Salinger

by Paul Alexander

  The next day, Bardo was arrested in Tucson while he walked through traffic, supposedly trying to commit suicide. On the night of the murder, police found in an alley near the murder scene the handgun Bardo had used to kill Schaeffer, a blood-soaked shirt, and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. It was the third time in the 1980s that a stalker had either killed or attempted to kill his victim with a copy of the novel in his possession.

  By the late 1980s, Salinger was approaching his seventieth birthday. As he had done for almost four decades, he tried to maintain a life defined by seclusion, spiritual enlightenment, and an overwhelming need to live on his own terms. For her part, after her divorce from Salinger in 1967, Claire continued to live near Cornish with her children and then returned to school at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, to finish the degree she had abandoned when she dropped out of Radcliffe in 1954 to be with Salinger. She finished her bachelor’s in 1969. Then, during the 1969–1970 academic year, she studied at the Antioch New England Graduate School in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; in that year, she earned a master’s degree in education. During the 1973–1974 academic year, with her children in prep school, she studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology, taking a master’s degree in social work. After this, Claire received her doctorate in psychology from the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco in 1984, which allowed her to become a Jungian clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of children.

  By 1991, Claire Douglas had moved to New York City where she set up her practice and took an apartment on the Upper East Side just off the river, in the same building in which George Plimpton lived. “She was very, very pretty,” Plimpton says. “Blonde. Very gracious. Very soft-spoken. The children were grown up and so she lived there alone in the apartment on the floor above mine. It was strange, but in all of the time she lived in that apartment, three or four years, we never once, not once, discussed Salinger.”

  Margaret had become an investment banker in Boston. Matthew was determined to make a career for himself in acting. “One night, we all went down to see Matt in a rather bad play in which he played the part of a homosexual rugby player,” Plimpton says. “He had to kiss another rugby player on set, which rather disturbed his mother with whom I was sitting.” The play in question was The Sum of Us, which was running at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, and it was the latest credit in Matthew Salinger’s on-again, off-again career as an actor. After attending Andover, he had matriculated at Princeton but took his degree in art history and drama from Columbia University. In the late 1970s, he became serious about acting. In 1983, he got his first professional job portraying a college lacrosse player on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. From there, he made his Broadway debut in 1985 in Dancing in the End Zone, a performance his father saw in previews. A small movie part followed, in Sidney Lumet’s Power in 1986, but mostly what he did between Dancing and The Sum of Us, which his father saw on closing night, was marry Betsy Becker, move to Los Angeles, and have a son, Gannon, Matthew had come back from Los Angeles to New York to appear off-Broadway in The Sum of Us.

  During his career, Matthew acclimated himself to being in the public eye, although he defended the right of his father not to be. “I see red when I hear about people bothering him,” Salinger said in an interview in 1984. “My father does not want a public life. That’s been clear for many years now. He wants to write for the page and he wants his characters to be on the page and in the reader’s mind. He doesn’t want people to make him into something he’s not. He thinks it’s bad for him and his work to have a public life.”

  While he loved and respected his father, Matthew had an extremely close relationship with his mother, who later on, in the 1990s, moved to Los Angeles to be near her son and his family. Claire set up a child psychology clinic in Malibu and bought a house on the Pacific Coast Highway. It was a good distance, both literally and figuratively, from the house on the hill in Cornish, New Hampshire, where she had once lived with Salinger so many years ago.

  4

  For some time, Cornish locals had known that another young woman was living in Salinger’s house, although, as was the case with other young women in the past, the locals were not exactly sure what her relationship with Salinger was. That was cleared up once and for all one morning in October 1992 when the young woman called the Cornish volunteer fire department and identified herself as Colleen Salinger—Salinger’s wife.

