Dream Catcher: A Memoir (18 page)

What was so unsettling and made her, for the first time, lose faith in Jerry was “not the abuse, as this at times seemed inescapable, but the lack of logic! I had to completely reject what I had had to completely accept one hundred percent and adopt the next thing one hundred percent, just because this was Jerry’s new super-encompassing God. I believe it was to cover the fact that Jerry had just destroyed or junked or couldn’t face the quality of, or couldn’t face publishing, what he had created.”
⁵

I think my mother is probably right in identifying the match that ignited these sudden changes whereby a new cult, or “ism” as she called them, rose out of the ashes of a work destroyed. However, not everyone who has problems with writing reacts by worshiping a newly risen phoenix, a new guru. This pattern has had a profound effect on those closest to my father—his flesh and blood family as well as his fictional characters and stories. Why? What made the forest so dry, as it were? Why were the conditions so flammable in the first place?

I understand one aspect of this behavior with every fiber of my being. Even the language of our clichés speaks to the vulnerability of human beings under fire, under terrible stress: “There are no atheists in the trenches.” In times of excruciating chartlessness or “detached f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s,” like the boy in France, Esmé’s sergeant, Holden, and my soldier father, I, too, have sought mooring in another human being, as well as heavenly hosts divine (“Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me!” or “Throw Out a Lifeline”
⁶
), clinging to them for dear life, sometimes nearly drowning
my human rescuers so tightly I clung and thrashed about in panic.
⁷
Human beings, when chartless, seek a stable point of reference, whether it be the North Star, permitting dead reckoning, or, when all is dark, a guiding light. This is true whether they be wise men in the desert or thirsty fools who pass by an oasis in pursuit of a mirage—reckoning dead wrong.

A few years ago, my mother sent me a book,
Cults and Consequences,
⁸
in response to my questions about my father’s involvement in and donations to everything from Zen Buddhists, Vedanta Hindus, Yogananda’s Self-Realization Church, Christian Science, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, followers of Edgar Cayce, George Ohsawa’s macrobiotics, Eastern medicines, and a hodgepodge of practices including drinking one’s urine, speaking in tongues, and sitting in a Reichian orgone box. This book proved an invaluable starting place for unraveling the mystery of my father’s journeys through the looking glass.

What I began to understand is that the content of what my mother called isms doesn’t matter, it may be truth or absolute rubbish: it’s what a cult does to the mind of a believer as well as the way in which the believer embraces the belief—the particular characteristics of the relation between believer and belief—that earns it the designation
cult
rather than
religion
or
belief
or
philosophy.
⁹

The existential state of the typical person who, upon encountering a cult, is likely to become a follower reads like a description of most of my father’s characters, and indeed, of my father himself. Many studies of cult phenomena have found that the appeal of the cult depends “largely on the weakness and vulnerability that all of us feel during key stress periods in life. At the time of recruitment, the person is often mildly depressed, in transition, and feeling somewhat alienated.”
¹⁰
One study, in particular, of those who become involved in cults, speaks directly to the vulnerability of my father and his characters who “just got out”: “Leaving
any restricted community can pose problems—leaving the Army for civilian life is hard, too . . . many suffered from depression . . . loneliness, anomie,”
¹¹
or what can be referred to as “future void.” They’re standing at the edge, as Holden said, of “some crazy cliff,” looking for a catcher, searching for a landsman in whom they can find mooring, before they sink down, down, down. Many of those who join cults find “close relationships with like-minded others.”
¹²

