THE ETHICIST
The topic of ethics isn’t probably the first thing that comes to mind when talking about author J. D. Salinger. His treatment of women--particularly young, inexperienced, often naïve and vulnerable women--is suspect. His deliberate withdrawal from the public's eye following the phenomenal success of his only published novel is questionable. His preoccupation with his characters' interpretations of right and wrong is often convoluted and blurred.
But, there is little doubt that the mystery behind the man who perfected the use of fiction's first-person monologue is anything but clouded. In fact, it’s an open book.
Coming from an upper middle-class family, Salinger could have chosen the easy way, the cushy way, through life. Instead, he elected to confront it on his own terms--first, as a college student who dared to dream large and then as a World War II veteran who dared to risk everything defending his country. His continual search for the right path to follow led him from Zen Buddhism to macrobiotics while he ignored societal approval for doing the right thing. For him.
If anything, Salinger remained true to himself and his personal beliefs throughout his lifetime, regardless of how they might have conflicted with the universe engulfing him. And, he imbued his characters, as flawed and marred by as many weaknesses as Salinger must have recognized in himself, with an inner strength and conscience that made them seek to do the right, the proper, the ethical thing. Even when they failed. That’s not only the character of Holden Caulfield we're talking about here; it’s J. D. Salinger.
When a Swedish writer announced plans for the U.S. publication of an unauthorized sequel to Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, the American author took him to court. The reason, even though a book entitled Sixty Years Later: Coming through the Rye would have spurred sales of Salinger's classic, was simple: Because it was infringement, and it was wrong. A U.S. District Court judge agreed with him. And plans for U.S. publication were shut down.
It was a small victory for Salinger and one of massive proportions for all writers everywhere. And just the kind of thing Salinger fought for while battling personal demons for his entire life.
Because doing so was right.
THE AUTHOR
Jerome David Salinger was born on New Year's Day 1919. Despite publishing only one novel and several short-story collections in his lifetime, he remains one of America’s most influential, if elusive, writers. His novel and best-known work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is the saga of a rebellious teenage schoolboy and his out-of-the-ordinary experiences in New York.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. - Holden Caulfied
Reared in a plush, Park Avenue brownstone in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, Salinger was the son of a Scotch-Irish, Roman-Catholic mother and a Jewish father who made a minor fortune importing Kosher cheese.
In 1934, after several restless years in prep school, young Salinger entered Valley Forge Military Academy where he remained for two years. His classmates recalled him for his sarcastic, sharp wit.
Three years later, at eighteen, Salinger left the states for a five-month stay in Europe before returning home to further his studies at Pennsylvania liberal arts college, Ursinus, and at New York University. In 1939, he took a class in short story writing at Columbia University under Whit Burnett, founder-editor of Story magazine, and discovered a creative side to his nature he never knew existed.
In 1942, Salinger met and began dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of legendary playwright Eugene O'Neill. Even at sixteen, the spotlight shone on Oona so brightly that she was constantly surrounded by fawning men. She learned well how to use her magnetic personality and stark beauty to attract and hold the interest of them all—not the least of whom was J. D. Salinger.
Named debutante of the year when she was seventeen, Oona often posed for photographs at The Stork Club, clutching a glass of milk—what else? Before long, she and Salinger professed their love for one another. Although both were looking for something different in a potential mate, both felt theirs was the genuine deal. For Salinger, Oona’s innocence and beauty charmed him, along with the scars of a broken childhood (her father was a notorious alcoholic). Salinger was attracted to people who were broken, and Oona fit the bill. With a distant father who, like Salinger, thought more highly of his characters than his own children, Oona grew up without the father-figure she needed and compensated for that by dating a succession of older, accomplished men to find one who could replace daddy. For Oona, Salinger’s writing drew her in. His rising career made him a promising candidate to fill the role that she was looking for in a man.
Despite her self-absorption (he once told a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in love with little Oona"), he was devoted to her, calling her often and writing her long letters every day. She was the woman of his dreams, outgoing and flirtatious, intelligent, worldly, and mysterious, and he’d never been happier.
But, their love affair was interrupted when Salinger was drafted and shipped off to war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The relationship continued for a while through letters, but to Salinger’s dismay and debilitating confusion, the relationship began to fade. While Salinger was still crazy about Oona and continued writing her, she had reached the decision that he wasn’t the man she was looking for to take her father’s place: He was too much like dad. She felt she needed someone older and more famous to replace him, and she found him in Charlie Chaplin, the most esteemed actor and film director of the day. Chaplin was everything that Salinger wasn’t: outgoing, boisterous, and awash in fame and fortune. Eventually Oona stopped replying to Salinger’s letters. Once Salinger found out about her marriage to Chaplin, he spiraled out of control and never did recover. Just as Oona went through a progression of men to replace her father, Salinger went through a succession of women to replace her.
Possibly because of his broken heart, Salinger threw himself into his work with a vengeance. He saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. He was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the war. The conflagration was a series of vicious engagements fought from September 19 to mid-December 1944 between American and German forces along the Western Front. It was the longest battle of the war on German soil and the most protracted single battle the U.S. Army has ever fought. Salinger was later singled out as being “extraordinarily brave” by his comrades.
Following Normandy, Salinger had an opportunity to meet with Ernest Hemingway, who at the time was a war correspondent stationed in Paris. He was impressed by Hemingway's modesty, finding him far softer than his public persona. Hemingway, in turn, was impressed by Salinger's writing. He later remarked, "Jesus, he has a helluva talent." The two corresponded for several years.
As the war with Germany wound down, Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, where he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war. In April 1945, he entered Kaufering IV concentration camp, an auxiliary camp of Dachau. Like so many soldiers who encountered the brutality of the camps, Salinger never spoke directly of his experiences, and no one knows for sure what his intelligence duties demanded of him. But his division was in charge of liberating the sub-camps of Dachau that included Horgau-Pfersee, Aalen, Ellwagen, Haunstetten, Turkenfald, and Wolfrathausen.
Serving in five campaigns eventually took its toll on the young soldier. He was hospitalized for several weeks for combat stress reaction following Germany’s defeat. He later confided to his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live." His biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences for several short stories, including "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, publishing stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. Although he allegedly considered Hemingway and Steinbeck second-rate writers, he often praised Herman Melville, drawn, no doubt, to that author’s most effective use of the same first-person monologue that appealed to Salinger.
In 1945, Salinger met, briefly courted, and married a French doctor named Sylvia Welter. He brought her to the United States in April 1946. But her German heritage didn’t sit well with Salinger’s Jewish family, and when rumors of her wartime involvement with the Gestapo surfaced, Salinger quickly soured on their relationship. She reportedly returned to Germany after her husband had left a one-way airline ticket on her breakfast plate.
In 1948, Salinger introduced the world to Seymour Glass in A Perfect Day for Bananafish. If the author couldn’t have the perfect woman to love, cherish, and grow old with, he would manufacture one. Bananafish was the earliest reference to the Glass family, whose legacy would form the main body of Salinger’s writings throughout his life. The Glass cycle continued in the collections, Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, andSeymour: An Introduction (1963). Buddy Glass narrates several of the tales.
Salinger continued publishing his stories throughout the forties, most of them in TheNew Yorker. In 1949, Harcourt, Brace & Co. editor Robert Giroux wrote him to ask if he wanted to publish a collection. Giroux didn't hear back from Salinger for months, and then, one day, the writer walked into his office. According to Giroux: "A tall, sad-looking young man with a long face and deep-set black eyes walked in, saying, 'It's not my stories that should be published first, but the novel I'm working on ... about this kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.'"
Giroux admitted he would have loved to publish the work. But after reviewing the book, a senior editor said he thought the kid in the book seemed too "unhinged"; so, Salinger took The Catcher in the Rye to Little, Brown and Company, and the rest, as they say, is history. The novel became an instant Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
Although early reviews of the work were mixed, most critics considered it brilliant. The story tells of 16-year old Holden Caulfield (a thinly disguised Salinger in his teens) who runs away from school to New York during his Christmas break. There, he hopes to find himself and lose his virginity.
