Salinger

by David Shields

  If I say more about Rupert in regard of his unearthliness I will not be for long free from confusion. I will—what I want to tell you will—fall victim to the disorder of passion, and I have promised you clarity. I have also promised someone squalor. I now intend, in all scruple and with haste, with reverence and haste, to keep both promises—and to save my brother, and everyone else, in the bargain.

  MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: It didn’t sound like Salinger, but I figured someone who’d been withholding his fiction for such a long time was not going to sound the same. His sensibility had had a chance to refurbish during this silence. It wasn’t going to sound like anything any of us would have expected. I was fooled for a few days, but after a few phone calls it became clear that Gordon Lish, the infamous editor, was behind it. He’s interested in literature as infection. He’s a Captain Hook type. He likes the down and dirty. He’s a profoundly provocative guy.

  GORDON LISH: There was an enormous amount of press coverage. The speculation was that either Updike or Cheever had written the story, although many readers believed it may have been Salinger who wrote it. There was colossal interest from TV and radio. Esquire sold the magazine out. Two or three months later, I finally told an agent I wrote it because she made me believe I owed her. Within days she was telling people at a cocktail party that I’d written the story. So I came into a great deal of criticism. The story of who the author really was broke on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. I heard from Salinger, through that agent, that he thought what I had done was absurd and despicable. That needled me because I didn’t think it was either. My feeling was that if Salinger was not going to write stories, someone had to write them for him.

  MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: It could only have been done by a scoundrel, and Gordon Lish likes being a scoundrel. Even in the classroom, he tells his students, “You’re at the edge of a cliff, and you’re going to jump off. Why should anyone be paying attention to you? What can you do with your very first sentence that’s going to galvanize attention?” Suggesting the story was by J. D. Salinger was obviously an effective attention-getting device. At the time it came out, it wasn’t exactly common knowledge that Salinger was still an object of such adoration that a story purported to be by him would sell out on newsstands across America.

  GORDON LISH: I did not see that fiction as a hoax so much as an attractive plausibility.

  MARC WEINGARTEN: I believe it remains one of the single best-selling issues of Esquire in the magazine’s history, but you would have to check that.

  9

  THE ORIGIN OF ESMÉ

  Jean Miller.

  Salinger meets a fourteen-year old girl, Jean Miller, and over the next five years corresponds with her, dates her, and seduces her. The same pattern recurs throughout his life: innocence admired, innocence seduced, innocence abandoned. Salinger is obsessed with girls at the edge of their bloom. He wants to help them bloom, then he needs to blame them for blooming.

  SHANE SALERNO: When Ian Hamilton was researching his book In Search of J. D. Salinger, he visited the archives of Time magazine. In the research folders was an item from the West Coast correspondent that was never published. It read, “We have found a lead that may finally open Salinger’s closet of little girls.” Apparently, Richard Gehman, who had clashed with Salinger when editing his stories at Cosmopolitan, had provided Time with the tip that Salinger, in his early thirties, had once proposed marriage to a teenage girl. The research speculates that this girl may have been the model for Sybil in “Bananafish.”

  According to Hamilton, the parents of the teenage girl ended the match, but the friendship lasted “two years.” Time tracked down the girl’s father, who told them that some “ten years earlier,” around 1950, “he and his family had met Salinger at a hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida.” The father wrote, “He fastened on my daughter, J——— and spent a lot of time with her.” J’s father speculated that Salinger’s standoffish behavior—“he didn’t mingle much”—might be attributable to Salinger’s being Jewish. “I mean, I thought he might have a chip on his shoulder.”

  The Time reporter’s ensuing memo, according to Hamilton, noted: “This establishes that J (the girl) met JDS in Florida. Check pub. dates of Esmé and Bananafish to determine if J, at 16 or 17, could have been the wellspring for either of these fictional girls. Secondly we should redouble our efforts to find a divorce record in vicinity of Daytona”—that is, might J have been the cause of Salinger’s divorce?

  Time reporter Bill Smith located and interviewed J, now married. He reported, “J tried to be aloof . . . didn’t remember where she had met Salinger or what he was like. Well, did she deny that, as a child, she had known him in Florida? She puffed on her cigarette a moment, as if debating over which plea to enter: ‘Yes,’ she said carefully. ‘I think I do deny it.’ ”

  Smith’s take on J’s response was this: “There is only one reasonable conclusion: that she is lying, presumably to protect Salinger.”

  The initial “J” is all we had to work on. We did a lot of research and concluded that Time came up empty because the magazine not only had the date wrong (it was 1949) but also J’s age was wrong (she was fourteen). Finding Jean Miller took years of detective work, and finding her was only the beginning. For sixty years she had kept silent about her relationship with Salinger. It took a number of conversations over many months to convince her to reveal exactly what happened in 1949.

