Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
We don't need exposis -- as Mary McCarthy showed long ago, the sickness is in his writing.
Oct 2, 2000 | It seems that today's readers no longer trust fiction to level with them. We read memoirs, biographies and as-told-tos as if "truth" can only be found in what actually happened, as if "facts" contain an authenticity that stories do not, as if only "real" life accurately assesses the world. As novelist Martin Amis said in his recent memoir, "Nothing, for now, can compete with experience -- so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed."
Margaret (Peggy) Salinger's memoir of her life and of her father, J.D. Salinger, "Dream Catcher," exposes the cracks in the facade of the Salinger mystique. But the truth was always there in J.D. Salinger's fiction. More than 35 years ago, the late Mary McCarthy, writing in Harper's magazine, applied her considerable faculties to Salinger's oeuvre; what she found in it, to use her own word, was "terrifying."
Peggy Salinger was born in 1955, the year "Franny and Zooey" was published in the New Yorker. Although "terrifying" isn't a word that the remarkably generous Peggy uses to describe her life, she has suffered from bulimia, perceptual distortions, panic attacks, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. And, she says, "parts of me, little encapsulated personalities jettisoned during retreat, may well have died or are, at least, lost forever ... I have spent years, with doctors and friends beside me, cruising the archipelago, calling out, 'All-y all-y in come free.'"
J.D. Salinger's work still has tremendous power, especially for young readers. (At last check, "The Catcher in the Rye" was No. 172 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, nearly 50 years after it was first published.) In the '50s and '60s he was a code word. Carrying a copy of any of his books was a sign that you knew. Holden Caulfield, the caustic narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye," added the word "phony" to the common lexicon. Later, Salinger introduced the Glass kids, a fictional family of seven former wunderkinds (two dead), all geniuses, who were uniquely sensitive and uniquely close, and through them Salinger introduced Zen Buddhism and meditation to the general public. "Franny and Zooey," "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (two novellas) and other works serialized the story of the fictional siblings as they spiritually suffered over all things phony or second-rate.
Yet, the stories of both Holden and the Glass family share a not-so-attractive quality. And it was this aspect of Salinger, a tendency to draw lines and to rate people, that McCarthy, in her essay "J.D. Salinger's Closed Circuit," pointed out: "Like Hemingway, Salinger sees the world in terms of allies and enemies ... 'The Catcher in the Rye' ... is based on a scheme of exclusiveness. The characters are divided into those who belong to the club and those who don't."
In Salinger's life, one could belong to this club and then get thrown out. Joyce Maynard, in her memoir "At Home in the World," reports that in the early '70s, after living with Salinger for eight months, she was unceremoniously booted out of his life. Eighteen years old to Salinger's 53, she spent the next 20 years wondering what it was that she had done. Ten-year-old Peggy Salinger was warned about this possibility, too. After an argument, Salinger told his daughter, "I'll always love you, but when I lose respect for a person, I'm done with them. Finished."
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