“It’s irritating. It’s really very irritating. I’m very upset about it,” said Salinger, who had been tipped off about the scheme by Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart. Salinger was so angered by Brown’s news that he filed a civil law suit in Federal District Court in San Francisco against “John Greenberg” and seventeen bookstores across the country. In the suit Salinger asked for $250,000 in punitive damages and an immediate injunction against the book.
“I wrote [the stories] a long time ago,” Salinger told Fosburgh, “and I never had any intention of publishing them. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death. I’m not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publishing.”
For her part, Fosburgh made the best of the situation and got Salinger to answer as many questions as possible. Naturally she asked him about his refusal to publish. “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” Salinger said. “It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Then Salinger talked about how much he was writing. “I don’t necessarily intend to publish posthumously, but I do like to write for myself,” he said. “I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work.”
The main issue on Salinger’s mind as he spoke to Fosburgh was the pirated edition of his stories. “It’s amazing some sort of law-and-order agency can’t do something about this,” he went on. “Why, if a dirty old mattress is stolen from your attic, they’ll find it. But they’re not even looking for their man”—the mysterious publisher. “I just want all this to stop,” Salinger said as a way of wrapping up a telephone call that had gone on for almost half an hour. “It’s intrusive. I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this.” It was then that Salinger ended the conversation, hanging up the telephone.
On November 3, 1974, the editors at the New York Times decided Fosburgh’s article about Salinger’s call was so newsworthy they ran it on the front page. The Times article spurred intense media interest in Salinger, the pirated edition of his stories, and the lawsuit. “Through the years,” Newsweek stated in a story the magazine ran as a follow-up to the Times piece, “Salinger has made news only with the rare publication of his works and with such scattered items as his wife’s divorce from him in 1967, his rumored liaison with nineteen-year-old writer Joyce Maynard in 1973, and a suit his lawyers filed recently over an unauthorized volume of early Salinger stories. It was the latter event that prompted him to talk to Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh.”
Because of this, the magazine had sent Bill Roeder to Cornish to try to get an interview with Salinger. It was the same approach many other reporters and fans had begun to take.
“His house is a brown, modern-looking hilltop chalet with a sun deck facing across the Connecticut River into the mountains of Vermont,” Roeder wrote in his article, which appeared in Newsweek on November 18. “The view is breathtaking.” However, even that spectacular view paled after Roeder walked up to the house, knocked on the front door, and came face-to-face with Salinger, who answered his own door. “Salinger, tall, gaunt, and grey-haired at fifty-five, was dressed in a blue jump suit,” Roeder reported. After he introduced himself to Salinger, the two men engaged in a brief chat. “His part of [the] conversation was reluctant—his hand never left the doorknob—but civil.”
Was he still writing? Roeder asked.
“Of course I’m writing,” Salinger said.
What kind of life did he live?
“I like to hang on to my privacy—my undocumented privacy,” Salinger said before he added, “Is there anything more boring than a talking writer?”
After ten minutes, Roeder ended the strained, awkward exchange by thanking him for his time and extending his hand to shake Salinger’s. Salinger reluctantly obliged, extending his own hand.
“This is not a friendly gesture,” Salinger said. “I really don’t appreciate your coming here.”
3
In 1975, Harper and Row published a book called A Fiction Writer’s Handbook, edited by Whit Burnett and his wife Hallie. At the end of the book, the publisher included a piece called “Epilogue: A Salute to Whit Burnett, 1899–1972.” The piece was the introduction Salinger wrote for Story Jubilee that Burnett had refused to run. Since the publication of that anthology, Burnett had died; it seemed appropriate to print a memoir written by Salinger, who had become one of Burnett’s most famous pupils. It’s ironic that Salinger’s beautiful and moving memoir of Burnett would appear in the rather mundane setting of a fiction writers’ handbook, but there it was.