My father’s troubled characters find landsmen in their ten-year-old sisters (Mattie and Phoebe) and ten-year-old dead brothers (Allie), in Sister Irma (in De Daumier-Smith), in and within the Glass family, siblings of various ages, both dead and alive. As time passes, however, my father and his characters increasingly begin to find landsmen only among the dead. We see it early on when Phoebe challenges Holden to name one thing he really likes, and all he can think of is Allie, his dead brother, and James Castle, the boy who died when he fell from a window at Pencey Prep. In my father’s next novel, Franny says of Zooey that “the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable . . . he never even wants to have
lunch
with anybody, even, unless he thinks there’s a
good chance
it’s going to turn out to be Jesus, the person—or the Buddha, or Hui-neng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that.” With the story “Teddy,” the departure is final. Teddy doesn’t seek a landsman even among dead people; he seeks unity with non-being, the dissolution of all separateness and personhood. He wishes to join the vast sea of undifferentiated souls in another, transcendent dimension. This ten-year-old child casually describes his prescient knowledge of his imminent death in order to teach the listener about the virtues of detachment and the absurdity of seeking mooring in this life, which is just
maya,
an illusion.

“I wish I knew why people think it’s so important to be emotional. . . . My mother and father don’t think a person’s human
unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or very annoying or very—very un
just,
sort of. My father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I’m inhuman.”

Nicholson flicked his cigarette ash off to one side. “I take it you have no emotions?” he said.

Teddy reflected before answering. “If I do, I don’t remember when I ever used them,” he said. “I don’t see what they’re
good
for.”

“It’s so silly,” Teddy begins as he describes how his little sister may accidently push him into an empty pool where he’ll crack his head open and die in a few minutes:

“What would be so tragic about it, though? What’s there to be afraid of, I mean? I’d just be doing what I was supposed to do, that’s all, wouldn’t I?”

Nicholson snorted mildly. “It might not be a tragedy from your point of view, but it would certainly be a sad event for your mother and dad,” he said. “Ever consider that?”

“Yes, of course, I have,” Teddy said. “But that’s only because they have names and emotions for everything that happens . . .”

By the time I read this story, I had already heard similar “sermons” from my father so many times that it was hard not to feel, once again, like a bored child being lectured. In reflecting on this, however, I have come to feel truly sad, rather than annoyed or bored. I think that my father was searching for landsmen, and when he didn’t find them amongst the living, he turned his search to other realities. Indeed, this reaction, a desire for an alternate reality or transcendent experience, was found to be the second most common response by those who had left a cult (the first being loneliness and the search for close companionship) to the question of what had attracted them. “The cult offers a path—they would say
the
path—to the unfamiliar realm of transcendence. . . . It stands to reason, after all, that if you are looking for an experience that you have never had before, you should look in places you have never before been to find it.”
¹³

The third reason given for the attraction to a cult, the “need for moral authority,” strikes even closer to the Salinger home. Middle-class parents, whose children predominantly fill the ranks of cult membership, often seek to overshelter and overprotect their offspring. They want to give their children things they themselves were denied to make them happy.
¹⁴

In such circumstances young people often build up dependencies on their parents of which they are not aware until, at the end of adolescence, they are suddenly expected to take charge of their lives and become independent individuals . . . it is not surprising that many young people find this sudden assumption of responsibility burdensome and confusing, especially in today’s world. . . . This is where cults come in. . . . They offer lifestyles that are . . . highly structured, with very limited choices and very specific demands. For some such a security blanket is most inviting.”
¹⁵

A blanket that Babe, in “A Boy in France,” held in hopes of its magical, restorative powers.

Though I tread lightly here, I suspect that my father’s attraction to the authoritarian nature and certitude of cult leaders has something to do with his upbringing. He describes, in a fictional account, exactly what I witnessed of his real-life family during our New York visits with Granny, Grandpa, and Aunt Doris. Seymour says of his visits with the Fedders, his fiancée’s family:

I wish Mr. Fedder were more conversationally active. Sometimes I feel I need him. Sometimes, in fact, when I come in the front door, it’s like entering a kind of untidy, secular, two-woman convent. Sometimes when I leave, I have a peculiar feeling that both M. [his fiancée] and her mother have stuffed my pockets with little bottles and tubes containing lipstick, rouge,
hairnets, deodorants, and so on. . . . I don’t know what to do with their invisible gifts.
(Raise High,
p. 69)

