J.D. Salinger: The Man in the Glass House

[Michael Bailey]

> http://www.esquire.com/features/jd-salinger-bio-0697
>

Thanks indeed for that!  It's a really good Salinger article!

a) while reading it, I found the link to the thumping good State of
the Union article I just posted

b) the whimsical yet well-informed article contains the following
rather fascinating reference to homeopathy:

"Which brings me to the rather extraordinary discovery I made about S.
as a healer in the course of pursuing various inquiries about the Man
Behind the Wall—something I believe has never been reported before.
It's a revelation I was led to very indirectly by a chain of random
connections and one that contradicts the conventional wisdom of an S.
utterly in thrall to Eastern religious disciplines. While it's true
that Eastern disciplines have their appeal for him, in fact the
healing discipline that, for a time, at least, most appealed to him,
one he also expounded upon to others, is a far more down-home, Western
system of healing: homeopathy. Yes, homeopathy, the heretical
alternative system of diagnosis and healing invented by the German
physician Samuel Hahnemann in the late eighteenth century, one long
dismissed by mainstream medicine, one taken up again by new-age
healers, one reportedly still relied upon by the British Royal Family,
among others.

"Why homeopathy? Part of the appeal might lie in the way the German
Romanticism of Hahnemann's healing system offered a bridge between the
physical and metaphysical, transcended the dualism of mind and body
that S.'s child avatars like Teddy in Nine Stories and Seymour in
"Hapworth" railed against. Homeopathy is all about the
interpenetrating resonance of the two realms. Setting aside the
question of its scientific validity, one can find a metaphoric poetry
in homeopathy's attempt to explain itself that I'd suggest would
resonate with S.'s solitary absent presence.

"Old Samuel Hahnemann believed in treating similars with similars:
that an infintesimal dose of what was making you ill could make you
better. If, for instance, you were vomiting, homeopathy prescribed
tiny doses of nause-inducing herbs. More peculiarly and
controversially, Hahnemann believed that the more he diluted his
remedies in distilled water, the more powerful they became. This has
led critics to claim that their "highest potency," i.e., their
greatest dilution, his homeopathic remedies were diluted to the point
of invisibility and that homeopathic doctors were essentially
prescribing nothing but distilled water to their patients. To which
homeopathic defenders poetically reply, It's not the presence of the
curative herb in the water but the "potentizing" imprint the
once-present, now-absent dose has left on the molecular-level
configuration of the fluid. A memory of an encounter, now somehow
inscribed in water.

"I'm not defending the science, just admiring the poetry of a healing
system in which absence and memory have more power than presence—and
suggesting that somewhere in this homeopathic rhetoric there is a
metaphor for S.'s own absence and invisibility in our culture: that
the withdrawal of his presence has left his memory, his influence,
perhaps even his healing power more more potent than an undiluted
presence would be. That his silence is a kind of homeopathic remedy
for the disease of noise we all suffer from.

"I learned some other surprising things about S. in the course of my
inquiries. I learned that in addition to the Glass-family chronicle,
he has also written a screenplay, a draft of some kind, in which his
faithful Glass-family narrator and alter ego, Buddy, is forced to
confront criticism of the increasingly murky and mystical turn S.'s
later Seymour-obsessed Glass-family stories have taken. (I'd pay to
see that.) I've also heard, though I'm less sure of this, that he may
have written some film scripts under a pseudonym for European
producers.

"I learned that he's not a Howard Huges-like recluse, that he has
traveled here and abroad, that he's tuned in to the culture around
him, hasn't walled himself off from it.

"And finally, I learned what his favorite junk food is. I learned this
from a friend who happened to find herself standing behind S. at a
deli counter where he's a regular. S. was complaining about the way
his soppressata,a rustic salami, was sliced (he likes it "thinly
sliced and layered," like the prose in his early New Yorker stories),
a concern that may be a tribute to his late father, Sol, a meat and
cheese importer. I asked my friend to speak to the deli clerk and
found out the astonishing fact that S.'s favorite junk food is (I
swear) doughnut holes! The pastry equivalent of the sound of one hand
clapping.

"His remedy? I learned that S. had a particular interest in a
homeopathic remedy called lycopodium, a variety of club moss, diluted
to near invisibility, of course. A quick check of the homeopathic
literature produced the fascinating disclosure that there is among
Hahnmann disciples something known as "the lycopodium personality."
Described by one British practitioner as "diffident, conscientious,
meticulous but self-conscious...[lycopodians] dislike public
appearances [italics mine] and may take offense easily..."

"I had an uncanny feeling that in reading the homeopathic literature
about the lycopodium personality, I was glimpsing at one remove the
way S. diagnoses his own persona. And perhaps a clue to his decision
to release the "Hapworth" story. A medicine for melancholy from Dr.
S., a tiny but highly potentized dose of his presence injected afresh
into the bloodstream of the culture, an infinitesimal opening in the
Wall around himself, in the hope of evoking, in homeopathic fashion, a
Presence, a memory of an Absence—lycopodium for the soul, ours and
his."



-- 
-- "Nonetheless.  Nonetheless.  None.  The.  Less!" - Loudon Trott to
Nicky Finn (in "Who's That Girl")