(A reprint; for November 11th.)
Infantry Under Fire, Huddled At The Utah Beach Seawall,
June 6, 1944 (
Smithsonian Collection; Public Domain)
Today, the New York
Times, one of the last newspapers where publishing Obituaries is an art form (one of the last
newspapers, come to that), reported two men who had once been at Utah Beach at the same time on D-Day --
J.D. Salinger -- author of
Franny And Zooey;
Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; and,
aber natürlich,
Catcher In The Rye -- and
Louis Auchincloss
("Wall Street lawyer from a prominent old New York family who became a
durable and prolific chronicler of Manhattan’s old-money elite"), died
at ages 91 and 92 respectively.
Portrait Of Auchincloss By Everett Raymond Kinstler, 2008
Auchincloss
was a member of America's hereditary, monied elite. He was raised in a
world of town houses, summer homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor,
Maine; private clubs and servants, debutante parties and travel abroad.
However, as a child Auchincloss thought of himself as "neither rich nor
aristocratic": In a 1974 autobiography,
A Writer's Capital, he
noted, “Like most children of affluence, I grew up with a distinct sense
that my parents were only tolerably well off. This is because children
always compare their families with wealthier ones, never with poorer."
Facades Of Brownstone Mansions, New York City 2008
(Photo:
New York Times Online Real Estate Section)
His
path through life was predictable enough for one of his class -- a
comfortable childhood, preparatory schools; guaranteed entry to Yale in
1935; he seemed predestined for the life of a Gentleman of his class; a
man with means who did little beyond tending and adding to the Family
fortune. But it was in his Junior year at Yale that the wheels came off
his little Bourgeois wagon.
Not For You And Me: Summer Home In Bar Harbor, ME
Auchincloss
yearned to break from the well-travelled path of the monied and
privileged and wrote a novel. When it was subsequently rejected by a
major New York publisher, Auchincloss decided “that a man born to the
responsibilities of a brownstone bourgeois world could only be an artist
or writer if he were a genius.” He dropped out of Yale, which he found
suffocating, and decided upon taking up a profession, one that his
milieu wouldn't reject, and entered the University of Virginia Law
School on the eve of WW2.
He was surprisingly good at the law -- and,
Trusts and Estates
law, at that -- a specialty almost solely devoted to the hereditary
wealthy. In WW2, he volunteered for the U.S. Navy, was commissioned an
officer and served in Naval Intelligence (typical for a Knickerbocker),
but left that to command an LST at Utah beach on D-Day at Normandy, then
in the Pacific after V-E Day. Even with his normal duties, he had
completed a second novel, but "threw it in the trash".
It wasn't until 1947 that he completed
The Indifferent Children,
published after he returned to his law practice. It appeared under the
pseudonym Andrew Lee, in deference to his mother, who thought the book
“trivial and vulgar”, and feared it would damage his career (the horror
of publicity, too, a trait of the rich).
Auchincloss At His New York City Home, 2005
I remember reading a
New Yorker
portrait of him several years ago while waiting in my Dog Trainer's
office, and was struck with how much a man of his class he was -- and
yet, he wasn't. He felt no sense of guilt at who and what he was (there
isn't a trace of it in his writing). And, although I haven't read much
of his work (which, like a wine, had hints of Edith Wharton and John
Updike-ian highlights, though Auchincloss was far below Updike), his
characters were drawn from his own world, and in chronicling their human
failings, Auchincloss pointed up the value of at least an ethical
rectitude if not a moral one.
The very wealthy are
rarely seen by the likes of you and I. Where they live, where they eat,
travel and shop is inside a Magic Circle of privilege and exclusivity.
If he hadn't been an author, and his books hadn't possessed some merit,
Auchincloss would have moved through life inside that Circle, acting as
lawyer to his own tribe; his mark would have been made in helping them
to preserve and maintain wealth accumulated over generations. His
friends and clients would have been "his crowd... the right sort", who
knew people
he knew, summered where he did, voted Republican, and
may have had their suits, shirts and shoes custom-made by the same
Gentleman's tailors and reclusive cobblers.
