The one constant in Salinger’s life, from the early 1950s until his death in 2010, was Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which transformed him from a writer of fiction into a disseminator of mysticism, destroying his work and, over time, causing him to turn silent in order to fulfill the final stages of his religious doctrine. As a writer, when he was lost, he was found, and when he was found, he was lost: at his height, Salinger was writing to save his own soul; by the end, to the degree he was writing at all, he was writing to inform you how you could save your soul.
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DAVID SHIELDS and SHANE SALERNO: Salinger’s mother was born into a Catholic family and converted to Judaism; his father was Jewish. Salinger could follow neither faith. He explored Scientology, Hinduism, Ayurveda, Christian Science, and Zen Buddhism; as drawn as he was to Buddhism, he recoiled from its atheism. He also explored bodily therapies, such as Kriya yoga, homeopathy, acupuncture, and macrobiotics.
In 1988, Ian Hamilton wrote, “For some years, Salinger has needed to set his gaze on some high purpose, and his dedication to his craft has often had a monkish tinge. Up until 1952, the order he aimed to belong to was an order based on ‘talent’ as if it were the same thing as ‘enlightenment’ and [now he] will seek in the curricula of holy men as a way of dissolving what has all along been for him an irritating, hard to manage separation between art and life, that is to say, his art, his life.”
In our research we have discovered that as early as 1946 Salinger learned about Vedanta Hinduism from Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, which explains the most important ideas of Advaita Vedanta. The book’s epigraph—“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; / thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard”—is from Katha Upanishad, a holy text of Hinduism, and the novel consists of Laurence “Larry” Durrell’s search for spiritual meaning after his best friend dies in World War I while saving Larry’s life. According to Margaret, even before Catcher was published in 1951, Salinger had become friends with the Zen adept D. T. Suzuki, had meditated at a “Zen center”—actually, the retreat of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center—in the Thousand Islands region of northern New York, and was thinking seriously of becoming a monk.
After Catcher, Salinger became increasingly devoted to and influenced by Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, the religious and philosophical teachings that Swami Vivekananda brought to the West in 1893. Salinger’s discovery of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (translated by Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph Campbell and published by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York) was a major event in his life, second only to the war. The damage the war wrought compelled him to seek not only transcendence but erasure.
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From his introduction to Vedanta until his death in 2010, Salinger’s life strictly followed the four stages of life, or asramas, as explained by Salinger’s spiritual teacher Swami Nikhilananda:
1. Brahmacharya: the stage of study, apprenticeship. The apprentice should be celibate, injure no living thing, honor his parents and teachers, and study the scriptures. During this phase of his life, Salinger attended classes, wrote for the slicks, and went to war. Though he did not become a disciple until the early 1950s, when he was in his early thirties, he never consummated his relationship with Oona O’Neill, Jean Miller had to throw herself at him to get him to respond, and Leila Hadley Luce describes her dates with Salinger as Platonic. In “Teddy,” the protagonist says, “I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters.”
According to a proponent of Vedanta and Buddhism, Donald Simons, in 1952, while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger “experienced a transformation. . . . [He told his friends about] a profound change in his life”; according to the Center, it was a “life-altering” experience for Salinger. Drawn toward Vedanta’s ideas about detachment, celibacy, karma, and reincarnation, Salinger attempted, also in 1952, to get his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, to issue a complete edition of what Salinger called “the religious book of the century.”
2. Garhasthya: the householder stage, when one should marry, create and support a family, and contribute to the welfare of the community. To restate briefly: Now this previously somewhat monastic and nomadic man bought a house in Cornish, married, and fathered two children. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna advises, “A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts, and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on ‘woman and gold,’ I say, ‘Shame on him!’ ‘Woman and gold’ are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he can not act as he likes.” Ramakrishna admonishes a husband who enjoys making love with his wife, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You have children and still you enjoy intercourse with your wife? Don’t you hate yourself for thus leading an animal life? Don’t you hate yourself for dallying with a body which contains only blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta?” In 1954, Salinger and Claire found a new guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, who believed that women could be holy and marriage sacred. Margaret believes that her father would never have married and raised children without Yogananda’s guidance.
According to Margaret, both Salinger and Claire read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi and asked the Self-Realization Fellowship to recommend a teacher-guru; the nearest disciple was Swami Premananda, in Washington, D.C., who in 1955 agreed to initiate them as householder devotees. “They were instructed to abstain from eating breakfast on the day of their arrival and to bring offerings of fresh fruit, flowers, and a little money.” According to Simons, Salinger and Claire were initiated into “Kriya yoga in a Hindu temple in Washington, D.C., whereupon they received a mantra and practiced pranayama (breathing exercises) twice a day.”
