[Deathwatch] J. D. Salinger, author, 91

[Notification of departing celebrities]

January 29, 2010


  J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91

By CHARLES McGRATH

J. D. Salinger 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/j_d_salinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
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, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be 
famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had 
lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Mr. Salinger's literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, 
announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. "Despite having 
broken his hip in May," the agency said, "his health had been excellent 
until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain 
before or at the time of his death."

Mr. Salinger's literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously 
influential body of published work: the novel "The Catcher in the Rye," 
the collection "Nine Stories" and two compilations, each with two long 
stories about the fictional Glass family: "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise 
High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction."

"Catcher" was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly 
echoing Mark Twain 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/samuel_langhorne_clemens/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
struck a brash new note in American literature: "If you really want to 
hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I 
was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were 
occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/david_copperfield/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know 
the truth."

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what 
to make of it, "Catcher" became an almost immediate best seller, and its 
narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled 
from prep school, became America's best-known literary truant since 
Huckleberry Finn.

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden's two favorite 
expressions are "phony" and "goddam"), its sympathetic understanding of 
adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust 
of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and 
quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading 
"Catcher" used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important 
as getting your learner's permit.

The novel's allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden's 
preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 
250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/mark_david_chapman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, 
who killed John Lennon 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/john_lennon/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the 
pages of "The Catcher in the Rye." In 1974 Philip Roth 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/philip_roth/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
wrote, "The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger 
indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the 
times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle 
of significance is going on today between self and culture."

Many critics were more admiring of "Nine Stories," which came out in 
1953 and helped shape writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/u/john_updike/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
and Harold Brodkey 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/harold_brodkey/index.html?inline=nyt-per>. 
The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their 
pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form 
of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech 
as people actually spoke it) and the way they demolished whatever was 
left of the traditional architecture of the short story --- the old 
structure of beginning, middle, end --- for an architecture of emotion, 
in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. 
Updike said he admired "that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way 
they don't snap shut."

Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony --- of 
validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, 
what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote 
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/salinger-raise.html> in 
The New York Times in 1963, "Rarely if ever in literary history has a 
handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, 
denunciation, mystification and interpretation."

As a young man Mr. Salinger yearned ardently for just this kind of 
attention. He bragged in college about his literary talent and 
ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of 
Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He 
told the editors of Saturday Review that he was "good and sick" of 
seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of "The Catcher in the Rye" and 
demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered his 
agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on 
East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and 
moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish. He seemed 
to be fulfilling Holden's desire to build himself "a little cabin 
somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life," 
away from "any goddam stupid conversation with anybody."

He seldom left, except occasionally to vacation in Florida or to visit 
William Shawn, the almost equally reclusive former editor of The New 
Yorker 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/the_new_yorker/index.html?inline=nyt-org>. 
Avoiding Mr. Shawn's usual (and very public) table at the Algonquin 
Hotel, they would meet under the clock at the old Biltmore Hotel, the 
rendezvous for generations of prep-school and college students.

After Mr. Salinger moved to New Hampshire his publications slowed to a 
trickle and soon stopped completely. "Franny and Zooey" and "Raise High 
the Roof Beam," both collections of material previously published in The 
New Yorker, came out in 1961 and 1963, and the last work of Mr. 
Salinger's to appear in print was "Hapworth 16, 1924," a 25,000-word 
story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.

In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in 
Alexandria, Va., bring out "Hapworth" in book form, but he backed out of 
the deal at the last minute. He never collected the rest of his stories 
or allowed any of them to be reprinted in textbooks or anthologies. One 
story, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," was turned into "My Foolish 
Heart," a movie so bad that Mr. Salinger was never tempted to sell film 
rights again.

Befriended, Then Betrayed

In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one 
of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the 
high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The 
article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. 
Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built 
a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.

He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/salinger-speaks.html> 
when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected 
stories, he told a reporter from The Times: "There is a marvelous peace 
in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible 
invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write 
just for myself and my own pleasure."

And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, 
especially after his appearance on the cover of Time 
<http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19610915,00.html> in 1961. For 
years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines 
to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young 
man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but 
now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, 
like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy 
avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in 
embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up 
around him.

Depending on one's point of view, he was either a crackpot or the 
American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent 
work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and 
for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of "Birdy," was 
rumored to be Mr. Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned 
out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du 
Aime.

