Salinger, the Escape Artist
by Christopher Cox
FEBRUARY 8, 2010 TAGS:
The headline for The New York Times obituary was scandalous: “J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91.” They had rejected the obvious option: “J. D. Salinger, Author of Catcher in the Rye, Dies at 91.” John Updike, who died a year earlier (to the day), was allowed to stand apposite his writing (“John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76”), but Salinger was condemned to be remembered more for the way he handled publicity than for his work. The reaction of the Times was a selfish one: memorializing a man primarily for the way he slighted us, as if we were jilted lovers: J. D. Salinger, Who Never Returned My Calls, Dies at 91.
But are we right to care if Salinger was a recluse? The question turns on whether the value of a work of literature depends in any way on its reception or the behavior of the author. The Times certainly thinks the two are directly related. Charles McGrath, the author of the obituary, begins by calling Salinger a man “who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation.”
In another Times piece, The Catcher in the Rye is described as a work that “established itself on the best lists in 1951 and began its evolution into one of the great works of American literature.” In other words, it didn’t emerge from the typewriter as a great work of literature; it only achieved that eminence once it hit the best-seller list. This could be a sophisticated point to make, and one that greatly privileges readers over authors, but I’m not sure it’s what the Times intended. Perhaps the better knee-jerk reaction was Stephen Metcalf’s, at Slate, who dispensed with the hang-ups about Salinger’s life with a terse line -- “So the man didn't like publicity; so the fuck what?”
But even if we take a middle road, and decide that an author’s life can be useful but not necessary in interpreting his work, then it still seems like a waste of time, not to say perverse, to insist on biography as the skeleton key to unlock the writings of someone who so steadfastly tried to keep his life to himself. The great sport for those poor souls who are haunted by Salinger’s decision to withdraw from public life more than 40 years ago is to scan his work for clues to what he would become.
And indeed, his stories are filled with people who are uncomfortable in the world. There’s the obsessiveness of the suicide Seymour Glass, who folds his robe “first lengthwise, then in thirds” and then carefully places the folded robe on top of his towel at the beach, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Or the narrator of “The Laughing Man,” who says of his childhood, “the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter.” Or Zooey (who says to his sister Franny, “We’re freaks, the two of us”) talking about his brother Buddy: “Take my word for it. He cares too much about his goddam privacy to die in any woods.” Most famously, Holden Caulfield wants to escape to “a little cabin somewhere . . . right near the woods.”
Clearly the man and his writing aren’t fully separable, and early critics were right to see the connection between Salinger’s wartime experiences and stories like “For Esmé -- With Love and Squalor.” But it’s ultimately a limited way to read an author’s books. It takes all the humor out of his writing (no recluses in Salinger’s line describing a toothpaste box as “an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment”) in favor of an X-marks-the-spot treasure hunt. One reason that so many people develop such a deep attachment to Catcher as teenagers is that they were allowed to read it without knowing, or caring, about the author’s personal life. If any book can speak itself, it’s this one. The book was funny, and dirty, and, relatable.
I remember reading it in the tenth grade, and I think every kid in the class was blissfully ignorant of the J. D. Salinger of Cornish, N.H. (we were tenth graders; we didn’t know anything). After we’d finished reading and discussing the book, our English teacher did a sort of grand reveal, and gave us the full story of Salinger’s withdrawal. From then on, the two stories slowly enmeshed themselves in our minds, until it became impossible to think of one without the other.
Critical opinion to some extent followed the same trajectory. The Times first called Catcher “an unusually brilliant first novel,” and even devoted a separate review to the book written in Holden Caulfield’s voice (a move echoed 50 years later by Michiko Kakutani, who took on Holden’s persona to review Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book that inherited Salinger’s penchant for precocious children as narrators). Eudora Welty called Nine Stories, published in 1953, the same year Salinger decamped for New Hampshire, “original, first rate, serious and beautiful.” By 1961, though, in a review of Franny and Zooey, reviewers were complaining that Salinger “cultivated personal obscurity with formidable zeal.” By 1963, shortly before Salinger stopped publishing altogether, the Times concluded a negative review of Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters with the suggestive line, “J. D. Salinger is a greatly talented writer who has not yet found his way through the woods.” Perhaps the turn in critical opinion away from Salinger was unrelated to his absence from public life -- the problem is, we’ll never know.
