For much of his adult life, Salinger made a living—and not a bad one at that—mostly off the publication of four books. From 1951 until 1997, The Catcher in the Rye sold approximately fifteen million copies in the United States; Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction combined to sell into the millions as well. Worldwide, from 1951 to the present, Catcher is said to have sold some sixty million copies. Salinger’s books have sold in large numbers because year after year he has been on the minds of the reading public. Just how he accomplished this feat was strange and complicated and open to debate, but it comes down to this: Either Salinger simply retreated to what he hoped would be the seclusion of his mountaintop estate in New Hampshire and the fans and the press followed him there, always hounding him against his wishes; or perhaps, just perhaps, he moved where he did on purpose, fully aware of the legend he was going to create, and made sure through the years that periodically he dropped enough clues about himself to tease the fans and the press into seeking him out.
Ghosts in the Shadows
It must have been as if he’d seen a ghost.
On the afternoon of November 5, 1997, Salinger, a gaunt, white-haired man who would turn seventy-nine on New Year’s Day, headed through his house to the kitchen and the back door. Tall and moderately built, he did not move with the same ease and grace he once had. In fact, over the last three years, friends and neighbors had noticed he had started to show his age, slow down. He was rarely seen around town anymore, as he had been in previous years; he no longer showed up at local events, such as monthly town meetings or the annual fair. Nor did he make as many of his regular trips into Manhattan to stay at the Algonquin Hotel, take in Broadway shows, and while away the hours browsing at the Gotham Book Mart. Instead, feeling the gradual encroachment of old age taking over, he spent more and more time secluded in his house, often allowing Colleen, his much younger wife, to run his errands for him. One task she did not have to perform was picking up his mail at the post office. After having his mail delivered to a post-office box for years, Salinger had arranged to have the postman bring the mail directly to his house. It was a subtle, but representative, change in his daily schedule.
Salinger had lived in this house since his divorce. Today, when he reached the back door, he found standing before him on the doorstep a woman he had not seen in years. Her arrival was an inconvenient interruption for him, a watershed moment for her. He didn’t remember that today was her birthday—her forty-fourth. Instead, he just stared at her, this lanky, intense, dark-haired woman who by now was a virtual stranger to him. A life of hard work and stress—a failed marriage, three children, and an active writing career that included the publication of seven books and countless magazine and newspaper articles—had not been particularly kind to her physical appearance. She barely resembled the bright-faced teenager Salinger had an affair with back in 1972, when she was nineteen and he was fifty-three. In fact, two different rounds of breast-implant surgery—first silicone, then saline—had done little to offset the effect of aging on this woman. So there they were, face-to-face, transfixed in one of those painful, awkward moments—two former lovers who had neither seen nor spoken to each other in almost a quarter of a century.
Her name, of course, was Joyce Maynard, and she had traveled to Cornish from her home in Marin County, California, where she had bought a house with the money she made from selling the film rights to her novel To Die For, the Gus Van Sant picture starring Nicole Kidman, after she had lived most of her life in her native New Hampshire. Maynard had come to see Salinger for a very specific reason. After not discussing their affair for years, she had decided she was going to write about it in a memoir. Actually, over the last few years, Maynard, who had come to view “openness” with nothing short of a pathological zeal, had not been completely silent about her connection to Salinger. In 1992, she discussed it with the Toronto Star. “I have nothing to hide,” she told the Star reporter. “Jerry is a very private person, as I’m sure you’re aware. And I will always respect his privacy. I made that promise a long time ago. However, I do have ownership of our shared past. And yes, I can say I was permanently changed by the relationship. He was as much a force in my life as any person I’ve known. After I left, it seemed like I’d been in Lost Horizon. There was no place on earth for me to go.” Then, as late as only days before she made her trip to Cornish, Maynard had discussed Salinger with the Sacramento Bee. “I was giving a speech one time,” Maynard recalled, “and the woman who introduced me said, ‘Well, she used to be J. D. Salinger’s girlfriend.’ I thought, ‘God, is that all I’ve been? I didn’t want to be reduced to that.’”
Maybe not, but at some point in 1997, she decided to disregard Salinger’s desire for privacy and write a book documenting their affair. So Maynard had to rush to New Hampshire to try to get a meeting with Salinger—which would be the concluding scene of her memoir—before word of her proposed book leaked out into Manhattan’s small, gossip-hungry publishing community.
