Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  The only biographical material contained in or on the book would be whatever Salinger crafted himself. Once more, he included a provocative dedication. It read: “If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.” The fact that Salinger was dedicating the book to his readers, something many writers do, was undercut by his putting it in the conditional—“if there is an amateur reader left” (emphasis added). Salinger seemed to be saying that people did not read his work merely for the sake of reading it; they read it with ulterior motives. It was a notion that elevated him out of the status of being just “any” writer. As a result, the adjective “untellable” that he used to describe the gratitude he had for his readers sounded affected. It did not leave the reader with Salinger’s desired effect; it was bothersome, off-putting. Then, the recluse who wanted his readers to know nothing about his private life, told them he had a wife and two children. It was an oddly forthright thing to say, coming from a writer who claimed he wanted to protect his anonymity.

  Next, again as he had done with Franny and Zooey, Salinger added an editorial note designed to attract attention to itself—and to Salinger. He began the note by giving a brief description of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction.” “Whatever their differences in mood or effect,” he wrote, “they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family.” After this, he felt he had to explain why these two novellas were being published so close to Franny and Zooey, but, naturally, he could not say he was doing it for the money. “It struck me that [‘Raise High’ and ‘Seymour’] had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along—waxing, dilating—each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better.”

  Here were more comments that beg questions. What exactly did he mean by “mixed company”? Why was it better to say less about the new stories than more? If that’s the case, why did he bring up the new stories at all? Finally, why would Salinger presume the reader would automatically want to know more about new material?

  What actually happened in the future—the “real” story, as it were—would ultimately make observers question the very accuracy of the statements made by Salinger in this editorial note. First, the truth: After the release of this book, Salinger would publish only one additional story in the New Yorker, which would appear two years later. Following that, Salinger published no new material, either in book form or in a magazine. So, if he did have “several new Glass stories coming along,” he apparently chose not to publish any of them, except the one in the New Yorker. This being the case, qualifying words and phrases like “there is only my word for it” and “granted” seem insincere. Suddenly, that language sounds as if Salinger were trying to overcompensate for the fact that he knew he had no new publishable material in development but didn’t want his readers to know it.

  Some reviews of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction were as bad as any Salinger had received. “Hopelessly prolix, both of these stories are marred by the self-indulgence of a writer flirting with depths of wisdom, yet coy and embarrassed in his advances,” Irving Howe wrote in the New York Times Book Review on April 7. “With their cozy parentheses and clumsy footnotes, their careening mixture of Jewish Vaudeville humor and Buddhist prescription, they betray a loss of creative discipline, a surrender to cherished mannerisms.” The most vicious attack came from Newsweek. The magazine started its assault by complaining, in unqualified terms, that the four stories that had been published in two separate books—“Franny,” “Zooey,” “Raise High,” and “Seymour”—could have just as easily been brought out in one volume, but that Salinger and his publisher had split the four stories up into two books to make more money. “These churlish sentiments are intensified, admittedly,” the magazine added, “by the discovery that these two stories are nearly as great a gyp artistically as they are financially.” Time was just as hard on Salinger. “[T]he grown reader is beginning to wonder whether the sphinxlike Seymour had a secret worth sharing,” the magazine said. “And if so, when Salinger is going to reveal it.”

  Finally, the Washington Post ran a good review on January 27, 1963. However, even here, Glendy Culligan began by recalling Mary McCarthy’s attack on Salinger in the Observer, which Harper’s had reprinted in October 1962. “As critic, Mary McCarthy operates with the tidy efficiency of a Waring blender,” Culligan wrote. “What goes in as literature comes out as pulp, with only a slight gritty sound to betray the shredding process.” In fact, Culligan disagreed with McCarthy, for, Culligan argued, Salinger did not strive to produce “great” literature, as McCarthy would want him to, but fairy tales. “Heroes and villains are both bigger than life size, and we gain stature by putting ourselves in their shoes,” Culligan wrote. “So, if Seymour is wiser than any mortal could be, we take no exception.” Keeping this in mind, readers should look for the Glass saga “not as Miss McCarthy’s indignation suggests, on the shelf between James and Joyce, but a little lower down, close to Jack the Giant Killer and Tilly the Toiler.”

