While Salinger worked at fixing up his home, he went into Windsor to meet the local teenagers at places like Nap’s Lunch and Harrington’s Spa, two coffee shops that were high-school hangouts. Before long, Salinger began to drive the kids to “away” basketball games and swim meets and escort them—the girls, that is—to dances at nearby colleges. In no time he had become a fixture at many of the teenagers’ high-school and social functions. Eventually, Salinger started entertaining the teenagers at his house with impromptu parties and gab sessions, during which everyone ate potato chips and played records on the phonograph.
As the spring and summer passed, Salinger became even closer to the kids. It was as if he had insinuated himself into their group, only he was almost two full decades older than they were. “I never saw anyone fit in the way he did,” one member of the group, Shirlie Blaney, later recalled. “He was just like one of the gang, except that he never did anything silly the way the rest of us did. He always knew who was going with whom, and if anybody was having trouble in school, and we all looked up to him, especially the renegades. He played whatever record we asked for on his hi-fi—my favorite was Swan Lake—and when we started to leave he’d always want to play just one more.”
By the early fall, Salinger had become so comfortable with the clique of teenagers that when Shirlie Blaney asked him if she could interview him (years later, Salinger would say she told him it was for either the high-school newspaper or a class assignment), Salinger agreed to sit down and talk with her. It was something he had done only once before and then with his New Yorker friend William Maxwell for the Book-of-the-Month Club News. The interview took place one day in early November in Windsor over lunch at Harrington’s Spa. So there they were—Salinger sitting in a wooden booth with Blaney and one of her friends, the girls drinking Cokes and Salinger eating his lunch. Scheduled to graduate from Windsor High School in 1954, Blaney asked Salinger a series of questions. He answered all of them.
He was born on January 1, 1919, in New York City, he said. He attended public grammar schools, the Valley Forge Military Academy, and New York University before he traveled to Poland to learn the ham shipping business, which he hated. After spending ten months in Vienna, he returned to America to attend Ursinus College and then Columbia University. During all of this time, or at least during the years after Valley Forge, he was writing. He began publishing stories when he was twenty-one. Following that, he worked on the cruise liner Kungsholm in the West Indies “as an entertainer.” At twenty-three, he was drafted into the Army. His novel, The Catcher in the Rye, took him ten years to write, he said; starting work on it in 1941, he did not publish it until 1951. When Blaney asked Salinger if Catcher was autobiographical, he gave her a telling answer. “Sort of,” Salinger said that day over lunch at Harrington’s Spa. “I was much relieved when I finished [the novel]. My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book, and it was a great relief telling people about it.”
One of his stories, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” had been made into the movie My Foolish Heart, Blaney pointed out. Salinger did not tell her how much he detested the picture—and Hollywood; he simply acknowledged the picture’s existence. When Blaney asked him what he liked to write about most, Salinger confirmed the obvious. The majority of his stories were written about people under the age of twenty-one; many concerned characters under the age of twelve. Soon after this, Salinger ended the interview.
Blaney published her article on November 13, not in the school newspaper as Salinger had anticipated, but in the Claremont Daily Eagle, Claremont, New Hampshire’s daily newspaper. Blaney began her piece with a brief description of Salinger. A man with “an interesting life story,” Salinger was “a very good friend of all high-school students,” although he had “many other friends as well.” “He keeps very much to himself,” Blaney wrote, “wanting only to be left alone to write. He is a tall and foreign-looking man of thirty-four, with a pleasing personality.”
Salinger’s personality turned out to be somewhat less than “pleasing” once Blaney’s article appeared. Horrified that the piece ran in a local daily newspaper, Salinger felt Blaney had betrayed him. It was following this episode that Salinger cut himself off completely from the Windsor teenagers he had been seeking out as friends for so many months. He never socialized with any of them again. The next time a carload of them drove up to his house in Cornish, he pretended not to be at home. Not too long afterward, he built a tall fence around the house.
As weeks turned into months, Salinger began to venture out to various parties and community gatherings attended by local adults. At these parties, Salinger mixed with people who lived in or around Cornish. On such occasions, he was known to talk about his favorite topics, such as detective novels and Eastern religion. Then, at one party in nearby Manchester, Vermont, Salinger found himself instantly attracted to someone who was, ironically, anything but an adult. Claire Douglas was a Radcliffe College student. Her father, Salinger would later learn, was Robert Langton Douglas, the famous British art critic who in 1940 had moved his family from England to New York, although it was hard to determine exactly what arrangement of people Douglas defined as his “family.” When in 1928 Douglas married Claire’s mother, an enchanting Dublin native named Jean Stewart, he was sixty-three and had been married twice before to women with whom he had children. Claire was born in 1933, which made her, on that evening in Manchester, Vermont, nineteen years old.
Claire was fashionable. She was attractive in a “pretty” sort of way. She was, for her age, intellectual, though her intellectualism was mixed with a drive to learn about subjects like spirituality and religion. She had a captivating, friendly personality. Of everything, though, one could not help but be taken by her youthful appearance. She was, simply put, a young-looking nineteen. She could have passed for Lolita herself.
