Read Dream Catcher: A Memoir Online
Authors: Margaret A. Salinger
Dream Catcher: A Memoir
Praise for Margaret A. Salinger
and
DREAM CATCHER
“Salinger’s daughter’s truths are as mesmerizing as his fiction. . . . There is information here that can’t help altering, and enlarging, our estimation of Salinger’s work. . . . This memoir may well prompt a reassessment of the place of Salinger’s fiction in American literature, and add a dimension to the marginalized mystic he’s become to many.”
—The New York Times
“An unprecedented look at one of the country’s most admired and reclusive writers.”
—USA Today
“A hot new tell-all memoir that blows the lid off her eighty-one-year-old father’s bizarre, secretive life. For J. D. Salinger fans and scholars, the details are fascinating. She sheds light on autobiographical elements in her father’s writing and shares acute psychological insights.”
—New York Post
“Margaret A. Salinger is an artful and accomplished writer.”
—The Toronto Sun
“Peggy Salinger has become a sort of dream catcher herself.”
—NPR’s Morning Edition
“Utterly riveting in its narrative and its hard-won conclusions.”
—The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)
“Imagine finding your father not at home but through his books. That’s the journey Salinger’s daughter details in this remarkable piece of writing.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“DREAM CATCHER
exposes the cracks in the façade of the Salinger mystique.”
“Margaret A. Salinger’s work shows the brilliance of what can happen when a woman’s way of seeing is adroitly applied to a man’s writing. . . . Rarely does a memoir do so much to make readers reconsider a body of fiction by a well-known writer. . . . This memoir has become one of the best books to surface in the world of Salinger criticism.”
—Academic Writing Review
“By fathering Margaret, or Peggy, America’s best-known creator of precocious fictional siblings begot a daughter with a level of brilliance and moral fiber that has proved capable of taking on both the challenge of the flesh-and-blood J. D. Salinger and the mystique he has gone to vast lengths to cultivate. . . . A master interpreter of her father’s work, Peggy skillfully balances her incisive readings of the stories with her father’s motives and behaviors. What makes it so remarkable is the brilliance with which, in describing the process of winning her own salvation, the author deconstructs the Salinger myth.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
(VA)
“Peggy’s diverse achievements and experience make
DREAM CATCHER
unlike any memoir . . . darkly comic.”
—The Jerusalem Report
“Salinger’s writing is vivid and strong.”
—The Telegraph
(UK)
“I found myself gaining personal insights from this book that applied to me both as a son and as a father. I could not ask for much more than that. There are, I believe, lessons here for all of us.”
—Buffalo Art News
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“How my parents were occupied and all before they had me”
1. “Sometimes Thro’ the Mirror Blue”
3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
11. “However Innumerable Beings Are, I Vow to Save Them”
13. “There She Weaves by Night and Day”
16. The Birds and the Bees: Hitchcock’s
18. Notes from the Underground
20. Safe Harbor: A Brief Interlude Between Islands
24. Springtime in Paradise:
The Producers
For my family
Dreams, books, are each a world . . .
with tendrils strong as flesh and blood . . .
—“Personal Talk,” William Wordsworth
I
GREW UP IN A
world nearly devoid of living people. Cornish, where we lived, was wild and woody, our nearest neighbors a group of seven moss-covered gravestones that my brother and I once discovered while tracking a red salamander in the rain, two large stones with five small ones at their feet marking the passing of a family long ago. My father discouraged living visitors to such an extent that an outsider, looking in, might have observed a wasteland of isolation. Yet, as one of my father’s characters, Raymond Ford, once wrote in his poem “The Inverted Forest”
1
: “Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest, With all foliage underground.” My childhood was lush with make-believe: wood sprites, fairies, a bower of imaginary friends, books about lands somewhere East of the Sun and West of the Moon. My father, too, spun tales of characters, both animal and human, who accompanied us throughout our day. My mother read to me by the hour. Years later, I read that my father’s character Holden Caulfield had dreamt of having children in such a place someday; “we’d hide them away,” he said, in his little cabin by the edge of a forest. He and his wife would buy them lots of books and teach them how to read and write.
In real life, however, it was a world that dangled between dream and nightmare on a gossamer thread my parents wove, without the reality of solid ground to catch a body should he or she fall. My parents dreamt beautiful dreams, but did not have the skill to wrest them from the air and bring them to fruition in daily life. My mother was a child when she had me. She remained a dreamer, and, like Lady Macbeth, a tortured nightwalker, for many years. My father, a writer of fiction, is a dreamer who barely can tie his own shoelaces in the real world, let alone warn his daughter she might stumble and fall.
Fiction, other worlds, other realities, were, for my father, far more real than living flora and fauna, flesh and blood. I remember once we were looking out of his living room window together at the beautiful view of field and forest, a patchwork of farms and mountains fading into the far distance. He waved a hand across it all as if to wipe it out and said, “All of this is
maya,
all an illusion. Isn’t that wonderful?” I didn’t say anything, but for me, who had fought long and hard for anything resembling solid ground, the idea of its vanishing from underneath me in one fell swoop was anything but wonderful.
Vertigo, annihilation, terror,
are words that come to my mind, certainly not
wonderful.
This was the dark side of the Inverted Forest.
I grew up in a world both terrible and beautiful, and grossly out of balance. It is, perhaps, part of the human condition that children, as they grow to adulthood, must disentangle themselves from who their parents dreamt they might be, in order to figure out who they really are or hope to be. For my mother, for my father’s sister, and myself, this task brought us near to drowning, so entangled were we in tendrils, strong as flesh and blood, fantastic garlands of my father’s dreams.