  Regardless of the bad reviews, by the sixth week of publication, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction was number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

  Good-byes

  1

  The one piece of fiction Salinger published after promising his readers “several new Glass stories” was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a long story narrated by a seven-year-old Seymour Glass.

  Salinger must have worked on “Hapworth” during 1964 and submitted it to the New Yorker near the end of that year, for by early 1965 the magazine had begun the lugubrious process necessary to publish one of Salinger’s long stories. As they had before, the editors and Salinger completed the process successfully, and the story appeared in the magazine on June 19, 1965.

  The story is a reproduction, supposedly typed by Buddy Glass, of a letter written by Seymour from summer camp. In the magazine the story ran from pages 32 to 113; many pages contained only one column of copy, but still the story dominated the entire issue. Unfortunately, while there were countless pages of copy, “Hapworth” did not have even a hint of a plot. The story was, quite simply, the long-winded, seemingly unedited ramblings of seven-year-old Seymour, who speaks, for reasons that are never explained, as if he were an adult with profound reasoning skills and a dazzling control of the English language. Here is a typical example of a sentence, which is about a fellow camper: “He, young Griffith Hammersmith, is also seven; however, I am his senior by a brisk and quite trivial matter of three weeks.” Then, well over into the story, Seymour spends paragraph after paragraph describing his reading list, which includes the Brontë sisters, John Bunyan, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and so on. “In fact,” says Edward Kosner, who had followed Salinger’s career long after he had published his article on him in the New York Post, “‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ was barely publishable. The material had gotten too precious, too inward. Salinger had become so preoccupied with his own concerns that it didn’t translate into the outer world anymore.”

  During 1964, Salinger attempted something he had not tried in his career: to write a piece of nonfiction unrelated to anything he had been working on. The piece came about because Whit Burnett, relentless as always, had approached him about publishing a story in an anthology. This particular anthology was going to be called Story Jubilee: 33 Years of Story, and it would stand as a monument to the magazine’s prestigious history. Burnett wanted to include Salinger among all the other “name” authors he would have in the anthology—all those writers who had made it after Story pu
blished them at the beginning of their careers. Naturally, as he had in the past, Salinger refused to allow Burnett to use a story. So the two decided Salinger would write an introduction to the anthology instead.

  During the year, Salinger worked on the piece. When he gave Burnett the introduction, Burnett felt the essay was not about the anthology as much as it was about him, Burnett; or, more specifically, Salinger’s recollections of Burnett from the days when Salinger was his student. Since the anthology was about Story, and not Burnett, Burnett decided he could not use Salinger’s introduction. “The preface was embarrassing,” Burnett wrote to Salinger on April 17, 1965, “because it had more about me and our Columbia class than it had about the fifty authors and I felt embarrassed to use it.”

  If there was any hope of Salinger and Burnett repairing their relationship, which had been severely damaged by their run-ins over the years, all hope was destroyed when Burnett killed Salinger’s introduction. It was bad enough that Salinger had wasted his time writing the piece; even worse, he must have been angry with himself for writing it for a man who, all those years ago, had let a publisher reject a book that he had been committed to.

  Salinger was involved in other literary skirmishes as well. “In April of 1965,” Tom Wolfe says, “the New York magazine section of the New York Herald-Tribune ran in two issues a very long piece I wrote about the New Yorker. I think I only mentioned Salinger because it was a profile of Shawn and a critique of the New Yorker on the occasion of their fortieth anniversary. They had been needling us so we decided to do a profile of Shawn. They originated the term ‘profile’; it was their baby. So it developed into the most unbelievable rhubarb you have ever heard of with Shawn, having gotten an advance copy of the first installment, trying desperately to get the thing quashed. To this day, I’m not sure what on earth he was so upset about. The revelations were rather innocuous. Salinger came into the picture subsequently. Somebody—I was always told it was Lillian Ross—organized a campaign that included telegrams being sent to Jock Whitney, the Tribune’s owner.

