JD Salinger's Orgone Accumulator

[gary shindler]

>From Secret Lives of Great Authors:

     J.D. Salinger 
January 1, 1919-
Nationality: American
Astrological Sign: Capricorn
Major Works: The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Franny and Zooey (1961)
Contemporaries & Rivals: John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Carson McCullers
Literary Style: 1950's New Yorkerish
Words of Wisdom: "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing." 
  The Sandy Koufax of world literature, Jerome David Salinger long ago mastered the art of enhancing your reputation by being inapproachable, unavailable, and incommunicado. (Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes also turned this nifty trick back in their day.) In terms of volume, his contributions to our literary canon were slim. But few authors can match the mystique of the man who once called the very act of being published "a terrible invasion of my privacy." Wouldn't most writers kill for such an invasion?
  His signature novel, of course, was The Catcher in the Rye, a masterpiece of teenage alienation that still resonates with disaffected high school students-among other unsavory types-to this day. The character of Holden Caulfield (named for the actors William Holden and Joan Caulfield) was based in large part on Salinger himself, with exclusive Pencey Prep standing in for the WASPY military academy he had once attended. An enemies list couched in the form of a novel, the acidly funny book gave its sensitive, nebbishy Jewish author a forum to take rhetorical revenge on everyone who made him feel like an outsider. Having written it, and a few more books beloved by a growing cult of Eisenhower-era misfit toys, he went into seclusion, never to publish again. 
  Was his retreat from the limelight the product of a thin skin? In the years following the publication of Catcher in the Rye, literary eminences like John Updike, Alfred Kazin, and Leslie Fiedler all expressed strong misgivings about Salinger's work. Joan Didion called it "spurious," deriding Salinger's "tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living." Maybe they were just sour grapes. He was, after all, making a lot more money and getting a lot more attention than any of them. But some think the criticism may have gotten to Salinger. Perhaps he was just concerned that he could never match the same level of achievement. Whatever the reason, he became the world's most celebrated recluse. 
  When he has surfaced at all, Salinger has tended to create controversy. In the early 1970, he shacked up with the 18-year-old memoirist Joyce Maynard, then unceremoniously kicked her out nine months later. She took revenge by auctioning off his love letters and writing a tell-all book about their relationship. In 2000, Salinger's daughter Margaret wrote her own memoir. In it she painted a decidedly unflattering portrait of the literary icon. In her telling, the man who captivated a generation of readers with his tales of adolescent anomie was actually a scowling martinet who drank his own urine and clung to outmoded racial stereotypes drawn from old Hollywood movies. "To my father, all Spanish speakers are Puerto Rican washerwomen," she wrote, "or the toothless, grinning gypsy types in a Marx Brothers movie." When Margaret Salinger became engaged to a black man, Salinger nearly blew a gasket, cautioning his daughter about another old movie he had seen where a white woman
 had married a black musician with disastrous consequences.
  Sequestered in his New Hampshire hideaway, Salinger continues to write. He reportedly has several room-sized safes filled with completed or in-progress manuscripts. Every now and then he puts word out that a new novel may be forthcoming, but invariably changes his mind. He has adamantly refused to sell the film rights to any of his works and blocked the few unauthorized adaptations that have been made. His will reportedly contains a stipulation blocking anyone from filming his stories after his death.
  He certainly doesn't need the money. Catcher in the Rye continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year, inspiring angsty teens the world over. In a sordid twist of fate, J.D. Salinger's greatest creation has also become the rune text of crazed loners and would-be assassins everywhere. When Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon dead in December of 1980, he was found clutching a thumb-worn copy of Catcher in the Rye. He later cited Holden Caulfield as his inspiration for the murder. When Hollywood wants to telegraph a character as a kook, as with Mel Gibson's addled paranoiac in Conspiracy Theory, it puts a copy of Catcher on their shelf. "I'm afraid of people who like Catcher in the Rye," sang indie rockers Too Much Joy in a 1991 song. Can you blame them?
  Fun on the High Seas
The world's most famous recluse was once the King of the Conga Line. In 1941, Salinger served as the entertainment director on board the M.S. Kungsholm, a Swedish luxury liner that ferried wealthy patrons to the West Indies and back. He later drew on this experience for his short story Teddy, which takes place on an ocean liner.
  Oonatic
In his early twenties, Salinger dated Oona O'Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. Salinger thought they made a good match, but he found himself outmaneuvered by the Little Tramp himself. Charlie Chaplin stepped in and swept young Oona off her feet. They were soon married, despite a 36-year age difference. Enraged, Salinger wrote Oona a vicious, angry letter describing in sordid detail his impression of her wedding night with Chaplin. 
  I Married a Nazi
Talk about a self-hating Jew! Salinger was always uncomfortable with his Jewish heritage-a trait that he passed on to many of his fictional offspring. But he may be one of the only Jews in history who knowingly and willingly married a Nazi. It happened in the closing months of World War II, when Salinger was serving as a counter-intelligence officer in occupied Germany. Charged with interrogating some low-level Nazi officials, Salinger instead fell in love with one of them-a woman known only as Sylvia (or "Saliva" as Salinger called her). An outspoken anti-Semite, Sylvia was not exactly welcomed with open arms by Salinger's relatives back in America. Their union lasted only a few months before Sylvia high-tailed it back to the Fatherland.
  He Also Says I Should Shoot You
When Catcher in the Rye was selected by the Book-of-the-Month in 1951, the Club's eminent editorial board had a problem with the book's obscure title. Asked to change it by the Club's president, Salinger coldly refused. "Holden Caulfield," he explained, "wouldn't like that."
  Have a Cuppa Pee
According to his daughter Margaret, Salinger drank his own urine-presumably for medicinal purposes and not for refreshment. Urine therapy has been practiced in India for more than 5000 years and is thought to have strong curative effects. It may also whiten teeth.
  Raving Homeopath
Urine therapy was only one aspect of Salinger's alternative medicine regimen. He also dabbled in Scientology, homeopathy, acupuncture, and Christian Science. He tanned himself in a homemade lean-to with metal reflectors until his skin was dark brown. On another occasion his macrobiotic diet made him turn a ghoulish shade of green. According to his family, his breath reeked.
  Practicing on himself was not enough, however. Whenever one of his children got sick, Salinger flew into a rage, refusing to rest until her had found the exact homeopathic remedy to cure what ailed them. He literally spent hours poring through books on alternative medicine searching for the perfect cure to a case of the sniffles.
  When it came to acupuncture, "Doctor" Salinger had an even stranger way of dispensing treatment. He eschewed the traditional needles in favor of stubby wooden dowels-the kind that are typically used to hold IKEA furniture together. The result was pure agony. His daughter Margaret described the sensation as "like having a blunt pencil shoved into your skin." On one occasion, Salinger tried to cure his son Matthew's cold by jamming one of his magic dowels into the bones of the boy's pinkie finger. The tyke screamed in pain, but his father was unmoved. "You, your mother, and your sister have the lowest pain thresholds I've ever seen," he railed. "You'd think you'd caught a piece of shrapnel, for Christ's sake!" No wonder the two children took to hiding their illnesses from dear old Dad.