So far in his life, Salinger had fairly consistently dated—or at least been attracted to—teenage girls. First, there had been the girl in Vienna, then Oona, now Claire. He had also written about pubescent and prepubescent girls in his fiction—the girls in “The Young Folks,” Barbara in “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” Leah in “A Girl I knew,” Mattie, Phoebe, Esmé, and so on. In his life and in his fiction, one obsession of Salinger’s was becoming clear. As Salinger aged—and he was now thirty-four years old—he remained attracted to young women in their mid- to late teens.
Not long after the party in Manchester, Claire began seeing Salinger at his home in Cornish. If the local teenage girls who had visited Salinger had come to his house for platonic reasons, Claire was apparently motivated by something else. Obviously she was not bothered by May-December relationships since she had grown up with parents who represented that very model. In fact, Claire did not have any concerns about the fifteen-year age difference between Salinger and herself. Claire was, however, seeing someone else, a recent Harvard Business School graduate. They had been dating long enough to have started discussing marriage.
But this did not keep Claire from dating Salinger too, and they soon embarked on a romance. As they spent time together, they talked about many topics, among them Zen Buddhism. Describing Salinger to her family, Claire told them he lived in Cornish with his mother, his sister, fifteen Buddhist monks, and a yogi who stood on his head. The monks and the yogi may not have been in Salinger’s house physically, but the essence of spirituality surely was.
By the end of 1953, Claire was seriously involved with Salinger, though she had not stopped seeing the Harvard Business School graduate.
2
In 1954, Claire married the Harvard Business School graduate. It must have been a rocky marriage at best, for it seems that, even though she was married to this young man, Claire could not end her relationship with Salinger. Whatever she had with Salinger, whatever bond she had formed with him on an emotional or spiritual level, was stronger than the union she forged with the young man she married. In the end her attraction to Salinger won out.
After being married only a matter of months, the newlyweds divorced, and Claire returned to Cornish—and Salinger.
While Salinger was dealing with this, he was charting various developments in his literary career. In 1954, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was reprinted in Short Story Masterpieces, edited for Dell by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” was reprinted in Manhattan: Stories from the Heart of a Great City, edited for Bantam by Seymour Krim. During the year, Nine Stories appeared in paperback from New American Library and The Catcher in the Rye continued to post solid sales figures. By 1954, Catcher had been published in Denmark, Germany, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Holland. On another front, Hamish Hamilton informed Salinger that his friend Laurence Olivier had expressed interest in adapting “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” as a BBC radio drama. Each week, Olivier presented a half-hour radio drama based on a famous story, Hamilton wired Salinger. To date, Olivier had used as source material stories by Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Melville, and Bret Hart. Olivier introduced the story, then read a part. “He’s most anxious to include ‘For Esmé,’” Hamilton wrote, “and hopes you will feel like agreeing.” Salinger would be the only contemporary writer represented in the series.
Ultimately, Hamilton’s efforts on behalf of Olivier did no good. Salinger couldn’t go through with it. The anger he felt over what Hollywood had done to “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was simply too fresh in his mind. He wired Hamilton his answer. His decision may have been infuriating and perhaps even illogical, but his decision was his and it was final. He wanted “For Esmé” to be a short story and not a BBC dramatization and that was that. Salinger had no trouble walking away from a deal most writers would have leapt at—imagine the chance to have one’s short story adapted for the BBC by Laurence Olivier!—but he had done it. It was one of the first signs that Salinger was becoming even more restrictive in what he would allow to happen to his work.
During 1954, Salinger worked on a story called “Franny,” one of the most ambitious pieces of fiction he had attempted. In December, Salinger and Lobrano corresponded about “Franny,” which Lobrano was editing for publication. The main worry of the editors at the New Yorker was the possibility that many readers could think Franny, a college student in the throes of a troubled relationship with her boyfriend Lane Coutell, might be pregnant. Since this would have been a scandal in the mid-1950s, the editors believed Salinger needed to resolve in his mind whether or not she was pregnant, and then reveal that some way in the story. In point of fact, Salinger said in a letter to Lobrano, Franny was not pregnant. So he suggested that a small addition be made in the story; he wanted to insert in one key scene the line of dialogue, “Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly.” If that didn’t resolve the trouble, Salinger said, he had two long additions that he would rather not use since they were obvious. Salinger ended his letter by saying he had been moving around, working out of hotel rooms and the like, so he was not going to be able to get into New York to see people, like Lobrano, for Christmas.
Whatever decisions that had to be made about “Franny” were reached by late December or early January, for the piece appeared in the New Yorker on January 29, 1955. The response to the story was greater than that received by any story Salinger had published so far. Indeed the magazine was flooded with even more letters than it got when it printed Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” That story had immediately attracted widespread attention and went on to be regarded as a model of the form.