  “Salinger was one of those who sent a telegram. His was very clear and succinct and angry. As I recall, I was accused of yellow journalism. Salinger’s letter was printed in New York magazine a couple of weeks later, along with a whole bunch from other New Yorker people. As these messages were arriving, though, they all came to Whitney who was startled by all of them. He went into the office of the editor, Jim Bellows. He had with him one letter from Shawn himself. Whitney said, ‘Jim, what do we do about this?’ Jim said, ‘I’ll show you! He picked up the phone and called Time and Newsweek and read them the letter from Shawn. Of course, they devoted the press section to the Herald-Tribune piece. After that, we were accused of dreaming up the piece to increase our circulation.”

  2

  In 1966, Salinger had been married to Claire for a little over a decade. Immediately after their wedding, S. J. Perelman had expressed to friends his concern about the marriage. Perelman did not believe Claire would be able to withstand the all-consuming isolation that was awaiting her; as it turned out, he was right. Without a doubt, Salinger was single-minded in his determination to write, which left Claire alone for long periods of time. Her loneliness was compounded by the fact that in this part of New Hampshire there was nothing to do. In the decade they had been married, the couple did little traveling. They had not taken summer vacations; they had not routinely gone to Europe or the Caribbean during Christmas holidays, as many of their friends did. Claire would tell a doctor that she came to feel alone, unfulfilled and, on occasion, unloved. When she tried to explain her feelings to her husband, he did not seem interested, which only made matters worse.

  Beyond this, Claire had few luxuries in her life. They had some friends, they went to occasional town meetings and social functions, but they did not have an active life outside their home. Both Salingers took parenting seriously and gave time to their children; ultimately, however, they did little else. Consequently, Claire had almost nothing to do besides function in her dual role of homemaker and mother. With Salinger’s income, she did not have to work, so she devoted herself to her children, and from all reports she was an excellent mother.

  For his part, Salinger had one priority above everything else in life—his writing. For years, he had spent long days working in his bunker, devoting as many as fifteen or sixteen hours at a stretch to writing. Over the last couple of years, he had become even more obsessed. In fact, sometimes he didn’t bother to go in at night, choosing to sleep in the bunker on a cot instead of returning to his and Claire’s bedroom. Eventually, it was not unusual for Salinger to stay locked in the bunker for a week or two at a time. “Claire Salinger was a wonderful, devoted mother,” says Ethel Nelson, the Salingers’ housekeeper (her husband worked as their groundskeeper) during the years Salinger published the Glass stories. “But Jerry was never there. He was just never home. He was always down in his studio. He had a studio down a quarter of a mile from the house and he was always there. He’d be there for two weeks at a time. He had a little stove he could heat food on. But when he got into his writing mode, that was it. He just stayed right down there. Nobody, but nobody, interrupted him.”

  How odd it must have been for Claire. Her husband was so close to their house she could look out the window and see him, but she could not have any communication with him because, short of an emergency, he was not to be disturbed no matter how long he stayed locked in his cell. “I think it was tough on Claire,” Nelson says. “During those periods of time I guess she didn’t want to see him, really, if you know what I mean. Actually, I never even heard them talk to one another. When you were with one, the other was never around. I never really saw them together that much. When I was there, Jerry was always down in his little writing room.”

  The marriage had other sources of tension, such as Salinger’s insistence on eating only organic foods prepared with cold-pressed oils. “There was some gossip around Cornish at the time about the trouble with the Salingers’ marriage,” says Warren French, who would one day live in Cornish Flats. “Part of the problem centered around Salinger’s unusual eating habits.”