This, of course, was the first piece of writing by Salinger to appear in print since “Hapworth 16, 1924” had been published in the New Yorker on June 19, 1965—a fact further underscoring the irony of Salinger’s memoir being printed in a fiction writers’ handbook. A decade had passed and Salinger had not published any of those new Glass stories he had promised in the editorial note to Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction—except for “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Most of Salinger’s critics and many of his fans had come to believe that, no matter what he said or implied, Salinger had stopped writing. His brief memoir about Burnett gave some minor indication that he had not.
Then, in that same year, 1975, Brendan Gill, who had written for the New Yorker for years, offered what he considered to be proof that Salinger was writing—an informal testimonial from William Shawn. “I had feared that the author’s prolonged and obsessive scrutiny of the Glass psyches had led him to still his hand,” Gill wrote in a book of his called Here at the New Yorker, “but Shawn has said that it is not so. Though Salinger’s absence from the pages of the magazine is from week to week and from year to year an obscurely felt deprivation, the fact is that he goes on writing, and surely someday he will be willing to let us observe the consequences.”
More innuendo, more rumor, but this was nothing compared to a theory about to be published that would make the rounds among the fans and admirers of Salinger—the most outrageous piece of gossip yet.
On April 22, 1976, the Soho Weekly News published an article by John Calvin Batchelor called “Thomas Pynchon Is Not Thomas Pynchon, or, This Is the End of the Plot Which Has No Name.” In his article Batchelor argued that Thomas Pynchon was not born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York; did not matriculate at Cornell University; did not go into the Navy for two years; did not work for a time as an editorial writer for Boeing Aircraft Corporation; and did not write such works of fiction as “Entropy,” “Low-Lands” and V. Instead, according to Batchelor, Pynchon was born on January 1, 1919 in New York City, matriculated at Ursinus College, joined the Army, met Ernest Hemingway during the war, and wrote The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey. “Yes,” Batchelor wrote, Thomas Pynchon “is Jerome David Salinger.”
“What I am arguing,” Batchelor continued, “is that J. D. Salinger, famous though he was, simply could not go on with either the Glass family, which had by 1959 become his weight to bear, or with his own nationally renowned reputation, which had become by 1959 chained to both Holden Caulfield’s adolescence and Seymour Glass’s art of penance. So then, out of paranoia or out of pique, J. D. Salinger dropped ‘by J. D. Salinger’ and picked up ‘by Thomas Pynchon.’ A nom de plume afforded Salinger the anonymity he had sought but failed to find as Caulfield’s creator. It was the perfect cover.”
The response to Batchelor’s article was immediate. As one might expect, Batchelor received a number of letters, many of them unfriendly. As one might not have expected, Batchelor also received a letter from Thomas Pynchon. Written on MGM stationery and mailed from Pluma Road, Malibu, California, the letter said that he, Pynchon, had read the article, that some of it was true and some of it was not (none of the interesting parts was true, he said), and that Batchelor should “keep trying.” That letter and additional fa
ctors—he began to meet people who actually knew Pynchon—forced Batchelor to reassess his theory that Thomas Pynchon was J. D. Salinger, or rather, that J. D. Salinger was Thomas Pynchon. “I am telling you right now,” Batchelor wrote a year later on April 28, 1977, in the Soho Weekly News, “that some if not most of those manuscripts”—V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow—“have come from J. D. Salinger. I am telling you right now that some of those manuscripts might have come from Thomas Pynchon. I am telling you right now that parts of those manuscripts might have come from Donald Barthelme” (a New Yorker writer known for his postmodern short stories). “I’d like to think Salinger wrote almost everything. It’s the romantic in me.”
In the future, while he would never grant an interview of any kind (rumor has it that he once jumped out the window of a house and ran away because he heard Norman Mailer was on his way there to talk to him), and while he would never allow himself to be photographed in any way (he does not have a driver’s license, it’s said, because he refuses to have his photograph taken), Thomas Pynchon did finally surface enough so that people, even John Calvin Batchelor, had to admit that he did exist and that he had written all of the books credited to him. Pynchon would marry Melanie Jackson, the New York literary agent, with whom he would have a son. That son, as luck would have it, would even end up attending the same Manhattan prep school as Batchelor’s son.