  It happened on the morning of October 20 at about 1:20 A.M. Frantic and panic-stricken, Colleen had telephoned the fire department to report that their house was on fire. Within minutes, as flames consumed the house, fire trucks and emergency vehicles arrived from the volunteer fire department in Cornish as well as the fire departments of the New Hampshire towns of Plainfield, Meriden, and Claremont, and the Vermont towns of Windsor and West Windsor. As Salinger and Colleen watched from their yard, the firemen fought the blaze for the better part of an hour until they got it under control at about 2:20 A.M. When it was out, the fire had destroyed half the house, although it had not damaged a new wing that was currently under construction.

  Naturally, word of the fire traveled quickly. News outlets such as CNN ran stories about the fire at once. By Thursday, the story had become big enough that the New York Times sent a reporter, William H. Honan, to Cornish to find Salinger and to learn, as Honan would later write in his article, “how he was bearing up.” Salinger was horrified when, on that Thursday afternoon, still dazed by Tuesday’s fire but out on his property to survey the damage to his house, he looked up to see a reporter and a photographer coming quickly toward him.

  Honan wrote: “When first spied, Mr. Salinger, lanky and with snow-white hair, was outside his house talking to his wife and a local building contractor. As strangers approached, Mr. Salinger, like the fleet chipmunks that dash across his driveway, scurried into his charred retreat.” Once he was inside, the contractor stopped Honan from getting near the house. “You’ve got to understand,” the contractor said, “this is a man who is really serious about his privacy.” Then, as the contractor blocked Honan, Colleen—a woman who was, according to Honan, “considerably younger than her husband”—walked briskly away from the men towards a blue Mazda pickup truck. “I have things to do!” she declared to Honan as a way of brushing off his questions before she got in the truck and sped away. When it was obvious no one was going to talk to him, Honan left.

  Before he finished his story, which appeared in the Times on October 24, 1992, Honan began to wonder if the fire might have damaged the unpublished manuscripts Honan had been told Salinger had in his possession. To find out about them, Honan called Phyllis Westberg, Salinger’s agent at Harold Ober, who had taken over for Dorothy Olding after Olding was forced to curtail her duties following a stroke in 1990. Westberg claimed she didn’t know anything about unpublished manuscripts. “She said Mr. Salinger had left a recorded telephone message telling her of the fire but had not mentioned any manuscripts,” Honan wrote. “She has had no further communication with him, she said, because he does not have a telephone.” This was an odd answer, naturally, since Salinger did have a telephone, the number for which was unlisted.

  In these years Salinger would have run-ins with unwanted guests besides journalists. He did not treat some of them kindly. “You have to be careful of him because he really gets angry,” says Ethel Nelson, his former housekeeper. “He glares at you with those big beady black eyes. My mom and I used to go around on the Cancer Drive and one time, even though he knew us both, he met us at the driveway with a gun in his hands saying, ‘Just go away.’ When we got through talking to him, he gave a donation toward the drive. Then he said, ‘Don’t ever come back again.’”

  5

  He almost published one more time. In a style that had become typical of Salinger throughout his publishing career, the first mention of this event was made in an almost calculatedly surprising way. On the on-line bookstore service Amazon.com, a brief notice appeared announcing the r
elease of a forthcoming book. The name of the publisher to bring out the book was Orchises Press. The name of the book was Hapworth 16, 1924. The author was J. D. Salinger.

  Because this would be the first book Salinger had published since 1963, Salinger fans surfing the Internet were astonished when they discovered the Amazon.com announcement. One fan mentioned the notice to his sister, Karen Lundegaard, who happened to be a reporter for the Washington Business Journal On November 15, 1996, Lundegaard wrote an article saying that the publishing event of the decade had apparently fallen to, as odd as it may have seemed, Orchises Press—a tiny press in Alexandria, Virginia, run by a fifty-one-year-old George Mason University professor named Roger Lathbury. The article in the Washington Business Journal led the Washington Post to run a short item on January 13, 1997, in the paper’s book column. Following the Post article, numerous reporters called Phyllis Westberg, Salinger’s agent. Reluctantly, Westberg admitted the item was true. A new book by Salinger was in the works and it would be published by Orchises. Another article, “Salinger Book to Break Long Silence” by David Streitfeld, further confirmed the story when it appeared on the front page of the Leisure section in the Washington Post on January 17.

