J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [0]
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.
RANDOM HOUSE 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
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1. Sonny
2. Ambition
3. Indecision
4. Displacement
5. Hell
6. Purgatory
7. Recognition
8. Reaffirmation
9. Holden
10. Crossroads
11. Positioning
12. Franny
13. Two Families
14. Zooey
15. Seymour
16. Dark Summit
17. Detachment
18. Farewell
19. The Poetry of Silence
20. Coming Through the Rye
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Introduction
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 Salinger’s 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 Salinger’s 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 Caulfield’s disgust at all the phonies laying flowers on Allie’s 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 Salinger’s works in tribute to the author who is so deeply embedded within them. Salinger the man may be gone—and for that the