“I’ve come to accept that Pynchon wrote those books,” Batchelor says. “What I came to accept was that, with Salinger and Pynchon, we are dealing with two eccentrics, not one. Sometimes it takes getting a perspective on a situation and that’s what I’ve done in this case.”
By 1976, as he remained a source of gossip within the literary community, Salinger had been divorced from Claire for almost a decade. In that time Margaret had grown up and attended college, and Matthew had gone off to Phillips Exeter Academy. Salinger apparently continued to write regularly. He saw his children as often as he could. In fact, on one occasion during the fall of 1976, he went to Phillips Exeter to see Matthew perform in a play. It was ironic that Matthew, who routinely appeared in school plays, was toying with the idea of going into the profession of acting, just as his father had considered doing when he was Matthew’s age. There was one difference. Whereas Sol was opposed to his son going into the arts, Salinger was supportive of Matthew’s interest. In fact, if Matthew had decided to go into acting for a living, Salinger could not have been more pleased with that decision.
“In 1976, at Exeter I was in a school production of Kennedy’s Children with Matt Salinger,” says Becky Lish, Gordon Lish’s daughter. “The play takes place in a bar, with four or five characters speaking monologues. There’s a bartender who has no lines, or, if he does, only one or two. Matt played the bartender who doesn’t speak. I remember his father came to the show. I remember at the time being surprised at how old he was—he was an older man. I think I had expected my father. Of course, as a high-school student I thought that what we were doing was fascinating and thrilling and I’m sure it was anything but to Salinger, But there he was. In my memory I think he was sitting in the front row. We all thought it was neat that he was there and also just sort of strange. I mean, some of us, myself included, had decided to be shipped off to prep school based on some sort of fantasy that we could become Holden Caulfield.”
Stalking Salinger
1
By the fall of 1978, a steady stream of fans, admirers, and journalists had been making its way to Cornish for some years. That fall, one reporter would be more aggressive than most in stalking Salinger. The reporter was Michael Clarkson from the Niagara Falls Review, who, out of the blue one day, got in his car, drove from Ontario to Cornish, and searched until he found Salinger’s house. Parking his car on the dirt road in full view, he waited so long he became conspicuous enough that Salinger drove down from the house, got out, and approached Clarkson’s car. Neatly dressed in a black turtleneck, a brown tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and a pair of sneakers, Salinger stopped at the driver’s window.
“Are you J. D. Salinger?” Clarkson said.
“Yes,” Salinger said. “What can I do for you?”
“I don’t know,” Clarkson said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Oh, c’mon, don’t start that,” Salinger shot back.
“Really,” Clarkson said. “All I know is I left my family and job and came a long way to see you.”
“You didn’t quit, did you?” Salinger said. “Are you under psychiatric care?”
“No,” Clarkson said, adding that what he really wanted, more than anything, was “to be published,” but that it had been hard for him to find someone he was “comfortable with, who I can share with.”
Salinger told Clarkson one day he would find someone he would feel comfortable with; then he asked Clarkson why he thought he would be comfortable with Salinger, which Clarkson had implied, of course, simply by being there.
“Your writing,” Clarkson said.
Salinger asked him if he had a way to make a living besides writing. It was at this point, when Clarkson told him he was a newspaper reporter on a police beat, that Salinger became horrified by the fact that he had been talking to a journalist. With this, Salinger turned, bolted back to his car and got inside. Hurriedly Clarkson rushed over to him.
“But I’m here for myself, not my job,” Clarkson said, his voice full of emotion.
“I certainly hope so,” Salinger said, “because I don’t have it coming!” Furious, Salinger drove off in a huff.
