We all know the story: After writing The Catcher in the Rye, the young and brilliant J. D. Salinger, afraid of his own fame, fled the public eye to be a recluse in small-town New Hampshire. Or do we?
In Salinger’s Soul, Stephen B. Shepard presents a different version of the iconic author, backed up by meticulous research and interviews. Shepard’s Salinger is not so much afraid of the public eye as much as he is hyperconscious of how he’s perceived by it. Far from fleeing New York to find a refuge from his fame, this Salinger seems to have retreated into anonymity only when his own fame began to sour, and when his prospects for further public adulation were turned down.
Shepard traces Salinger’s unremarkable path from early childhood, when his less-than-stellar academic performance still earned him adoration from his mother. Though Shepard doesn’t spend much time on Miriam Salinger, he shows us the beginnings of Salinger’s obsession with the differences between “phony” projected image and reality. Miriam’s real name was Marie, which was more reflective of her Scotch Irish heritage than the Jewish image she wanted to project (Salinger would later steal the trick, trying to pass off his German wife as French in post – WWII New York). It was not until Salinger enrolled at Ursinus (after dropping out of NYU and going abroad to Europe to learn his father’s cheese business) that Salinger’s ambitions began to become known. At Ursinus, he “fancied himself a theater critic for The New Yorker. Or perhaps making it on Broadway or Hollywood as writer, actor, or producer … it was at Ursinus that he declared his goal of becoming a major writer. He even boasted to classmates that he would someday write the Great American Novel.”
Prescient? Yes. Yet the psychological portrait that Shepard paints of early Salinger is closer to that of a budding egomaniac, one obsessed with fame and the acceptance of high society.
He would get his big break in 1940 through the largesse of Whit Burnett, a friend and mentor who founded Story magazine nearly a decade earlier; but when Burnett later had to break the news that Story Press could not, ultimately, publish a collection of Salinger’s short stories (an attempted favor, after Story stopped publishing Salinger’s work), Salinger blamed Burnett and did not speak to him again for years.
This pattern played out over and over again in Salinger’s life. Rather than reinforcing the popular impression of Salinger as a pure artist who is afraid of or disinterested in fame, Shepard depicts Salinger as a narcissist who used art and friends to achieve fame — but was afraid of and disinterested in critique. When the editor of Cosmopolitan helped to publish one of Salinger’s stories, but had to explain that — unbeknownst to Salinger — the title was changed at the last minute, “Salinger exploded. ‘He said it was a terrible deceit on my part … He left me with my beer, sitting at the table. He took the magazine with him. I never saw him again.’” His personal relationships — frequently with young women “in the last minute of her girlhood” — tended to follow the same routine.
In Salinger’s Soul, Shepard does a tremendous job of balancing the literary establishment’s hagiographic treatment of Salinger with damning evidence that suggests something more complex at play than a literary genius’s self-imposed seclusion. Love or hate Salinger, it’s well worth the read.
Daniel H. Turtel is the author of the novels The Family Morfawitz and Greetings from Asbury Park, winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel. He graduated from Duke University with a degree in mathematics and received an MFA from the New School. He now lives in New York City.