The unmet need for an active male presence in a boy’s life can lead to a vulnerability, or an attraction to what is called, in the literature on cults, an “authoritarian personality.” As I read the descriptions and theory of the so-called authoritarian personality, I felt as though the researcher had been a fly on the wall in our home for years observing my father’s strange behavior in the thrall of a new belief. In a way, it was a relief to find that this disturbing phenomenon was not unique to us. It was horrifying as well. This was not a mainland to which it was comforting to find our island linked. For me, it was the proverbial “read it and weep” experience. One article in particular, “Religious Cults: Havens for the Emotionally Distressed, Idealists and Intellectuals, and Strongholds of Authoritarian Personalities,” could have had the subtitle “At Home with J. D. Salinger.” The author
¹⁶
writes:

First, cult leaders are individuals with authoritarian, charismatic personalities who exude, if for some with reserve and indirection, a determined and unshakable conviction in themselves and their religious views. They serve as authority figures with whom their converts identify and their views and pronouncements are presented as infallible.

Next, each cult leader claims that only the religious views he espouses are true, as well as being the ideal and practical means of resolving the problems afflicting the world and those who join cults. The doctrinaire character of their statements provides converts with a clear sense of meaning, direction, and purpose for their minds and lives, thus dispelling the confusion, uncertainty, and self-doubt that are characteristics of many of them prior to their conversion.

Third, cults impose specific, demanding, and often ascetic and puritanical rules and regulations that govern most of the
major aspects of converts’ daily lives (e.g., the observation of religious rituals, diets, personal appearance, sexual codes, prohibiting drug use, etc.). Cultists perceive the religious views as true, encompassing explanations about the meaning of life and their role in it, and welcome the inflexible standards as concrete guides for their personal, interpersonal, and social behavior. Both provide them with an alternative of substance to the anomie culture that so bewilders them.

Another way of understanding my father’s attraction to such belief systems involves moving away from the realm of individual psychology and looking, instead, at our shared history. I believe that there are things particular to my father’s background as a Jew or half-Jew growing up in America that left him, and those with a similar background, vulnerable to what one expert in the field calls “the new religions,” a term perhaps less emotionally provocative than
cults.
Rabbi Fine
¹⁷
speaks eloquently of Jews and chartlessness in our society:

Young Jews . . . wonder, what does it mean to be a Jew, rising out of the ashes of the Holocaust? What does it mean to be one of 3.5 percent of the population in a non-Jewish culture? Those considerations affect Jews as individuals. They cause a person to question and wonder. And when men and women question and wonder inside of themselves, internally they seek resolution. The new religious movements, of course, provide that resolution.

The belief systems that Rabbi Fine cites as particularly attractive to Jews are precisely those to which my father and his characters are attracted. Fine believes that Eastern religions, especially guru movements, “because of their universalist pitch—we will accept and bring in everyone— . . . solve a lot of unique Jewish concerns instantly. . . . You can still be identified more or less (mostly less) with your Judaism, but acceptance
is for everybody. You don’t have to deal with any of those historical or minority problems because the solution is ‘we are one’ . . .”
¹⁸

While Rabbi Fine’s view is not true for all, or perhaps even many Jews, when I looked again at my father’s writing, I found Fine’s argument supported in spades. While my father’s early work, time after time, is concerned with chartless young men searching for mooring in the purity of a child, this strategy is transposed, resulting in a sort of Christianized Eastern mysticism, in the story of de Daumier-Smith, who finds his way out of his Blue Period through a vision of purity amid the sea of filth in which he is drowning. First Sister Irma saves him, and then, in a mystical vision, the shit of the world—including himself, his terrible students, and the colon-irrigation devices—is transmuted into twice-blessed flowers. De Daumier-Smith embraces a new unity with the world, reinstates his terrible students, and leaves us with his revelation that
“tout le monde est une nonne”
—all the world is a nun, a sacred sister. He finds mooring in the realization that we are one.