For J.D., With Love and Squalor

Last Friday, when I saw J.D. Salinger's NYT obit, my multi-decade hoping for more Salinger entered its own death spiral . I thought I had read everything he ever wrote, but I’d somehow missed “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story which is ostensibly a letter from camp written by Seymour Glass at age 7. Maybe I’ll hunt it down now. Or maybe let it lie.

Ah, the Glass family. Ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie and their precociously existential offspring Seymour, Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo. Salinger flashed us the first peek at them in Nine Stories and thundered adoringly on from there; I don’t need to name those books for you. Some critics (e.g.John Updike) complained that Salinger loved the Glasses “more than God loved them.” But not more than I loved them. You too?

Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980, had become obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and saw Lennon as one of the “phonies” Holden Caulfield so despised. It came out in his trial that he believed killing Lennon would transform him into a Caulfield-like guardian angel for all children.

Salinger’s writings helped shape a generation of writers (Roth, Updike, Bellow) and remodeled the skeleton of the modern short story. As John Updike says of these open-ended pieces, “they don’t snap shut.”

In place of beginning, middle and end, Salinger’s stories hang on an architecture of emotion and irony and pitch-perfect dialogue. (Seven-year old Sybil in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”: “Seymour Glass? Do you see more glass?”)

Found out a bunch of interesting stuff about J.D. He was a spectacularly poor student, flunking out here, putting in a couple of weeks there, sitting through a term or so at the next place, taking one evening class at Columbia before abandoning formal education. He got drafted into WWII and fought in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. Apparently this gave him a honking case of PTSD (“battle fatigue” in those days) for which he was hospitalized in 1945.

His first marriage was to a German doctor named Sylvia (Salinger called her Saliva.)
They rather quickly divorced. In 1955 (he was 36) he married 21-year-old Radcliffe senior Claire Douglas, said in many ways to resemble Franny Glass. She divorced him in 1966, stating that to continue the marriage would “endanger her reason.” In 1972 (he was 53) he had a year-long affair with Yale freshman Joyce Maynard, who wrote in 1998 that Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative and ate frozen peas for breakfast. In 2000, Salinger’s daughter Margaret added that he was abusive to her mother, embraced Scientology, and drank his own urine.

A sliver of hope for my Salinger devotees: J.D.'s former mistress, Joyce Maynard, says that over the years Salinger had continued writing nonstop about the fictional Glass family, filling shelf after shelf and possibly one safe with more tales of their lives.

May it be true!