Claire told her daughter, “On the train home to Cornish that evening, Jerry and I made love in our sleeper car. It was so nice to. We did not make love very often . . . [since] the body was evil. . . . I’m certain I became pregnant with you that night.”
Why, in 1959, did Salinger break his silence to write a letter to the New York Post in which he argued against mandatory life sentences for mass murderers? Was he newly empathetic to the incarcerated of Sing Sing? It’s difficult not to see his letter as an extraordinarily apposite trope for the life sentence in which he found himself: wanting desperately to break out of the maximum security prison of his own (war-shadowed) ego.
He was so damaged from the war that not only was he using religion to make the most important decisions about his life—marriage, children, work—but he needed to yield control of his life to another authority. In effect, he was no longer a free agent.
Also in 1959, James Thurber published The Years with Ross, which was highly critical of Harold Ross; Salinger composed a twenty-five to thirty-page defense of Ross, which the Saturday Review turned down owing to its “length and unusual style.” Salinger’s interest in mentors, gurus, and swamis led him into bombast here and elsewhere.
3. Vanaprasthya: when the householder’s children have left home and he is too old to be of much practical use to his community, he should withdraw from society and retire into the forest, where his responsibility is to continue his religious studies. For Salinger, this stage appears to have begun when he was forty-six. In 1965 he stopped publishing, preparing himself for the final stage of Vedanta (renunciation).
In 1967 he wrote to Swami Nikhilananda, “I, too, have been reading about Stalin’s daughter, and I can well understand your inclination to offer her those three books, simply as a gift.” Salinger is being used here, awkwardly, as a liaison, but both he and Swami Nikhilananda must insist on the otherworldliness of the mission. “It seems to me that the Life of Swami Vivekananda might appeal to her especially at this period of her life. I’m thinking, of course, of the chapters telling about Swami Vivekananda’s life in America. The people, the lectures, the press, the kindnesses, the prejudices, the generosities, the good and not-so-good of it, the bitter and sweet of it.”
In The Influence of Eastern Thoughts on “Teddy” and the Seymour Glass Stories of J. D. Salinger, Sumitra Paniker notes that “Brahmadrari Buddha Chaitanya . . . who works with the Ramakrishna Vivekananda Centre in London, in a letter dated July 18, ’69 wrote: ‘Salinger presented the Swami [Nikhilananda] with a copy of Franny and Zooey when it was first published, and I saw the inscription by the author, but the exact wording escapes me now. Something about Salinger’s being able to circulate the ideas of Vedanta only through the medium of such stories as these, and expressing appreciation for his contacts with the Swami.’ ” Salinger did indeed keep writing, though not publishing, and the work is focused heavily on Vedantic ideas.
In 1972 Salinger wrote to Swami Nikhilananda:
I’m so sorry about your need of the wheel chair and the chair-lift. I sometimes wish that the East had deigned to concentrate some small part of its immeasurable genius to the petty art or science of keeping the body well and fit. Between extreme indifference to the body and the most extreme and zealous attention to it (Hatha Yoga), there seems to be no useful middle ground whatever, and that seems to me one more unnecessary sadness in Maya. . . . I’ve forgotten many worthy and important things in my life, but I have never forgotten the way you used to read from, and interpret, the Upanishads, up at Thousand Island Park. . . .
With great affection and respect, always,
Sincerely, J. D. Salinger
Later in 1972, Salinger wrote to Swami Nikhilananda to express his gratitude to the man who had guided him out of his “long dark night.” At this point, healing the wound had become immeasurably more important to Salinger than transforming the wound, as becomes clear in a letter he wrote in 1973 to Swami Adiswarananda: “Part XVI of ‘Vital Steps Toward Meditation’ is beautifully saturated with Vivekachucamani. That marvelous and incomparable book. It was one of the first books Swami Nikhilananda recommended to me, many years ago. Almost every sloka speaks volumes. ‘In the forest-tract of sense pleasures there prowls a huge tiger called the mind. Let good people who have a longing for Liberation never go there.’ I suspect that nothing is truer than that, and yet I allow myself to be mauled by that old tiger almost every wakeful minute of my life.” There it is: Salinger’s life story and spiritual autobiography in nine words: forest-tract; sense pleasures; tiger; mind; liberation; mauled; wakeful. If the mind must be renounced, writing is over.
