JD Salinger: narcissist, enigma and nutcase

The famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye has turned 90, Charles Laurence doesn’t expect him to be celebrating

FIRST POSTED JANUARY 6, 2008

JD Salinger has turned 90. The novelist who best captured the particularly 20th century phenomenon of the teenage rebel driven by angst in his novel The Catcher in the Rye was born on January 1, 1919. The novel itself was published in 1951, more than a half-century ago.

The strange thing is that the story of Salinger's antihero Holden Caulfield still resonates. The novel still sells 250,000 copies a year, which makes it a bestseller even now. Among my son's 17-year-old classmates, it remains, for the broody, brainy ones, the tattered paperback bible they carry away on holiday and read without being told to.

But while teenagers revel in the book, and find comfort in it, the grown-ups are more interested in the author.

Salinger seems to be a nasty narcissist even by the standards of creative genius. Because he has been infamously reclusive since 1953 - when he bought a farm outside Cornish, New Hampshire where he has lived ever since - nobody really knows him at all as a man. And because he has refused to publish any book since 1965, nobody really knows if he qualifies as a genius.

What is for sure is that Salinger is a nut case. We know this from the memoirs of three women who knew him well and just about survived - a wife (one of three), a lover (the future writer Joyce Maynard), and a daughter.

Salinger was a crank and a control freak who foisted it all on his family

The wife, Claire Douglas, was his second and passed up her degree at Harvard to join him behind locked doors. She reveals a demented spiritual quest as Salinger dragged her through Zen, Hinduism, Christian Science and even Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology. Playing hop-scotch with the soul might have been okay if Salinger had not also been a crank - dabbling in macrobiotics, home-made medicines, even the fabled Orgone Accumulator machine of the Freudian heretic WR Reich – and a control freak who foisted it all on his family.

When daughter Margaret, born in 1955, was 18 months old, Claire decided that the only way out was to murder the baby and commit suicide. Luckily, she ran away to New York instead, and then, remarkably, returned to Salinger, and had a second child, Matt, in 1960.

Margaret, back home with Dad, gathered the material for her 1996 memoir Dream Catcher the hard way. She was a sickly child, but doctors were banned because Salinger, with his herbal infusions and special diets, believed that he knew best. So Margaret grew sicker and eventually concluded that Salinger had only got married at all because a Yogi told him to "follow the way of the householder". You don't get much more narcissistic than that.

He has his excuses: some believe battlefield horrors on Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge left him scarred with stress disorders. But it is worth comparing Salinger to another literary recluse, Cormac McCarthy. The author of All the Pretty Horses and