It looks like such a happy childhood. Baby Peggy perches on beaming Daddy's shoulders. Little Peggy and smiling Daddy play the piano together. Daddy holds young Peggy's hand as they stroll down a country lane. The perfect family album. In the last picture, however, there is a shadow of anxiety. Parent and child hold hands but look in opposite directions, over their shoulders, each apparently fearing an intrusion.
The vigilance is hardly surprising. Little Peggy was the daughter of J.D. Salinger, America's famously reclusive and arguably paranoid writer. Her childhood was consequently privileged - and strange.
William Shawn, the legendary editor of the New Yorker, was her godfather. When Daddy took Peggy to New York they stayed at the Plaza. But they registered under assumed names and each visit was executed as if it were a covert CIA operation.
Salinger should have been looking not over his shoulder but down at his child. Little Peggy, the watchful secret agent, grew into Margaret Salinger, the author of Dream Catcher, a rambling new memoir that has doubtless caused the deaf, 81-year-old writer to rave Lear-like on his New Hampshire heath while his daughter proclaims her right "to defy his cult of secrecy by writing this book". Salinger remains a fierce, though not always successful, defender of that secrecy. In the 1980s, his lawyers delayed a biography by Ian Hamilton when Hamilton proposed to quote Salinger's unpublished letters. In 1998, however, Joyce Maynard published a lurid, often repulsive memoir of her affair with Salinger and subsequently auctioned off the letters he wrote to her in the 1970's. The letters were bought by a California software executive who then returned them to their author.
Anticipating a fierce legal challenge from Salinger, Dream Catcher's American publisher, Pocket Books, produced the memoir in almost total secrecy. Such melodrama enhances sales and galls Salinger's many defenders who view Margaret's revelations as the ultimate betrayal of a serious writer. In a blistering Washington Post review titled "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth", Jonathan Yardley accuse d Ms Salinger of invading her father's "cherished privacy to the point of disloyalty and exploitation . . with this unattractive and unwelcome book."
"Disloyalty?" Margaret replied in a subsequent Boston Globe interview, "There was no loyalty towards us. Only loyalty toward him, always. To the point of my having taken a bunch of pills once and wanting to go to the hospital, but calling ahead so that his name - his name - would not get into the newspapers."
You don't expect such vehemence from this easy-going 45-year-old who currently works as a hospital chaplain in Boston and will soon graduate from Harvard Divinity School. But Salinger's anger is palpable when she describes the episode that finally jetissoned her out of her father's orbit, marking the end of his existence as "Daddy."
At 37, she became pregnant and told her father. "He attacked me with the impersonal viciousness of an earthquake," she writes, "He said I had no right to bring a child into the "lousy" world that I couldn't support, and he hoped I was considering an abortion." Infuriated by his declaration that he had always been a good, reliable parent, she defied him for the first time. "I said, `That's absolute crap. You've never inconvenienced yourself for your children. You've never interrupted your precious work. You've always done exactly what you wanted, when you wanted."
Margaret then called her mother and said "Has he lost his mind? Has Daddy gone crazy?" After a pause, her mother replied "Peggy, he's done this before. He did it when I was pregnant. With you."
Salinger will not say any more about the pregnancy. Happily married to an opera singer, she has one son whose name and age she refuses to disclose. But she insists that her son - as much as her father - inspired this memoir: "I was absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me." The irony of the wounded child of a celebrated recluse imposing a state of besieged celebrity on herself and her family seems to escape Margaret, at least for now.
She also rejects the suggestion that Dream Catcher is just another work of literary revenge - a "smutty tell-all" in her words - masquerading as public healing. Margaret does, however, seem determined to tell all. "I grew up in a world nearly devoid of living people," she begins, dividing her book into three parts. Part One, spanning 1900 to 1955, includes interviews with J.D.'s sister, Doris, and chronicles the Salinger childhood in Manhattan where Jerome David grew up the son of an affluent Jewish father and an Irish-Catholic mother, who often passed herself off as Jewish. Salinger once wrote, in a letter to Hemingway, that his mother walked him to school until he was 24.
In a straightforward biographical style, Margaret records her father's second World War service - Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, couter-intelligence missions - and argues convincingly that his traumatising wartime experiences have been ignored by Salinger scholars. We also learn of Salinger's post-war marriage to Sylvia, a Nazi Party member Salinger met while he was arresting her. Sylvia, according to Margaret, "hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis." The marriage lasted less than a year and Salinger thereafter referred to his first wife as Saliva.
Shamelessly prurient readers may skip to Part Two which concentrates on Salinger family life in rural Cornish, New Hampshire. Wife number two was Claire Douglas, born in England and the daughter of the art critic Robert Langton Douglas. Salinger was 31 when he met 16-year-old Claire. After a brief first marriage, she dropped out of Radcliffe University to marry the writer and live in rural isolation.
When Salinger met Claire he was studying Indian mysticism and abstaining from sex. After marriage, a certain rigor persisted. Claire later told Margaret that Salinger demanded elaborate meals, enforced a strict laundry schedule and was repulsed by his wife's pregnancies. Margaret was born in 1955. Her brother, Matthew, now an actor and producer in California, was born in 1960. "I was the only grown-up in the house," Margaret recalls of the years spent witnessing both parents plunging repeatedly into depression, fighting operatically, dabbling in yoga, Scientology and other enlightenment fads.
In Dream Catcher we see J.D. Salinger sitting in an orgone box - a cubicle believed to concentrate the universal life force - and drinking urine. We see little Peggy coming across a miscarried foetus and blithely flushing it down the toilet. At one stage, her mother allegedly planned to kill baby Peggy and commit suicide, but settled for burning the house down.
But "the world just lit up when Daddy came home," Margaret writes, "He was just so funny." Salinger doted on his children, creating magical bedtime stories and a world "lush with make-believe . . . a world that dangled between dream and nightmare on a gossamer thread my parents wove."
Salinger was also working. The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, Franny and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters in 1955. Although he stopped publishing in 1965, Salinger reportedly still writes. His daughter describes him as "a very, very needy man" who writes with the "intense, borderline neediness of a cliff walker." Critics like Jonathan Yardley respond that "her neediness is as transparent as her father's and is no more attractive."
Salinger the man is more easily diminished, particularly by Margaret's accounts of his fondness for teenage girls. Joyce Maynard was 18 when she lived with the 53-year-old writer and Salinger's third and present wife, Colleen, a nurse, is 50 years his junior. Part Three of Dream Catcher is a tedious description of Margaret's bumpy recovery. Following a brief marriage to her karate instructor, she earned degrees from Brandeis and Oxford, worked as a garage mechanic, then found contentment. In her early 20's she finally read The Catcher in the Rye but ignored its warning. "My parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them," Holden Caulfield says, "They're quite touchy about anything like that."
Skewering her father "while he is still alive and able to take the punishment,"
Margaret has probably earned his lasting silence and her brother's coolness. So far there has been no reaction from the walled New Hampshire fortress.