After spending an evening nightclubbing, he has an unsuccessful encounter with a prostitute. Later, a former schoolteacher makes homosexual advances toward him, and the boy confides in his sister about his plans to leave home. Filled with quirky humor in the tradition of Mark Twain's most memorable works, the book shows that Caulfield views life around him as shallow and meaningless as he continues his search for sincerity and significance:
What gets me about D. B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That's what I can't understand. It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don't see how D. B. could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that. I mean, for instance, I don't see how he could like a phony like that and still like that one by Ring Lardner, or that other one he's so crazy about, The Great Gatsby. D. B. got sore when I said that, and said I was too young and all to appreciate it, but I don't think so. I told him I liked Ring Lardner and The Great Gatsby and all. I did, too. I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me. Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.
At the height of his popularity in 1954, the 36-year-old Salinger met 19-year-old Radcliffe student Claire Douglas at a party. She was the daughter of British art critic Robert Langton Douglas. Salinger insisted she drop out of school and live with him, only four months short of graduation. She did so, and Salinger recreated some events from their relationship in the story "Franny," published in January 1955.
The following February, Salinger and Claire married. A year later, Claire gave birth to a daughter, Margaret. Writing in her memoir Dream Catcher that her parents would not have married, nor would she have been born, but for her father's Hindi readings promising enlightenment to those following the path of the "householder," or married person with children. After their marriage, Salinger and Claire were initiated into the path of Kriya yoga in a small neighborhood Hindu temple in Washington, D.C.
As Salinger turned increasingly toward his work and away from his family, Claire grew more frustrated. She had difficulty dealing with her husband's revolving-door policy toward religion. Despite her having embraced Kriya partly to satisfy her husband, Salinger left Cornish to work on a story "for several weeks only to return with the piece he was supposed to be finishing all undone or destroyed and some new 'ism' we had to follow." Claire believed "it was to cover the fact that Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn't face the quality of, or couldn't face publishing, what he had created."
In truth, Douglas was no longer the young, innocent girl that Salinger had fallen in love with, and the two drifted further apart. He spent more time with his created family, the Glasses, than with his actual one. By the time the couple had their second baby, Matthew, Salinger had moved out of the house and into a bunker on one side of their property. He barely spoke to his family, who weren’t allowed to enter the bunker so as to not disturb his work. Eventually, Claire couldn’t take the strain, and the couple divorced in September 1966.
After abandoning yoga, Salinger tried Dianetics (the forerunner of Scientology), even meeting founder L. Ron Hubbard, but the author soon grew disenchanted with the shallowness of the "religion" and went on to sample a number of other spiritual, medical, and nutritional belief systems, including Christian Science, Sufism, Taoism, Edgar Cayce, homeopathy, acupuncture, macrobiotics, and Vedanta Hinduism, which would remain a constant in the author’s search for meaning and spirituality throughout his life.
In 1972, at 53, Salinger had a relationship with 18-year-old Yale freshman Joyce Maynard after seeing her photo on a magazine cover. Joyce was an accomplished writer for Seventeen magazine. Salinger wrote her, warning about the difficulties in dealing with fame. After numerous additional exchanges, she moved in with him. She dropped out of Yale that fall and spent ten months as a guest in Salinger's home before, she claims, he broke off the relationship and sent her away, refusing to take her back. In her autobiography, Joyce claims Salinger began relationships with several other young women while exchanging letters. One of them was his last wife, a nurse who was already engaged to be married to someone else when she met the author.
In a 2021 Vanity Fair article, Joyce wrote, "I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life." In the few years that followed, “I heard from well over a dozen women who had a similar set of treasured letters from Salinger in their possession, written to them when they were teenagers. It appeared that in the case of one girl, Salinger was writing letters to her while I sat in the next room, believing he was my soul mate and partner for life."
In 1974, the publicity-shy author broke with tradition, granting an interview to a reporter from the New York Times. "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing …" he said. "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Years later, Joyce said Salinger considered publication "a damned interruption" to his creativity.
In the 1980s, Salinger became romantically involved with television actress Elaine Joyce while she was appearing on shows such as Fantasy Island, Magnum PI, Simon and Simon, and Murder She Wrote. As their relationship cooled, Salinger began seeing Colleen O'Neill, a nurse and quilt-maker. The two were secretly married sometime around 1988. Forty years younger than he, Colleen later told Salinger's daughter, Margaret, that the couple tried conceiving a child together but failed.
Interestingly, the world might never have heard of Colleen O’Neill except that, in 1992, fire struck the Salinger home. Colleen was the one who called it in, inadvertently exposing Salinger’s private life to the public. When reporters saw the perfect opportunity to corner the writer for an interview, they flocked to the scene. But Salinger, ever on his guard, managed to escape both fire and reporters unscathed. An article in the New York Times mused, "Not even a fire that consumed at least half his home on Tuesday could smoke out the reclusive J. D. Salinger, author of the classic novel of adolescent rebellion, The Catcher in the Rye. Mr. Salinger is almost equally famous for having elevated privacy to an art form."
In 1999, a quarter-century after their relationship ended, Joyce Maynard auctioned off a series of letters Salinger had written to her. Her memoir, At Home in the World, was published the same year. In the ensuing controversy over the book, Joyce claimed that she was forced for financial reasons to auction off the letters. Software developer Peter Norton bought them for $156,500 and announced that he would return them to Salinger. A rare photograph of Salinger and Margaret as a child adorns the book's cover.
A year later, Margaret published her own Salingeresque version of life with father in Dream Catcher: A Memoir. In it, she describes the harrowing control Salinger had over her mother and dispels many of the myths surrounding the author, one of which was that post-traumatic stress disorder left Salinger psychologically scarred for life. Margaret Salinger admitted that "the few men who lived through Bloody Mortain, a battle in which her father fought, emerged unscathed. But, she pointed out, her father was proud of his service record, and he retained his military haircut and jacket, driving around town in an old Jeep.
Both of Salinger's women—mother and daughter—confirmed the author as a film buff. Margaret claimed her father's favorite flicks included Gigi (1958), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The 39 Steps (1935), which was Salinger character Phoebe's favorite movie in The Catcher in the Rye, and the comedies of W.C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers. Longtime friend Lillian Ross, a staff writer for The New Yorker, claimed after the author's death, "Salinger loved movies … loved Anne Bancroft, hated Audrey Hepburn, and said that he had seen Grand Illusion ten times."
A few weeks after Dream Catcher was published, Margaret's brother Matt discredited the memoir in a letter to The New York Observer, disparaging his sister's "gothic tales of our supposed childhood."
"I can't say with any authority that she is consciously making anything up," he wrote. "I just know that I grew up in a very different house, with two very different parents from those my sister describes."
J. D. Salinger died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire on January 27, 2010. He was 91, nearly crippled, and virtually deaf. His literary representative told the New York Times that the author had broken his hip the previous May but that "his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year." Salinger's third wife and widow, Colleen O'Neill, and his son began preparing the author’s work for posthumous publication, announcing in 2019 that "all of what he wrote will at some point be shared." But, they concluded, it was a complex job, and the work wasn't yet ready for unveiling.
Salinger’s daughter confirmed what everyone had long suspected. Additional works did indeed exist. Her father used a detailed filing system for his unpublished manuscripts: "A red mark,” Margaret wrote, “meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant publish but edit first, and so on." A neighbor said that Salinger once told him he had written fifteen unpublished novels. And who’s to say he didn’t?
In all, the “reclusive” Salinger had married three times and had numerous romantic liaisons. He had three grandchildren whom he saw periodically, went into New York City for dinner with friends, participated in community affairs, attended church suppers and town meetings, and shopped at Price Chopper. So, was he a recluse or wasn’t he? Or, perhaps, was he merely averse to inviting public scrutiny of his life?
The man who turned his back on the public spotlight had spent his entire adult existence looking for a replacement for his first and only true love. It seems more than a coincidence that the last woman in Salinger’s life bore the same last name as the first woman he’d ever loved and never forgotten: O’Neill. Salinger spent his life looking for a replacement for his beloved Oona, and he finally found her in the waning years of his life in a devoted and loving
For complimentary review copies of D. J. Herda’s latest books, check out his Website at www.djherda.org, as well as his most recent publisher, Elektra Press. And happy reading!