  There were, of course, bigger problems than sleeping arrangements and eating habits, as there almost always are when a marriage begins to fail. Here was the problem that couldn’t be fixed: Not only had Salinger’s feelings about Claire changed, but, most shattering, he had told her so. In one or more of their fights, this was how he put it: He was not sure he loved her anymore; because of this, he was not certain he wanted their marriage to continue. Claire was devastated. She could not believe her husband could say such a thing to her; after all, she was the one who had had to endure his strange demands, his sometimes difficult personality, his long bouts of writing. What was the problem? How had she changed? Could it boil down to this?—that she simply was no longer the nineteen-year-old who had just left behind “the last minutes of her girlhood.”

  By the summer of 1966, Claire could no longer cope with the pressures of her marriage. So distraught she was physically ill, she began to get treatment from Dr. Gerard Gaudrault, a Claremont, New Hampshire, physician. Gaudrault later described Claire as an unhappy woman when he first treated her: “She complained of nervous tensions, sleeplessness and loss of weight, and gave me a history of marital problems with her husband which allegedly caused her condition. My examination indicated that the condition I found would naturally follow from the complaints of marital discord given to me.”

  Perhaps it was a doctor’s objective opinion that motivated Claire to get a divorce. Whatever the reason, as the summer of 1966 passed and she saw Dr. Gaudrault, Claire concluded she had no choice but to end the marriage. Claire hired a lawyer at the firm of Buckley and Zopf in Claremont, and on September 9, 1966, filed a libel action for divorce in the Superior Court of Sullivan County in Newport, New Hampshire.

  In the divorce papers, Claire, the libelant, detailed the reasons she wanted a divorce from her husband, the libelee, who
was ordered to appear before the court on the first Tuesday in October. Claire stated that “the libelee, wholly regardless of his marriage covenants and duties has so treated the libelant as to injure her health and endanger her reason in that for a long period of time the libelee has treated the libelant with indifference, has for long periods of time refused to communicate with her, has declared that he does not love her and has no desire to have their marriage continue, by reason of which conduct the libelant has had her sleep disturbed, her nerves upset and has been subjected to nervous and mental strain, and has had to seek medical assistance to effect a cure of her condition, and a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”

  Over the next year, the Salingers remained married, but their relationship did not improve. On September 21, 1967, Claire made yet another visit in the many she paid to Dr. Gaudrault. “I found some improvement in her condition,” Gaudrault wrote around this time, “but the continuance of her marriage appears to prevent a complete recovery. It is my opinion that her health has been seriously injured as a result of this marital condition, and that a continuance of the marriage would seriously injure her health and cause continued physical and mental upset.”

  Since it seemed difficult to turn back, the Salingers proceeded with their divorce, which was granted effective October 3, 1967, by a judge who signed the order on October 13. The cause of the divorce was “treatment as seriously to injure health and endanger reason.” According to the stipulation agreement, Claire was awarded “the care, custody, education and training of the minor children” with Salinger having “rights of reasonable visitation”; “the homestead of the parties . . . described in a deed of Carlotta Saint-Gaudens Dodge dated February 16, 1953” while “the real estate standing in the name of J. D. Salinger as conveyed to him by Arthur J. Frankland and Elizabeth K. Frankland by a deed dated September 12, 1966 [would remain] disencumbered of all claims of the libelant”; “the household furniture, furnishings, and equipment of the household”; “one motor vehicle, a Rover”; and “the support of the minor children of the parties [in] the sum of Eight Thousand Dollars ($8,000.00) per year, payable semi-annually” with the understanding that Salinger would supplement that amount “to meet costs of education for the children of the parties when such children are enrolled in private schools or schools requiring the payment of tuitions.” In short, Claire got everything—custody of the children, the house and property, the household furnishings, a car, and a significant amount of child support with the promise that Salinger would pay for private-school and college tuition. All Salinger got was a nearby piece of property, which he had bought a year earlier. If it was freedom he wanted, he had it, but that freedom had destroyed him financially, at least for the time being.