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CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
PART I
BRAHMACHARYA
APPRENTICESHIP
1 WE’RE GOING TO START THE WAR FROM RIGHT HERE
2 SLIGHT REBELLION OFF PARK AVENUE
Conversation with Salinger #1
3 SIX-FEET-TWO OF MUSCLE AND TYPEWRITER RIBBON IN A FOXHOLE
Conversation with Salinger #2
4 INVERTED FOREST
Conversation with Salinger #3
5 DEAD MEN IN WINTER
6 STILL BURNING
7 VICTIM AND PERPETRATOR
8 MEASURING UP
Conversation with Salinger #4
9 THE ORIGIN OF ESMÉ
10 IS THE KID IN THIS BOOK CRAZY?
11 WE CAN STILL RUN AWAY
Conversation with Salinger #5
12 FOLLOW THE BULLET: NINE STORIES
Conversation with Salinger #6
PART II
GARHASTHYA
HOUSEHOLDER DUTIES
13 HIS LONG DARK NIGHT
14 A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE FALL
Conversation with Salinger #7
Conversation with Salinger #8
PART III
VANAPRASTHYA
WITHDRAWAL FROM SOCIETY
15 SEYMOUR’S SECOND SUICIDE
Conversation with Salinger #9
16 DEAR MISS MAYNARD
17 DEAR MR. SALINGER
Conversation with Salinger #10
Conversation with Salinger #11
Conversation with Salinger #12
18 ASSASSINS
PART IV
SANNYASA
RENUNCIATION OF THE WORLD
19 A PRIVATE CITIZEN
20 A MILLION MILES AWAY IN HIS TOWER
21 JEROME DAVID SALINGER: A CONCLUSION
22 SECRETS
FICTION IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER OF PUBLICATION
LOST STORIES, UNCOLLECTED STORIES, AND PUBLISHED LETTERS
THE GLASS FAMILY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTO CREDITS
ABOUT DAVID SHIELDS AND SHANE SALERNO
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PERMISSIONS
FOR MY MOTHER
—Shane Salerno
FOR LAURIE AND NATALIE
—David Shields
I was with the Fourth Division during the war. I almost always write about very young people.
—J. D. Salinger
What a low and specious thing “religion” would be if it were to lead me to negate art, love.
—J. D. Salinger
INTRODUCTION
J. D. Salinger spent ten years writing The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his life regretting it.
Before the book was published, he was a World War II veteran with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder; after the war, he was perpetually in search of a spiritual cure for his damaged psyche. In the wake of the enormous success of the novel about the “prep school boy,” a myth emerged: Salinger, like Holden, was too sensitive to be touched, too good for this world. He would spend the rest of his life trying and failing to reconcile these completely contradictory versions of himself: the myth and the reality.
The Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 65 million copies and continues to sell more than half a million copies a year; a defining book for several generations, it remains a totem of American adolescence. Salinger’s slim oeuvre—four brief books—has a cultural weight and penetration nearly unmatched in modern literature. The critical and popular game over the past half-century has been to read the man through his works because the man would not speak. Salinger’s success in epic self-creation, his obsession with privacy, and his meticulously maintained vault—containing a large cache of writing that he refused to publish—combined to form an impermeable legend.
Salinger was an extraordinarily complex, deeply contradictory human being. He was not—as we’ve been told—a recluse for the final fifty-five years of his life; he traveled extensively, had many affairs and lifelong friendships, consumed copious amounts of popular culture, and often embodied many of the things he criticized in his fiction. Far from being a recluse, he was constantly in conversation with the world in order to reinforce its notion of his reclusion. What he wanted was privacy, but the literary silence that reclusion brought became as closely associated with him as The Catcher in the Rye. Much has been made of how difficult it must have been for Salinger to live and work under the umbrella of the myth, which is undeniably true; we show the degree to which he was also invested in perpetuating it.
Other books about Salinger tend to fall into one of three categories: academic exegeses; necessarily highly subjective memoirs; and either overly reverential or overly resentful biographies that, thwarted by lack of access to the principals, settle for perpetuating the agreed-upon narrative. Previous biographies have tended to rely on the relatively small collections of Salinger papers and unpublished manuscripts found at Princeton University and the University of Texas, Austin. The result is the recycling of the same information from a very shallow well and the republication of inaccurate information. The letters we excerpt, ranging from 1940–2008, are from Salinger to his closest friends, lovers over many decades, World War II brothers-in-arms, spiritual teachers and others; the overwhelming majority of the letters have never been seen before.
We began with three goals: we wanted to know why Salinger stopped publishing; why he disappeared; and what he had been writing the last forty-five years of his life. Over nine years and across five continents, we interviewed more than two hundred people, many of whom had previously refused to go on the record and all of whom spoke to us without preconditions. We aim to provide a multilayered perspective on Salinger, offering first-person accounts from Salinger’s fellow World War II counterintelligence agents with whom he maintained lifelong bonds, lovers, friends, caretakers, classmates, editors, publishers, New Yorker colleagues, admirers, detractors, and many prominent figures who discuss his influence on their lives, their work, and the broader culture.
