August 30, 2000



Salinger's Daughter's Truths as Mesmerizing as His Fiction

By DINITIA SMITH



Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Margaret A. Salinger, daughter of J. D. Salinger. Related Articles

• Featured Author: J. D. Salinger

Pocket Books Book cover of "Dream Catcher" by Margaret A. Salinger.

Mr. Salinger, 81, who has not published anything since 1965 and has not spoken publicly for years, is so determined in his seclusion that he successfully delayed the publication of a biography by Ian Hamilton because Mr. Hamilton had sought to use some of his letters.

"Ian Hamilton thought my dad would be so proud of him and sent him the galleys," said Ms. Salinger. "I know better."

Ms. Salinger has written a book that reveals not only her own life but previously unknown and deeply intimate aspects of her father's life. Her motivation in breaching his zealously guarded privacy is likely to be questioned by many who criticized Joyce Maynard's 1998 memoir, which included details of her romance with Mr. Salinger when she was 18 and he was 53. Last year's auction of letters that Mr. Salinger wrote to Ms. Maynard in the early 1970's also prompted criticism. The letters were bought by the California software entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Norton, who returned them to Mr. Salinger.

Ms. Salinger says she is willing to take the risk that her father might not speak to her again. And then of course there is the possibility that the public might see her book as an attempt to trade on his name. In any case she has written it, Ms. Salinger says, to make sense of her strange childhood. And she has come to New York to promote the book.

The Plaza is a place of happy memories, where she used to stay with her father when they visited her godfather, William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker. She is looking at photographs in her book about her handsome young father, beaming as she learns to walk, as she sits on his shoulders, plays the piano.

"He loves me," said Ms. Salinger, as if surprised. "Isn't he sexy! How funny he was." And she looks like him, too, tall, with the same long face and dark eyes.

Her father loved her, but he was also pathologically self-centered, Ms. Salinger says.

Nothing could interrupt his work, which he likened to a quest for enlightenment. He was also abusive toward her mother, Claire Douglas, Ms. Salinger says, keeping her a virtual prisoner in his house in Cornish, N.H., refusing to allow her to see friends and family. Ms. Salinger said that her father feared the female body and that when Ms. Douglas was pregnant, he found her abhorrent. She said that since her parents rarely had sex, she feels her birth was almost an accident.

Mr. Salinger's agent, Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates, said he would not comment on his daughter's book.

Ms. Salinger also says that when she was 13 months old, her mother planned to kill her and commit suicide, and did indeed burn the house down later. Ms. Salinger said her mother denied setting the fire. Ms. Douglas is now a Jungian analyst in California and "a terrific grandma," Ms. Salinger said.

Ms. Douglas did not respond to messages left on her answering machine in California.

Meanwhile Mr. Salinger pursued Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science. He drank urine, his daughter writes, and sat in an orgone box.

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He spoke in tongues, fasted until he turned greenish and as an older man had pen pal relationships with teenage girls.

After her parents divorced in 1966, her father continued to be part of her life. She stayed with him at times in Cornish.

Does he know about her book? "He does now," said Ms. Salinger, because of newspaper articles.

Has she spoken to him since them? She laughs.

"I may be 44," she said. "But I still don't want to get yelled at."

Still, "it's not unusual at all to not speak for several months," said Ms. Salinger. "Particularly because he's very deaf," and for a long time refused to wear a hearing aid, she added.

"We're not officially estranged," she said.

"What other people might call weird is just regular for us."

Considering Ms. Salinger's accounts of her childhood and teenage years -- bulimia, "severe perceptual distortions," "panic attacks, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia" -- she seems quite jolly.

She laughs, makes fun of herself.

Her father loves her, she said, but "he probably hates my guts, too, I would say, operatically."

Ms. Salinger said she wrote "Dream Catcher" because "I was absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."

"There is something to be said for the examined life," she said.



Lotte Jacobi/ UP Newspictures J. D. Salinger in 1953. FROM THE ARCHIVES "Mr. Salinger, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, tells a story well, in this case under the special difficulties of casting it in the form of Holden's first- person narrative. This was a perilous undertaking, but one that has been successfully achieved. Mr. Salinger's rendering of teen-age speech is wonderful: the unconscious humor, the repetitions, the slang and profanity, the emphasis, all are just right. Holden's mercurial changes of mood, his stubborn refusal to admit his own sensitiveness and emotions, his cheerful disregard of what is sometimes known as reality are typically and heart breakingly adolescent."

-- from the original New York Times Review of "The Catcher in the Rye," July 16, 1951.

There is one moment that stands out above all, she said. "It is so horrible, it's so powerful." When she was pregnant and sick, instead of offering help, her father "said I had no right to bring a child into this lousy world," she writes, "and he hoped I was considering an abortion."

The book, she says, is her struggle to make sense of it all.

The Salingers have always been secretive, she said. It is embodied in "Catcher in the Rye": "My parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.

They're quite touchy about anything like that."

From her Aunt Doris, her father's sister who is six years older and in failing health, Ms. Salinger said she learned about her father's childhood as Jerome David Salinger, son of Miriam and Sol Salinger, who became a prosperous food merchant in New York. Jerome grew up on the Upper West Side and Park Avenue and attended Valley Forge Military Academy. He was the center of his mother's life, Ms. Salinger said her aunt told her.

