I was pleasantly surprised to find this rather curious article in the newspaper today. I say curious, because it makes absolutely no mention of Hapworth, which seems the raison d'etre of most recent Salinger articles. As you'll see there's a couple of clanging inaccuracies and distortions, but he makes a couple of interesting points - the idea that Salinger's incarceration has something to do with perpetuating himself as an everlasting teenager is one such idea which, while I'm not sure is totally plausible, is certainly food for thought. P.S. By `unexpurgated' English version, I assume he means with the `--- you's' changed to `fuck you's'. If this is the case, in Australia we still only have the `expurgated' version, as I've never yet come across a copy which has anything but the dashes. But please confirm this for me someone - there isn't some missing chapter or something is there !!!??? (: Camille verona_beach@geocities.com @ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442 @ THE INVERTED FOREST www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest ------------- Reprinted from Sydney Morning Herald Summer Section, 5th Jan 1999. World's Oldest Teen Idol Silent for 35 years, he still remains the voice of youth for millions of readers. Daniel Johnson examines J.D. Salinger at 80, a cross between Peter Pan and Howard Hughes. Ask a 17-year-old - just about any 17-year-old - what is the best novel he or she has ever read, and the answer you are most likely to get is: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Ask a twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fiftysomething the same question, and there's a good chance you will get the same answer. We were all 17 once, and many of us have never read as intensely since we read Salinger. Even as parents, the post-'60s generation instinctively sympathises with rebellious youth. First published in the United States in serial form in 1945-46, in book form in 1951 and in Britain for the first time in unexpurgated form only in 1994, The Catcher still regularly tops polls of the most popular novel of all time. More to the point, it still sells a quarter of a million copies a year, every year. It is a reading-list fixture in every school and college in the English-speaking world, the bible of the cre- ative writing class. Its idiomatic, deliberately unliterary lan- guage makes it the most sacred of all set texts in the post-'60s literary canon. The Catcher now reads like a period piece; a study in the optimistic assumptions of post-war America. The hero, Hold- en Caulfield, goes AWOL from his boarding school, Pencey Prep; the episode is based on Salinger's departure from Valley Forge Military Academy. Holden's only real problems are those of prosperity. But his immaturity has rendered him immortal. He is forever the disaffected teenager who does not want to grow up. Yet his inventor, the apostle of adolescence, turned 80 on January 1: Jerome David Salinger has, it must be said, done his best to perpetuate the myth of eternal youth, by retreating into well-guarded seclusion almost as soon as he became known. Since 1953, he has lived as a virtual recluse in Comish, New Hampshire, where he is said to brandish a shotgun at uninvited visitors. Only one recent photograph of him is known to exist: the face a fearful and furious mask, unreco - nisable from the suave, grinning young author of the early 1950s. Salinger also uses lawyers to protect his privacy. As a result, the only major biography, by Ian Hamilton, had to be rewritten and published under a new title. Salinger has published nothing since 1963, though he has apparently continued to write; he must by now have accumulated the largest corpus of unpublished work of any important living writes Since he shows no sign of wishing to publish any more books during his lifetime, one said to must assume that the only additions to the one short novel and four slim volumes of short stories on which his reputation rests are likely to be posthumous. His literary executor will clearly have an extraordinary responsibility. Hence the interest in the writer's private life has some justification aside from natural curiosity about the autobiographical nature of his fiction. Salinger has been thrice married and twice divorced; his present wife is a much younger woman, Colleen O'Neill, whom he met in Cornish, where she used to run the town fair, and he has become something of a local legend. Now ailing and deaf, he seems to have found happiness with.a woman who is, by an odd coincidence, a namesake of his first great love: Oona, the daughter of Eugene O'Neill, who wag the first American writer to win the -Nobel Prize and who was to some extent the young Salinger's model. If his will grants her control over access to his papers, Salinger's present wife could become one of those fiercely protective literary widows. This may mean it will be some time before we get to know what Salinger was really like - or what on earth he has been doing all this time. In the shape of an old lover, however, his past returned to haunt him last year. Joyce May- nard's rather tawdry book At Home in the World revealed how he had wooed her by correspondence and then conducted a 10-month affair in 1971-72, when she was 18 and he was more than 50. But apart from the Clintonesque detail that their only sexual activity was oral, Maynard's memoir added little to our knowledge of the man. Her insistence that the relationship was exploitative does not ring true: she had already published a cover story in The New York Times Magazine entitled, "The Embarrassment of Virginity". All the same, Maynard's story has stimulated gossip. Hints that Salinger may have a Lolita-like fixation on prepubescent girls have been linked to his fiction. It is true that he depicts several such girls. But there is nothing lascivious in these portraits. Take one of his best stories, For Esme - with Love and Squalor, about a 13-year-old English girl with whom the narrator, a GI waiting for D-Day, has a single, chance conversation in a tea-room. It is almost certainly based on a wartime encounter. Yet its charm depends not on sexual undertones, but on the almost clinical objectivity with which the narrator observes Esme's gauche attempts to make friends, her mixture of precocity and innocence. Esme and her little brother are rich, even aristocratic, but they are also orphans of the war. She craves contact with her dead father's world of action. Her valediction - "I, hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact" - has, in the light of the narrator's nervous breakdown, an ironical significance. But not an erotic one. Salinger's psychology isn't really very complex; the great strength of his writing is precision. The key to Salinger may turn out to be not pedophilia but philosophy. Long before it became fashionable, Salinger took up Zen. Under its influence, he has become sufficiently self-contained not to crave the critical adulation that was always a substitute for the absent paternal approval of his disappointed Austrian Jewish father, a cheese importer who sent his son to expensive schools to no avail. Holden Caulfield, like most of his characters, is at once self-indulgent and self-destructive. Salinger's most celebrated short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, hints at a propensity to suicide. Zen seems to have taken the sting out of Salinger's life - the dread that he might be a "phoney". Now he is content to wait for posterity. We must hope that this Peter Pan of American literature leaves us plenty more by which to judge him. The Daily Telegraph, London