Some dear friends want me to write more. The writing wind is not in my sails these days. But I will try.
I've been thinking, I know not why, about Jerome David Salinger these days.
Salinger was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. His mother changed her name to Miriam and passed as a Jewess. He discovered that only at his Bar Mitzvah.
What a difficult lesson to learn. Holden says that adults are phony. I think that was experiential in his biography.
Catcher in the Rye has sold 65 million copies in many languages. He probably learned early that parents, peers, and careers are phony too. How else to explain his reclusiveness?
He is now dead. There is talk about what he might have written in his reclusive years. Ten novels maybe.
The text of Hapworth 16, the last almost published text still amuses me as satire. Read it yourself. Salinger was caught in the Christian Jewish dilemma. Perhaps that is the best way to interpret him.
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