But Miriam was also overprotective. Mr. Salinger once wrote in a letter to Hemingway that his mother walked him to school until he was 24, Ms. Salinger said.

He had always thought his parents were Jewish, Ms. Salinger writes, but when he was a teenager he discovered that they hid from him that his mother was Irish Catholic. Still, he experienced anti-Semitism, from which he developed his aversion, expressed by his characters, for the Ivy League, for "phonies."

During World War II he was a counterintelligence agent assigned to the Twelfth Regiment of the Fourth Division, interrogating POW's.

He served in the most brutal campaigns of the European theater, including D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 in Germany he was hospitalized for "battle fatigue."

In one of the book's surprises, Ms. Salinger writes that her father arrested a young Nazi Party functionary, Sylvia, then married her. The marriage was brief, and forever after he referred to her as Saliva.

Ms. Salinger's parents met in 1950 when Ms. Douglas was about 16 and Mr. Salinger about 31, at the writer Francis Steegmuller's apartment. Ms. Douglas was born in England, the daughter of the art critic and dealer Robert Langton Douglas. Her stepfather was a partner in Duveen Brothers.

At the time Ms. Douglas and Mr. Salinger met, he abstained from sex, her mother told Ms. Salinger, because he was studying with an Indian mystic who taught that it interfered with enlightenment.

Ms. Salinger quotes from "The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna," written by the guru's guru. An acolyte announces that he and his wife have had intercourse: "Don't you hate yourself for dallying with a body which contains only blood phlegm, filth and excreta?" Ramakrishna asks.

Ms. Salinger noted that in Mr. Salinger's story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the character Seymour shoots himself on his honeymoon.

Just months before her high school graduation, Ms. Douglas married Mr. Salinger and moved with him to Cornish. Ms. Douglas told her daughter that he demanded elaborate meals and that the sheets had to be laundered twice weekly, though there was no heat or hot water. When her mother became pregnant, Ms. Salinger writes, she had "a suicidal depression when she realized that her pregnancy only repulsed him."

Ms. Salinger was born in 1955, the year her father's stories "Franny" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" were published in The New Yorker.

Mr. Salinger wrote letters about his joy in her, Ms. Salinger said.

He was a playful father who seemed easier in the magic world of childhood. Her imaginary friends were real to him, too, she says, as were the characters in his books. "The world of fiction and reality were very blurred," she writes.

But, her mother felt "jealousy and rage over my replacement of her in my father's affections."

In 1960 the Salingers had a son, Matthew, who is now an actor and producer in California.

Last month The Sunday Times of London quoted him as saying of his sister: "I guess she's got a lot of anger. But to write a book just isn't right.

It's kind of pathetic." Ms. Salinger says she does not believe he said it: "I love my brother dearly.

It just doesn't sound like him."

Attempts to reach him telephone or through friends were not successful.

After his divorce in 1972 Mr. Salinger had a relationship with Ms. Maynard, the journalist, who was two years older than his daughter.

To Ms. Salinger it was a repeat of his relationship with her mother.

He induced her to leave college and live in isolation with him, Ms. Maynard wrote her own memoir of Mr. Salinger, "At Home in the World" (Picador U.S.A., 1998).

After a brief "impulsive" marriage to her karate instructor, Ms. Salinger began pulling her life together. She graduated from Brandeis University with honors and received a degree in management from Oxford University. She attended Harvard Divinity School and trained as a nondenominational hospital chaplain. She is married to an opera singer and actor -- she refuses to give his name, or that of her son, or her son's age. She wants to write more books, she said, though she would not say on what topics.

Today Mr. Salinger is married to his third wife, Colleen, a nurse, some 50 years younger than he. "She's lovely," Ms. Salinger said.

She cared for Ms. Salinger for a time during her pregnancy, she said, though Mr. Salinger constantly asked her to come home.

Ms. Salinger writes that Mr. Salinger berates Colleen, as he did her mother.

At one point the couple was trying to have a child, Ms. Salinger said.

Mr. Salinger still lives in Cornish. The curtains in the house are drawn nearly all the time, said Ms. Salinger. She has seen his bedroom and study, "probably twice in my life." Mr. Salinger is still writing, and lives on royalties. "Catcher in the Rye" sells "at least" 250,000 copies annually, she said.

She said she did not know why Mr. Salinger refused to publish his work. "My aunt thinks he can't stand any criticism," she said. "He sure doles it out."

Ms. Salinger speaks with affection of her father's early "lovely stories in magazines he won't allow to be published in books."

"He's stopped lecturing enough and was telling a good story," she said.

Later stories, like "Hapworth 16, 1924," are simply lectures, she says, that she heard as a child. "He has opinions on everything from how to chew your food to proper breathing techniques."

Toward the end of "Dream Catcher," Ms. Salinger writes that in giving up her dream of a perfect father, memories of happy times with him have returned.

"When I was a kid, he was just so funny," Ms. Salinger said.

"The world just lit up when Daddy came home."