Margaret A. Salinger: Dream Catcher: A Memoir

Washington Square Press

$49.95

Review: Margie Thomson*

The lanky, 81-year-old frame of J.D. Salinger has endured the rigours of macrobiotics, orgone boxes, homeopathy and possibly the drinking of his own urine; his mind has attached itself with fervour to Yogananda's Self-Realisation Church, Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Dianetics, Christian Science.

How will the famously reclusive author of fiction that includes one of the 20th century's most important works, The Catcher in the Rye, who is obsessive about his privacy, withstand the psychic pressure of two damningly revealing "memoirs" in the past two years?

Seeping through the usually closed curtains of Salinger's isolated home in Cornish, New Hampshire, came news in 1998 of Joyce Maynard's memoir, At Home in the World. In 1972 the wraith-like, 18-year-old Maynard went to live with Salinger, 35 years her senior, with, for her, disastrous consequences. Attracted to her girlhood, he nevertheless despised her for it. Fanatically pernickity about eating, he encouraged her to purge herself by sticking her fingers down her throat after eating "bad" food, a practice which led her to bulimia and anorexia.

Now comes his daughter's memoir. Daddy, dearest, indeed. In our kiss-and-tell era, where any truth is as valid as any other, the memoir is an increasingly favoured genre, its inherent subjectivity fitting very well into our talkshow culture.

And of course, we read memoirs such as Peggy Salinger's and Maynard's not because we are interested in these women - intelligent, interesting and articulate as they are - but because of the salacious details they can offer us of one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century.

Dream Catcher, which in many places has the jagged, frightening resonance of a scream from a very black place, confirms for those of us who have read Maynard's memoir that Salinger is an incredibly selfish, unempathetic misogynist caught up in the fantasy of his own life, a hardline perfectionist who should probably never have married or had children.

With Catcher in the Rye he created Holden Caulfield, lost, alienated and with a keen eye for phony-ism, whose desire was to stand guard over little children, rescuing them if one should stray too close to the edge of a crazy cliff.

Yet, Peggy Salinger reveals, Salinger himself created or collaborated in an extremely unsafe environment for his own children. He allowed Peggy and her brother to carry on living with their mother after she may have deliberately tried to burn her house down with them in it; he packed Peggy off to a horrific boarding school at which she experienced a kind of psychological torture which nearly killed her; he failed to provide a home for her, forcing her to live on the street when she was only 14.

When Peggy was disabled with chronic fatigue syndrome and had her disability payments cut off, Salinger's response, a week or two later, was a three-year subscription to a Christian Science Church booklet. His daughter, he said, would get well when she stopped believing in the "illusion" of her sickness.

"What began to crack," Peggy writes, "was my belief in the illusion of my father."

Certainly, Peggy has a grim background to come to terms with. But why the need to work it out in public, and while her father is still alive?

For all her right to tell her own story, this is a vengeful, as well as a redemptive project. It is a lumpy, inconsistent piece of writing which contains odd gaps, complemented with overkill in other places; some lovely expressive passages, coupled with chunks where you're really not quite sure what she's talking about.

However, she has tried to be even-handed: as well as revealing his negative peculiarities, Peggy is almost sentimental at times as she recreates her father's good points, his occasional generosity, his occasional sensitivity - although it's pretty clear he rarely sees her as anything other than a construct of his own imagination.

In the end, having failed in his eyes to be "a swell girl," she becomes just another bloody woman, the same as all the others.

After nearly bombing out - too much alcohol too young, bulimia, hallucinations, and a psyche that had clearly had about all it could take - Peggy was, rather surprisingly, rescued by the trade union movement. She became a mechanic, and an activist in the United Utility Workers Union of America.

An official encouraged her to take adult classes at Brandeis University ("I know you're smart") and from then on, she cleared one academic achievement after another.

A Phi Beta Cappa scholar, she graduated from Brandeis summa cum laude, with a scholarship and an award for best legal thesis, went on to Oxford and later attended Harvard Divinity School. Happy endings: now in her 40s, she is married, has a young son and works as an Episcopalian chaplain.

It wasn't all bad. Being J.D. Salinger's daughter was "terrible and beautiful," bringing opportunities and insights not available to other teenagers: a visit to London, stays in flash New York hotels, friendships with influential people.

But all those trappings count for little when one has a black hole at the centre of one's life.

"What are you doing," she rhetorically asks, like a little girl, "that is so much more important than taking care of your kids and family?" The offspring of our world's heroes may all too often cry that question.

Salinger hasn't published a story since 1966, although, according to Peggy, he is still writing. He simply locks his stories away in a filing system of his own devising, to be published posthumously, such is his unwillingness to be judged by people he doesn't believe are fit to do so. He has married again, a woman 50 years his junior.

God knows whether he will read this book, or what Dream Catcher will do to the hapless Salinger family, or whether it has been a worthwhile therapeutic experience for Peggy.

She has been looking for healing all her life; let's hope she, at least, has found some.

* Margie Thomson is the Herald's deputy books editor.