Celibacy ...

[Guest guest]

namaste.

 

We were discussing celibacy in the past few weeks. I came

across this following news item (comment on a book) at

 

http://us.rediff.com/

 

This is a news item/comment on a book by one Margaret Salinger,

the daughter of J.D. Salinger, the author of CATCHER IN THE RYE.

This may be (i) showing the dangers in the incorrect interpretation

of vedanta, or (ii) misinterpretation of J.D. Salinger, or (iii)

a modern book-writing technique. I leave it to the readers,

particularly the more knowledgeable ones on J.D. Salinger,

for their interpretation.

 

Regards

Gummuluru Murthy

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(taken from http://us.rediff.com)

 

Father's Failings Blamed on Vedanta

 

By ARTHUR J. PAIS

10/27/2000

 

 

With Catcher in the Rye hailed as a literary

sensation in America and Europe in 1951, its

author J.D. Salinger was on his way to

becoming a literary celebrity. But his

increasingly reclusive nature surprised the

publishing world and his fans. Salinger would

publish two more works before plunging into

a life of anonymity, frustrating fans, journalists

and biographers.

 

Some of the speculations about Salinger, one of the

most celebrated and fiercely private writers of the

20th century, are now answered in Dream Catcher, a stormy

memoir by his daughter Margaret A. Salinger. Many of the

revelations are not pleasant. He spoke in tongues, drank

his own urine, studied homeopathy, and rarely had sex with

her mother, she reveals.

 

He was also deeply into the Vedanta throughout the fifties,

and it was his interpretation of Vedantic life that ruined

her mothers happiness and her own, Margaret notes. Salinger,

81, who has not published anything since 1965, is not saying

anything about the tell-all book.

 

While several books and a recent documentary discussed Salinger's

obsession with Zen Buddhism, this is the first time anyone has

revealed that Salinger was drawn to Hinduism soon after the

publication of his landmark novel.

 

Margaret recounts how the conflicting emotions Vedanta

philosophy raised in Salinger were the cause of many unhappy

episodes in his life even after he began dating Claire Douglas,

an Irish Catholic girl. Salinger was in his early 30s at the time;

she was at least 15 years his junior. For several months, Salinger

influenced by Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and the book The Gospel

of Sri Ramakrishna, thought of becoming celibate.

 

Like his fictional character, Teddy, Salinger believed meeting

a woman would bar his path to enlightenment. After reading

Ramakrishna's thoughts, Salinger was convinced that women and

gold spell trouble for any man.

 

Margaret, 44, who studied at Oxford and attended Harvard Divinity

School, is a nondenominational hospital chaplain. Her mother,

Claire is the source of many of her anecdotes.

 

Despite his intentions to remain celibate, Salinger was haunted by

Claire. He was relieved to come across Paramahansa Yogananda who told

him women need not be obstacles to enlightenment and karmic progress.

 

Claire Salinger was attracted to Yogananda's thinking too and got

into kriya yoga. A greater hero for the couple was Lahiri Mahasaya,

Yogananda's guru, who was a married man, proving that yogic

attainments could be open to family men and women.

 

But when Margaret recently studied Lahiri Mahasaya's work, she

wondered how her parents, especially the mother, could not detect

misogyny in his ideas.

 

It was like reading the obituary of our family before we even

became one, she says. Her own birth was not welcomed by her father,

she reveals. From time to time, he would try to give up sex, and her

mother often got him drunk on wine so that he would make love to her.

 

Her own conception was an accident, and Salingers distress over the

impending birth drove her mother into a deep depression. Towards the

end of the 1950s, as she became more involved in kriya yoga and Hinduism,

Salinger suddenly switched to Scientology, making her even more miserable.

 

Why is Margaret Salinger revealing all this? In her words, she is

absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done

with me.

 

 

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