The J.D. Salinger I Never Knew
In the second half of the 20th century, there were a number of celebrated novelists who happened to be Jewish: Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth among many others. J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger was also Jewish. Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t know that. His fame came as much for his refusal to be a celebrity as for what he wrote.
Salinger’s permanent literary stature comes from The Catcher in the Rye published in 1951. Holden Caulfield is the sort of smart-ass adolescent whose views have the universal perspective of youth observing mores and personalities with disdain.
I read that book in the late 1950s and especially appreciated it because I was attending a boarding school very much like Pencey Prep, from which at the start of the book, Holden is being expelled. My school was Cheshire Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut. Founded in 1794, it is the tenth oldest private school in the country, or so it was said. J.P. Morgan attended.
In my time we would say that Cheshire had boys “kicked out of the finest schools in the country.” The opening lines of the school song included, “Cheshire fields are proud and hoary” which pretty much brought the house down at every rendition.
The hardest I have ever laughed at a work of fiction came from a paragraph on page 23 of Catcher in the Rye. In it, a major donor to the school holds forth in chapel in a speech “that lasted about ten hours.” It continues, “the only good part of the speech came right in the middle. He was telling us what a swell guy he was…then all of a sudden, this guy sitting in front of me, Edgar Marsalla, laid this terrific fart. It was a very crude thing to do, in chapel and all, but it was also quite amusing. Old Marsalla. He damn near blew the roof off.”
Schoolboy humor to be sure, but this former schoolboy never forgot the pleasure it gave me reading it.
Despite the success of Catcher — which was still selling a reported 250,000 copies annually years after it was published — Salinger disappeared from authorial sight in the mid-1960s. The rumor was that he had permanent writer’s block. Up until the moment he died in 2010, the belief was that he was a hermetical sort of ogre who kept a college-aged live-in girlfriend among other female relationships. To the extent that people cared, Salinger became a model of self-inflicted obscurity.
At long last that is about to change. Matt Salinger, J.D.’s 59-year-old son, has started to unlock the vault. J.D.’s work is being digitized for the first time. Matt has said that he is working on the release of his father’s writing which was extensive over the decades. J.D. didn’t want the hassle of the limelight, Matt says, because his early experiences with fame were bad. And, I should add, the royalties of Catcher and the other books probably meant he was financially secure.
Of perhaps the greatest value now is the re-introduction of Salinger in an exhibit currently at the New York Public Library. It is for all intents and purposes a biography in photographs, memorabilia, manuscripts, letters, books and everyday objects: chief among them his reading glasses, pipes and Royal typewriter.
What is displayed, I suspect, has more resonance for me than it might for other people. It turns out that J.D. and I come from much the same background.
Jews in New York in the 1930s and 1940s were divided by boroughs rather than their commitment to faith. Brooklyn Jews — Flatbush et al. — prided themselves on their cozy and relatively simple lower-middle class life. Their offspring, if they live in Brooklyn at all now, tend to be in town houses in gentrified neighborhoods.
Salinger’s family, like my own, might be called Manhattan Jews — steps above Brooklyn Jews in income levels. As it happens, we both attended P.S. 166 on 89th street between Amsterdam and Columbus Ave, albeit a quarter century apart. In the exhibit is Salinger’s P.S. 166 pin and autograph book with his father’s advice, ”Be honorable in all your dealings with your fellow man. Daddy:”
Salinger was then enrolled at the McBurney School, a West Side private school a notch below the fancier schools attended by Jews in Riverdale — Horace Mann and Fieldston. His parents moved to Park Avenue and Salinger attended Valley Forge Military Academy. In a letter he wrote to a friend, he said:
“A boarding school is the first cut-off — the first real quittance from the regimented obediences of children and family.”
He attended NYU for a while, but his real education was in writing courses at Columbia’s College of General Studies. In 1937, Salinger went to Poland to learn more about Central Europe and his father’ kosher food import business.
He published his first story in Esquire in 1941. A complimentary letter on his early writing from Ernest Hemingway is in the exhibit. He served in the Army in World War II combat as an enlisted man and stayed on in intelligence after the war during the Nuremberg war crime trials. Photographs of Salinger in those years show a handsome man with a cigarette and a dash of the debonair.
The war apparently had a significant impact on his Jewish identify — although he was later drawn to Hindu practices of yoga and breathing exercises. His written comments in April 1993 alongside a letter someone sent the New York Times about the American response to the Holocaust during the war reads: “The U.S. can’t feel proud of its Holocaust role — the world looked away.”
The exhibit sheds considerable light on the years of his writing and publishing life. For a book person like myself, it was fascinating to see his book contracts with Little, Brown in the 1950, ’52 and ’63, despite the ommission of their financial terms. Also on display is the correspondence with his agents and editors, which is entirely consistent with the cranky temperament of many writers today. “Dear Dorothy” he writes about a proposed cover: “It is ugly and stupid.” Salinger wrote that the esteemed editor, Robert Giroux, was trying to be “palsy” and “makes [him] sick,” and insisted that in promotional material Little, Brown could not call him “America’s most popular 20th century writer.”
Yet, his most fervent gratitude was extended to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker who published much of Salinger’s writing, at least initially, “against the advice of other editors at the magazine.” He says of Shawn: “Editor, mentor and (heaven help me) closest friend — William Shawn Genus 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 artists and editors.”
Shawn replied: “Heaven has already helped me in giving me you.”
In 1965, when New York Magazine was still part of The New York Herald Tribune. Tom Wolfe wrote: “Tiny Mummies: The True Story of The Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” Salinger fired off a telegram to John Hay Whitney, proprietor of the newspaper calling the story, “inaccurate, sub-collegiate and …poisonous.”
After ending his life in the limelight, he still had a full life. Along the walls of the exhibit are wonderfully open-minded and affectionate letters to Matt at Andover, correspondence with old Army pals and school friends from Valley Forge. One letter asks Salinger for money to treat Parkinson’s disease which he provided.
A student at Salmon Hills School in Hollis, Maine wrote to invite Salinger to the graduation of six students in 1976 at what was still a one room schoolhouse. Salinger replied with thanks but said his presence would be a distraction.
All this was happening while Salinger was no longer allowing himself to be published.
Photographs of Salinger with his grandchildren are recognizable for the genre’s warmth and joy. Not there, are any pictures of Joyce Maynard, the Yale undergraduate who moved in with Salinger for months when she was about 19 and later a wrote a book about it. Salinger’s romantic relationships and three marriages presumably had their complexities, but seemed tame compared to those of Mailer, Bellow and Roth.
Reading Catcher now, some of the teenage jargon is dated, but the spirit is indelible. I like the J.D. Salinger I met in the New York Public Library. I’m pretty sure that I am not the only visitor coming away with that view. The exhibit will remain until early January.