But that
wasn't his life -- or, not all of it. When he was writing, he was
temporarily freed of the bourgeois world he swam in so easily.
Auchincloss couldn't escape what he was as a man, but as an author he
tried to see further, explore the human condition and bring back an
artifact from his travels for a wider audience.
Commenting
to an interviewer for some Tony Manhattan publication in 2007, however,
Auchincloss reminded us that the world of the wealthy never really goes
away in what are, for the rest of us, good times or bad:
Even
near the end of his life, Mr. Auchincloss said the influence of his
class had not waned. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau
riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I’m still living in
one!,” he told The Financial Times
in 2007. “The private schools
are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs — all the old clubs —
are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with
yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we
live in today. Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about?” he
asked. “I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”
J.D. Salinger, Surprised By A Fan's Camera In Cornish, NH,
On His 89th Birthday In 2008: "woe betide any of those fans
who track him down just to explain that they, like, totally
love him and can so relate to his retreat from a world of
phony bastards. “No you don’t,” he told one such visitor.
“Or you wouldn’t be here."
Jerome
David Salinger was once groomed by his father for a career in the ham
business, which, fortunately for American letters, never quite
congealed. He was born in New York City, attended Progressive and Prep
schools; he had just begun to publish short fiction -- in The New
Yorker, no less -- when he was drafted in 1942. Initially a rifleman in
the 4th Infantry Division, he was transferred to serve as a
Counterintelligence specialist, trained to interrogate prisoners and
review captured documents and maps -- meaning Salinger had to possess an
above-average ability with spoken and written German.
Camp Ritchie, Maryland, During WW2 (Contemporary Postcard)
(Training for all CIC specialists was conducted at one location --
Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and is detailed in the book,
Germans,
by George Bailey [1970]. I wonder if Salinger and Bailey knew each
other; they were at the Camp at the same time, 1943, and had to know the
same instructors, characters, and fellow voulnteers, many of whom were
German-Jewish refugees from the nazis who had taken U.S. citizenship.)
Salinger
went ashore on D-Day at Utah beach with elements of the firat wave of
the 4th Infantry. I've wondered from time to time whether Louis
Auchincloss, commanding an LST in carrying that first wave in to Utah on
June 6th, ferried the future author of one of America's enduring,
classic postwar novels that day; it's not impossible.
In
December of 1944 and into 1945, Salinger fought in the Battle Of The
Bulge -- when everyone on the line, for weeks, no matter what their
MOS*, were riflemen. After The Bulge, he was was hospitalized with
"battle fatigue", the forerunning terminology for Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder.
[*MOS = Military Occupational Specialty, a term more familiar to Vietnam-era draftees]
Salinger, In The U.S. Army, Circa 1944 (Unknown)
After
release from hospital, he remained in Germany for at least a year,
helping Allied authorities track down nazi functionaries wanted by the
Occupation powers. He married a German woman, briefly; very little is
known of her, or this period in Salinger's life.
(We
might be able to infer what some of his duties may have been, again from
George Bailey's book: Many of the CIC specialists in 1945-46 also
helped to resettle refugees from the Soviets in various small German
communities -- who were under Allied military jurisdiction and had no
choice but to, uh, follow orders.)
(This involved a
degree of subterfuge, quick wits, and a sense of both the scale of
physical and moral destruction the nazis had brought on Europe and their
own country; and a heightened sense of the kind of absurdity peculiar
to the U.S. Army, which appears in novels like
Catch-22 or
Slaughterhouse Five.)
Returning
from the war, Salinger also returned to New York City and in 1948
published a short story, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish", in the
New Yorker
-- a kind of shot-across-the-bow to announce a different kind of writer
was in town. After several other short stories were published by the
magazine, in 1951 Salinger's seminal novel,
Catcher In The Rye, was published.
