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The Salinger Riddle

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http://www.publicbooks.org//fiction/the-salinger-riddle

EXCERPT: [...] Everyone knows that [J.D.] Salinger was a notorious recluse, renouncing public life in 1953. But we have also discovered he was a misanthrope, and would have quickly hung up had a reader called to speak with the creator of Holden Caulfield. Now that the private side of his withdrawal has come to light, the array of eccentricities and bad behaviors found there has come to dominate our attention. Initiating the shift were two memoirs in 1999 and 2000: the first by a former lover, Joyce Maynard, and the second by his daughter, Margaret. Each depicted an often cruel and distant man. In their wake came several biographies, the most recent of which is 2013’s oral biography Salinger, a nastily inflected version of these earlier laments, by David Shields and Shane Salerno (accessorized by a television documentary produced by Salerno). Unremittingly snide and censorious, they seem to have appropriated the pain that these two women suffered through direct experience.

From these accumulated grievances a portrait of Salinger in New Hampshire emerges: except to a handful of old army buddies and editors of the New Yorker, the writer was grumpy and self-absorbed, a hypocrite and misogynist. He was obsessed with purity, preaching detachment and spiritual fastidiousness while chasing women often less than half his age, blind to the destruction inflicted on his family by his own egomania and selfishness.
Everyone knows that Salinger was a recluse, but we have also discovered he was a misanthrope.

He insisted on spending most of his time writing in a small cabin in the woods, literally detached from his family, often ignoring them. He reserved his loyalty and love for the fictional Glass family. Yet more perverse was his refusal to publish after 1965, dedicating those labors to posterity and locking his manuscripts in a vault. More Glass stories and a war novel are among the works evidently slated for publication, perhaps starting in 2015.

[...] Salinger’s literary achievement is scandalously underappreciated, his considerable intellectual distinction smothered by clichés: the Glasses as drowning in cuteness, sainthood, and hothouse self-regard. (Janet Malcolm’s persuasive 2001 dissent, “Justice to J. D. Salinger,” is an exception to the rule.) By the early ’60s, the die was cast—in 1961, Irving Howe called him “the priest of an underground cult.” The next year, Mary McCarthy accused him of depicting the Glass family as a “closed circuit” of narcissism. Whether an in-group or “cult,” the point was to mark off a fanatical readership of “well-scrubbed” apolitical rich kids, too self-involved to rebel or conquer, merely “bright, ‘cool,’ estranged.”

This critique from the left doubtless helped to sink Salinger’s reputation among academics in succeeding decades....




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