The plot to “Franny” is simple. Lane Coutell, a full-of-himself Ivy League English major, is having lunch with his girlfriend Franny Glass, Seymour’s younger sister, in a restaurant named Sickler’s in the town where he goes to college. Over lunch, Franny, clearly disturbed for reasons that are not obvious, tells Lane that she is sick of dealing with all of the “pedants and conceited little tearer-downers” she encounters at her college, that she hates her professors who call themselves poets when they are not “real” poets, and that what she actually wishes she could do in her life right now is “meet somebody I could respect.” Upset, Franny rushes to the bathroom, locks herself in a stall, and has an episode that some readers believed indicated that she was pregnant, others that she was cracking up. Leaning forward and hugging herself, she breaks down and cries “for fully five minutes.”
At last, she composes herself and returns to the table. Then Lane zeros in on a book she is carrying, The Way of a Pilgrim. Franny tells him the book, written by a Russian peasant, argues that, if one says “incessantly,” over and over, something called the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” the prayer goes), one can finally “get to see God.” As Franny talks about the Jesus Prayer, Lane ignores her, making comments about his frog’s legs and garlic. Eventually Franny stands, walks to the bar, and faints.
The story ends with Franny lying on a sofa in the manager’s office. There, Lane tells her he is taking her to a boardinghouse where he’s lined up a room for her so she can get some rest that afternoon and he can sneak up into her room that night. “You know how long it’s been?” Lane says, a reference to the last time they had sex. “When was that Friday night? Way the hell early last month, wasn’t it?” He’s obviously bothered by this. “That’s no good. Too goddam long between drinks. To put it crassly.” Going to get a taxi, Lane leaves Franny on the sofa. “Alone,” Salinger wrote, “Franny lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they continued to move.” Then the truly disturbing subtext of the story becomes apparent. After Franny has spilled out her innermost thoughts to Lane, after she has had what amounts to a nervous breakdown, after she has fainted in the restaurant bar, Lane still cares only about himself—and having sex with her that evening, whether she wants to or not.
Like The Catcher in the Rye, “Franny” is an indictment. What Salinger is attacking is not specific, but general, even societal. Franny hates insincere people and phonies, yet she is forced to deal with them at college. Even worse, she is dating one, and for that she has no one to blame but herself. Maybe, but in the course of the story she never accepts responsibility for her failure to break up with him. Instead, “Franny” seems to imply that, because the world is full of phonies, all one can do is retreat from it into some form of religion. In Franny’s case, she seeks solace in the Jesus Prayer. Ultimately, however, even religion is not enough. As she tries to cope with her life by clinging to religion, Franny slips deeper into mental distress, until she is barely able to hold on to her sanity. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden ends up in a mental institution. In “Franny,” she ends up in an unfamiliar room babbling a prayer to herself, unsure of where she is and where she is going next.
Salinger was still swept up in the wave of attention resulting from the publication of “Franny” when on February 17, 1955 in Barnard, Vermont, he married Claire Douglas, who, many critics would argue in the future, was actually the inspiration for the fictional character Franny. (To be accurate, the name Frances Glass was inspired by a young woman named Frances whom Salinger had dated at Ursinus College and with who he had continued to correspond over the years. Not long before Salinger wrote “Franny,” Frances had married a man with the surname Glassmoyer to make her married name Frances Glassmoyer, news about which she had written to Salinger.) On his marriage certificate to Claire, Salinger stated that this was his first marriage.
Following the wedding, Salinger did something he had rarely done. He threw a party. In attendance were Salinger’s mother, who was proud of her son, as any mother would be; Salinger’s sister Doris, who was a two-time divorcée herself and a buyer for Bloomingdale’s; and Claire’s first husband, who clearly did not hold the failure of their marriage against his ex-wife. Soon after the party, town members held a community meeting at which Salinger was elected town hargreave, a title given to the town’s most recently married man. The town hargreave was supposed to gather up the
area farmers’ pigs if they got loose. Salinger did not find the humor in the Cornish locals’ gesture. Then again, he did not have, nor would he ever have, a keen sense of humor. Serious and aloof, Salinger was so wrapped up in his life, he was usually unable to step back and laugh at himself, or at others.
There were random exceptions. “One afternoon I was up at Columbia University,” says Dorothy Ferrell, who was then married to James T. Ferrell for the second time. “I knew Whit Burnett because James knew him. I was in the Butler Library and I ran into Whit who had this young man with him. He told me who he was and I said, ‘Oh, you’re the young man who wrote The Catcher in the Rye.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ And I said, ‘You’re Mr. Salinger, J. D. What does the ‘J. D.’ stand for?’ Then he smiled at me and said, ‘Juvenile Delinquent.’ I laughed. I thought he was a funny and quick-witted young man.”
The Glass Family
1
After they were married, the Salingers settled into their life in Cornish. Almost from the start this isolated rural existence was hard to adapt to for a young woman as energetic and vivacious as Claire was. In June, the newlyweds were visited by S. J. Perelman, who later described the Salingers’ spread as being their own “private mountaintop overlooking five states.” While he was there, though, Perelman sensed Claire’s unease. “It’s anybody’s guess how long his wife—young, passably pretty—will want to endure the solitude,” Perelman wrote at the time. “Jerry, in all justice, looked better than I’ve ever seen him, so evidently he’s flourishing under matrimony or over it.”
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