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From Peggy, with Love and Squalor
Judith Solomon / Boston
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Margaret (Peggy) Salinger, model-like at 44, her prominent cheekbones accentuated by gold earrings and a chic, short haircut, is standing in the plush law offices of friends, admiring spectacular views of Boston�s Mystic River. We have to meet here because the threat-management company she�s hired since the release of her memoir, "Dream Catcher," decreed no interviews at her home, in an undisclosed suburb, to which she, her opera-singer husband and 7-year-old son recently moved for safety reasons.
"There are lots of crazies out there," she says, referring to those young men, like assassins Marc David Chapman and John Hinckley, whose "love" for her father J.D. Salinger�s "Catcher in the Rye" - they both carried around dog-eared copies - veers beyond that of a normal fan to a "just touch the hem of his garment and be healed" obsession. "This is not my father�s fault," she continues. "If you�re going to capture the borderline aspects of adolescence brilliantly, you�re going to capture an audience of a borderline group of guys. It becomes a problem when they respond to [the novel] at 30 the way they did at 17."
Their rage at her betrayal of the "Hermit of Cornish," as the 81-year-old Jerome David Salinger is known - his pursuit of privacy took him to the Supreme Court in 1986 in an attempt to quash publication of Ian Hamilton�s biography, he hasn�t given an interview since 1974 or published anything since 1965, and allows neither photos on his book jackets nor movie licensing - is almost equaled by that of the pundits.
Dan Carpenter of the Indianapolis Star predicts she�ll go to hell, where there is a special place reserved "for people who try to make a name and a fortune for themselves by humiliating their conveniently famous parents." The New York Observer�s Sven Birkerts chimes in that her memoir violates the "ontological essence" of the parent-child relationship and that "the lesser cannot comprehend the greater."
Why the indignant hoopla? Holden Caulfield�s hold on the popular imagination may be the answer. He hated what we hated - phonies, morons and pimples, and he spoke to us, the select, with a colloquial intimacy. Whereas Holden dreamed of "catching" playing children before they go off a cliff bordering a field of rye, Peggy dreamed of being "caught" by her father, rescued by a man she thought of as morally faultless until she was in her mid-30s. As the years went by and she became more emotionally self-reliant, that delusion began to crack, thus leading to a coming-to-terms and the word processor.
Peggy says she has a healthy respect for privacy but not for the cult-like secrecy in which she was raised, likening the difference to mindful parental authority versus child abuse. Waiting for her father to die before publishing, she suggests, would have been "sneakier," as he wouldn�t have been able to defend himself. "If my motivation was to get rich, I could have taken several million dollars up front by agreeing to a ghostwriter." Instead, she settled for a $350,000 advance and the freedom not to have to write "juicy crap."
But Peggy may have her own price to pay for publication. While her mother, Claire, a Jungian analyst, was a helpful source, her father hasn�t been in touch for two years, since learning the book was in the works. "What am I losing, anyway?" she asks. Her most satisfying dealings with him took place in letters, provided she didn�t want anything and remained in good health, which was hardly ever, as she suffered from perceptual distortions, panic attacks, chronic fatigue syndrome, and bulimia from her teens onward. Still, there is a sadness to her voice. She loves the "wonderful daddy" who skipped the educational stuff at the Museum of Natural History, taking her straight to the dinosaurs. They�re not officially estranged, and she would ring him, except, well, he�s still very scary when he yells.
Also keeping his distance is her actor brother Matthew, who has said he considers the book "largely a work of fiction." Peggy responds that "siblings grow up in totally different households. They really do."
If her memoir has alienated some of her closest kin, it has drawn, like a magnet, sympathetic paternal relatives she never knew existed. She�s yet to meet them, but their correspondence has been eye-opening.
Peggy's Lithuanian immigrant great-grandfather, Simon Salinger, became both a pulpit rabbi and doctor. Sol, his son, was a successful food importer who married Marie Jillich, whose Irish Catholic family disowned her for wedding a Jew. Marie became Miriam and raised both J.D. and his elder sister, Doris, as Jews. Only after his bar mitzvah did she tell them that they were half-Jews. Doris remembers the news as traumatizing, though what she failed to tell Peggy, and probably didn�t know, was that her mother had undergone a halakhic conversion. This means, of course, that the author, who is commonly thought of as half-Jewish, is entirely so.
Peggy found this out only a few weeks ago, upon a receiving a letter from Jay Goldberg, her father�s first cousin, who also enclosed an unmailed letter he�d written to Sonny, Salinger�s nickname, 12 years back. In it he admits to basking in his cousin�s reflected glory but goes on to say: "I think you made a touchdown but lost the game, fame and adulation are wonderful but family is also important. You obviously turned your back on your heritage."
Indeed, Salinger had feelings of "attraction and repulsion" toward his Jewishness, writes Peggy. As a counterintelligence officer in Germany after World War II, he arrested a Nazi doctor and then briefly married her. "She hated Jews as much as he hated Nazis, and she let him feel it." His experience with harsh anti-Semitism at military school, and Marie/Miriam�s view of Jews as loud, cheap vulgarians, surely contributed to his twisted emotions, which found expression in his stories on the openly half-Jewish Glass family.
Peggy sees clues of her father�s Jewishness everywhere: "He was hilarious," she says. "It was schtick, egg-cream humor. With wet hands, he�d walk up behind you and go �Ah choo,� and then squirt you from the back so you�d think you had sneeze on your neck;" as part of his loopy health kick, which included sitting in a Reichian orgone box, acupuncture, homeopathy, macrobiotics and drinking urine, he refused to mix meat and dairy, citing the combination as poisonous to the liver.
