Subject: Peggy's revenge
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Jul 31 2000 - 02:40:27 GMT
In response to Will's request, I'm sending an extract from
the Sunday Times article by Adam Luck about the new book
from Salinger's daughter:
________________________________________
'... Margaret Ann Salinger has risked her father's wrath to write
Dream Catcher, thought to be a reference to her father's famous
novel. It threatens to lift the veil of secrecy from the literary icon
who lives in isolation in New Hampshire.
'Although Margaret Salinger seems to have inherited her father's
obsession with privacy - she has refused to speak about the book
- extracts have leaked out. In one passage Peggy, as she is known
to her family and friends, writes: "My father, a writer of fiction,
is a dreamer who can barely tie his own shoelaces in the real world,
let alone warn his daughter she might stumble and fall."
'The former management consultant, now 44 and living with her husband
in a Boston suburb, is thought to have begun the book after the birth
of her son about two years ago.
'Her reflections threaten to widen the apparent gulf with her own
father.
"I grew up in a world both terrible and beautiful, and grossly
out of balance," she writes. "In real life, when he chooses to make
himself
available, he can be funny, intensely loving, and the person you most
want
to be with." But she adds: "To get in the way of his work, to interrupt
the holy quest, is to commit sacrilege."
'J D Salinger is understood to have refused to co-operate with the
project,
for which his daughter is being paid £172,000 by Pocket Books.
Peggy's brother Matt, a Hollywood actor, said: "I guess she's got a lot
of anger. But to write a book just isn't right. It's kind of pathetic."
'Both Salinger children are believed to have been affected by their
parents'
divorce, after which they moved back and forth between their father
and mother, Claire Douglas.
'Joyce Maynard, who has written about her affair with Salinger when
Peggy was in her mid-teens, said: "I wish Peggy Salinger the best,
though I could hardly expect her to have warm feelings towards me
or any other girls who took the place in her father's life, however
briefly,
that should be reserved for his own daughter.
"She had a hard time growing up with such a father, I'm sure.
For anyone to question her right to tell her story strikes me as
the worst form of idolatry and hypocrisy."
______________________________________
I myself find it hard not to agree with this latter sentiment.
To express some of the most important & intimate of one's
feelings in the public prints & then complain about intrusive
interest is like a Channel swimmer complaining of the wet.
Fame & fortune are very, very fickle mistresses.
Who knows? JDS may one day be a footnote in literary
history as the Willy to Joyce Maynard's Colette, a mildly
intertesting bloke who wrote a couple of sentimental novellas,
curiously popular in their day but now too sickly sweet
for our taste.
And even if not America's answer to Austen, aren't these girls
too entitled to their screams of rage?
Scottie B.
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