Plumbing Salinger for the Depths of Salinger

I have a perverse tendency to like authors not for their best-known books, but for the other ones. I appreciated Catch-22, but it’s Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold and God Knows that make me fall out of my chair laughing and to which I turn again and again. I enjoyed The Adventures of Huck Finn, but I think The Mysterious Stranger is the more meaningful, and superior, work. And while I, like damn near every other American adolescent since 1951, read The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s Glass Family stories mean infinitely more to me. I don’t care if I never read Catcher again. I didn’t particularly enjoy it the first time. I thought Holden was a self-important, insufferably condescending little jerkoff. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories off the shelf.

J.D. Salinger is on my mind lately, I suppose, because of “Salinger,” the recent documentary by Shane Salerno and David Shields, and its bombshell revelation that there are five more complete books, which will be published over a period of years beginning in 2015. Which revelation, by the way, is the only reason to see it. Now that I’ve given away the spoiler, you can avoid it. It’s a gruesome piece of work that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about ol’ Jerry from the kiss-n-tell “memoir”, At Home in the World, by the profoundly unprofound and talentless Joyce Maynard, with whom he shacked up for a few months, and Dream Catcher, his daughter Margaret’s more interesting, but still lousy, memoir.  

Salinger, undoubtedly thinking about himself. 

Salinger fans tend to fall into one of two camps. One faction is made up of the kind of obsessive stalker-freaks in whom Dylan fans will see analogs to A.J. Weberman: the deeply disturbed cultist types who haunted the environs of Cornish, NH, where he holed up for the last five or six decades of his life, skulking around town hoping to go through his garbage, or talk to him and see if some kind of contact from The Master couldn’t heal their own tormented psyches, or just to get a glimpse of the guy.

The other group, less creepy but more irritating, is constituted by his self-appointed guardians, the ones who bellow, “JUST LEAVE HIM ALONE” whenever a new article or biography or reminiscence appears because, after all, that’s what he wanted. They swell up in righteous indignation when anyone attempts to shed a little more light on him. They regard curiosity about him as an incursion on his own legendary privacy. I’m not a fan of Margaret Salinger’s Dream Catcher, but the chorus of Salinger fans acting like her writing about what is, after all, her own life and who was, after all, her own father was some kind of unforgivable betrayal of the guy struck me as almost psychotic. She might be a lousy writer, but she’s no Judas.

I don’t belong to either of these camps. I like some of his stuff quite a bit, I think he’s an important American writer, and I, for one, would like to know more about him. Salinger isn’t sacred (nothing is, really), and his life ought to be as fair game as anyone else’s. What puzzles me is why the stuff we do have about him—the biographies, the memoirs, and now the documentary and its accompanying volume—is so uniformly shitty. Both his memoirists sucked--Joyce Maynard cashed in on him, and his daughter might very well be bonkers. The biographies are largely dreck. Kenneth Slawenski's is the best, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, glosses over the unpleasant bits, and is generally unsatisfying. Why hasn’t anyone serious—a first-rate academic, critic, or biographer—someone who actually knows what he or she is doing, and who could actually give us some genuine insight into the guy—tackled him yet??

Because somebody damn well should. All of us who read and appreciate him would benefit from a good critical account of his life and work. His long-term significance remains to be seen. Maybe he’ll endure, maybe he won’t. I have my doubts. But his significance to the millions of people for whom Catcher resonated is undeniable. It’s not that he owes us anything. It’s that it’s natural for people to be curious about someone who means as much as he does to so many people, and, like it or not, as a major 20^th century American writer, he’s going to end up under the critical and biographical microscope no less than any other writer or public figure of such significance. So it might as well be someone good who does it.

Some of Salinger's more outre weirdnesses--his thing for young girls, his various religious phases, his short-lived enthusiasm for drinking his own urine, his parsimony in regard to food and money, and of course most notably his self-imposed seclusion, etc., etc.--are already well-known, and I don't care to know more about them. It isn't that uniquely Anglo-American obsession with celebrity that drives the desire of mine to know more about him. If salacious revelations and celebrity gossip is what butters your potatoes, go watch the Salinger documentary—that garbage was unalloyed Us Magazine. 
It’s that we simply won’t be able to understand his work in all its complexity without knowing more about him, because quite possibly no other American writer has been more obsessed with himself. It's all he ever wrote about. Other writers have written about the Civil War, or Jews and comic books, or North Korea, or any other topic under the sun, but the only answer to the question, when applied to anything he ever wrote, of "What did J.D. Salinger write about?" is "J.D. Salinger." 

