Originally published on Forbes.com Oct 3rd, 2013
So I am blowing some of the blogging time that the end of the day job freed up on a JD Salinger jag. The biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno is done in the form of an oral history – brief anecdotes by various people who knew Salinger interspersed with quotes from Salinger’s work and comments by Shields and Salerno. Although it has a poor notice in the New Yorker, I rather liked it.
Gee, Salinger, himself, had a hard time with the New Yorker. In order to follow the biography, I felt obligated to reread Catcher in The Rye, which I was annoyed to find requires a trip to the bookstore rather than a few clicks on the Kindle. The rest of the corpus was there, which I hate to admit I hadn’t read even once, so I bought all that too. I haven’t gotten through it yet.
Then there is the documentary by Shane Salerno
I was practically begging my covivant to see it with me. We often spend Saturday night in Amherst eating at the High Horse, which has a great hamburger and excellent beer selection and enough vegetarian options for CV. Right nearby is Amherst Cinema which was taunting me by offering Salinger.
CV still has a day job though and is in the midst of second tax season (due to the October 15th deadline for extended returns). She wants something relaxing on Saturday night. So yesterday I arranged a private showing of Salinger for myself. Well, maybe that is a little inaccurate. I schlepped to Hollywood Hits Theatre in Danvers, possibly the only other theatre in Massachusetts where Salinger is playing, for the 2:40 showing. I had the theatre entirely to myself. Not surprisingly the movie and the book pretty much cover the same ground.
What’s A Tax Blogger Writing About Salinger For ?
Amidst all that material and some independent research, there are two tax stories worth highlighting. My son William is currently majoring in creative writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Interactions with that incipient hipster continually rub in how unliterary I am. This was seared into my consciousness in 1972 when in my last semester as an English major, I took Hawthorne, Melville, Twain. The professor thought I was an utter idiot, because I thought Moby Dick was a story about a bunch of guys who worked in the whaling industry. I did a lot better in history, so I switched to that. Unliterary as I may be in an absolute sense, I am the most literary tax geek I know, so it was clearly my calling to find the two tax stories in all that Salinger material. I’m only going to give you one of them in this piece, but I also have a literary history observation that I will share first.
The Sociable Seclusion of JD Salinger
One way the Salinger story is told is that after Catcher in The Rye became wildly popular, he “disappeared” and “went into seclusion”. That narrative probably says more about the self-absorption of literary New York than reality. According to mapquest ,Cornish, NH is a five hour drive from Manhattan and it was no secret that he was living there. He was a regular at the roast beef suppers put on by the Men’s Fellowship of the First Congregational Church of Hartland, VT. He wasn’t living in seclusion. He was hanging out with people who think good fences make good neighbors and that people who come asking about folks that prefer their privacy don’t deserve much in the way of cooperation.
What Happens When Writing “Hermits” Come In From The Cold
James Gould Cozzens had quite a bit in a common with JD Salinger. He was a bit older, born in 1903 as compared to Salinger’s 1919. He was a prep school kid and college drop-out who achieved early literary success. Cozzens was never part of the New York literary scene. His wife Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten was a literary agent and took care of all that for him. Their “seclusion” was about two hours from New York in Lambertville, NJ.
Like Salinger, Cozzens served in World War II, but he had a much easier war. Already a well known writer, he was directly commissioned and started writing training manuals and then speeches for generals including Hap Arnold. Toward the end of his service, he was preparing memos following developments in the news that might be damaging to the reputation of the Army Air Corps. He turned his insider’s view into the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Guard of Honor . Then he went back into “seclusion” where he did what writers do, which is write.
In 1957 By Love Possessed was published. It was a runaway best seller and critically acclaimed. It won the Howells Prize which is awarded only once every five years. Then he got his picture on the cover of Time just like Salinger would a few years later. The critical wheel turned. In some circles By Love Possessed and James Gould Cozzens are best remembered for the damning review – By Cozzens Possessed – that Dwight Macdonald wrote for Commentary. Much of the trouble was caused by the interview that Cozzens had granted to Time.
This event, which was a very big deal in the literary world at the time, was very early in Salinger’s “seclusion”. We don’t know whether Salinger noticed the parallel, but Cozzens certainly did. He wrote in his journal commenting on a letter he saw in Time in which the writer speculated that now the critics would turn on Salinger:
Hell, you might say: Time has someone on the cover every week: but of course it’s true they only have about one writer a year: and, now I think of it, the more crazily abusive critics were always digging out, in my case, hunks of the incredible TIME Crap they seemed to have been able to swallow; and so, in short, the success of the cover story may indeed be what they can’t take; not, mere best-selling, or diffused illiberal opinion.
OK. That’s enough of me being literary, back to the tax reservation.
The One Piece Of Salinger Trivia It Takes A Tax Geek To Notice
The thing that surprised me about Salinger actually says more about the way things have changed than Salinger I suppose, but it is still interesting. According to the social security death index, Salinger’s social security number was issued in 1952 or 1953. He was over thirty years old. That seems kind of extraordinary, but only till you start thinking about it. He was as, Salerno said, a “Park Avenue rich kid”. No waiting in line to apply for “working papers” like I did when I was Holden Caulfield’s age. The only steady paycheck Salinger ever received was from the Army. No social security for the military until 1957.
But he was selling short stories to the New Yorker and other magazines. Didn’t he have to file an income tax return ? Take a look at the Form 1040 for 1950. It doesn’t ask for your social security number, because unless you were an employee covered by social security you didn’t need one. If you compare 1950 1040 to the 1951 1040 you will see that they are still not asking for a social security number on page 1, but there is a new line – self-employment tax.
You could also open a bank account and own securities without a social security number. When I started out we did returns by hand in pencil and they were then photo-copied. Of course in those earlier days they didn’t have photocopy machines, so Herb Cohan told me they would type the returns to get multiple copies using carbon paper. He said it was hard, but they had the advantage of being able to start earlier – like in November or December. You didn’t have to worry about all those darn 1099s, so for the dividends you could put in “You know – a figure.”
Dammit Jim I’m A Tax Blogger
You will have to wait for the other Salinger tax story. It requires a bit of investigative reporter type work, which I am incapable of, so I have somebody helping me. You’ve waited over 50 years for another Salinger story, so you can wait the blogging equivalent amount of time which is about two weeks or so for the next installment of this piece. In the mean time I remain in seclusion somewhere in Central Massachusetts, but you can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.