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92 | Shoot for the Moon, but Don’t Aim Too Hard VanityFair.com, April 2010 J. D. Salinger’s books have always been my favorites to read and reread. I decided to write him a letter in 1982, knowing full well of his reclusive nature. But like many of his readers, I felt I knew him—or knew Holden, or Buddy, or Zooey, or Phoebe. It was a pleasant shock to receive a letter in reply. At the time, I thought the reason for his warmth toward me was because I told him about my family, complete with suicidal brother. But it may equally have been because I was a dancer. I do think he had a special place in his heart—and in his stories—for dancers, a place of innocence. At some point when we were hanging out, I promised him that I would never say or write anything about him publicly, and he trusted me. That was just part of the bargain of knowing him. So it was with all kinds of ambivalence that I sought to publish this little memoir after he died. I asked myself (and my husband) the question: Does a promise extend beyond death? Ultimately I thought it would be a good thing and might dispel some of the damaging effects of other, more intimate stories about Salinger. I wanted to offer up my experience of him as a basically decent, if wildly contradictory, person. So I decided to write down—keeping my own mixed reactions to him intact—my memory of that friendship. One nice follow-up: I recently met a Columbia student who wrote her senior thesis on the role of dance in Catcher in the Rye after coming across this story when surfing the web. This is the only part of Section III that was not written in the eighties, but is about the eighties—just as I put my memoir about the sixties into “The Sixties” even though it was written much later. The first thing I noticed was the look of fear in his eyes. We were meeting at the Drake Hotel in Manhattan, and for a moment I thought I had spotted the wrong guy. But he was the only man standing alone in the lobby. I had written him, and he had responded within a week that my letter was a “tonic,” that he wanted to “plunge into daily, if not hourly, correspondence ,” and that he wanted to see me dance. He signed the last page with initials only, and typed over them, claiming that he was paranoid about writing his full name. That was December 1982, when I was thirty-five and on leave from my job on the dance faculty of Bennington College in Vermont. Five months and several letters later, we were finally meeting. When I read Catcher in the Rye in the sixth grade, I felt that Holden was just like my brother Tommy. The massive dissatisfaction, the restlessness, The Eighties | 93 the inability to behave as expected, the brilliant spins of sarcasm, and the urge to puncture the pretensions of others were the same. And this: the constant lying, which sprang partly from evasion and partly from sheer excess of imagination. I’d been drafting letters to J. D. Salinger in my head for a long time. And then, six years after my brother killed himself at age thirty, I finally wrote. I had an older brother, too, who was Seymour-like.This scholarly brother (who also went to college at fifteen) took Tommy and me under his wing, sharing his love for poetry, theater, and music. And redheaded Phoebe was like one of my two little sisters. So I had an eerie sense of familiarity with Salinger’s characters. But I also loved the way, when you’re reading him, you can burst out laughing in the midst of melancholy. In my first letter I tried to put into words what his books had meant to me. I think Jerry responded out of sympathy, but also because I was a dancer (and had no ambitions to be a writer). After all, Bessie and Les, the Glass parents, had been vaudeville performers. And whenever Holden dances in Catcher—either breaking into a tap routine when horsing around or slow dancing with his kid sister—his depression lifts a little. Salinger seems to hold a special place for dancing as he does for childhood: they are two realms that are not lousy...

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