The secret of Salinger's enduring appeal has less to do with his work than it does with a fascination about him--both his personality and the persona he created. He said, more or less in so many words, that HE didn’t matter, so don’t worry about him. Just read his stuff. Which is kind of ironic, because he spent his career writing about nothing BUT himself, thereby cultivating--perhaps unwittingly, although I don't think so--a cult of personality which he then took an almost sadistic pleasure in denying to damn near everyone (including his own family).

So maybe his defenders can forgive the rest of us for being interested in learning more about him. He was a fascinating guy who spent a lifetime thinking about a fascinating thing: himself.

It’s a truism, of course, to say that every character is an extension or facet of the author. We can’t get out of ourselves. Every word each of our characters says is us, or part of us, talking. But Dostoevsky wasn’t Raskolnikov, Twain wasn’t Huck, and Bellow wasn’t Herzog in quite the same way that Salinger was Holden. Perhaps no other character in literature is so unadulteratedly the author, which Salinger more or less admitted when he said that he would never allow Catcher to be made into a movie, because he was the only person on planet Earth he would allow to play Holden. 

Well, no other character in literature except for the Glass family. Because he was them even more so. 

This is why, I think, I like the Glass Family stories better than Catcher. Catcher was a young man’s book. Its darkness is an adolescent’s darkness, and its sneer is the sneer of every 17-year old in the world, who thinks he knows everything there is to know, but who doesn’t know himself nearly as well as, with any amount of honest introspection, he will later. Catcher is about precocity, not profundity.

The Glass Family stories, on the other hand, are written after many more years of Salinger’s obsessive self-contemplation, and the greater knowledge of himself that a few more decades of that activity. Narcissistic? Undoubtedly, but when you’re most likely the most interesting person you know, perhaps narcissism can be forgiven.

"I love working on these Glass stories," Salinger wrote on the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, and it's no wonder, since he liked writing about himself, and the Glasses are nothing more than personifications of different aspects of himself. Taken as a whole--as I suspect they're meant to be--they amount to as complete a self-portrait as ever created. "I’ve been waiting for them most of my life," he added. Waiting for the Glasses? Perhaps that's another way of saying waiting for himself to get to the point where he could discuss himself honestly, which is what the Glass Family cycle is all about.

The Glass Family cycle, to me at least, reflects Salinger’s coming to terms with who he was, right down to their shared ethnicity. Holden was a WASP blueblood: an identity which Salinger, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a kosher cheese importer, probably envied, at least as a young man. Holden, has much as he despised Pencey Prep, belonged at an elite East Coast boarding school. It was the logical place for him to be. The prep schools Salinger’s own socially-ambitious parents sent him to were manifestly not, and I can’t help but wonder if Holden’s alienation didn’t spring, in part, from Salinger’s own experience of being a Jew thrown among Episcopalians.

Or, more accurately, a half-Jew, as he reportedly found out soon after his bar mitzvah. Turned out that his mother Miriam was really Mary, a German-Irish woman from Iowa, who was passing as Jewish so as not to upset her husband’s family. By the time Salinger got around to writing about the Glasses, he’d ditched his WASPy pseudopersona. His fictional avatars, the Glasses, were Jewish on their father’s side and Irish on their mother’s, a pedigree almost identical to Salinger’s own. 

Even Les and Bessie's prior occupations as vaudeville performers rings truer to Salinger’s experience—being the child of a vaudevillian is no more ridiculous to a kid brought up on Park Avenue and educated in elite boarding schools than being the son of a kosher cheese importer. Les and Bessie’s background of sawdusty shticklach on the vaudeville circuit is probably a wry, veiled nod to his own father’s less than glamorous livelihood.

