She sometimes said no to her father. Not too many people challenged J. D. Salinger, and she did, even then. She challenged him just with the choices she’d made for her life. She wasn’t a literary, academic type. She was a girl with a passion for basketball. She had a Native American boyfriend. The two of them hung out on the couch, drinking soda and watching TV. And I thought, “How can she do this?” She was being her own person.
MARGARET SALINGER: Certainly, in my family, [writing] was what Daddy did. I didn’t take English classes. I didn’t do creative writing. It was trespassing on his turf. I did everything else but. . . . So, in a sense, becoming a writer was really, as one journalist said, “Could we look at it as a declaration of independence?” That is, I think, overly dramatic but, in a sense, it’s true. We were supposed to be anything but writers. He was tremendously relieved when I went into business years ago. . . .
I don’t think [Dream Catcher] is a tell-all. I was speaking with Susan Stamberg from NPR the other day, and she said someone asked her if my book was a “Daddy Dearest,” which is what you think of with a tell-all. She said she thought it was a “Daddy, Why?” It’s an ask-all rather than tell-all, asking questions.
One of the things I wrestled with in writing this book was knowing that if I disobeyed him in this kind of way, there was a good chance he would cut me off like he cut off everybody else who committed a misdemeanor in his eyes. And this was not going to be any misdemeanor. I also realized pretty early on that this was the death of a wish, not a reality. I’m never going to have the mommy and daddy I wished for. What I really had to lose wasn’t a whole lot. Even on good terms with him, I never saw my father much. I miss him, but—and I don’t mean this in a cute way at all—I miss my daddy, not my father.
RON ROSENBAUM: She says she wrote it for her own sake, as therapy, as deprogramming for her cultic upbringing. . . . In both his life and his work J. D. Salinger brought the war home, brought it home in the form of a desperate search for peace that torments his characters and seems to have tormented his own character. Holed up in his hilltop retreat in New Hampshire, Salinger waged the war for peace with one spiritual weapon after another. As his daughter chronicles it, it was “Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, 1950’s on and off; Kriya yoga, 1954–55; Christian Science, 1955 off and on to the present; Scientology, called Dianetics at the time, 1950’s; something having to do with the work of Edgar Cayce; homeopathy and acupuncture, 1960’s to present; macrobiotics, 1966. . . .”
What these disciplines all have in common, of course, is the promise of relief from, or transcendence of, the sufferings of the flesh. The problem for Margaret Salinger was that her father often extended those experiments to his family.
Margaret reports that almost from birth she served as a guinea pig for her father’s spiritual enthusiasms. When she fell ill as a baby, she says, she wasn’t taken to the doctor. Salinger “had suddenly embraced Christian Science, and now, in addition to being forbidden any friends or visitors, doctors were out.”
She says she wrote the memoir for the sake of her young son, so that he will understand the family history and the chain of suffering will be broken. Very noble, but there’s something a bit disingenuous about this piety: if the account is really just meant as therapy, what need was there to publish it? . . . Or if it was somehow necessary to publish it, what need was there to rush it into print when her father, now eighty-one, was still alive to be hurt by it? Unless the hurt was part of the therapy. . . . Still, Salinger has the right to tell her own story as she sees it. . . . And whatever her other motives, she clearly believes that it is we too who need to be disillusioned as she was; that it is important to destroy the illusion that the authors we love are perfect gurus and saints as well.
DAVID SHIELDS: The book is replete with photos of Margaret and her father in loving embrace, but these pictures stop well before the end of adolescence. Here, too, Salinger stopped loving a girl once she became a woman. She was now dirty.
THOMAS CHILDERS: One woman, responding to a website devoted to the children of World War II veterans, wrote of her POW father, “My father’s undiagnosed and untreated PTSD kept my family from living full and normal lives, lives others take for granted. . . . I was never ‘Daddy’s little girl,’ but I certainly was his POW.”
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LINDSAY CROUSE: When Margaret wrote this book exposing the intolerance in her father, the rigidity in her father, the serious damage he had done to her, people didn’t want to hear that.