When word did leak out, only days after her trip to Cornish, the prospect of Maynard writing her memoir at the expense of the reclusive Salinger was enough to spark a heated debate within literary and publishing circles. The San Francisco Chronicle accused Maynard of having “no sense of shame”; the New York Post agreed, calling her “shameless.” Soon the debate spilled over into Maynard’s Internet chat room. One fan charged Salinger with being “a pedophile,” while another believed Maynard “had every right to want the relationship, as is normal for an eighteen-year-old, physically mature woman” since “she was sufficiently mature . . . to make an ‘adult’ decision.” Finally, when one Internet user accused her of exploiting Salinger, Maynard herself weighed in. “And I wonder,” she wrote, obviously angry, “why you are so quick to see exploitation in the actions of a woman—sought out at eighteen by a man thirty-five years her senior, who promised to love her forever and asked her to forswear all else to come and live with him, who waited twenty-five years to write her story. (HER story, I repeat. Not his.) And yet you cannot see exploitation in the man, who did this. I wonder what you would think of the story, if it were your daughter. Would you still tell her to keep her mouth shut, out of respect for this man’s privacy?”
On her Web site she provided a few more details. “Last time I saw him, I was a frightened and crushed girl . . . and he was, to me, the most powerful man in the world. . . . He told me I was unworthy. But when I stood on his doorstep the other day, I was a strong and brave forty-four-year-old woman and I knew he had been wrong.”
Their exchange that day was unpleasant. Salinger said she had never written anything worthwhile. Maynard accused him of taking advantage of her when she was young and impressionable. Once she left, with Salinger shouting after her that he didn’t even know who she was, she was consumed by a haunting feeling. One night, years earlier, she was at a dinner party in Manhattan when she met a writer who told her about her former au pair girl who had had some sort of relationship with J. D. Salinger. She was young. She was beautiful. She had met Salinger by chance and they had started writing to one another. The writer was fascinated, of course, since the girl had ended up with a cache of letters from Salinger—letters, Maynard realized that night in Manhattan, not unlike the ones he had written to her. Over time, Maynard became obsessed with the girl. She found people who knew her. She even got hold of a picture of her. Today, even though she didn’t acknowledge it in any way when it happened, Maynard had finally met her. She had opened the door for her when she knocked—Colleen.
Coda
Over the years, there would be much speculation about why Salinger has decided to live his life the way he has. “I would not assign any high-minded reason to it,” says Gordon Lish. “The man probably initially lost his nerve and then he got in the habit of being quiet. One gets fixed in a position for no reason at all. I don’t think there’s some kind of transcendent statement to be derived. My sources tell me tha
t he did not take criticism well. They tell me he was much wounded by critics lighting out after him. It suited him to keep his distance and he felt unduly assailed.” Russell Hoban agrees, although he does question the healthiness of Salinger’s situation. “He began to write for himself and not for others,” Hoban says. “Good work can’t have meaning for only the writer. He lost the ability to make the judgment of what is interesting to others—and not just to himself. What he’s doing now is not life-affirming in any way. The whole thing seems very unwholesome. In fact, it seems to me he lives in a state of resentment for reasons I don’t know. He doesn’t have what he wants and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe he didn’t get the kind of recognition he wanted. He became famous, but that’s different, isn’t it?”
On the issue of Salinger’s secrecy, George Plimpton believes that “Salinger finally ran out of things to write about and so he just stopped.” “Capote stopped,” Plimpton says. “Harper Lee stopped. Margaret Mitchell stopped. If you’re not a recluse people say, What are you doing now? What are you doing next? It’s a constant problem with agents and friends.”
In popular legend, Salinger writes on and on, churning out story after story written only for himself. In the spring of 1999, for example, the Associated Press reported an interview with a Salinger neighbor who said that in 1978 Salinger told him he had written fifteen or sixteen unpublished novels that he kept in a safe in his house. There was no evidence to support the neighbors story. But no matter what Salinger has written over the last three and a half decades, he did stop publishing, it seems now, for good.
Did Salinger stop publishing because he lost his nerve? Did he stop because he discovered he could not deliver the fiction he had promised his readers? Did his writing become so inward it lost touch with the real world, making it dull and unpublishable? And why did he go into seclusion? Was he sincere in his desire to be left alone? Was it a publicity stunt? Or could it be that, overriding everything else, he sought and protected his privacy because he had a penchant for young women that he did not want to reveal to the public? After all, a recluse can live out his fantasies and obsessions without too many people knowing about them—for a while at least. Now as he lives his final years in the house on the hill in Cornish, who’s with him in his world besides Colleen? Many people, actually—real and imagined. There’s Franny and Oona and the Girl with No Waist and Betty Eppes and Phoebe and Joyce and Esmé and Claire and Seymour and Whit and Zooey and Sylvia and the young girl in Vienna. And Holden, of course. Always Holden.
