Commentary

 

J.D. Salinger’s literary estate may disclose vital clues to understanding the much-loved but enigmatic American writer, says FARLEY CLINTON.

 

At 14 this rich, good-looking boy learned to his astonishment that he was, at least from one point of view, not a Jew. He discovered this just after he had been feted with what was undoubtedly a fairly extravagant bar mitzvah.

 

But it seemed that the truth was the last thing that he could expect. He was not strictly the son of a Jewish mother, the indispensable qualification for being a Jew by birth. Of course Sol Salinger was undoubtedly a Jew. But it is likely enough that the future author of Holden Caulfield’s agitated memoir felt ashamed, at least slightly, of that father, a Polish Jew who when his son was approaching adolescence transported his family into an apartment on Park Avenue, financed by supplying Polish cheeses, and other delights of the delicatessen to the folk in Manhattan and Long Island.

 

A primary function of upper class schools like the ones where young Jerome David Salinger was confined (for as long as they would put up with him) is to smooth rough edges that can frequently be detected in the newly rich, so that a few years later younger members of the family will fit in where the older ones never could. It is an old story, in New England societies organized on an English model.George Osborne in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair makes all the points.

 

Deferring to Sol’s desires, J. D. Salinger’s mother all his life made a show of being super-Jewish. As she was a Jewess by conversion, her kitchen and his early nutrition may well have been kosher.

Perhaps they felt that that was enough to make him undeniably Jewish. But it may have confused him. So many things confused him. All the things he did not insist on simplifying drastically, confused and seriously alienated him.

 

In manhood, or at least in that extended adolescence that continued till he was 90, he was constantly committing himself to one religion or other which made a great issue of dietary laws.

 

In the very first paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye the writer avows a sense of terror in regard to speaking frankly about his father and his mother. Obviously he was anxious to say a lot. And we would like to hear it. It would have been at least as interesting as the things he was not afraid to say, which fascinated a large chunk of the world.

Well, now there are possibly a great many manuscripts which might shed some light on these mysteries which might at last be published.

 

Unless he really was crazier than he seemed, someone no doubt is authorized to arrange that something will be published.

 

But we can’t, in our ignorance, assess three dark problems; first how crazy he was and secondly, how much of what he left it would in fact be helpful for an executor to publish, and the great question — the possible non-existence of friends he thought were competent to decide what should be printed.

 

In the obituaries much was said about Holden’s belief that adults were hypocritical and teenage boys were not. Is that what he really says?

 

From The Catcher in the Rye I got the opposite impression. The “phoneys” whose existence caused him such pain seemed to be largely his own contemporaries, of whom he drew devastating portraits. He seemed pleased to be an ultra-sensitive adolescent, a poet without a skin, but he did not appear to think that most young men were like him.

 

But despite his raging against human beings in general, he admires and obviously wants to resemble those sophisticated few who display knowledge about Eastern religions. Holden, accepting these pretensions uncritically, is very willing to learn when a kid three years his senior tells him that, in the East, fornication is seen as at once a physical and spiritual experience.

 

Although Holden is supposed to be 16, the age J.D. Salinger reached in 1935, this kind of talk about the East seems transparently “post-war,” it surely belongs to the 1946-1949 period, when the novelist was working on The Catcher. It seemed he never got beyond this world.

 

In the 1950s, as the Salinger cult bloomed I was not part of it. Though he delighted boys and girls a little older than I was, to me the Salinger spewing out accusations looked like a bit of a lunatic.

 

Two accidents put me off him.

 

He speaks with contempt about David Copperfield but I had loved that book. And Catcher in the Rye describes the world as seen from Park Avenue. But I didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, that Park Avenue world or any like it. Finding it described in living colors in its glaring incongruities, I could not believe in it.

 

Gradually, I learned to feel a grudging amazement before the sharp, ruthless sketches of character - and his conversations. Time passed. In due course I understood why he dazzled sensitive people.

 

And Time in fact even brought me to Park Avenue, and other parts of New York. (Or, if not Time, at least the National Review.)

 

But even as I came to like him, for his own new peer group, that is, for some other youngish brilliant writers with gifts like his, some high barriers rose. In effect, they drummed him out of their club.

 

Hugely admired younger writers, who had lately been “discovered,” and were acclaimed like him - but were unable to sell such a lot of copies of their novels, turned on him fiercely in a pack. The most noticeable of these rivals was Joan Didion. Four others took the same line.

 

There was much less than met the eye in Salinger, the other discoveries felt it their duty to say.

 

And the poor man of course could not write The Catcher in the Rye a second time.

 

It was a problem that Catullus and Keats must have faced – and others who have written lines hot with the fire of youth before 25.

 

He could not repeat what skyrocketed him to the stars. The skyrocket had to fall.

 

In the meantime he had a short story turned into a film - the story he called Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut was made into My Foolish Heart, with Susan Hayward.

 

Salinger loved the movies. He took the name Holden Caulfield from the 1940s stars William Holden and Joan Caulfield, who appeared in Dear Ruth, about an adolescent whose imaginative scribbling turns her family upside down.

 

We don’t know how long his parents lived. But there is reason to think they left him very rich. Even if they didn’t, the royalties that kept on coming certainly did.

 

So he didn’t need money, nor the reassurance that he was talented. There was no reason for him to publish.

 

I knew someone once as famous as he was. It was a sensationally loved and trusted radio preacher in North America, and from the horse’s mouth I heard to be adulated by millions who are sure you understand them is a horrible experience — and, though we can’t realize it, no doubt it is.