GERALDINE McGOWAN: I felt sorry for his daughter. She didn’t have a chance. When you’re up against such a celebrity, when people find your artistic value much lower than someone else’s, you almost don’t count.
BENJAMIN ANASTAS: Of all the private documents that have lately found their way into print under the abused publishing category known as “memoir,” only one, Margaret Salinger’s Dream Catcher, is so unequivocally removed from the realm of literature—so inward-looking, so ungenerous, so artless—that it achieves a perfect state of irrelevance, the nadir, if you will, of the autobiographical practice, revealing falsehood where it seeks to expose the “truth,” and truth where it reveals the hollows of the secret-teller’s damaged little heart.
One would have thought that Margaret Salinger, of all the writers’ children in the world, would have a better grasp on the numberless value of what remains unspoken; that she would have found a way, somehow, to avoid indulging in the kind of confessional writing that her father, in a more comic vein, once described as taking on “precisely the informality of underwear.” As it is, the secrets are out, the dirty laundry has been aired, and nothing is changed, really, but for another dream of “wellness” written, bound, and cast atop the discounted pile in the memoir section. And at what cost? Another dream, just as foolish, coveted by Seymour Glass and shared by kindred spirits everywhere—the peace, the quiet, the respite, the relief of an unexamined life.
SVEN BIRKERTS: It seems to me that these [parent-child] relationships are private not merely in popular designation, but in their ontological essence as well. Which is to say that they constitute, emotionally and psychologically, worlds of their own. They are profoundly contextual. Wrest them into the public glare and they often collapse into near unrecognizability or become caricature. This does not mean that personal memoirs of this sort ought not to be written, simply that they should be viewed by readers as intrinsically suspect. Only where a writer is skillful enough to recreate the complex atmosphere of interactions is there a chance that the figures will live. Ms. Salinger is not a writer of this caliber.
Second, I would invoke—or propose—the worthiness law: that the memoirist ought to be, in some core perceptual way, the equal of her subject. It seems evident that the lesser cannot comprehend the greater.
JONATHAN YARDLEY: Dream Catcher is indeed in almost all respects an unattractive and unwelcome book. Had its author been anyone except the only daughter of this country’s most famously reclusive novelist—yes, even more famous than if not quite so reclusive as Thomas Pynchon—it certainly would not have been published. It is too long by at least two hundred pages, it is almost indescribably self-indulgent, and it invades the author’s father’s cherished privacy to the point of disloyalty and exploitation. . . . It may seem a bold gesture for Peggy Salinger to say that she meant “to defy his cult of secrecy by writing this book,” but it remains that her father is entitled to his secrecy, or privacy, and that this book is a willful violation of it. That being the case, Dream Catcher must be seen not as an attempt at self-exploration and self-understanding but as an act of revenge and betrayal: a blow beneath the belt.
VED MEHTA: J. D. Salinger was someone who wanted to be private, which was so heroic in this publicity- and advertising-driven society; he didn’t want to be part of this climate. Then this daughter went and wrote about all kinds of quirks he has. I was appalled at that book. I think Dream Catcher is a very good argument for not having children.
JUDITH SHULEVITZ: La
dies and gentlemen, the jury has filed back into the room, and a verdict has been announced. J. D. Salinger is the victim of a literary crime. His daughter, Margaret Salinger, is the guilty party. (This time, that is. Last time it was his ex-lover, Joyce Maynard.) Dream Catcher, Margaret’s memoir of her life as the problematic daughter of the most misanthropic author in America, strikes “a blow beneath the belt,” critic Jonathan Yardley says. Another, Sven Birkerts, charges that Margaret Salinger has broken two laws of nature. The first of these is the father-child bond, whose “ontological essence” she violates by exposing its intimate details to public scrutiny. . . . The second dictates the proper place of the unskilled writer, which is at a respectful distance from the more accomplished one. “It seems evident that the lesser cannot comprehend the greater,” Birkerts writes. Actually, what seems evident is that if writers adhered to Birkerts’ exacting code of conduct, literature as we know it could no longer be produced. . . .