In 1975 Salinger wrote again to Swami Adiswarananda, “I read a bit from the [Bhagavad] Gita every morning before I get out of bed, Swami Nikhilananda’s annotated version. (It seems such a reasonable pleasure to imagine that [the eighth-century mystic] Shankara would have approved unreservedly of Swami’s inspired intelligence, devotion, and authority. How could he not?)” It’s striking how verbally and syntactically simple Salinger’s letters to the swamis are; perhaps they were written this way to ensure that they could be understood by correspondents for whom English was not their first language. Even so, Salinger seems to be teaching himself how to write and think in as plain and flat a manner as possible.
4. Sannyasa: the stage in which one renounces the world, becomes a wandering monk, and is honored as a spiritual leader of society. By giving up the world, one becomes a sannyasin, a holy man. It’s impossible to write in such a state, let alone publish. According to the announcement of his death, Salinger “had remarked that he was in this world but not of it.”
For the last five decades of his life, Salinger had an enduring relationship with the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center and its founder, Swami Nikhilananda. He accepted the swami as a spiritual teacher, attending services and classes at the Center, located at 17 East Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan (just three blocks north of his parents’ apartment), and also at the Vivekananda Cottage retreat in Thousand Island Park.
On April 12, 2013, “To preserve the legacy of J. D. Salinger’s association with the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center and the significance of Vedanta in his life, and to commemorate the 150th birthday of Swami Vivekananda,” at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York presented a gift to the Morgan: a collection of more than twenty letters (and related papers) written by Salinger to Swami Nikhilananda, to his successor Swami Adiswarananda, and to the Center.
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Ramakrishna died in 1886. His student, Vivekananda, popularized Vedanta in the West in the late nineteenth century. Tolstoy called Vivekananda “the most brilliant wise man. It is doubtful in this age that another man has ever risen above this selfless, spiritual meditation.” Other adherents of Vedanta were Jung, Gandhi, Santayana, Henry Miller (a lifelong devotee), Aldous Huxley (who called Vedanta “the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality”), and George Harrison, according to whom Vedanta has one goal: “the realization of God.” Harrison also said, “If there is a God, we must see him. And if there is a soul, we must perceive it.” The author A. L. Bardach summarizes Vedanta’s conception of the mind as a drunken monkey stung by a scorpion and then consumed by a demon. In Vedanta, “the same mind, when subdued and controlled, becomes a most trusted friend and helper, guaranteeing peace and happiness.” Salinger’s work from 1952 to 1965 is an increasingly explicit attempt to perform these actions: to realize God, see God, perceive the soul, and subdue and control his own and the reader’s demons, guaranteeing peace and happiness.
The teachings of Vedanta are rooted in the Vedas, ancient Sanskrit texts from India that underlie Buddhism and Hinduism.
Vedanta: “God is everywhere.” Teddy: “All she was doing was pouring God into God.”
Vedanta: “Each soul is potentially divine.” Zooey: “There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
Vedanta: “The goal is to manifest that divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal.” Zooey: “Detachment, buddy, and only detachment.”
Vedanta: “As soon as I think of myself as a little body, I want to preserve it, protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies. Then you and I become separate.” Buddy: “An unknown boy (‘some shnook he never saw before in his life’) had come up to Waker and asked him for his bicycle, and Waker had handed it over. Neither Les nor Bessie, of course, was unmindful of Waker’s ‘very nice, generous intentions,’ but both of them also saw the details of the transaction with an implacable logic of their own. What, substantially, they felt that Waker should have done—and Les now repeated this opinion, with great vehemence, for Seymour’s benefit—was to give the boy a nice, long ride on the bicycle. Here Waker broke in, sobbing. The boy didn’t want a nice, long ride, he wanted the bicycle. He’d never had one, the boy; he’d always wanted one. I looked at Seymour. He was getting excited.”
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From Catcher onward, Salinger’s work became more and more one of “translation” and popularization—taking the metaphysical and religious ideas with which he was consumed and finding ways of disseminating these ideas by making them vivid, funny, and attractive to his (largely secular or at least non-Hindu) readership. As his audience grew, his concerns became increasingly abstruse, and he had trouble bridging that gap. Surely, one of the main reasons he stopped publishing was the difficulty of being the servant of two masters, art and religion. His intolerance of civilian life in New York. His flight into isolation. His love of uniformity. His experience of critical attacks as a revisitation of the shelling. His hatred of intellectual dissection. His need for very young girls, healers, nursemaids, innocents to rewind the clock. His homeopathy as battle triage. His need for control—titles, commas, everything else. His short temper. His hatred of being touched by strangers. His taste in movies. His driving his Jeep “like a nutcase.” His silence, above all his literary silence as an acknowledgment that there is no way to ever redeem the dead. By his own admission, Salinger was “a condition, not a man.” That condition, from 1945 until his death in 2010, was PTSD.