  But the media coverage had only started. Reuters issued an article on its newswire entitled “Reclusive Author to Publish First New Book in 34 Years”; the article was picked up by papers all across the country. CNN covered the story as well; so did the Guardian in England, where, in a subhead to its piece, the newspaper announced that “the publicity-shy author of The Catcher in the Rye has found an obscure press after his own heart.” The pending publication of the book was even mentioned on Saturday Night Live. Included in the “Weekend Update” segment of the show, the joke went like this. When J. D. Salinger was asked why he was releasing a new book after all these years, he answered, “Get the hell off my lawn.”

  Then, on February twentieth, Michiko Kakutani, the lead daily book critic for the New York Times, published an article called “From Salinger, a New Dash of Mystery.” She started off by calling “Hapworth” “disappointing”—she had found a June 19, 1965 back issue of the New Yorker and reread the story—before she asked the obvious question. After not publishing a book for thirty-four years, why would Salinger bring out a new one at this point and why would that book consist only of “Hapworth”? “One can only speculate,” Kakutani wrote, “that the author wanted to remind his readers of his existence, that he wanted to achieve a kind of closure by putting his last published story between book covers, that he wanted readers to reappraise the Glass family (and by extension his body of work) through a story that, within the Glass canon, is nothing less than revisionistic.”

  When Kakutani herself looked at the Glass family saga, she came away with her own assessment of that body of work. “There is a darker side to [the Glasses’] estrangement [from society]: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, a familial self-involvement that borders on the incestuous and an inability to relate to other people that, in Seymour’s case at least, will have tragic consequences indeed.” Then, evaluating the Glass canon today, Kakutani found that “the tales have grown increasingly elliptical over the years,” that “the stories have grown increasingly self-conscious and self-reflective,” and that the reader cannot help but notice “the solipsism of the Glass family itself, underscoring the rarefied, self-enclosed air of all the stories they inhabit.”

  This was startling criticism coming from the New York Times—a stark dismissal of a good portion of Salinger’s oeuvre. What’s more, Kakutani blamed the solipsism of the Glass stories on Salinger’s own life, saying that in his fiction he realized his prediction that he would one day “disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms.” Kakutani wrote: “This falling off in his work, perhaps, is a palpable consequence of Mr. Salinger’s own Glass-like withdrawal from the public world: withdrawal feeding self-absorption and self-absorption feeding tetchy disdain.” The failure of the Glass stories, then, could be linked directly to Salinger’s own failure to deal with the real world. As Salinger became more cut off from society, his stories became more inward, which ultimately destroyed them. Evidence of this was “Hapworth” itself, a piece that was, Kakutani concluded, “a sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.”

  “In the end it was Kakutani’s article in the New York Times that made Salinger change his mind about publishing the book Hapworth,” says Jonathan Schwartz, the radio personality who has closely followed Salinger for many years. “Can you imagine how he felt having his last published story, and by extension the entire group of Glass stories, dismissed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times? It had to make him have second thoughts about bringing out Hapworth as a book.” It was not long after Kakutani’s article appeared that Orchises Press announced that its plans to publish Hapworth 16, 1924 had been put on hold indefinitely.

  Perhaps the most curious publication to result from the Hapworth 16, 1924 ordeal was the June 1997 Esquire cover story called “The Haunted Life of J. D. Salinger.” Written by Ron Rosenbaum, the article was a long meditation on Salinger and what Rosenbaum termed his “Great Wall of Silence.” Comparing him to other recluses and near-recluses on the current literary scene (that club includes Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and William Wharton), Rosenbaum concluded that Salinger was by far the most reclusive, which would qualify him to be, as the magazine put it, “the last private person in America.”