By reproducing material that has never been published before—more than one hundred photographs and excerpts from journals, diaries, letters, memoirs, court transcripts, depositions, and recently declassified military records—we hope to deliver many factual clarifications and significant revelations. We particularly illuminate the last fifty-five years of his life: a period that, until now, had remained largely dark to biographers.
Still, we faced two major obstacles: The first was that key people had died before we began this project, and the second was that while certain members of the Salinger family initially cooperated, the Salinger family ultimately did not participate in formal interviews. Although they didn’t speak directly to us, they had spoken, and through a careful dissection of their public statements and our obtaining of private letters and never-before-published documents, their voices appear throughout this book. In addition, many people unwilling to talk on the record directed us to crucial information and passed on photographs, letters, and diaries they had kept secret their entire lives; half a dozen of our most important interviewees spoke to us only after Salinger’s death.
We also provide twelve “conversations with Salinger”: revealing encounters over half a century between journalists, photographers, seekers, fans, family members, and the man who never stopped living his life
like a counterintelligence agent. These episodes place the reader on increasingly intimate terms with an author who had been adamantly inaccessible for more than half a century.
—
There were two emphatic demarcation points in Salinger’s life: World War II and his immersion in the Vedanta religion. World War II destroyed the man but made him a great artist. Religion provided the comfort he needed as a man but killed his art.
This is the story of a soldier and writer who escaped death during World War II but never wholly embraced survival, a half-Jew from Park Avenue who discovered at war’s end what it meant to be Jewish. This is an investigation into the process by which a broken soldier and a wounded soul transformed himself, through his art, into an icon of the twentieth century and then, through his religion, destroyed that art.
Salinger was born with an embarrassing congenital deformity that shadowed his entire life. A college dropout, mercurial talent, wise-guy dandy out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, he was ferociously determined to become a great writer. He dated Oona O’Neill—the gorgeous daughter of arguably America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill—and published short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and other “slicks.” After the war, Salinger refused to allow any of these stories to be republished. The war had killed that author.
A staff sergeant in the 12th Infantry, Salinger served through five bloody campaigns of the European Theater of 1944–45. His job, as a counterintelligence agent, involved interrogating prisoners of war; working the shadow war, the no-man’s-land between Allies and Germans; gathering information from civilians, the wounded, traitors, and black marketers. He saw firsthand the war’s destruction and devastation. When the end was near, he and other soldiers entered Kaufering IV, an auxiliary of the Dachau concentration camp. Soon after witnessing Kaufering, Salinger checked himself into a Nuremberg civilian hospital, a psychic casualty of the war’s final revelation.
Throughout the war and during his postwar hospitalization, Salinger had carried a personal talisman for survival inside the war’s corpse machine: the first six chapters of a novel about Holden Caulfield. Those chapters would become The Catcher in the Rye, which redefined postwar America and can best be understood as a disguised war novel. Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Instead of producing a combat novel, as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller did, Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel. So, too, in Nine Stories, the ghost in the machine is postwar trauma: a suicide begins the book, is barely averted in the middle of the book, and ends the book.
Profoundly damaged (not only by the war), he became numb; numb, he yearned to see and feel the unity of all things but settled for detachment toward everyone’s pain except his own, which first overwhelmed and then overtook him. During his second marriage, he steadily distanced himself from his family, spending weeks at a time in his detached bunker, telling his wife, Claire, and children, Matthew and Margaret, “Do not disturb me unless the house is burning down.” Toward Margaret, who dared to embody the rebellious traits his fiction canonizes, he was startlingly remote. His characters Franny, Zooey, and Seymour Glass, despite or because of their many suicidal madnesses, had immeasurably more claim on his heart than his flesh-and-blood family.
A drowning man, grasping desperately for life rafts, drifting farther away from the taint of the everyday, occupying increasingly abstract realms, he disappeared into the solace of Vedantic philosophy: you are not your body, you are not your mind, renounce name and fame. “Detachment, buddy, and only detachment,” he wrote in Zooey. “Desirelessness. ‘Cessation from all hankerings.’ ” His work tracks exactly along this physical-metaphysical axis; book by book, he came to see his task as the dissemination of doctrine.
Salinger’s vault, which we open in the final chapter, contains character- and career-defining revelations, but there is no “ultimate secret” whose unveiling explains the man. Instead, his life contained a series of interlocking events—ranging from anatomy to romance to war to fame to religion—that we disclose, track, and connect.
Creating a private world in which he could control everything, Salinger wrenched immaculate, immortal art from the anguish of World War II. And then, when he couldn’t control everything—when the accumulation of all the suffering was too much for a human as delicately constructed as he to withstand—he gave himself over wholly to Vedanta, turning the last half of his life into a dance with ghosts. He had nothing anymore to say to anyone else.
