Fifty Years ago, J. D. Salinger published a book called The Catcher in the Rye, and gave birth to a literary enigma still pursued hungrily. After the book, an instant success and a 20th century landmark, he moved to a remote farmhouse in New Hampshire with his wife, Claire. There he lived as a literary hermit, an artist in a garret made of nature and distance. He even refused a personal invitation from Jackie Kennedy to dinner at the White House. But after 1965 he published nothing.
Websites devoted to Salinger and his works often feature long links relating to getting in contact, somehow, with the celebrated recluse, now 82. Eeerily, he prefigured this in The Catcher in the Rye, in chapter three, where the narrator, Holden Caulfield, says that what "knocks him out" is a book that "when you're 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." Yet the man who wrote those words is just as famous for his inaccessibility - in a profession crowded with egos desperate for public adulation - as for his extraordinary and brilliant writing. His daughter, Margaret, tells at the end of her autobiography of some Boston schoolkids who persuaded their teacher to drive them up to rural New Hampshire in an attempt to find Salinger after they had The Catcher on their syllabus. They were, like most people, unsuccessful. Margaret Salinger's advice to them is the sad kernel of her story:
"Whatever he may be, he is not going to be your catcher in real life. Get what you can from his writing, his stories, but the author himself will not appear out of nowhere to catch those kids if they get too close to that crazy cliff." Margaret, or Peggy, Salinger is now 45 and a successful academic, married with a small son. But that safe harbour was only reached after a very stormy life. From her account, there were many times when she was physically or psychologically on the edge, or even over, a cliff of some sort, and her father barely looked up from his paper-covered desk. On the eve of her first, on-the-rebound, wedding, Peggy's best friend begged J.D., who was of course in his rural fastness, to intervene to stop the marriage, in Boston. "He refused, saying: `I have so much piled up on my desk now, it's impossible.' " When that marriage broke up, with her husband doing a moonlight flit and leaving her with a mountain of bills, it was friends who came to the rescue, gave her somewhere to live, spoonfed her to keep her alive when she went into shock, with not a parent in sight. Likewise when she took a lethal cocktail of medicines, not so much to commit suicide as to end up in hospital where someone would care for her. When she got Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and could not work or pay her bills, her father's only response was to send her a monthly booklet of testimonials to "miraculous healing". Her contact with him has for years been minimal, and after she finally gets around to enunciating her feelings about his parenting at the end of this book, there doesn't seem much prospect of that increasing.
The fault was not all Jerome David Salinger's: Margaret's mother, Claire Douglas, is also portrayed as having plenty of shortcomings. (At the above-mentioned wedding, she left shortly after the pictures were taken, to go on a canoe trip with friends. When Peggy protested, she said, "But darling, I've been planning this for weeks".)
There were compensations of course: being taken to visit Bill Shawn at the New Yorker (curiously referred to in the text as the real dream catcher, although he makes only a fleeting appearance in the book); staying with Edna O'Brien, attending a symposium with James Callaghan, the British PM. A thin thread of privilege runs through this tale, often humdrum and bulk standard for an American kid of her generation, but ghastly in the lack of solid grounding Salinger and his second wife offered their children.
TALENT is not hereditary. Of this Peggy Salinger is perhaps painfully aware, as one of her recurring themes is J.D's almost pathological hatred of second-rate art. He had little sympathy for those who could not produce prose of his standard. (But perhaps secretly he envied those who had quantity if not such quality as their strength?) Her writing is adequate, and it is the story that matters, not the style. Presumably people will buy this book to find out about the mysterious author - as with any such second-generation memoir, but frankly there are only glimpses of "the real" J.D. Salinger. We find out some facts, if not already acquainted with them from previous biographies, such as the 1998 memoirs of Joyce Maynard, one of the girl-women Salinger took up with after his divorce from Claire. So: he is a creature of enthusiasms, a cult-maniac, first embracing Vedanta yoga, then Scientology, a macrobiotic diet, etc, etc. Yet personally he is slovenly and unmethodical. His art is everything to him, and he has his papers filed according to which parts can be published after his death without correction (if so, why not publish now?) His wartime experiences as a GI affected him deeply - he once told his daughter that the smell of burning human flesh was something impossible to forget - and conditioned his response to America's role in Vietnam in the 1960s. He has no time for human relationships of equals. The only women he really admires are clever children. His current wife is nearly 50 years younger than him and acts more as his nurse. His reason for not attending the above-mentioned dinner at the White House seems to have been as much about keeping Peggy's mother "in her place" as about any reluctance on his part.
But most of this book is about Margaret Salinger, and the truth is we don't care so much about the offspring of the great or famous, unless they exhibit rare talents and personalities of their own, like Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds' daughter. Children are "me-centred", whether their upbringing is kindly and supportive or uncaring and unstructured. There is fascinating material in this 20th century memoir - but not much of it is about J.D.Salinger.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist