Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  Around this time, Salinger was dealing with other publishing issues. On February 19, Burnett wrote to ask if Salinger would contribute to an issue of Story devoted to “the most outstanding” writers to have been published in the journal. “It is a long time since we have seen a story by you,” Burnett said in his letter. What Burnett did not know, but what he would soon figure out, was that Salinger continued to blame him for Lippincott’s failure to publish The Young Folks. As a result, he no longer wanted to publish his work in Story. When Salinger refused to accept Burnett’s invitation, Burnett was distressed. He simply couldn’t fathom why Salinger was angry at him.

  In early 1952, with the success of The Catcher in the Rye behind him—on March 2 the book made its final appearance on the New York Times best-seller list, showing up at number 12—Salinger had more pleasant publishing business on his mind. First, he was about to decide that he should release a collection of his short stories. A book whose contents would be completely different from The Young Folks, it would be made up mostly from stories he had published in the New Yorker. Recently Salinger had met with Roger Machell in New York to tell him of his interest in bringing out a story collection. When Hamish Hamilton heard the news, he was elated, sending Salinger a letter to assure him that he “long[ed] to hear more.” The story collection, Hamilton said, could be in the range of sixty thousand words. In March, Salinger wrote back to Hamilton. He was planning on coming to England in June, Salinger said, and they could talk then about releasing a story collection sometime in the not-too-distant future. This was more or less how Salinger left the situation when he departed New York for a vacation in Florida and Mexico.

  As it happened, Salinger was gone on this trip for some time. While he was away, officials at the Valley Forge Military Academy selected him as one of its distinguished alumni. Salinger was asked to attend a ceremony at the school as part of this honor. Someone answering Salinger’s mail wrote back to say he would not be able to attend because he was in Mexico. On June 25, back in New York, Salinger wrote the school’s officials himself to thank them for the award, although it did unsettle him. He just did not like this kind of public attention, he wrote in his letter.

  At the moment, Salinger was becoming more involved in Hindu studies, often attending seminars and lectures at the Ramakrishna Vivekanada Center. In addition, he continued to think about future career moves. Of course, currently those moves were affected by the release of the reprint of The Catcher in the Rye, which occurred in the summer of 1952.

  In the fall of 1952, S. J. Perelman, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, like Salinger, introduced him to Leila Hadley, a young woman who had just written a book called Give Me the World, an account of a three-month trip she took on a schooner. Hadley had recently visited Sri Lanka, where she had met a Buddhist monk at a monastery, and Perelman thought Salinger would like to hear Hadley’s take on Eastern religions. So Perelman arranged for Hadley and Salinger to meet; if a romance evolved as well, so much the better.

  On the evening they were to meet, Salinger picked up Hadley at her mother’s apartment at 150 East Seventy-second Street. The couple had a quiet dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. “He was very tall and thin,” Hadley says. “He looked like a lanky Jimmy Stewart. And those eyes were incredible—like black coffee. With great depth, they were extraordinary, memorable.” Over dinner, Hadley brought up Buddhism. “There was this one doctor in Sri Lanka with whom I had talked about Buddhism, and he had told me an analogy about a person having a scab on ones knee and picking at it. He said how much better it would be if one didn’t have the scab at all. I told this to Jerry who was not impressed. I should have been more erudite and mystical for him, but I wasn’t.”

  Despite the awkwardness of their first date, Salinger took Hadley out several times during the next two months. They went to dinner; some nights they stopped by his apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. “It was a dark apartment on the first floor that was not expensive,” Hadley remembers. “Everything in the place was in that kind of parade-formation neatness, creating a kind of clean and tidy look.” The strictly maintained neatness bothered Hadley, who, she admits, never really felt comfortable around Salinger. “With Jerry,” Hadley says, “I always felt as if I was going to say the wrong thing, which is not something I usually feel with people. In the 1950s one was trained to make conversation, but he wasn’t someone who was easy to talk to at all.”

  Still, they did have conversations—many of them. “He talked about his ex-wife, who he carefully explained to me he met in dreams,” Hadley recalls. “He told me all about the experiences of meeting his ex-wife in dreams. He also talked about Holden as if he were a real live person. I would ask him about what he was doing at some point in the past and he would say, ‘Well, that was when Holden was doing this or that.’ It was as if Holden really existed, which I couldn’t understand. Besides this, he talked about his writing and a notebook he was keeping. He also told me he was writing about the Glass family. Everything I said was challenged. At one point I told him I wanted to own a painting by the artist Cranach. And he said, ‘You don’t need to buy that painting; you can own it in your head.’ That was a very advanced idea for the 1950s. But Salinger was against materialism. After all, attachment creates desire, desire creates suffering, so suffering can be avoided if . . . ” One last subject he talked about with Hadley was the war. “He did talk about the war with me. I gather he had had a nervous breakdown because of the war. He didn’t say so specifically but he certainly hinted at it.”

  That fall, Salinger began to consider leaving New York. He was tired of living in the city and longed for a quiet solitude he thought he could find in the country. He also disliked the personal attention he was getting because of Catcher so much that he wanted to isolate himself. Because of this, when he began to look at different pieces of property, he found a tract of land in New Hampshire off the Connecticut River near Windsor, Vermont, that he could not resist buying. The land belonged to Carlotta Saint-Gaudens Dodge, a granddaughter of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the world-famous sculptor who had lived in the area until his death in 1907. The negotiations for the property went smoothly—Salinger ended up buying ninety acres—and the deal was finished not too long after New Year’s Day in 1953, with the date on the deed reading February 16, 1953. Of course, New Year’s Day was Salinger’s thirty-fourth birthday—a day on which he was able to look to the future and see what his life was going to be like. In Cornish, the name of the New Hampshire town in which the property was actually located, Salinger got a beautiful wooded piece of land with a view of the Connecticut River Valley. He also got a small, gambrel-roofed cottage that, while attractive, needed both plumbing and a furnace. So what Salinger saw when he moved there in the dead of winter was a place that needed work but a place that was his. What’s more, it was far enough away from normal civilization that he could live his life in seclusion.

  As soon as he moved in, Salinger started making arrangements to winterize the cottage, deciding he would do much of the work himself. Until the house was modernized, however, Salinger had to carry water from a nearby stream for cooking and bathing, and cut firewood in the surrounding forest to keep warm. It was an existence not unlike one Holden Caulfield fantasizes about in The Catcher in the Rye when he dreams of buying a secluded cottage in a forest “up north” so that he and Sally could escape civilization. Soon after he moved into his cottage, Salinger began venturing into Windsor, a quaint Vermont village located across from Cornish on the other side of the Connecticut River. Cornish, the town where he lived, had no banks, no stores, no restaurants, no doctor’s offices, no business establishments to speak of.

  On January 31, as Salinger was dealing with issues concerning his new property in Cornish, the New Yorker published “Teddy,” a story on which he had worked intermittently for some time. Because of its plot and subject matter, it would be one of the most controversial stories Salinger ever published. The story centers around Teddy, a ten-year-old
genius who is on a cruise with his parents and his six-year-old sister Booper. On board the ship, Teddy meets a young man named Bob Nicholson with whom he has a long, philosophical conversation, a highlight of which occurs when Teddy talks about his lack of emotions. “I take it you have no emotions?” Nicholson asks. “If I do, I don’t remember when I ever used them,” Teddy answers. “I don’t see what they’re good for.” Later, Teddy reveals to Nicholson that he can see in his mind both when and how certain people are going to die. “All you do is get the heck out of your body when you die,” Teddy says. “My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. Just because they don’t remember it doesn’t mean they haven’t done it. It’s so silly. . . . For example, I have a swimming lesson in about five minutes. I could go downstairs to the pool, and there might not be any water in it. This might be the day they change the water or something. What might happen, though, I might walk up to the edge of it, just to have a look at the bottom, for instance, and my sister might come up and sort of push me in. I could fracture my skull and die instantaneously.”

  With this, Teddy heads for his swimming lesson, leaving behind Nicholson, who soon decides to follow him. Once Nicholson arrives at the deck that goes to the swimming pool, he stops. “He was a little more than halfway down the staircase,” Salinger wrote at the end of the story, “when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls.”

  That’s how the story concludes, too—as abrupt and unexpected as a sudden death. In this way “Teddy” was similar in structure to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which also ended with a startling event. In the case of “Teddy,” the New Yorker audience was stunned. For here, in the pages of this staid magazine, they had encountered a story about a young boy who, for reasons that are never fully explained, apparently kills his sister by shoving her into an empty swimming pool. Nothing is more disturbing than the destruction of innocence, and that was what Salinger was writing about in this story. Teddy, the picture of innocence, is capable of cold-blooded murder. The only possible contributing factor behind this action, at least in terms of the material provided in the story, is Teddy’s genius. As Teddy gained knowledge, he lost his ability to feel human emotions, which allows him to commit the act of murdering his sister. Perhaps he kills her—just perhaps—for no other reason than because he wants to.

  Salinger received as much mail for “Teddy” as he had for “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” mostly from readers disturbed by the ending. In early February, weathering response to the story, Salinger continued to deal with the problems he had incurred moving to Cornish. On the second, a Saturday, he was preparing for workers to come on Monday to build a bulkhead on the property and to outfit the house with storm windows. Next Salinger canceled a trip to New York to see Hamish Hamilton, who had come over from England with his wife Yvonne, because he needed to stay in Cornish and work on the house. A month later, he canceled another proposed trip to New York, most probably because he was still focusing all of his attention on his new life in the country.

  In March, Signet published The Catcher in the Rye in paperback. Priced at fifty cents, the book had a front cover showing a picture of a boy, with a magazine-style picture of Holden, who carries a suitcase and wears an overcoat, a scarf, and a red baseball cap turned backward on his head. The boy stares into a club that features women in “3 Shows.” On the back cover, a brief biography of Salinger also appeared. It would be among the last biographies Salinger would allow to appear on the cover of one of his books.