Salinger’s rejection of society seemed more devastating because of the high emotional tenor of his work. The narrator of “The Laughing Man” talks about a story that resonates with its audience so much, you “take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub,” much as Zooey reads and rereads Buddy Glass’s letter while sitting in the bath. It’s an intimacy that many readers felt not just with the stories but also with the man himself; his turning away from the world felt like a betrayal.
“His modest wish for privacy,” Janet Malcolm wrote, “was perceived as a provocation.” It clearly wasn’t meant as such (and Salinger’s failure to cash in on the hype surrounding his seclusion should lay any contrary claims to rest), but that didn’t stop a steady stream of visitors from traveling up to New Hampshire to try to crack the code. What comes through most clearly in the stories of those who met him during his many years out of the public eye was how kind, if fragile, he was.
When a young journalist named Betty Eppes tried to meet him in 1980, he not only responded to her last-minute request for a meeting, he also showed up exactly on time, only to suffer a barrage of questions from her that ranged from insipid (“Is there going to be a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye?”) to inane (“Have you visited Indonesia?”). And yet, as Eppes admits, he managed to be gracious and patient with her: “[Salinger] said, You write. I write. He had come as one writer to another. Then he began asking me about my writing.”
His impromptu interview with Eppes ended in disaster when a man who had watched their conversation tried to grab his arm and shake his hand. Just as Sybil shouts when Seymour quickly kisses her foot in “Bananafish,” or Zooey shrinks from his mother’s touch, or Holden jumps off the couch at Mr. Antolini’s apartment when his former teacher tries to pat his head, Salinger recoiled from contact with a stranger. “Because of you,” he told Eppes, “this man I don’t know, have never even met, has spoken to me. . . Walked up and put his hand on my arm and spoke to me. I don’t like that.” Despite his anger, Salinger, amazingly, indulged Eppes with one final question. Are you really writing? she asked. “I am really writing,” he responded. “I love to write and I assure you I write regularly. I’m just not publishing. I write for myself.”
But even if he weren’t a mensch, even if he were the piss-drinking, writer’s-blocked, Howard Hughes figure some of the portraits depict, he still doesn't deserve his Times obit. He didn't owe us anything, not even his writing, but he gave us that, generously, and that should be enough.
We don’t know yet if a treasure trove of new Salinger stories really waits to be released. When Franny and Zooey came out, Salinger wrote that he planned a whole series about the Glass family: “I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.” Maybe now that the man is removed from the crosshairs of our longing, his books can fully stand in for his absence as they could not when he was alive. Maybe now our half-century obsession with J. D. Salinger will end up being, as he described the story of Franny and Zooey, “a love story, pure and complicated.”
Christopher Cox is senior editor of The Paris Review.
But are we right to care if Salinger was a recluse? The question turns on whether the value of a work of literature depends in any way on its reception or the behavior of the author. The Times certainly thinks the two are directly related. Charles McGrath, the author of the obituary, begins by calling Salinger a man “who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation.”In another Times piece, The Catcher in the Rye is described as a work that “established itself on the best lists in 1951 and began its evolution into one of the great works of American literature.” In other words, it didn’t emerge from the typewriter as a great work of literature; it only achieved that eminence once it hit the best-seller list. This could be a sophisticated point to make, and one that greatly privileges readers over authors, but I’m not sure it’s what the Times intended. Perhaps the better knee-jerk reaction was Stephen Metcalf’s, at Slate, who dispensed with the hang-ups about Salinger’s life with a terse line -- “So the man didn't like publicity; so the fuck what?”
But even if we take a middle road, and decide that an author’s life can be useful but not necessary in interpreting his work, then it still seems like a waste of time, not to say perverse, to insist on biography as the skeleton key to unlock the writings of someone who so steadfastly tried to keep his life to himself. The great sport for those poor souls who are haunted by Salinger’s decision to withdraw from public life more than 40 years ago is to scan his work for clues to what he would become.
And indeed, his stories are filled with people who are uncomfortable in the world. There’s the obsessiveness of the suicide Seymour Glass, who folds his robe “first lengthwise, then in thirds” and then carefully places the folded robe on top of his towel at the beach, in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Or the narrator of “The Laughing Man,” who says of his childhood, “the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter.” Or Zooey (who says to his sister Franny, “We’re freaks, the two of us”) talking about his brother Buddy: “Take my word for it. He cares too much about his goddam privacy to die in any woods.” Most famously, Holden Caulfield wants to escape to “a little cabin somewhere . . . right near the woods.”
