TLS signed “Jerry,” two pages, 8.5 x 11, December 23, [1971]. Letter to Eileen Paddison, a boarding-school girl and aspiring writer who struck up an unlikely lifelong friendship with the author, maintaining a correspondence with Salinger for over 15 years. Over time, she became the recipient of some of the reclusive writer's most candid and personal confessions.
In this long and intriguing letter, Salinger writes he understands what she is going through, grappling with a mixed identity, elucidating how similarities in their backgrounds led him to feel "a gigantic comfort" in her friendship. As well as both being boarding school kids, Salinger found it "extraordinary" that the two share the same unique combination of half-Irish, half-Jewish backgrounds. He recognizes that "mixtures in lineage" have become less of a social hang-up in recent years, adding that in his day they resulted in a "fairly rotten form of self-consciousness."
He writes a bit on public education and boarding schools, observing: "Boarding schools have a bad name, but they oddly suit some kinds of kids." Notably, it was Salinger's own boarding school experience, coupled with intrinsic alienation, that formed the basis for his celebrated novel The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger closes by thoughtfully cautioning against theft ("I just can't stand any form of swiping, stealing, whatever verb") and commenting on his intense need for privacy, asking if she destroys mail after she reads it. He says that he has had "some bad/bitter experience with letters" and is therefore "leery of this form of conversation," emphasizing that it "isn't sheer paranoia." In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
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