Between 1951 and 1963, J. D. Salinger transformed American literature. In one short novel, "The Catcher in the Rye," in "Nine Stories," in the novellas "Franny" and "Zooey, and in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: An Introduction," he startled readers with his authenticity, honesty and simplicity. Beat without being decadent, post-modern before the academics coined the word, and without their arch self-consciousness, Salinger revolutionized the short story form.
Salinger's quest in his fiction for purity made Holden Caulfield a lodestar of the "phony," hypocrisy, self-promotion and self-interest. He discovered the profound alienation at the heart of American prosperity. If Salinger was overly fond of Holden and the Glasses, the family at the center of his best stories, he offered simultaneously a definition of sentimentality: "We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it."
He perfected the literary strategy of the list, anatomizing the Glass medicine cabinet, decades before William Gass waxed on about this "new" technique. He created positive images of Jews before Bellow, and an intimacy with his reader no one achieved before him.
Fascinated by Zen Buddhism, Salinger propelled his readers out of the materialistic Fifties. He wrote anti-war stories (See "For Esme - with Love and Squalor") a decade before the Vietnam War. He revealed how profound stories could fascinatingly be made of the small: Buddy Glass trapped on a hot day when his brother Seymour doesn't show up for his own wedding.
His dialogue was profoundly invigorating: his characters talk themselves onto the page. "I am a dash man not a miler," Salinger admitted. The short story was his form and he quickly became the New Yorker's first great post-war voice.
Then, when he was in his mid-40s, in search of the "satori" Franny Glass discovers with the help of her brother Zooey, Salinger fled the "New York types." Bessie Glass points out that "you can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes." Her words evoke her son Seymour, no less than author Salinger. Seymour calls "cleverness ... my permanent affliction." At the close of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," he fires a bullet through his right temple.
Salinger himself escaped with his life, leaving forever behind wiseacre critics like Norman Mailer, who dismissed him as "no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," and Mary McCarthy, who asserted, preposterously, that "Salinger's world contains nothing but Salinger."
He settled in rural New Hampshire, his own personal Shangrila of frugality, never to publish again. Zooey himself had charted the map: "detachment, desirelessness. Cessation from all hankerings." Modestly, Salinger issued no messages from the front.
It was predictable that Salinger's determination to choose exile would excite curiosity seekers. His commitment to solitude and privacy were tested most predictably by English biographer Ian Hamilton, who hunted him to the ground, assuming arrogantly that Salinger would yield to the blandishments of Oxford.
He was wrong. Salinger surfaced to protect the copyrights of his unpublished letters, challenging the very notion of "fair use" for biographers to come, and forcing Hamilton to publish a pale, self-serving book about his trying to write a book about Salinger ("In Search Of J. D. Salinger," 1988).
A persistent Salinger theme had been the Wordsworthian delusion that in youth lies wisdom. Unschooled in grasping opportunism, the legacy of adults, the children in Salinger are the people he loves best. The little girl Sybil in "Bananafish," the arch of whose foot Seymour kisses, generously noble Phoebe, wise sister of Holden in "The Catcher in the Rye," and the adorable Esme are all free of the taint of adult corruption.
In 1972, the then 53-year-old Salinger spotted the cover photograph in the New York Times magazine of an 18-year-old Yale freshman named Joyce Maynard, who had written a piece called "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life." She wore the same oversized watch Salinger placed on Esme's wrist, and he wrote her a fan letter.
Maynard presumed to speak for her generation. She also looked like a child, an effect embellished by an ambitious mother who for Maynard's first visit to Salinger, tarted her up in a child's frock complete with the letters of the alphabet and purple Mary Janes, as if she were Lolita fitted out to tempt a pedophile.
Too long absent from the landscape of literary opportunism, Salinger failed to perceive that Maynard has been a skilled and ruthless self-promoter from the age of 15 converting her life into prose she marketed with demonic energy. Mistaking youth for innocence and purity, Salinger told Maynard she "could be a real writer."
Their nine-month "affair" is now chronicled in Maynard's tawdry memoir "At Home in the World" (Picador, 347 pages $25), bringing Salinger's worst nightmare to life. Maynard shines high beams on Salinger the man: in bed, consoling a young woman whose vaginal muscles reject him; forcing a weeping Maynard to submit to another form of sexual contact; eating raw fruits and vegetables, nuts and undercooked lamb patties; ordering clothes from the L. L. Bean catalogue. He teaches her how to put her finger down her throat to vomit when she eats fattening food. Accompanying this "kiss and tell" are neither insight nor illumination.
Salinger found himself harboring not an innocent young woman free of "wanting," but a precocious, voracious seeker of fame and fortune, writing, in fact, her first memoir.
Long patches of dialogue suggest she was making notes all along. None too soon, Salinger dismissed Maynard as a "foolish little girl." Exasperated, blaming himself, "How did I let this happen? What have I brought on myself?" he cried out in pain: "Do you have any idea of how weary I have grown of you?
Years later, Maynard, in search of an ending for her book, suddenly shows up at Salinger's door, the barbarian once more within the gates.
A woman in her 40s, Maynard can only be disingenuous as she asks Salinger her absurdly narcissistic question: "What was my purpose in your life?" The premise that she meant anything to Salinger has long been rejected by the reader along with the idea that since Maynard reveals much against herself, her book has redeeming value.
Still a stranger to tact, grace or compassion, Maynard stands there memorizing Salinger's indignation. Calling him the first man she "loved," even as her book reveals that she was too immature to know what the word meant, that she wasn't even physically capable of womanhood, Maynard elicits these words from a now 78-year-old, white haired and "shrunken," Salinger: "I didn't exploit you! I don't even know you."
The public splash of this self-serving book will soon pass. That much of it may in fact be "phony" is revealed in Maynard's confidently calling "O. K. Harris" a "prominent gallery owner." Brash assertion masks ignorance; in fact there was no "O. K. Harris" - this was Ivan Karp's gallery. Perhaps other of Maynard's revelations may be untrue.
Despite its rich specificity, Salinger's work weathers well the test of time. And Salinger was wrong about his readers being "fair weather friends;" 250,000 copies of "The Catcher in the Rye" sell each year. Generations remember Holden and the Glass stories fondly and vividly, not least those who read Salinger when the works appeared, when it was a thrill and a deliverance to discover in The New Yorker a Salinger story!
If Maynard's book leads people to rediscover the prose of their old friend, it may turn out, paradoxically, to be no small salutary thing.
Joan Mellen teaches in the creative writing program at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of 13 books, most recently "Hellman and Hammett."
Pub Date: 9/20/98