  As other journalists had done before him, Rosenbaum went to Cornish, found Salinger’s house, and waited at the foot of his driveway until he saw him drive off in his car. Watching Salinger leave that day, Rosenbaum had an unusual take on the experience. “In the silence left behind, I felt terrible,” Rosenbaum wrote. There was no clear indication that Salinger had even seen him, but Rosenbaum responded to the event with visceral, dramatic charm. “I felt a wave of remorse strike me. I had wanted to be known to S. as a serious seeker, someone who understood him and his silence, someone who respected his silent privacy—but perhaps someone he might want to speak to (because of my exegetical insights, of course). But now I felt that, inevitably, it looked to S. as if I were a door stepper. I felt my intrusive driveway presence might inadvertently change S.’s mind about releasing ‘Hapworth,’ about releasing anything—that I might have thus ineradicably altered the course of literary history.”

  While he was probably overstating the case, Rosenbaum did bring up a relevant point. Why had Salinger chosen to live his life the way he had, and, more specifically—the same question Kakutani asked—why had he chosen to publish a new book now? “The problem,” Rosenbaum wrote, “the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer . . . is the literary equivalent of the problems of theology, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problems of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.” So Salinger’s silence was God-like, according to this way of thinking, and the publication of a new book in the midst of that silence was the equivalent of some divine or semi-divine act.

  But consider the facts. First, Salinger was not bringing out one of the new manuscripts he was rumored to have finished; he was releasing in book form the last story he had published in a magazine. In this way, no additional document would be added to the Salinger canon. Second, he had picked an obscure press run by a college professor who preferred to sell books by mail order instead of through stores. “My philosophy is that books are pushed at people for wrong reasons,” Lathbury told the Washington Post. “There’s a marketing mentality that has little to do with the literary experience. I want people to know Hapworth 16, 1924 is available. I don’t want to force it on anyone.” Beyond this, under strict orders from Salinger, Lathbury agreed not to publicize the book in any way, not to reveal how many copies were being published, not to disclose any information about Salinger or the business dealings he had had with Salinger, and not to send out review copies of the book to critics. (“They’ll bu
y it—or better yet, not review it,” Lathbury also told the Washington Post.) Finally, after the publication date of Hapworth 16, 1924 was announced for March 1997, it was first moved to June and then postponed indefinitely. When asked why the publication of a finished manuscript that was not being rewritten had to be delayed, Lathbury said, “I don’t know”—he was not the reason for the delay. As for the potential popularity of the book, Lathbury revealed that the waiting list of readers who want to buy the book by mail was as long as “the bread lines of the thirties.”

  It was as if Salinger had decided that, should he break the silence he had created, he was going to milk that act for all it was worth. Make the event itself so weird, so offbeat, no journalist could resist covering it. Then, after it was clear one had the attention of the press, drag out the process as long as possible.

  Then again, the end result of the vast majority of the actions Salinger had taken in his career had achieved the same result. By cutting himself off from the public, by cutting himself off the way he had done, he made sure the public would remain fascinated with him. By refusing to publish any new work, by letting the public know he had new work he was not publishing, he ensured a continued fascination in the four books that were in print. But that was not enough. To guarantee that there was no way the public could forget him, he periodically surfaced in the press by doing something that was sure to attract publicity—giving a calculatedly strange interview to Betty Eppes when she came up from Baton Rouge, calling a reporter from the New York Times to complain about pirated editions of his short stories, and showing up from time to time at events certain to be covered in the media. William Wharton did not do this; he never broke his anonymity. Thomas Pynchon did not do this; he continued to refuse even to be photographed. However, the way Salinger handled the publicity he said he did not want was a bit too contrived to get attention itself. Salinger became the Greta Garbo of literature, and then periodically, when it may have seemed he was about to be forgotten, he resurfaced briefly, just to remind the public that he wanted to be left alone. The whole act could have been cute or whimsical; only, it felt as if it were being put on by a master showman, a genius spin doctor, a public-relations wizard hawking a story the public couldn’t get enough of.