The tone of Clarkson’s voice must have stayed with Salinger, for minutes later he sped back and stopped next to Clarkson’s car. Getting out, he approached Clarkson, who was again sitting inside, but before Salinger could start yelling Clarkson did something that gave Salinger pause. He began to read a note he had written to Salinger which said, considering the fact that Clarkson had driven twelve hours to see him, Salinger could at least be gracious. Clarkson ended his note by stating that, in coming there, he had hoped to meet “the person who wrote those books I love.”
Salinger seemed oddly moved by Clarkson’s note.
“Nothing one man can say can help another,” Salinger said. “Each must make his own way. For all you know I’m just another father who has a son.” As for writing, Salinger believed the profession was still open to people who have “enough drive and ego.”
Then, ending their conversation, Salinger walked away.
One afternoon a year later, Salinger sat in his living room watching television when he looked up to see Michael Clarkson standing on the outside deck looking in at him through the sliding glass door. Later, Clarkson would describe what he saw that afternoon:
I squinted through the glass into an old-fashioned tattered living room. A hanging light set the depressing atmosphere, centering several old, worn couches and easy chairs, a bookcase and a thin, patterned red rug that were dwarfed in the spacious room. A movie screen on the far wall was pulled halfway down. Sunshine, as it was in the Glass apartment, was unkind to the room. Large metal spools of movie film, books, and National Geographics lay scattered about. The fireplace was clotted with crumpled writing paper and garbage. You could almost smell the mustiness through the glass.
Startled, Salinger, dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a white shirt, got up and walked over to the door. Kicking aside a piece of two-by-four that kept the glass door shut, he opened the door. “You look much better now,” Salinger said. “Are you still reporting?”
Clarkson said he was.
“You tried to use me for the betterment of your career,” Salinger said. “The only advice I can give you is to read others, get what you can out of a book, and make your own interpretation of what the author is saying. Don’t get hung up on the critics and that madness. Blend in your experiences, without writing facts, and use your creativity. Plan your stories and don’t make rash decisions. Then, when it’s finished, you’re in your own stew.”
“You
haven’t really given an explanation to your fans,” Clarkson said, “why you ran from them, then stopped publishing.”
“Being a public writer,” Salinger said, “interferes with my right to a private life. I write for myself.”
“Don’t you want to share your feelings?”
“No, that’s wrong,” Salinger said. “That’s where writers get in trouble.”
When it became obvious Salinger did not want to be talking to him, Clarkson ended their brief interlude. Before he did, he could not help but ask Salinger if he would like to join him for a drink one night.
“Thanks, but no,” Salinger said, smiling. “I’m busy these days.”
Then Clarkson left and Salinger returned to his television.
Within weeks, Clarkson had written an article based on his two encounters with Salinger, which he published in the Niagara Falls Review.
2
In the narrative of Salinger’s life, especially that part which unfolded after he went into seclusion, one person would make a brief appearance in the early summer of 1980 that would be discussed and debated for years to come. She was an avid tennis player from down South—from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be precise—who had been born originally in Trenton, Mississippi. She was a writer for a newspaper called the Baton Rouge Advocate, and she got her start at the paper by doing a tennis column. Her name was Betty Eppes—a kooky, overachieving woman who sprinkled her conversation with phrases like “neat” and “super-exciting”—and for the Advocate she had written about all kinds of “neat” and “super-exciting” people, everyone from Billie Jean King to Rod Laver to New Orleans Saints head football coach Hank Stram. Then one day, while she was browsing in her local bookstore, she got a wild idea. She had always loved The Catcher in the Rye (even if Salinger was not one of her personal favorite authors the way William Faulkner was), so she thought it would be interesting—actually she thought it would be “super-exciting”—if she traveled up from Louisiana to New Hampshire to try to get an interview with him. After all, others, like Shirlie Blaney and Michael Clarkson, had succeeded; certainly she had as much of a chance as they did.
Salinger Page 20