Margaret Salinger understands the world’s attachment to the myths she’s out to dispel. She grew up in their shadow. By that she means, at first, that Salinger couldn’t tolerate the disruptions to work caused by the birth of his first child. Before long, she developed a full-fledged rivalry with her father’s imaginary children. Note that J. D. Salinger could be a sweet father as well as one who was impossible to please. He was by turns an uncondescending playmate, a wiseacre older-brother type, and a lively travel companion. But Peggy’s all-too-human needs proved too much for him, as they did for her mother, and when the daughter reached eighth grade, the parents (now divorced) parked her at boarding school.
PAUL ALEXANDER: Just the idea of Margaret writing a book about her father, the last private man in America—regardless of the revelations in it, some of which were startling—was enough to offend many Salinger loyalists. Readers and commentators alike were shocked by the book’s revelations, such as Salinger’s practice of drinking his own urine.
MARGARET SALINGER: Gosh, I wish I hadn’t put in everything about drinking urine, because that’s all I’m reading [in reviews]. It speaks to my odd upbringing that I didn’t find this particularly peculiar. I never expected to see that as sort of a “shockeroo” headline. It’s quite a common practice of yogis, having to do with self-purification. Not being a practitioner myself, I don’t know anything about it, but I was certainly surprised at the attention drawn to that.
I tried to be careful in my book of not having sexy, quotable quotes that can be taken out of context. My real desire with this book was to put things in context and to de-sensationalize and make human.
LINDSAY CROUSE: The public wants to take Salinger in its arms and hold him out of gratitude. Here comes little Margaret, writing her book; she’s a detractor and she’s throwing water on all that. She’s speaking to other kinds of universal truths. It’s difficult and it’s disquieting and it’s upsetting that you’ve got J. D. Salinger in your arms and you’d just like to write him a love letter. But he needs privacy. Writers need privacy. You’re bringing something to birth and it’s not for everybody to look at while you’re doing that.
She couldn’t get into his room, so how did she get in? Through the same medium her father used: she wrote. She went down that road herself, alone. And her purpose wasn’t fame and fortune and reaching the masses. Her purpose was, for one moment, for one damn moment, to find her father, to find her real father. I think she accomplished it. It’s palpable. You feel it.
ETHEL NELSON: I was sorry after I read some of her book that I didn’t stay in touch and didn’t get to know her more just because I think she really needed a friend. I sat and cried reading that book. I haven’t read it all. I couldn’t go back to it. It’s too sad. You always picture those kinds of kids as being brought up happy. I don’t know how much of her book is really true and how much isn’t, but I think it’s the saddest thing I ever read.
LINDSAY CROUSE: There is a moment in Dream Catcher where Salinger says to his daughter, Christ, you’re sounding just like every other woman in my life, my sister, my ex-wives. They all accuse me of neglecting them. . . . I can be accused of a certain detachment, that’s all. Never neglect.
DAVID SHIELDS: It’s difficult to discern the difference between parental detachment and parental neglect. Is Salinger aware of the dubiousness of the distinction? This is absence reframed as a philosophical position.
MARGARET SALINGER: I really would like to have the image put forth which is the same thing I try to convey to my son, that you don’t have to be perfect to be lovable, that you may not like some of the things someone does, but that doesn’t mean you have to dismiss the person. And in my father’s world, you’re either perfect or you are an anathema. And I don’t feel that way. I don’t love him less for understanding him more.
Ian Hamilton thought my dad would be so proud of him and sent him the galleys. I know better. I have not been in contact with him since it hit the press that the book was coming out. Call me chicken. There hasn’t been any formal, “Oh, we’re not talking to each other.” I want to wait until his anger subsides some, and he’s had a chance to read the book, and then we’ll see what happens.
In many ways, the historical research I did took the man off the pedestal of this sort of myth that he sprang from nowhere, that he is a recluse not attached to any family or community or background, and put him squarely in the realm of human beings, which is not a bad place to be. I think you dehumanize someone when they are on a pedestal, and they become a projection of one’s wishes, rather than who they really are. . . .