Salinger
had A Major And Serious Jones for attention as a literary genius; and,
he'd proven he had the chops for it. While in college, he had bragged
about his literary talent and ambitions -- and his short fiction had
marked him as a real talent. But, when
Catcher became a runaway
bestseller and critical success, being in the 'eye of the comic book
hurricane' was more than he bargained for.
Salinger On The Cover Of
TIME, 1953: From The Bulge
To National Notoriety In Less Than Ten Years
It
wasn't just being lionized by the Establishment press and New York
literary mafia; the book was a landmark of postwar American alienation.
Salinger seemed to give a voice through his narrator, Holden Caulfield,
to the conflicted, shamed, vainglorious, and noble patter which runs
through all our heads on a daily basis; Caulfield was nearly an
archetypal figure -- and the novel resonated.
What I
like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really
knocks me out is a book that, when you're all 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. That doesn't happen
much, though.
Holden Caulfield,
Catcher In The Rye
And
it did resonate with the feelings of being lost, an undefined longing,
in so many people who read the novel that Salinger was subjected to what
eventually would be termed 'stalking' from readers -- some
enthusiastic, many others troubled; but all of whom believed Salinger
had a finer perception of the world we live in, and could be that
"terrific friend" and help them. They wanted answers to The Big
Questions.
(Sometimes, it's the author of the moment you look for. In the 70's, after
The World According To Garp
had appeared, four friends from my time in New York and I borrowed
someone's car and drove up into New England; there was talk of trying to
get a glimpse of Salinger -- rejected by the eternal Mick Koznick [A
guy as big as Lucca Brazi, drunk, in black leather jacket and Ray-Bans,
punches you in the chest with a forefinger and says, "M'eye right? I'm
right. M'eye right? I'm right"] as "too bourgeois" -- turned into a
search for Putney, Vermont, and author John Irving; which might have
succeeded, but for the fact that we were most of the time drunk.)
First Paperback Edition Of
Catcher In The Rye
The
response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates
that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times
but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of
significance is going on between self and culture.
Phillip Roth, 1974
Eventually, Salinger told his editors that he was “good and sick” of seeing his photograph on the dust jacket of
Catcher in the Rye
and demanded that it be removed from subsequent editions. He ordered
his agent to burn any fan mail. In 1953, Salinger moved to a 90-acre
parcel of land in Cornish, New Hampshire, which had a long history as an
artist's colony.
And, for the most part, Salinger was never publicly seen again. He was rumored to have achieved a mystical state of
satori
and left the physical plane; or to be writing novel after novel to be
published after his death (and so removed from attendant publicity); or
to have decayed into an abberated, Howard-Hughes-like paranoid,
long-haired recluse. College students tried staking out his property, or
-- once it became known he had a PO Box in Cornish -- his local Post
Office. sightings of Salinger were few, and brief; the man was smart and
quick.
James Earl Jones As 'Terence Mann', The Salinger Character
From W.P. Kinsella's Tale Which Became
Field Of Dreams
In the early 80's, when W.P. Kinsella wrote his novel, "Shoeless Joe" (turned into the film
Field Of Dreams
in 1989), he put J. D. Salinger into the novel, going to New Hampshire
to bring him back to Iowa and the magical baseball field Ray Kinsella
has built in his cornfield. Salinger would have nothing to do with the
production and didn't want his name used; the reclusive author figure
played by James Earl Jones became 'Terence Mann' ("I don't have any
answers for you -- and I don't know the secret of life. So piss off").
In 1997, Ron Rosenblum wrote a piece for
Esquire magazine, "The Haunted Life Of J. D. Salinger":
The
silence of a writer is not quite the same as the silence of God, but
there's something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone who we
belive has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding
his face, withholding his creation.