Endnotes
A SIGHTING
I had been given the general directions . . . the covered bridge: Information about the covered bridge comes from The Cornish—Windsor Covered Bridge: Celebrating the Reopening of the Nation’s Longest Covered Bridge, a pamphlet published in December 1989 by the New Hampshire Department of Transportation.
TWO BIOGRAPHIES
“Salinger is a writer . . . it will survive”: This quote comes from my interview with Harold Bloom.
Tom Wolfe agrees . . . “has great sorrow”: This quote comes from my interview with Tom Wolfe.
Then again . . . and fifteen million copies by 1996: In December 1961, Peter Seng published “The Fallen Idol” in College English which noted that The Catcher in the Rye was still selling 250,000 copies a year. By 1990, according to sources at Bantam, Catcher was the twelfth best-selling novel among all American novels with five million in print, third or fourth by 1990 with nine million in print.
In late 1997 . . . first appeared: The information in this sentence comes from USA Todays published in October and November of 1997.
Did he want to avoid . . . would become notorious: “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959.
Or this one from Joan Didion . . . Sarah Lawrence girls: “Finally (Fashionably) Spurious” by Joan Didion, National Review, November 18, 1961.
However, Salinger had an obsession . . . very young people”: One notable example of an occasion Salinger made such a revelation was in the letter he sent to the editors at Mademoiselle when they accepted his story “A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist at All,” which appeared in the magazine in May 1947. The Salinger letter is in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library. In the text of this book, several other examples of Salinger documenting this interest are cited.
SONNY
His father, Sol Salinger . . . who became a doctor: J. D. Salinger by Warren French, Twayne, 1963 and 1974.
One family member . . . “a long and productive lifetime”: This quote comes from a letter written by Sid Salinger which appeared in the “This World” section of the San Francisco Examiner on September 6, 1987.
As a young man . . . the Jewish-sounding Miriam: The information about Sol and Miriam (Jillich) Salinger’s background comes from J. D. Salinger by Warren French.
There, Sol became . . . New York operation: This information comes from a December 15, 1983 letter written by Arthur Schuman which is at Princeton.
“[H]e was an excellent businessman . . . intelligent and dynamic”: This quote comes from the same letter.
During these years . . . long walks by himself: J. D. Salinger by Warren French.
As for school . . . by his teachers as “poor”: J. D. Salinger by Warren French and “The Search for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger” by Earnest Havemann which appeared in Life on November 3, 1961.
In his younger years . . . overshadowed by Mr. Salinger”: The information included here, as well as the quote, comes from the letter written by Arthur Schuman which is at Princeton.
In the summer of 1930 . . . of 1930: Information about Salinger’s attendance at Camp Wigwam comes from “Sonny: An Introduction,” Time, September 15, 1961.
“As a boy . . . the beginning of vacation”: “J. D. Salinger” by William Maxwell, Book-of-the-Month Club News, Summer, 1951.
“The relationship of Sol Salinger . . .warm family relationship”: This quote comes from the letter written by Arthur Schuman which is at Princeton.
In 1932, Sol Salinger . . . the fall of 1932: The McBurney material is at Princeton. Salinger’s time at McBurney is also discussed in “Sonny: An Introduction” and “The Search for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger.”
At McBurney, Salinger . . . potential as an actor: Ibid.
Perhaps Sonny’s failure . . . wouldn’t join in”: This quote comes from “Sonny: An Introduction.”
In his first year there . . . not McBurney material: Salinger’s grades from McBurney are at Princeton; they were also included in “The Search for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger.”
So, McBurney made . . . did not know the word”: The McBurney material is at Princeton.
Here is how one student . . . than to Harvard”: This quote comes from a letter written by William R. Freehoff which is at Princeton.
Hopeful Sol placed . . . on September 22: This comes from Salinger’s file at the Valley Forge Military Academy.
“I feel confident . . . Sonny’s enrollment”: Ibid.
It was pitch black as the two boys . . . without ever getting caught: The information in this paragraph comes from my interview with Richard Gonder.
“He was very pro-British . . . moment of his life”: This quote comes from the letter written by William R. Freehoff.
Another cadet . . . “a good leader”: This quote comes from my interview with Franklin Hill.
Things had begun . . . Spur Dramatic Club: The information from Salinger’s Valley Forge yearbook is at Princeton. It’s also included in J. D. Salinger by Warren French.
As it happened . . . as they swam: The information in this paragraph comes from my interview with Richard Gonder.
His final grades . . . at McBurney: Salinger’s Valley Forge transcripts are at Princeton. His performance there was also discussed in “Sonny: An Introduction” and “The Search for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger.”
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