This Day in Literary History (Birth of J.D. Salinger, Star-Struck Literary Garbo)

Jan. 1, 1919—J.D. Salinger, a star-struck youngster who became a literary Garbo by walking away from his career at the height of his fame and acclaim, was born in Manhattan in comfortable circumstances that made him uncomfortable—not unlike his most indelible character, the troubled teenager Holden Caulfield. 

Even that name of the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye reflects Salinger’s fascination with actors: It’s a mashup of two he particularly admired, William Holden and Joan Caulfield. Holden’s older brother is a Hollywood screenwriter, a profession that, for all its glamour, fills the alienated teen with uneasiness.

Over the years, many readers have mourned the fact that The Catcher in the Rye has never been adapted for the screen. A major reason for that might have been the botch that producer Samuel Goldwyn, together with screenwriting brothers Philip and Julius Epstein, made of Salinger’s short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” That bitter satire of WASP suburbia was turned into the Susan Hayward weepie My Foolish Heart, which gave rise to an Academy Award-winning song—and widespread critical derision.

Salinger was so embarrassed to be associated with this travesty of his work that he almost automatically refused other opportunities to adapt his work. I say “almost” because Salinger, a mass of contradictions, did, for whatever reason, allow agent H.N. Swanson to make one exception to the rule: marketing the short story “The Laughing Man.” (Producer Jerry Wald rejected the overture, unsuccessfully urging Swanson to convince Salinger to let him make a film of—you guessed it—The Catcher in the Rye.)

As protective of his intellectual property as Holden Caulfield was of innocent children, Salinger might also have feared how the censorship regime that held sway in Hollywood from 1930 to 1967 might have bowdlerized or twisted his depiction of sexual exploitation in the novel. (The restrictive “Production Code” of the time was adamant about its exclusion: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.”)

As noted in Dan Grossman’s perceptive piece in the online magazine The Millions, hints of this theme appear early on, in Holden’s fear for the safety of one of his crushes, Jane Gallagher, at the hands of her alcoholic stepfather and Holden’s prep-school tormentor, Stradlater. It culminates in Holden fleeing the apartment of the only adult authority he trusts, Mr. Antolini, because of his suspicion that the English teacher is trying to seduce him.

When I read the novel as a high-school freshman, it was possible, given Holden’s status as a not-always-reliable narrator and the implications of his psychiatric treatment at the end of the book, to see this incident as ambiguous. But the flood of child sexual-abuse incidents that have been reported in prep schools and, of course, the Roman Catholic Church makes such a reading untenable now—a fact reinforced for me after reading Caitlin Flanagan’s connection of that scene to the scandal that erupted at New York’s Horace Mann School in The Atlantic three years ago.

The details provided force the conclusion that Mr. Antolini is a cunning sexual predator—one who latches onto the product of a troubled or broken family and carefully “grooms” him to win his trust. When Holden awakens to find Mr. Antolini staring at and caressing his body, the teacher claims that Holden is imagining such a transgression, calling him a “strange boy.” 

The abundant examples of Antolini’s prior kindness, however, are enough to make Holden wonder, as he spends the night helplessly alone in Grand Central, if the pat on the head represented affection instead of perversion. “The more I thought about it,” he tells us, “the more depressed and screwed up about it I got.”

Influenced by movies, Salinger in turn would influence generations of American filmmakers. Echoes of The Catcher in the Rye, with its loose conversational lingo, its scorn for adult “phonies” and its sympathy for adolescents feeling misplaced, can be found in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Graduate, Ordinary People, Less Than Zero, Tadpole, The Ice Storm, and Igby Goes Down.

Rangy and handsome—“like a candlestick, a Giacometti statue,” according to one admirer —with a warm, funny presence, Salinger might have become an actor himself if his passion and commitment to writing had not proven so all-consuming. At summer camp as a child, he had performed in at least four plays and was voted the most popular actor by counselors and fellow campers. His son Matthew would please his father considerably by becoming an actor.

Among the celebrities drawn into his orbit as an adult were Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, a beautiful teenage debutante (who would break the writer’s heart by wedding Charlie Chaplin instead) and actress Elaine Joyce (more than a quarter-century his junior when they dated in the early 1980s).

After his last story in The New Yorker, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” was published in 1965, it became common to refer to Salinger as “reclusive.” But his attitude might have been more akin to Greta Garbo, who complained that rather than wanting to “be alone,” as normally reported, she had actually said she wanted to be “left alone.”

Someone who worked every day like Salinger could not have helped but notice how one of his heroes, Ernest Hemingway, distracted by his monstrous celebrity and the image he had created, had seen his productivity and art decline. 

Ironically, Salinger’s decision to step away from the publicity machine had only made him more famous, as the World’s Most Famous Reclusive Author. 

The movies created characters from him. At least the makers of Finding Forrester came up with a different surname. 

But W.P. Kinsella even used his actual name for the character sought by Ray Kinsella in the novel Shoeless Joe. (In a sense, this was art mirroring art: Salinger had created a character named Ray Kinsella in his story “A Young Girl In 1941 With No Waist At All.”) When the novel was turned into the film Field of Dreams, changes in the character’s name (to “Terence Mann”) and race (to African-American, to facilitate adding James Earl Jones to the cast) still did not fool viewers about who was really being referred to.

After Salinger’s death in 2010, it was announced that several books on which he had worked in his decades-long withdrawal from publishing would be issued between 2015 and 2020. But no word has been released since then on any publication timetable.

(A tip of my hat to my college friend Greg, who first suggested that I write about Salinger after the writer’s death in 2010. It took a long time, but I finally got around to it, my friend. Thanks!)