In 1984 the British literary critic Ian Hamilton approached Mr. Salinger 
with the notion of writing his biography. Not surprisingly, Mr. Salinger 
turned him down, saying he had "borne all the exploitation and loss of 
privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime." Mr. Hamilton went 
ahead anyway, and in 1986, Mr. Salinger took him to court to prevent the 
use of quotations and paraphrases from unpublished letters. The case 
went all the way to the Supreme Court 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
and to the surprise of many, Mr. Salinger eventually won, though not 
without some cost to his cherished privacy. (In June 2009 he also sued 
Fredrik Colting, the Swedish author and publisher of a novel said to be 
a sequel to "The Catcher in the Rye." In July a federal judge 
indefinitely enjoined publication of the book.)

Mr. Salinger's privacy was further punctured in 1998 and again in 2000 
with the publication of memoirs by, first, Joyce Maynard 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/joyce_maynard/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
--- with whom he had a 10-month affair in 1973, when Ms. Maynard was a 
college freshman --- and then his daughter, Margaret. Some critics 
complained that both women were trying to exploit and profit from their 
history with Mr. Salinger, and Mr. Salinger's son, Matthew, wrote in a 
letter to The New York Observer 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_observer/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
that his sister had "a troubled mind," and that he didn't recognize the 
man portrayed in her account. Both books nevertheless added a creepy, 
Howard Hughesish element to the Salinger legend.

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, Ms. Maynard 
wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his 
diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for dinner). 
Ms. Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and 
abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added 
a long list of other enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, 
Christian Science, Scientology 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/church_of_scientology/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat 
for hours in an orgone box.

But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the 
absence of real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn't written a word 
for years. Or, like the character in the Stanley Kubrick 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/stanley_kubrick/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
film "The Shining," he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or 
like Gogol 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/nikolai_gogol/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all. 
Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away 
in a safe, though she had never seen them.

Early Life

Jerome David Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year's Day, 1919, the 
second of two children. His sister, Doris, who died in 2001, was for 
many years a buyer in the dress department at Bloomingdale's. Like the 
Glasses, the Salinger children were the product of a mixed marriage. 
Their father, Sol, was a Jew, the son of a rabbi, but sufficiently 
assimilated that he made his living importing both cheese and ham. Their 
mother, Marie Jillisch, was of Irish descent, born in Scotland, but 
changed her first name to Miriam to appease her in-laws. The family was 
living in Harlem when Mr. Salinger was born, but then, as Sol Salinger's 
business prospered, moved to West 82nd Street and then to Park Avenue.

Never much of a student, Mr. Salinger, then known as Sonny, attended the 
progressive McBurney School on the Upper West Side. (He told the 
admissions office his interests were dramatics and tropical fish.) But 
he flunked out after two years and in 1934 was packed off to Valley 
Forge Military Academy, in Wayne, Pa., which became the model for 
Holden's Pencey Prep. Like Holden, Mr. Salinger was the manager of the 
school fencing team, and he also became the literary editor of the 
school yearbook, Crossed Swords, and wrote a school song that was either 
a heartfelt pastiche of 19th-century sentiment or else a masterpiece of 
irony:

Hide not thy tears on this last day

Your sorrow has no shame;

To march no more midst lines of gray;

No longer play the game.

Four years have passed in joyful ways --- Wouldst stay those old times dear?

Then cherish now these fleeting days,

The few while you are here.

In 1937, after a couple of unenthusiastic weeks at New York University 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
Mr. Salinger traveled with his father to Austria and Poland, where the 
father's plan was for him to learn the ham business. Deciding that 
wasn't for him, he returned to America and drifted through a term or so 
at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. Fellow students remember him 
striding around campus in a black chesterfield with velvet collar and 
announcing that he was going to write the Great American Novel.

Mr. Salinger's most sustained exposure to higher education was an 
evening class he took at Columbia in 1939, taught by Whit Burnett, and 
under Mr. Burnett's tutelage he managed to sell a story, "The Young 
Folks," to Story magazine. He subsequently sold stories to Esquire, 
Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post --- formulaic work that gave 
little hint of real originality.

In 1941, after several rejections, Mr. Salinger finally cracked The New 
Yorker, the ultimate goal of any aspiring writer back then, with a 
story, "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," that was an early sketch of what 
became a scene in "The Catcher in the Rye." But the magazine then had 
second thoughts, apparently worried about seeming to encourage young 
people to run away from school, and held the story for five years --- an 
eternity even for The New Yorker --- before finally publishing it in 
1946, buried in the back of an issue.

Meanwhile Mr. Salinger had been drafted. He served with the 
Counter-Intelligence Corps of the Fourth Infantry Division, whose job 
was to interview Nazi deserters and sympathizers, and was stationed for 
a while in Tiverton, Devon, the setting of "For Esmé --- with Love and 
Squalor," probably the most deeply felt of the "Nine Stories." On June 
6, 1944, he landed at Utah Beach, and he later saw action during the 
Battle of the Bulge.