Still, Salinger could be
seen
in and around Cornish, if you were diligent. He would be outdone in
the reclusiveness department by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., author of
his own engrossing postmodern novels (
V.;
Gravity's Rainbow;
Crying Of Lot 49;
Mason & Dixon;
Vineland;
Against The Day), who has only been publicly seen twice between the early 1960's and the late 1990's -- and not at all since.
Thomas Riggles Pynchon, Jr., In 1953: One Of Seven
Only
seven published photographs of him known are to exist -- six yearbook photos, and one as a seaman in the U.S. Navy in the mid-to-late 1950's.
Okay,
Pynchon's done a few 'Simpsons' voiceovers, where his cartoon character
has a paper bag over his head; and Robert K. Massie thanked Pynchon in
the afterword to Massie's amazingly good 1991 book,
Dreadnought; but he still makes Salinger look like a publicity hog.
Unlike Salinger, Pynchon (who is 73 this year) isn't demanding, Garbo-like, to be left alone; he simply
prefers anonymity. Doing the occasional 'Simpsons' guest spot is Pynchon's way of
mocking
his own sense of privacy -- something Salinger would never have done,
and proof that hanging out with Tom for an afternoon or over a beer
wouldn't be a waste of time and might even be fun.
Wikipedia notes:
In
the early 1990s, Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson — a
great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt — and fathered a son,
Jackson, in 1991. The disclosure ... led some journalists and
photographers to try to track him down.
[I]
n
1997, a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan. Angered by this
invasion of his privacy, he rang CNN asking that he not be identified
... "Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed." In 1998, a
reporter for the [South African] Sunday Times
managed to snap a photo of him as he was walking with his son.
I
don't know enough about Salinger's inner life, or Pynchon's, to know
why they removed themselves from the barest hint of the public
spotlight. But, I don't have to. Their lives -- like mine, or yours --
are no one else's business.
I don't agree with John Fowles' autobiographical-fictional narrator in his novel,
Daniel Martin,
when he notes that creative persons put themselves up on a public
soapbox and suffer all that doing so entails. I'm a fairly private
person, and Pynchon (or Salinger)'s ire at being stalked like a Snow
Leopard by a National Geographic film team is wholly appropriate.
“Here’s your quote. Thomas Pynchon loved this book. Almost
as much as he loves cameras,” a reference indicating that
Marge Simpson’s novel sucks Brontosauruses. Fellow Recluse
Salaman Rushdie describes Pynchon as "Still Crazy After All
These Years".
Salinger
was married several times, and divorced; in the 1990's, his daughter
would publish a book about being the child of an obviously brilliant and
obsessive-compulsive man, the only look into his world anyone had been
granted in almost forty years. One tantalizing glimpse from the book:
Salinger had a bookcase in his Cornish home, packed with what very well
may have been manuscripts written over the years.
Salinger And His Wife, Circa 2009 (Paul Adao,
NY Post)
About
the same time, in his early eighties, Salinger married a nurse
"considerably younger" than himself, but did not change his
reclusiveness or irascibility. His new wife adopted Salinger's desire
for privacy. He only had his name brought back into the public spotlight
when forced -- as he did last year, when a Swedish author wanted to
publish what amounted to a sequel to
Catcher, titled "Sixty Years After". The Swede claimed it was a parody, like
Jane Austen With Zombies. Salinger was plenty steamed, and a court agreed with him.
After
breaking his hip this past winter, his health declined rapidly, and he
passed away -- peacefully, it was reported -- last night. Like
Auchincloss, he lived his life on his own terms; not comfortably
provided to him, but -- for better or worse, like all of us -- one made
by his own hand. But I believe Salinger will be missed, and his works
read by new generations (
Catcher In The Rye still sells over 250,000 copies a year) long after Louis' writings fade into a genteel obscurity.
I
hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me
in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam
cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach
on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead?
Nobody.
Holden Caulfield,
Catcher In The Rye
