Was Salinger Demonically Possessed?

There seem to be two distinct schools on JD Salinger: those who remember him best for Catcher in the Rye, and those who better remember better Franny & Zooey. Among Catholics, this division is expressed equally well as: those who detest Salinger (the Catcher crew) and those who see him at least as a spiritual fellow-traveller (the Zooeys). David Warren is of the former party: not to be hyperbolic or anything, he sees Salinger as writing “under direct demonic possession.”

I am in the second camp. Catcher in the Rye left relatively little impression on me. I saw Holden Caulfield as sincere, and his problem as real and fundamental, but I did not really identify with him, because I felt, even as a teenager myself, that he was reacting to it in entirely the wrong way—just thrashing about instead of looking for a solution. I surmised, and still think, the author thought the same, and was ironically distancing himself from Caulfield in many ways—firstly be making him young. I feel a lot of people, including Warren, as well as the several million who have seen Holden Caulfield as themselves, and all been totally alienated from one another together, have been missing the main point.

As I see it, Salinger was using Catcher in the Rye to lay out the problem—the problem of life in general, or life in what Jesus called “this world,” the objective, physical, shared, social world. Caulfield calls it “phoniness”; Jesus and John the Baptist called it “hypocrisy”; Socrates and Plato called it “sophistry.” Any reasonably intelligent adolescent figures out, by about Holden's age, that things here are rarely what they seem, and rarely what they clearly ought to be. Those in charge are generally liars, and nobody says the truth to anyone else.

But so far, in Catcher in the Rye, he was only setting out the problem. I believe Salinger then created the Glass family to explore and debate possible solutions. Caulfield had nobody to talk to about his perceptions; and this alienation was itself a large part of the problem. In a world of phoniness, whom can you trust? Salinger's Glass family, as a mental experiment, at least solves this problem: because they are all siblings, and already know each other thoroughly well, they are rather more likely to be straight with one another, and permitted to speak at the deepest emotional levels. Being exceptionally intelligent, they are allowed, in ordinary dialogue, to refer to anything and everything that might be relevant, however arcane the scholarship, however subtle the point.

Salinger can then use these characters to each represent a different possible path out of this thicket of phoniness, and have them by their interaction draw out the strengths and weaknesses of each possibility.

Seymour was the first and most obvious option, and so the first one Salinger explored in his stories: suicide. Obviously, that is not the option Salinger himself chose, in the end, since he lived into his nineties.

We know less about Salinger's other characters, because their choices were more complex. One of them, Waker, was already, when Salinger stopped publishing, a Carthusian monk—the religious life. Buddy represents the life of the writer, or artist, standing aloof and commenting on the world. Walt, “the only truly lighthearted member of the family,” represents the option of laughter, of seeing it all as absurd and meaningless and not caring; but Salinger seems to have already dismissed that option by blowing him up. Boo Boo represents the conventional life, trying to “fit in” and be “normal.” Zooey represents the life of an actor, the option of eternally wearing a mask for the world. Franny has an emotional breakdown—she is well-placed, at least, to be elaborated into an investigation of the always-popular option of going mad.

My guess is that it was Salinger’s plan to work out the issue by following through with the life stories of all of the Glasses, not really knowing himself which option would win out in the end. It was his plan for his personal spiritual development, which is one reason he felt no need to publish. My guess is that he has followed through on this, and his posthumous manuscripts will include the full biographies of all the Glasses.

I’m not sure who will win out, or whether that will even be apparent; other than that it’s pretty clearly not Seymour, Walt, or Zooey.

I’m kind of betting on the Carthusian monk. His name seems to suggest he had the inside track as of the 1950s. And Franny & Zooey already ended on a distinctly Christian note.

Written with a child on my lap.