  On April 6, in the wake of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in paperback, Little, Brown released Salinger’s collection, Nine Stories. The dual release of the books was planned to maximize the publicity value of both publications. Of all the stories he had published so far, Salinger chose to include in the collection “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “The Laughing Man,” “Down at the Dinghy,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” and “Teddy.”

  Nine Stories received a burst of reviews, most of them careful to qualify their praise. Under the title “Youthful Horrors,” Alan Barth reviewed the collection in the Nation. Saying that these “accomplished and effective” stories “range from the macabre to the psychopathic . . . including the much-discussed New Yorker tale of the child prodigy who pushes his sister, we think, into the empty swimming pool,” Barth writes that Salinger “is a fiction writer of great brilliance” who is nevertheless in danger of becoming “one of definite and ultimately disappointing limitations.” Later Barth continued: “Just as Saroyan has succumbed to the glamour of a happy childhood, it is possible to be infatuated by the charms of juvenile diseases at the expense of a larger and more complex area of human suffering. This is a sickness of mind in a very small world for a writer of large gifts.”

  Gilbert Highet reviewed the book for Harper’s. In “Always Roaming with a Hungry Heart,” Highet said that “a year or so ago J. D. Salinger published one of the best novels of adolescent distress which have appeared in our time: The Catcher in the Rye.” He had “produced a splendid set of Nine Stories,” the last of which, “Teddy,” “staggered its readers when it came out in the New Yorker, and is absolutely unforgettable.” Although he believed there was “not a failure in the book,” Highet feared Salinger was in danger of writing about the same character in story after story. “There is a thin, nervous, intelligent being who is on the verge of a breakdown: we see him at various stages of his life, as a child, as an adolescent, as an aimless young man in his twenties worried about homosexuality. One of his chief troubles is that one of his parents is Jewish and the other Gentile. The male parent is always powerful but rarely understanding. The mother is jittery and unreliable.”

  But none of the reviews compared in scope and content to Eudora Welty’s, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review on April 5. One of the most accomplished and respected short-story writers of the twentieth century, Welty praised Salinger’s writing as being “original, first rate, serious, and beautiful.” Obviously a “born writer,” Welty said, Salinger had “a sensitive eye . . . an incredibly great ear, and something I can think of no word for but grace.” Welty continued with her praise. “Mr. Salinger is a very serious artist, and it is likely that what he has to say will find many forms as time goes by—interesting forms too. His novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was good and extremely moving, although—for this reader—all its virtues can be had in a short story by the same author, where they are somehow more at home.”

  Based in part on the good reviews and in part on the fact that it was the follow-up book to The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories soon made its way onto the New York Times best-seller list. It remained among the top fifteen books for the next three months—an almost unheard of feat for a collection of stories published by a new author. Interestingly, Salinger saw little of the coverage of Nine Stories, or at least that was what he wanted people to believe. In early April he wrote the New Yorker and his publisher to inform them that he did not want to see any reviews of the story collection. He could not work if he believed he was in the news, he said, and at the moment he was in the middle of doing excellent work, which only made him want to write more.

  Two months after Little, Brown published Nine Stories, Hamish Hamilton released the book in England. There was, however, one major difference between the American and British versions. Hamilton felt strongly that the generic name Nine Stories would have been the worst possible title to put on the book and he somehow convinced Salinger to let him use as the title for the collection For Esmé—With Love and Squalor, the story that was perhaps Salinger’s most famous in England if not the United States as well. To the public, Hamilton also finessed the fact that the book was a collection of stories by emphasizing in the a
dvertising copy the idea that For Esmé was the next book from the author of The Catcher in the Rye. Hamilton wanted to downplay the truth, since story collections never sell as well as novels.

  No matter how Hamilton packaged the book, the critics still wrote about it as a story collection. Most reviews described the book for what it was—a volume of well-written stories that often deal with the same issues. This was seen as either an asset or a detriment, depending on the publication. Mostly, the reviews were favorable. On April 8, the Times Literary Supplement praised the book. “Not since F. Scott Fitzgerald has an American writer shown a similar grace, originality and tenderness, and managed to squeeze out of the relationship between children and grown-ups such grave wistful amusement.” The Observer concurred, saying that Salinger “seems to understand children as no English-speaking writer has done since Lewis Carroll.”

  Claire

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  When he moved to Cornish, the first people Salinger made friends with were the teenagers living in the area. Maybe his overwhelming desire to write about “very young people” impelled him to be friendly with young people in his everyday life. Maybe he even saw the teenagers as source material for the characters he was creating in his fiction. Whatever the reason, seeking out the friendship of teenagers rather than adults, especially teenage girls, is not something most well-adjusted grown men do. The attraction of an adult man to a teenage girl was about to be offered to the world in the form of a novel in September 1955 when Vladimir Nabokov published the first edition of Lolita, a book whose narrator, Humbert Humbert, plays out his obsession for a teenage girl. In the future Nabokov himself would praise “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” as being “a great story,” one he had more than likely read around the time he wrote Lolita. Perhaps Nabokov identified with Seymour Glass’s unusual fondness for a young girl he meets on the beach—she’s actually not even a teenager yet—before he goes into his hotel room and shoots himself.