Kenneth Slawenski - J. D. Salinger: A Life

Copyright 2010 by Kenneth Slawenski

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This work was originally published in the United Kingdom as J. D. Salinger: A Life Raised High by Pomona Books, West Yorkshire, England, in 2010. Published by arrangement with Pomona, England Ltd.

eISBN: 978-0-679-60479-2

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design: Christopher Sergio
Jacket photograph: Antony Di Gesu/San Diego Historical Society/Hulton Archive Collection/Getty Images

v3.1

To
my mother

Since I have maintained a website devoted to the life and works of J. D. Salinger, it has grown extensively over time and receives a healthy amount of traffic but rarely generates more than a handful of e-mails per day. So you can imagine my surprise when I checked the mail on Thursday, January 28, 2010, and found not three or four messages shouting to be opened but fifty-seven. They were left unopened, too, for hours until I had gathered up the courage to confront them. By glancing at the e-mail on top of the heap, I knew exactly what had happened and how I would always remember that day. The news stared me down from my inbox through the starkest, most ugly of headers. It read: Rest In Peace J.D. Salinger. It should have read: Quicksand.

A few words of explanation are probably in order here. For nearly as long as I had been running the Salinger site, I had been chipping away at this book, determined to one day deliver a true and fair and unsentimental account of Salingers life justly infused with appreciation for his works. After seven years, I had finally completed that task. In fact, I had sent in the final draft of my final chapter only a week before. For seven years, then, I had been completely immersed in Salinger: in his writings, his philosophy, and the smallest details of his life. Salinger had become my constant companion. And now he was gone.

Though I could perhaps push aside my e-mails for a time, I felt I could not ignore my website. My last post was now three weeks old, a message of congratulations to the author on his ninety-first birthday, complete with warm wishes for a long life that suddenly seemed obscene. Attempting to address Salingers death, I searched my mind for a tribute I knew I should have already prepared but had been unable to even consider. Impossibly, I fumbled for a sentiment that would match the man. Not an epitaph. I remembered Holden Caulfields disgust at all the phonies laying flowers on Allies grave until it began to rain and their priorities suddenly shifted. Salinger himself did not believe in death, and I knew that. What I needed to offer was a salute, a call to gratitude rather than sorrow. What Salinger deserved was an affirmation, and I requested that others join me in presenting it.

I still doubt the quality of my delivery. It pales in the face of countless eloquent memorials Salinger has received since. But it is honest and heartfelt. It is not mourning for the dead. It is an invitation to salute. A salute not to the memory but to the essence of J. D. Salinger, and I offer it here again to anyone who wishes to honor the author now or at any time in the years to come:

Read. Explore, whether for the first time or twentieth, The Catcher in the Rye. Read Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam and Seymour. Re-experience Salingers works in tribute to the author who is so deeply embedded within them. Salinger the man may be goneand for that the world is an emptier placebut he will always live within the pages he created, and through his art remain as vital today and tomorrow as when he walked the boulevards of New York and strolled the woods of New Hampshire.

Kenneth Slawenski
March 2010

The Great War had changed everything. As 1919 dawned, people awoke to a fresh new world, one filled with promise but uncertainty. Old ways of life, beliefs and assumptions unchallenged for decades, were now called into question or swept away. The guns had fallen silent only weeks before. The Old World now lay in ruins. In its place stood a new nation poised to assume the mantle of leadership. No place in that land was more anxious or more ready than the city of New York.

It was the first day of the first year of peace when Miriam Jillich Salinger gave birth to a son. His sister, Doris, had been born six years before. In the years since Doriss birth, Miriam had suffered a series of miscarriages.

This child too was almost lost. So it was with a mixture of joy and relief that Miriam and Solomon Salinger welcomed their son into the world. They named him Jerome David, but from the very first day, they called him Sonny.

Sonny was born into a middle-class Jewish family that was both unconventional and ambitious. The Salinger line reached back to the village of Sudargas, a tiny Jewish settlement (shtetl) situated on the

Hyman Joseph Salinger, Sonnys great-grandfather, had moved from Sudargas to the more prosperous town of Taurage in order to marry into a prominent family. Through his writings, J. D. Salinger later immortalized his great-grandfather as the clown Zozo, honoring him as the family patriarch and confiding that he felt his great-grandfathers spirit always watched over him. Hyman Joseph remained in Russia all his life and died nine years before the birth of his great-grandson. Salinger knew of him only through a photograph, an image that offered a glimpse into another world. It depicted an elderly peasant brimming with nobility, erect in his long black gown and flowing white beard, and sporting a tremendous nosea feature that Salinger confessed made him shudder with apprehension.

Sonnys grandfather Simon F. Salinger was also ambitious. In 1881, a year of famine (though not in Taurage itself), he left home and family and immigrated to the United States. Soon after arriving in America, Simon married Fannie Copland, also a Lithuanian immigrant, at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The couple then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they found an apartment in one of the citys many immigrant neighborhoods and where, on March 16, 1887, Fannie gave birth to Sonnys father, Solomon, the second of five surviving children.

By 1893, the Salingers were living in Louisville, Kentucky, where Simon attended medical school. His religious training in Russia served him well, enabling him to practice as a rabbi in order to finance his education. Sonny knew his grandfather well, as do readers of The Catcher in the Rye. Dr. Salinger often traveled to New York to visit his son and was the basis of Holden Caulfields grandfather, the endearing man who would embarrass Holden by reading all the street signs aloud while riding on the bus. Simon Salinger died in 1960, just short of his hundredth birthday.

In the opening lines of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield refuses to share his parents past with the reader, deriding any recount of how they were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap. My parents, he explains, would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. This apparent elusiveness on the part of Holdens parents was imported directly from the attitudes of Salingers own mother and father. Sol and Miriam rarely spoke of past events, especially to their children, and their attitude created an air of secrecy that permeated the Salinger household and caused Doris and Sonny to grow into intensely private people.