I’m also a little surprised that no critic, or at least none that I’ve read thus far, has noticed the phonetic similarity of both Salinger’s and the Glass family’s names. Bessie’s (the Glass matriarch) maiden name is Gallagher—more recognizably Irish, but still phonetically similar to Salinger’s own mother’s maiden name of Jillich (they probably have the same Celtic root)—and every letter in “Glass”, S, A, L, and G, is represented in Salinger’s own surname.

The Glass kids’ own childhoods as prodigies on the radio show “It’s a Wise Child” likewise probably mirror Salinger’s own youthful conviction, nurtured by overdoting parents, that he was special, a junior genius destined for greatness. When Salinger, speaking through Buddy, describes the popular perception of the Glass kids as "a bunch of insufferably ‘superior’ little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth," one can't help but feel that Salinger is looking back, less than enchantedly, on the guy who wrote Catcher.

Each Glass kid represents some aspect, some facet, of Salinger’s own character. Seymour commits the suicide that Salinger almost certainly flirted with, but couldn’t bring himself to commit. Buddy and Waker are the hermits—Waker becomes a Carthusian monk, and Buddy, the Glass family scribe and chronicler, disappears up into the mountains (but continues to teach at a women’s college where, conveniently, he’s surrounded by all those young, pure, innocent girls Salinger himself obsessed over and occasionally seduced). Boo Boo, the perfect mother who can heal the scars inflicted on her son Lionel by the anti-Semitism of the family servants, is the parent he probably simultaneously wished he had and could be (or is he Lionel, the little kid who wants to run away?) Franny’s breakdown mirrors the one Salinger experienced in Europe, after D-Day, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, and an ill-advised quickie marriage to a German woman with Nazi associations, and Zooey...

Ah, Zooey. My favorite Salinger character, and to my mind, the most memorable. Him with the insults, the neverending bath, the cigar, and the trickle of sweat that sticks his shirt to his back. Is it possible to read Zooey as Salinger’s sendup of himself? An irascible, know-it-all, prematurely gruff little twerp, who not only thinks he’s smarter than he is, but knows he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Is Zooey Glass Salinger’s own affectionate mockery of both Holden Caulfield and the guy who wrote Holden?

Because, at the end of the day, what very few of his critics seem to get is that the Glasses are funny. Seymour, for all the reverence his siblings slather onto him and his memory, is kind of a yutz. He’s clueless—selfish in the manner of people who are oblivious to other people’s feelings. What kind of person disappears the day of his wedding, show back up, and then blows his brains out laying next to his sleeping bride on their honeymoon?

Zooey, alone of all the Glass siblings, gets it. He’s the only one who calls out Seymour for being the jerk he was. A genius, a being of almost pure spirit, too pure for this fallen world and all its imperfections, yes, but a self-centered jerk nonetheless, a Vedantic Henry Higgins who deformed his younger siblings’ development by exposing them, prematurely, to Eastern mysticism. Zooey, the way I read him, is Salinger poking fun at himself, mocking his own pretensions and predilections. Zooey gives the rest of the Glasses the grounding that they need to survive in this miserable world. It came too late for some of them, but Franny, the youngest, subjected to Zooey’s own brand of tough love, might just be the redemption from Seymour’s suicide that the family needs so desperately.

One can’t read the Glass Family stories—or at least I can’t—without coming away from them with a sense of Salinger’s own loneliness. The Glasses aren’t merely his mouthpieces and different aspects of himself—they’re the family he wished he had, the family he wished he’d been a part of. And that, perhaps, is the central tragedy of J.D. Salinger’s life—the dumb son of a bitch HAD a family. He had two children whom, by his daughter’s account at least, he kept at arm’s length, ignored, belittled, and eventually brushed aside in favor of his fictional ones. 

At the end of the day, he preferred the company of his made-up friends to that of his own. He couldn’t forgive his children for not being as much like himself as the Glasses were, and he couldn’t forgive the world for not being the way he wanted it to be. Perhaps understandably—he went through some pretty stuff during the war. So he hunkered down in Cornish, drew the curtains tight, and dealt with the world on his own terms, filtering out whatever he didn’t like and whatever couldn’t live up to his standards.

Perhaps that’s the tension, and the tragedy, underlying Salinger’s life and work: knowing that that his narcissism was, ultimately, self-defeating and destructive--and that he was unable, and would never be able, to get beyond it.