Quack in a Box
When not tormenting his children with crackpot remedies, Salinger liked to spend a little "me time" in his own personal orgasmatron. Called an orgone box, the single occupancy wood-and-sheet metal man-room was invented in the 1930s by the quack psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The 5 by 2 1/2 by 2 1/2-foot box, also known as an Orgone Accumulator, was purported to absorb "orgone," the life essence of the universe. (It was also widely believed to act, for the person sitting inside it, as a powerful sexual stimulant.) The device sold like hotcakes in the early 1950s before the U.S. Government declared it a fraud and threw its inventor in prison. (For the record, Wilhelm Reich once spent five hours talking with Albert Einstein. When their conversation was over, he said to Einstein, "You understand now why everyone thinks I'm mad." Einstein replied: "And how.")
  Power of Babble
Salinger's spiritual life was of the Baskin-Robbins variety. Born Jewish, he tried Zen Buddhism and Vedantic Hinduism and even, on one memorable occasion, charismatic Christianity. Apparently, Salinger was so favorably impressed by a visit to a charismatic house of worship in New York City that he returned to his home in New Hampshire and began speaking in tongues. His daughter found him rapt in glossolallia, the ancient mystical language thought to represent the power of the Holy Spirit, inside his jerry-built tanning parlor in the family yard.
  I'll See You in Court!
Salinger is fiercely protective of his privacy, often using lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits to scare off would-be biographers. He successfully sued to stop author Ian Hamilton from reprinting some of his personal letters in a 1988 biography. When an Iranian filmmaker directed an unauthorized adaptation of Franny and Zooey in 1998, Salinger had his lawyers put a stop to the screening. Even the threat of a Salinger legal action has been known to have an effect. The characters of Terrence Mann, played by James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, and William Forrester, played by Sean Connery in Finding Forrester, were based on Salinger, but changed to avoid litigation. 
  Shields Up!
Salinger's son is the actor Matthew Salinger, who played Marvel Comics' superpatriot superhero Captain America in a 1990 straight-to-video feature film.
  From Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights (c) 2008 by Robert Schnakenberg. Reprinted with permission from Quirk Books, www.quirkbooks.com.
    


       
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