Many commentators have claimed that Salinger made art his religion; instead, suffering from PTSD and searching for meaning and God, he made religion his art. Salinger’s work became increasingly informed by and then inundated by references and odes to Christ, St. Francis, Buddha, Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Shankaracharya, Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, and Hui-neng—all of whom are, to a greater or lesser extent, antihierarchical religious prophets. Remember grunts’ contempt for REMFs: rear-echelon motherfuckers. Just as he gave over command of his life to religion, he now gave over his work.
Story by story, from “Teddy” forward, Salinger’s work moves from religion as a factor or even a crutch in his characters’ lives to religion as the only thing in their lives that matters to the work’s entire purpose being to cryptically convey religious dogma. As the author A. L. Bardach says and as we have noted earlier, Salinger “confided to Nikhilananda that he intentionally left a trail of Vedantic clues throughout his work from Franny and Zooey onward, hoping to entice readers into deeper study.”
“Teddy” appeared in the New Yorker on January 31, 1953, to much acclaim, angst, and controversy. Readers debated who died, who killed whom—ten-year-old Teddy walks into his own death, allowing his sister, Booper, to push him into the empty pool—and were uncomfortable with the willful death of a child, which goes to the very core of the story. “The trouble is most people don’t want to see things the way they are,” Teddy informs Bob Nicholson, with his wonderfully ordinary name. “They don’t even want to stop getting born and dying all the time. They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice.” Many of Teddy’s observations throughout the story are explicitly Vedantic (“I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating”), but the story is under exquisite formal control. Religion is still, just barely, serving art.
The same is true for “Franny.” Throughout the novella, which was published in the New Yorker on January 29, 1955, Franny is taking the Salingerian/Vedantic line:
I’m sick to death of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
I am just sick of ego, ego, ego.
I mean all these really advanced and unbogus religious persons that keep telling you if you repeat the name of God incessantly, something happens. Even in India. In India, they tell you to meditate on the “Om,” which means the same thing, really, and the exact same result is supposed to happen.
The reader is meant to sympathize and fall in love with Franny, but we still read at least partway through her, past her, into her psyche. We’re not meant to view her, quite yet, as a godhead.
“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” which appeared in the November 19, 1955, New Yorker, is a crucial transition for Salinger’s work, since for its first three-quarters it’s an elaborately and brilliantly rendered account of a wedding day “flatting,” and then Seymour’s diaries take over the proceedings. From here on we will get tighter and more glamorous close-ups of Swami Seymour, an enlightened being who is trying to teach certain key concepts to his younger siblings (who are trapped performing such lower-level activities as acting, writing, and teaching) before he kills himself. Salinger’s answers, delivered almost always through Seymour, are invariably taken directly from Vedanta. Seymour: “I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day.”
Which is pretty much what happens, or doesn’t happen, in “Zooey” (The New Yorker, May 4, 1957). Not that anything has to “happen” in a work of fiction. It’s not the stasis of “Zooey” that kills the pleasure of the text for many critics; it’s the syrupy certainty of the solution. Zooey tells Franny, “One thing I know. And don’t get upset. It isn’t anything bad. But if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have enough sense to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup—which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse.” Think how far we’ve come from Teddy’s pouring God into God. We were with Teddy; we’re being enlightened by Zooey. Certainty has won out. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” appearing in the June 6, 1959, New Yorker, Buddy Glass says, “I tend to regard myself, if at all by anything as sweet as an Eastern name, as a fourth-class Karma Yogin, with perhaps a little Jnana Yoga thrown in to spice up the pot.” Buddy is referring to two related Vedantic concepts, that of the four yogas or paths to salvation, and that of the four asramas or stages of life. Salinger saw his own spiritual progress in precisely the same terms. By now, form and content have come completely apart: “Seymour” feels like outtakes from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and Bardach sees Franny and Zooey, when published together, as an “emotional, humorous, and easily understood version of The Bhagavad Gita,” with its preaching of selfless action.