I think it’s lovely to have a book mean something to you. And I don’t think anything in my book should take away from [a reader’s] cherished memory of reading his books, or new readers coming to them, fresh.
What I do attack is the idolatry, the notion that the person who wrote these wonderful books will be your “catcher,” the kind of people who troop to his house expecting him to be the one to understand them, to be their “catcher in the rye,” and that’s fair enough. I think the things expected of him as the writer of the book are not appropriate.
LINDSAY CROUSE: As you move toward the end of the book, you feel her starting to mature and to extricate herself from this poison, this toxicity that she grew up with. You feel her rise almost to a spiritual plane and begin to develop compassion for her father. And when she comes to it, it’s stunning.
JEAN MILLER: I read it with great interest. Jerry said to his young daughter, “You never forget the smell of burning flesh.” He had said that to me, and it rocked me. It was something he carried with him. Also, Margaret mentions that he got a letter from his first wife, with whom he had corresponded telepathically; he told me he got a letter from her, and he didn’t even open it up. He was like that. Margaret said when he was through with somebody, he was through. And I thought that is so true. When it’s over, it’s over.
DAVID SHIELDS: In the early 1970s, Salinger received a letter from Sylvia but tore it up and threw it away without reading it.
ETHEL NELSON: Margaret wrote her book to let her dad know her feelings, to communicate with him, because there was no other way she could. I have no idea if he ever read it or not, but I know he gets quite angry when his kids do things he doesn’t understand.
LINDSAY CROUSE: If she wrote it only for herself, you wouldn’t be so moved in reading it. She gouged it out of a hillside, grubbed it out of the ground, that book. She wrote it in order for life to come up through hard concrete. Her purposes were to dig through the mine to her dad. It was an act of generosity; although the world might not perceive it that way, it was an act of generosity on her part. Drama is based on love; otherwise, everybody would just leave the room. She could have just said, “To hell with you,” and stayed in a shrink’s office. But she didn’t. It’s not my reading of Dream Catcher that J. D. Salinger is a monster. It is my reading of her experience, her early experience with him, that there wasn’t any margin for her.
Margaret is as extraordinary as her father, and I think
he is extraordinary. One of the only places we can put love, frankly, is in art; it can be very afflicted in other arenas. She put it in her life.
I found Dream Catcher gripping. I was astounded by the clarity of Margaret’s memory, by her ability to go back and reconstruct just what happened, and it made me feel there had to have been a reason for that. When I go back and think of what happened to me in third grade or sixth grade, it’s pretty much a wash. I’d have to concentrate very hard to try to call something up specifically; she had reams of memory at her fingertips, it seems. Which indicates that there was a good reason to remember: there was a vigilance.
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DAVID SHIELDS: The king chose not to defend the realm himself; he sent out his loyal foot soldier, Matthew, who many years earlier had tried to fulfill his father’s other ambition: acting.
MATTHEW SALINGER: I love my father very much and I wouldn’t want him to be different. Just wish I’d see him more. The public image of my father has been filtered through the lens of people who are angry, whether it be a daughter or an ex-lover, or journalists who can’t get interviews.
I’m not in contact with my sister now, nor will I ever be. But Dad has been remarkably untouched by the book; I was more upset by it than he was. He’s a very kind man who was a terrific father; I had a wonderful childhood.
MARGARET SALINGER: I would prefer not to speak about someone else’s relation with another person from my perspective. My brother and father have their own relationship, and I’m not comfortable speculating on that, other than to say that siblings can have extremely different experiences of growing up, and both are telling the truth.
MATTHEW SALINGER: Of course, I can’t say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up. I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes. I do not remember even one instance of my mother hitting either my sister or me. Not one. Nor do I remember any instance of my father “abusing” my mother in any way whatsoever. The only sometimes frightening presence I remember in the house, in fact, was my sister (the same person who in her book self-servingly casts herself as my benign protector)! She remembers a father who couldn’t “tie his own shoe-laces” and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even—specifically—how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away.
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