In 1945 he was hospitalized for "battle fatigue" --- often a euphemism 
for a breakdown --- and after recovering he stayed on in Europe past the 
end of the war, chasing Nazi functionaries. He married a German woman, 
very briefly --- a doctor about whom biographers have been able to 
discover very little. Her name was Sylvia, Margaret Salinger said, but 
Mr. Salinger always called her Saliva.

A Different Kind of Writer

Back in New York, Mr. Salinger moved into his parents' apartment and, 
having never stopped writing, even during the war, resumed his career. 
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish," austere, mysterious and Mr. Salinger's 
most famous and still most discussed story, appeared in The New Yorker 
in 1948 and suggested, not wrongly, that he had become a very different 
kind of writer. And like so many writers he eventually found in The New 
Yorker not just an outlet but a kind of home and developed a close 
relationship with the magazine's editor, William Shawn, himself famously 
shy and agoraphobic --- a kindred spirit. In 1961 Mr. Salinger dedicated 
"Franny and Zooey" to Shawn, writing, "I urge my editor, mentor and 
(heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New 
Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of 
the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great 
artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book."

As a young writer Mr. Salinger was something of a ladies' man and dated, 
among others, Oona O'Neill, the daughter of Eugene O'Neill 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/eugene_oneill/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
and the future wife of Charlie Chaplin 
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/12334/Charles-Chaplin?inline=nyt-per>. 
In 1953 he met Claire Douglas, the daughter of the British art critic 
Robert Langdon Douglas, who was then a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore 
who in many ways resembled Franny Glass (or vice versa); they were 
married two years later. (Ms. Douglas had married and divorced in the 
meantime.) Margaret was born in 1955, and Matthew, now an actor and film 
producer, was born in 1960. But the marriage soon turned distant and 
isolating, and in 1966, Ms. Douglas sued for divorce, claiming that "a 
continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and 
endanger her reason."

The affair with Ms. Maynard, then a Yale 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/y/yale_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
freshman, began in 1972, after Mr. Salinger read an article she had 
written for The New York Times Magazine titled "An 18-Year-Old Looks 
Back on Life." 
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/maynard-mag.html> They 
moved in together but broke up abruptly after 10 months when Mr. 
Salinger said he had no desire for more children. For a while in the 
'80s Mr. Salinger was involved with the actress Elaine Joyce, and late 
in that decade he married Colleen O'Neill, a nurse, who is considerably 
younger than he is. Not much is known about the marriage because Ms. 
O'Neill embraced her husband's code of seclusion.

Besides his son, Matthew, Mr. Salinger is survived by Ms. O'Neill and 
his daughter, Margaret, as well as three grandsons. His literary agents 
said in a statement that "in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising 
desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and 
the family asks that people's respect for him, his work and his privacy 
be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time."

"Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it," the 
statement said. "His body is gone but the family hopes that he is still 
with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, 
personal friends or fictional characters."

As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently 
been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of 
notebooks devoted to the family. In Mr. Salinger's fiction the Glasses 
first turn up in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which Seymour, the 
oldest son and family favorite, kills himself during his honeymoon. 
Characters who turn out in retrospect to have been Glasses appear 
glancingly in "Nine Stories," but the family saga really begins to be 
elaborated upon in "Franny and Zooey," "Raise High the Roof Beam" and 
"Hapworth," the long short story, which is ostensibly a letter written 
by Seymour from camp when he is just 7 years old but already reading 
several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, wife of the camp owner.

Readers also began to learn about the parents, Les and Bessie, 
long-suffering ex-vaudevillians, and Seymour's siblings Franny, Zooey, 
Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo; about the Glasses' Upper West Side 
apartment; about the radio quiz show on which all the children appeared. 
Seldom has a fictional family been so lovingly or richly imagined.

Too lovingly, some critics complained. With the publication of "Franny 
and Zooey" even staunch Salinger admirers began to break ranks. John 
Updike wrote 
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/salinger-franny01.html> 
in The Times Book Review: "Salinger loves the Glasses more than God 
loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a 
hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic 
moderation." Other readers hated the growing streak of Eastern mysticism 
in the saga, as Seymour evolved, in successive retellings, from a 
suicidal young man into a genius, a sage, even a saint of sorts.

But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/janet_malcolm/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, 
just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about 
Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm contended, 
were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, 
by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the 
whole point, Ms. Malcolm wrote, and it said as much about the world as 
about the kind of people who failed to get along there.


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