacious apartment at 1133 Park Avenue, a handsome building on the corner of Ninety-first Street. But this move, the last the Salingers made while Sonny was growing up, had special meaning, since it suggested to Sol, and no
doubt to Miriam’s and Sol’s families, that Sol had truly made it in the business world. Before, the Salingers had lived on the Upper West Side. Not as bohemian as Greenwich Village, not as grungy as Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper West Side attracted actors, writers, intellectuals, artists, and the like, of different races and backgrounds. It also had a large Jewish population, making the Upper West Side more liberal than many parts of the city. Lively and varied, the neighborhood was not, however, an “appropriate” place to live if one had social aspirations.

  For that, one chose the Upper East Side, which connoted status and wealth. As if to reinforce his desire to live a life of social rank, Sol purchased an expensive car, which the family used to drive around the city, and decided to take Sonny, then thirteen, out of public school and enroll him in an expensive private school—another mainstay of the Upper East Side elite. So Sol, the rabbi’s son who had defied his father and married a Christian, had made it. In his business he had become such a success that he now lived on one of the most famous and exclusive streets in the world. Interestingly, that street was located in a neighborhood not known for having a significant Jewish population. If Sol seemed to be rejecting his Jewishness by dating and then marrying a Christian, he was certainly abandoning it by passing over other sections of New York to live in a neighborhood synonymous with WASPs and money—Park Avenue on the Upper East Side. Without question, Sol passed his values and preferences on to his son, who years later would choose not to write about the world of the immigrant Jew and his descendants, but instead the world of the Upper East Side WASP—the very world Sol Salinger had embraced so completely.