JD Salinger: narcissist, enigma and nutcase

JD Salinger has turned 90. The novelist who best captured the particularly 20th century phenomenon of the teenage rebel driven by angst in his novel The Catcher in the Rye was born on January 1, 1919.  The novel itself was published in 1951, more than a half-century ago.
 
The strange thing is that the story of Salinger's antihero Holden Caulfield still resonates. The novel still sells 250,000 copies a year, which makes it a bestseller even now. Among my son's 17-year-old classmates, it remains, for the broody, brainy ones, the tattered paperback bible they carry away on holiday and read without being told to.

But while teenagers revel in the book, and find comfort in it, the grown-ups are more interested in the author.

Salinger seems to be a nasty narcissist even by the standards of creative genius. Because he has been infamously reclusive since 1953 - when he bought a farm outside Cornish, New Hampshire where he has lived ever since - nobody really knows him at all as a man. And because he has refused to publish any book since 1965, nobody really knows if he qualifies as a genius.

What is for sure is that Salinger is a nut case. We know this from the memoirs of three women who knew him well and just about survived - a wife (one of three), a lover (the future writer Joyce Maynard), and a daughter.

Salinger was a crank and a control freak who foisted it all on his family

The wife, Claire Douglas, was his second and passed up her degree at Harvard to join him behind locked doors. She reveals a demented spiritual quest as Salinger dragged her through Zen, Hinduism, Christian Science and even Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology. Playing hop-scotch with the soul might have been okay if Salinger had not also been a crank - dabbling in macrobiotics, home-made medicines, even the fabled Orgone Accumulator machine of the Freudian heretic WR Reich – and a control freak who foisted it all on his family.

When daughter Margaret, born in 1955, was 18 months old, Claire decided that the only way out was to murder the baby and commit suicide. Luckily, she ran away to New York instead, and then, remarkably, returned to Salinger, and had a second child, Matt, in 1960.

Margaret, back home with Dad, gathered the material for her 1996 memoir Dream Catcher the hard way. She was a sickly child, but doctors were banned because Salinger, with his herbal infusions and special diets, believed that he knew best. So Margaret grew sicker and eventually concluded that Salinger had only got married at all because a Yogi told him to "follow the way of  the householder". You don't get much more narcissistic than that.

He has his excuses: some believe battlefield horrors on Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge left him scarred with stress disorders. But it is worth comparing Salinger to another literary recluse, Cormac McCarthy. The author of All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men keeps his suffering to himself, living alone, politely declining conversations with journalists or readers, though when popular recognition came with The Road, he did break cover for an appearance on Oprah. Salinger, on the other hand, revels in his self-styled, prophet–in–the-wilderness role and curses at devotees of The Catcher in the Rye who track him down.

There are devotees because Catcher is a true gem of a novel. The 90th birthday tributes focus on the novel's enduring appeal as a literary work, breaking stylistic ground. Salinger described himself as "F Scott Fitzgerald's successor" and is hailed for his brilliance with dialogue and profound but spare character development.

But the young who still enjoy the book today recognise themselves in the story of Holden's struggle to hang onto childhood innocence, catching the children lost in the rye, heading to the cliff edge, rejecting and exposing the 'phony' world of adults.

It has been a long time since 'innocence' was the prevailing concept of America's birth into a new and better world of democracy and prosperity, an idea buried deep in the truths of slavery, greed and violence. That, the critics point out, makes Catcher simply obsolete.

True. But while the 'innocence' has been compromised, the phoniness of those grown-up claims to know best have become more obvious than ever. With Dubya Bush's immoral wars and dodgy 'homeland security', and the implosion of  the economy that was meant to give everyone an opportunity, Catcher is as powerful as it ever was to the generation facing the mess.

What does Salinger, at 90, think of that? We will never know: and there is no point in wishing the old horror a happy birthday. ·