The PBS Newshour had some professors on to talk about J.D. Salinger, and Salinger the Recluse emerged as something just as interesting — maybe more — than Salinger the writer. Robert Thompson of Syracuse nailed it (6:18 to 6:52):
“He didn’t like the idea of notoriety and fame and this makes him an unbelievably interesting character, especially in contemporary America. He’s going completely against the American grain. Most people would do anything for the attention, the slobbering attention that fame brings. … He is the antithesis of American Idol, the antithesis of reality tv. And in an odd way that makes him really, really cool.”
Sinking Salinger
Now this takes some of the heat off of Salinger. It’s not just that he was a little nutty, as Thomspon also said, though maybe he was. There was a corresponding nuttiness on the other side. There was the growth, the metastasis, the ugly swelling infection of fame hunger that spread through the country faster than H1N1 and Salinger developed a powerful aversion to what the rest of the country gorged on till it became a Thomas Hardy “Convergence of the Twain” situation. As busy Englishmen built the Titanic nature fashioned a great big iceberg. Reality TV culture was Salinger’s iceberg.
Now here comes the Seymour Krim angle. According to this Salinger timeline, he bought his New Hampshire redoubt in 1953, which means he had a powerful fame allergy. And allergy is just the word for it, “a damaging immune response by the body to a substance … to which it has become hypersensitive.” It’s the hypersensitivity that’s important here. Fame culture gave Salinger hives at a time when nobody else was even getting a runny nose. But Salinger was hypersensitive, not paranoid, because in Krim’s 1959 “Making It!” essay he described what Salinger had detected years before.
“In every brain-cell of intellectual and artistic life the heat is on in America today no differently than it is in business. Values? Purpose? Selectivity? Principles? For the birds, Charley! I want to make it and nothing’s going to stand in my way because everything is crap, except making it! I want my ego to ride high, my heart to bank the loot of life, my apartment to swing, my MG to snarl down the highway, my pennant to wave above the scattered turds of broken dreams for a better world! Why don’t you level and say you want the same, you hypocrite? Be honest for Chrissakes!
I’ll take it
And Krim also saw how this desperate race for personal plumage would infect the broad public, which until then was content to live without fame.
“….while down below the lusting average man and woman sweats in jealousy at the sight of these dexedrine angels, the very inspiration of what he and she can become if only they too can put that last shred of shame behind them and swing, extrovert yourself, get with it, make that buck, make that chick, make that poem, make this crazy modern scene pay off, O my heart, so I too can sink my teeth in the sirloin and wear the pearls of hell!”
And that’s what made Salinger take a look at 90 acres of secluded New Hampshire and say, “I’ll take it.”
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