In Search of JDS

 Ian Hamilton 

Salinger, it seems, had begun to have doubts, solemn doubts, about the whole business of authorship, doubts which were to prove crucial later on. What did it mean to bring a character to life?

From the start Salinger had shown himself to have a proprietorial, almost parental, attitude toward the people in his stories—he'd wanted to be Jameson onstage. This would intensify later on; indeed, it would swell into a damaging obsession. At the moment, though, it manifests itself as a mild, nagging doubt. Is there not a kind of sadism, an ugliness, in creating characters simply in order to arrange, readably, for their suffering and destruction? Ought not the author to behave more kindly, more protectively, toward these children of his imagination? 

Later, Salinger will favor fictional techniques that give him the illusion of having, as it were, delivered his characters’ destinies into their own keeping: the interior monologue, the letter, the long telephone call—these are all ways of making it seem that the “I” figure is in control of what is happening to him, that the parent of his tale, the author, has granted him full independence. Of course, if the characters are meant to believe in their own freedom from authorial designs, it need be no surprise if the author himself begins to partake of some similar delusion, begins to think of his characters as if they were his “real children”—creatures who have been imagined into “life,” who must be looked after, sheltered from the hurtful scrutiny of critics, the casual deconstructions of the academics, the editorial intrusions of magazine editors and publishers. And of biographers who want to take them back to where they came from. 

In 1942, none of these thoughts had taken shape. Salinger’s unease then was much more to do with the authorial detachment he himself had been guilty of so far. He suspects that he might simply have been using fiction as a means of handing out punishments he would wish to see inflicted in real life. His changed situation—the patriotism aroused by Pearl Harbor, the camaraderie he feels with his new army buddies, the whole atmosphere of crisis and self-sacrifice—seems to have encouraged him to ponder his motives in this way.