PART I
BRAHMACHARYA
APPRENTICESHIP
Landing at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
1
WE’RE GOING TO START THE WAR FROM RIGHT HERE
UTAH BEACH, NORMANDY, JUNE 6, 1944; SAINT-LÔ, MORTAIN, CHERBOURG, FRANCE, JUNE–AUGUST 1944
Salinger’s 12th Infantry Regiment lands on Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, with not quite 3,100 soldiers; by the end of June it will have lost about 2,500. Salinger comes face-to-face with oblivion in the massive aggregate and at the intimate level of his unit.
J. D. SALINGER: I landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the Fourth Division.
MARGARET SALINGER: “I landed on D-Day, you know,” he’d say to me darkly, soldier to soldier, as it were, as if I understood the implications.
EDWARD G. MILLER: Of all the days for someone to be initiated in combat, Jerome David Salinger’s was D-Day.
ABLE SEAMAN KEN OAKLEY: On the evening prior to the D-Day landings, the senior arms officer gave us a briefing, and I will always remember his final words. “Don’t worry if all the first wave of you are killed,” he said. “We shall simply pass over your bodies with more and more men.” What a confident thought to go to bed on.
SHANE SALERNO: Salinger was a privileged, sheltered twenty-five-year-old from Park Avenue who thought war would be an adventure—glamorous, romantic. He imagined himself the protagonist of a Jack London novel and hoped military service would explode the bubble in which he was raised. Salinger wrote, “My mind is stocked with some black neckties, and though I’m throwing them out as fast as I find them, there will always be a few left over.” He wondered whether he lacked the requisite pain to become a writer. He wanted the war to toughen him, deepen him as a person and a writer. The next year would change him forever.
DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger told Whit Burnett, his writing teacher at Columbia University and the editor of Story magazine, that on D-Day he was carrying six chapters of The Catcher in the Rye, that he needed those pages with him not only as an amulet to help him survive but as a reason to survive.
WERNER KLEEMAN: Jerry was just a nice little boy then. He was kind of quiet. I could see he was a little bit of an eight ball. He was different. He didn’t close the straps of his helmet. He did what he wanted to do.
ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger’s serial number was 32325200, the same number he gave many years later to his fictional character Babe Gladwaller in “Last Day of the Last Furlough.”
SHANE SALERNO: John Keenan served with Salinger in the Counter Intelligence Corps [CIC]. Salinger, Keenan, Jack Altaras, and Paul Fitzgerald were together throughout the war, calling themselves the “Four Musketeers”; they remained close friends all their lives. Altaras and Fitzgerald have never been identified before.
“The Four Musketeers”: (L–R) J. D. Salinger, Jack Altaras, John Keenan, Paul Fitzgerald.
JOHN KEENAN: I guess about 3 a.m. the frogmen [naval combat demolition units] left. None of us could sleep, so we knew what was going on. There was a lot of small talk and a lot of fake bravado, too. I don’t think anybody thought this was going to be the great adventure of our lives. Thank God they all got back. Five-ish the infantrymen left. They were the first wave.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger was assigned to the 12th Infantry Regiment. I thought he landed with the regiment at 1030, almost four hours after H-Hour. But the U.S
. Army’s official History of the Counter Intelligence Corps states that the “4th CIC Detachment went in with the 4th Infantry Division when it stormed Utah Beach at 0645.” This means that Salinger’s CIC detachment went ashore at that time with the 8th Regiment, which spearheaded the landing of the 4th Division.
DAVID SHIELDS: An eyewitness, Werner Kleeman, who was serving as an interpreter for the 12th Infantry and who was friends with Salinger, reported that Salinger landed in the second wave of the D-Day assault.
ALEX KERSHAW: On D-Day, Salinger was in a landing craft, coming in toward Utah Beach, crammed in tight with his friends and fellow soldiers, some of whom would be dead shortly.
WERNER KLEEMAN: Shells were flying over our head. The small arms were still coming in. The artillery shells were coming in.
EDWARD G. MILLER: Most of these guys were nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. Salinger was twenty-five, an old man.
PAUL FITZGERALD (excerpt from an unpublished poem): Glamor and bravado were not a part of this. The beach was just ahead of us. Floating in the tide I saw my first casualty.
JOHN KEENAN: The battleships were firing at the coast, aiming at the pillboxes [fortified concrete structures from which German soldiers operated machine guns].
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: The waves were pitching the landing craft around, coming over the gunwales to hit the troops smack in the face, making many of the men so miserable they could not wait to get off.
PRIVATE RALPH DELLA-VOLPE: The boats were going around like little bugs jockeying for position. I had had an extra, extra big breakfast, thinking it would help, but I lost it.
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: So did many others. Seaman Marvin Perrett, an 18-year-old Coast Guardsman from New Orleans, was coxswain on a New Orleans–built Higgins boat. The 30 members of the Twelfth Regiment of the Fourth Division he was carrying ashore had turned their heads toward him to avoid the spray. He could see concern and fear on their faces. Just in front of him stood a chaplain. Perrett was concentrating on keeping his place in the advancing line. The chaplain upchucked his breakfast, the wind caught it, and Perrett’s face (and everyone else on the boat) was covered with undigested eggs, coffee, and bits of bacon.
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