J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [100]
Salinger’s tirade against literary egos also averted the purpose of the sketch, which was to shed light on the details of his own life. The only personal facts he actually parted with were three short pieces of information that were important but not very enlightening. “I’ve been writing seriously for over 10 years,” he told his readers. “I was with the Fourth Division during the war,” and “I almost always write about very young people.”
However, Salinger did allow a fragment of a revelation to slip onto the page. “I’ve written biographical notes for a few magazines,” he confided, “and I doubt if I ever said anything honest in them.” That much was certainly true. When it came to revealing the details of his life, the Salinger family attitude toward privacy emerged in full force. He considered such confessions to be an imposition and felt under no obligation to respect them. This, after all, was the same Jerry Salinger who, as a young man, had playfully falsified his own draft application.
A comparison of the few autobiographical profiles that Salinger granted reveals a number of deliberate contradictions. For Story magazine in 1944, he claimed that his father had dragged him off to Europe to slaughter pigs. For the 1951 dust jacket biography for The Catcher in the Rye, he recalled the same trip as being “a happy tourist year,” while his interview with William Maxwell the same year confided that he had “hated it.”
These aspects of Salinger’s public persona reveal the way in which he dealt with emerging fame. He avoided disclosing personal facts regardless of how harmless they were and desperately attempted to appear humble. He protected himself with the defense that any attention drawn to him personally was a deflection from the work he was presenting. In truth, his displays of modesty were in deference to his work alone and in no way actually made him humble.
Amid the successes of 1949, the contributor’s biography that accompanied “Down at the Dinghy” demonstrated that, in the heat of the public spotlight, Salinger was already beginning to squirm. As the year drew to a close, two events occurred that should have put his ego in check, alerting him to reconsider the consequences of the fame to which his ambition was driving him.
Salinger was friends with the poet Hortense Flexner King, who was currently teaching a creative writing class at Sarah Lawrence College, an all-girls’ school in upscale Bronxville, New York.16 When the autumn semester began, she invited Salinger to be a guest speaker. Salinger accepted, but, as he later recounted to William Maxwell, “I got very oracular and literary. I found myself labeling all the writers I respect … a writer, when he’s asked to discuss his craft, ought to get up and call out in a loud voice just the names of the writers he loves.” He then went on to name his favorite writers. “I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Proust, O’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge.”
When the lecture was over, Salinger was embarrassed. Once on the speaker’s stage, he had become a performer and displayed a persona that smacked of smugness. This was clearly not a comfortable position—or rather, he was too comfortable in the position, and it revealed aspects of his personality that he wanted kept from display. “I enjoyed the day,” he commented to Maxwell, “but it isn’t something I’d ever want to do again.” In fact, it was Salinger’s first and only public appearance in such a capacity. Authors routinely employ such appearances to sell their books, but for Salinger future speechmaking and book-signing appearances were out of the question.
Another prickly consequence of Salinger’s fame occurred the following December. Shortly after the release of “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” the year before, he had sold the story’s movie rights to Darryl Zanuck for the Hollywood