"Dream Catcher" isn't all about her father. Peggy�s diverse achievements and experience make it unlike any memoir you�ve read before. One internship away from finishing Harvard Divinity School, she has a Master�s from Oxford in management studies and a BA summa cum laude from Brandeis, which admitted her at 25 on a "second chance" program, taking a risk with her poor high school grades.
The memoir�s kaleidoscopic 436 pages whirl with literary criticism, a study of mid-20th-century American anti-Semitism, and her take on cults. It also chronicles a family�s strange secrets, its daughter�s meltdown - Peggy was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder while in her teens - and mend.
Most notable about "Dream Catcher" are its darkly comic aspects, the humor within its pathos. The father, a serial follower of Yoga, Vedanta, Zen, Scientology, Christian Science, is the guru in his home "headquarters." Locked away in his study writing, on a sacred mission for his art (he is said to have written steadfastly until the late 80s), he requires his family/disciples to ape his fictional heroes. His daughter is all too aware at age 7 that her "peer" Seymour Glass is reading Cervantes and she L. Frank Baum. After a fight when she�s 10, her father advises they find a way to make up because "�when I�m through with a person, I�m through with them.�"
"Behind every enlightened man in his fiction there�s a demonization of womanhood and a sacrifice of childhood," she writes. When the 31-year old writer meets Claire Douglas, 16, the daughter of upper class Brits, he�s a celibate adherent of Sri Ramakrishna, who deems women "phlegm, filth, and excreta." Luckily, he moves on to the more progressive Lahiri Mahasaya, who okays sex and marriage as long as the woman licks the man�s toes.
Claire, who heeds Salinger�s ultimatum that she drop out of Radcliffe four months shy of graduation to follow him to rural New Hampshire, soon becomes a depressed, lonely young mother. Visitors to the cabin are prohibited, as are doctors for the infant Peggy (Christian Science doctrine). When her daughter is 13 months old, Claire decides on a murder/suicide but escapes into the hands of a paternalistic psychiatrist who sends her back to her husband.
Life goes on for little Peggy: At 3 she finds what years later she learned was a bloody fetus in the toilet but has to pee so flushes it away. When she�s 8, the house burns down; Claire is suspected but denies the charge. Peggy attends a school whose philosophy is "Idle hands are the devil�s workshop, active minds, the devil�s spawning ground." But Peggy periodically flies off somewhere, downing Shirley Temples in Manhattan with her godfather, New Yorker editor William Shawn; her parents split when she�s 11, and though officially in her mother�s custody, she�s shipped off to a tony boarding school that seems to double as a fat farm. When a "room search" turns up a roll of Lifesavers in her pillow, Peggy is denounced as a "viper and snake" and takes to burying hard-won candy in the ground.
A year after eighth grade graduation, out of a class of 20, three are in a mental institution, one dead; Peggy�s now at the Cambridge School, in Massachusetts, acting crazy, weaving in and out of consciousness, taking on different personalities, like that of a large black woman who speaks patois. Nonetheless, she becomes a "catcher" for other troubled kids; gets arrested for stealing a pair of black satin hotpants (undoubtedly to go with her thigh-high suede boots) and lands in a police lockup. She loves the jailhouse community. They�re the family she�s never had - "Get yourself together, honey," they shout; next, she�s off to public high school in nearby Lexington, living on her own. She makes up a low-income guardian to wrangle free lunches. Food at last. She porks up, and then, used to enforced starvation, concocts a diet of lettuce sprinkled with Sweet and Low; has an abortion; May 5, at age 16, she gets saved, in a black church, after the preacher calls out, "Does anyone want to receive Jesus Christ as savior and Lord?" The saving, however, does not include immediate normalization; at 20, she impulsively marries her African-American karate instructor. He runs off with her money and car. Years later, dumped by her investment banker boyfriend, she attempts suicide, but wanting to protect her father�s privacy, first calls the emergency room to insure her name won�t get in the papers. When her disability payments are cut off, she calls her father with the grave news. He sends her a booklet of testimonials to miraculous healing, no dough; an unmarried 37, working on her second graduate degree, she gets pregnant. Father advocates abortion, saying she has no right to bring a child she can�t support into this "lousy" world.
First, one wracks one�s head as to why she describes in detail her childhood method for eating Lifesavers. But then, it dawns that Peggy must have known, unconsciously, from an early age, that her life needed saving, and lacking adult clarity, she grasped the concrete and accessible. Candy! It�s cleverly depicted.
Peggy�s "Jesus as Lifesaver" is without fanaticism: "Christianity was very important to me as a lifeline in my less sane times," she says pragmatically. "Judaism is not a religion that picks up strays . . . but I consider myself both deeply Jewish and not Jewish." Interestingly, she doesn�t say Christian. Now a non-denominational hospital chaplain, Peggy "didn�t want to pledge allegiance to anyone�s club."
Her father, who loathed the Waspy, Ivy League, country-club set that shunned him as a Jew, nonetheless, maintained his link to it through his disdainful fictional portrayals. Peggy, too, embraced her own nemeses, physical and mental illness: "Why," she asks, "does one child who is beaten turn around and torture small animals and another become a veterinarian?" In any event, both get to re-experience pain in different veins, as perpetrator or ameliorator.
Through Freud we learned our identities are forever split. The sadist is part masochist, the exhibitionist, a wallflower. As we go down the elevator after the interview, a boy gets on blasting his Walkman. Peggy starts to break into the twist, but then Peggy II stops her, saying, "Doesn�t he know that�s bad for his ears?"
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