Clearly the man and his writing aren’t fully separable, and early critics were right to see the connection between Salinger’s wartime experiences and stories like “For Esmé -- With Love and Squalor.” But it’s ultimately a limited way to read an author’s books. It takes all the humor out of his writing (no recluses in Salinger’s line describing a toothpaste box as “an object roughly the size of the Hope diamond or an irrigation attachment”) in favor of an X-marks-the-spot treasure hunt. One reason that so many people develop such a deep attachment to Catcher as teenagers is that they were allowed to read it without knowing, or caring, about the author’s personal life. If any book can speak itself, it’s this one. The book was funny, and dirty, and, relatable.I remember reading it in the tenth grade, and I think every kid in the class was blissfully ignorant of the J. D. Salinger of Cornish, N.H. (we were tenth graders; we didn’t know anything). After we’d finished reading and discussing the book, our English teacher did a sort of grand reveal, and gave us the full story of Salinger’s withdrawal. From then on, the two stories slowly enmeshed themselves in our minds, until it became impossible to think of one without the other.
Critical opinion to some extent followed the same trajectory. The Times first called Catcher “an unusually brilliant first novel,” and even devoted a separate review to the book written in Holden Caulfield’s voice (a move echoed 50 years later by Michiko Kakutani, who took on Holden’s persona to review Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book that inherited Salinger’s penchant for precocious children as narrators). Eudora Welty called Nine Stories, published in 1953, the same year Salinger decamped for New Hampshire, “original, first rate, serious and beautiful.” By 1961, though, in a review of Franny and Zooey, reviewers were complaining that Salinger “cultivated personal obscurity with formidable zeal.” By 1963, shortly before Salinger stopped publishing altogether, the Times concluded a negative review of Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters with the suggestive line, “J. D. Salinger is a greatly talented writer who has not yet found his way through the woods.” Perhaps the turn in critical opinion away from Salinger was unrelated to his absence from public life -- the problem is, we’ll never know.
Salinger’s rejection of society seemed more devastating because of the high emotional tenor of his work. The narrator of “The Laughing Man” talks about a story that resonates with its audience so much, you “take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub,” much as Zooey reads and rereads Buddy Glass’s letter while sitting in the bath. It’s an intimacy that many readers felt not just with the stories but also with the man himself; his turning away from the world felt like a betrayal.
“His modest wish for privacy,” Janet Malcolm wrote, “was perceived as a provocation.” It clearly wasn’t meant as such (and Salinger’s failure to cash in on the hype surrounding his seclusion should lay any contrary claims to rest), but that didn’t stop a steady stream of visitors from traveling up to New Hampshire to try to crack the code. What comes through most clearly in the stories of those who met him during his many years out of the public eye was how kind, if fragile, he was.
When a young journalist named Betty Eppes tried to meet him in 1980, he not only responded to her last-minute request for a meeting, he also showed up exactly on time, only to suffer a barrage of questions from her that ranged from insipid (“Is there going to be a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye?”) to inane (“Have you visited Indonesia?”). And yet, as Eppes admits, he managed to be gracious and patient with her: “[Salinger] said, You write. I write. He had come as one writer to another. Then he began asking me about my writing.”
His impromptu interview with Eppes ended in disaster when a man who had watched their conversation tried to grab his arm and shake his hand. Just as Sybil shouts when Seymour quickly kisses her foot in “Bananafish,” or Zooey shrinks from his mother’s touch, or Holden jumps off the couch at Mr. Antolini’s apartment when his former teacher tries to pat his head, Salinger recoiled from contact with a stranger. “Because of you,” he told Eppes, “this man I don’t know, have never even met, has spoken to me. . . Walked up and put his hand on my arm and spoke to me. I don’t like that.” Despite his anger, Salinger, amazingly, indulged Eppes with one final question. Are you really writing? she asked. “I am really writing,” he responded. “I love to write and I assure you I write regularly. I’m just not publishing. I write for myself.”But even if he weren’t a mensch, even if he were the piss-drinking, writer’s-blocked, Howard Hughes figure some of the portraits depict, he still doesn't deserve his Times obit. He didn't owe us anything, not even his writing, but he gave us that, generously, and that should be enough.
We don’t know yet if a treasure trove of new Salinger stories really waits to be released. When Franny and Zooey came out, Salinger wrote that he planned a whole series about the Glass family: “I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.” Maybe now that the man is removed from the crosshairs of our longing, his books can fully stand in for his absence as they could not when he was alive. Maybe now our half-century obsession with J. D. Salinger will end up being, as he described the story of Franny and Zooey, “a love story, pure and complicated.”
Christopher Cox is senior editor of The Paris Review.
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