For most readers, if “Seymour” comes right up to the precipice of legibility, logic, and sense, “Hapworth 16, 1924” (The New Yorker, June 19, 1965) falls into the crevice. Wisdom delivery system overrules realistic representation: seven-year-old Seymour delivering arias on philosophy and religion. Buddy types up Seymour’s impossibly rococo letter for us, adding an extra layer of discipleship between us and the godhead, in a way that’s exactly reminiscent of the layers of discipleship in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, a quotation from which appears on Seymour and Buddy’s beaverboard. Seymour says, “Raja-Yoga and Bhaki-Yoga, two heartrending, handy, quite tiny volumes, perfect for the pockets of any average, mobile boys our age, by Vivekananda of India. He is one of the most exciting, original and best equipped giants of this century I have ever run into; my personal sympathy for him will never be outgrown or exhausted as long as I live, mark my words; I would easily give ten years of my life, possibly more, if I could have shaken his hand or at least said a brisk, respectful hello to him on some busy street in Calcutta or elsewhere.” This is literal hagiography.
After Catcher, Salinger was no longer a novelist per se, and in a sense it’s possible to see him as no longer especially devoted to fiction writing, at least as conventionally understood. He was seeking to write, and indeed was writing “wisdom literature”—metaphysical uplift—adapting Eastern satori for Western consumption. As Som P. Ranchan writes in An Adventure in Vedanta: J. D. Salinger’s The Glass Family:
One of the visions of the great Vedantist Vivekananda was to bring the message of Vadanta from the cloisters and the forest where it was first discovered and propounded by the sages and the disciples into the mainstream of daily existence. It is a tribute to the creative genius of Salinger that he has done it. He has brought it into the routine of teaching, acting. He has brought it into a New York apartment, into its living room, bedroom. He has brought the Ganges from the head of Siva into the tub where Zooey splashes like a porpoise while reading his [brother’s] letter replete with Zen satories and Vedantin affirmations. He has broadcast it coast to coast through a quiz program and that too from the voices of children. He makes us smoke it through cigarettes and cigars. While we inhale the acrid smoke from the freshly-lit cigars of Zooey, as we travel in taxis with crooked taximeters, while rummaging through loaded ashtrays, he makes Vedanta real—something that Raja Rao the self-confessed Vedantist could not do. Vedanta thus ceases to be the sacred preserve of the monks. . . . In a word, the vision of Ramakrishna is made real with such fun, mischief, metaphysical seriousness and profound, symbolic gravity. Finally, it must be said that Salinger has profound grasp of the methods of action exemplified in Franny and Zooey, of worship leading to gnosis exemplified in Buddy, and of gnosis and love exemplified in Seymour, and in the beginning and the end and behind them all, exemplars of various approaches stands the dynamic Mother Bessie who is the crazy, cosmic vibration of Prema, and love.
In “ ‘The Holy Refusal’: A Vedantic Interpretation of J. D. Salinger’s Silence,” Dipti Pattanaik writes, “Thus the conventional quest theme of Catcher gradually gives way to stories which deal more and more with mysticism. From the busiest places in the world Salinger moves in his later stories to narcissistic autonomous families and cocooned individuals. Like the shift of themes there is predictable shrinking of language. From Holden’s slang, signifying a language of mass consumption, there is movement towards a solipsistic voice—a voice that is often a monologue (Buddy’s), confiding secrets ([Seymour’s] letter), offering an advice (Zooey’s advice to Franny), or speaking to and about itself (Buddy as an artist talking about the intricacies of writing a fiction)—almost a voice of the monastery.”
Indeed, Salinger’s late novellas—“Zooey,” “Seymour,” “Hapworth,” with their loose form, overlapping tales, diary entries, letters, Socratic dialogues, dueling swami-wisdom jousting tournaments—resemble nothing so much as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The man and writer who had once been opposed to all established authorities and guidelines had succumbed to the rules of a religion and, in so doing, had absolutely nowhere to go but deeper into the forest of his own silence.
Three key Vedantic tenets, as summarized by Bardach: “You are not your body”; “You are not your mind”; “Renounce name and fame.” Relief from Salinger’s anatomy; relief from postwar psychic trauma; the last forty-five years of his life. His commitment to Vedanta was, by far, the most serious and long-lasting commitment of his life. His religious devotion exists in direct relation to his postwar trauma—it’s a heartbreaking attempt to retire it—but it wound up being his second suicide mission. War killed him the first time; Vedanta, the second.