  JEAN MILLER: We were in Daytona Beach, and I was sitting at this rather crowded pool at the Sheraton Hotel, by the beach. This was January or February 1949. I was from a little town in upstate New York, and my family always went to Florida for the winter. I went to a little private school there for three or four months, from eight to one, and then I’d spend the afternoons on the beach or by the pool, reading, doing homework.

  I was reading Wuthering Heights, and a man said to me, “How is Heathcliff? How is Heathcliff?” He said it, I don’t know how many times, but I was concentrating, and I finally heard it peripherally. And I turned to him and I said, “Heathcliff is troubled.”

  Salinger and his sister, Doris, vacationing in Daytona Beach, Florida.

  I looked at him. He had a long, wonderful, angular face and deep, brooding, sad-looking eyes. He was in this terry cloth bathrobe, and his legs were very white; he was very pale. He wasn’t exactly shivering, but he didn’t look like he belonged at this pool.

  J. D. SALINGER (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” The New Yorker, January 31, 1948):

  “He won’t take his bathrobe off? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because he’s so pale.”

  JEAN MILLER: He looked old. And he was not going to stop talking, so I put my book aside. We began a conversation, and he was very intense. His mind seem to skitter over various topics. He told me he was a writer and that he had published a few stories in the New Yorker, and he felt this was his finest accomplishment.

  Jean Miller, age fourteen, on Daytona Beach.

  We sat there talking for quite a while, and finally he asked me how old I was, and I said fourteen. And I remember very clearly his grimace. He said he was thirty. He made a point of saying that he was thirty on January first so that, in a way, he was just thirty; he had just come out of his twenties. He was funny, sort of a wisecracking sense of humor. We sat there for quite a while. I left, and as I was going away he told me his name was Jerry. I had no idea who he was.

  I saw him the next day, and we began these walks. We would walk down to this old rickety pier and find a bench and sit where the wind wasn’t blowing, eat popcorn or ice cream, and we’d talk. And we’d feed popcorn to the seagulls. He was having a wonderful time. We walked very slowly down to the pier. It was like he was escorting me. We’d do this every afternoon for about ten days.

  Salinger and Jean Miller would take walks down to this Daytona Beach pier.

  He was very deaf in his right ear. I think something to do with the war. He would always have his left shoulder behind me
and lean down to hear what I had to say. I would do cartwheels on the beach, and then I would whip off into the ocean, and he would love that. I think he felt it was as close to a perfect, maybe even direct moment that he’d had—maybe ever had. These perfect moments: they got him away from his melancholy, his angst about the war. He seemed to take joy out of my childishness. The frivolity and the pure innocence of fourteen-year-old me, I think, is what he was attracted to.

  He was very tall, thin, and I don’t know that he was athletic, but he was graceful. He was careful with what he wore; he always looked very neat. He was awfully good-looking. It wasn’t his main attraction, but he was very good-looking.

  Jerry Salinger listened like you were the most important person in the world. He was the first adult who seemed to be genuinely interested in what I had to say. No grown-up had really listened to me as though I was a person in my own right. Jerry was interested in my opinions; everything about me he was interested in. He wanted to know about my family, about my school, what games I played. He wanted to know who I was reading, what I was studying. He wanted to know whether I believed in God. Did I want to be an actress?

  He began talking about the Brontës, the moors, how he loved the Brontës, how everyone—every student, every adult, every old person—should read the Brontës, read them over and over again. He talked most of that day.

  He was not pleased at all with all the slick magazines; they would change names or take out sections or rewrite some sections, and never with any permission from the author. [His stories] would just appear in a form that he didn’t know was going to happen. He was very down on most every publisher, and of course he hadn’t even gone to the book publishing world yet.

  He talked about his publishers, what a parasitic group they were. He said publishers were not on the writer’s side. The only publishers that he really had any respect for at all, and actually had a great deal of respect for, were the people at the New Yorker : Harold Ross, William Shawn, Gus Lobrano, William Maxwell. He would wax on about the New Yorker and how it was the only place he wanted to publish. He might publish in Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly, but they didn’t pay as well. He very much liked the idea that the New Yorker didn’t insist upon knowing a great deal about the author. He always felt that what people should know about an author was nothing personal.

  He talked about Ring Lardner. He admired Fitzgerald tremendously. He told me what to read, that I should read the classics. Never mind with this modern rubbish. Read Chekhov. Read Turgenev. Read Proust.

  He talked about his family, his mother. He adored his mother. His father thought his writing was silly. Self-indulgent.

  At night, with the dancing, he was a different person—very gregarious and fun-loving and free. He could be very carefree. He was a very kind, gentle man, very interested in other people. He was not egocentric. He was not a solipsist. He simply was interested in other people.

  The Daytona Beach Sheraton Hotel.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger broke up with his first wife, Sylvia, at the Daytona Sheraton in 1946; he began his seduction of fourteen-year-old Jean Miller at the Daytona Sheraton in 1949; he broke up with Joyce Maynard at the Daytona Sheraton in 1972; and he set “Bananafish” more or less at the Daytona Sheraton. He continually returns to the scene of Seymour’s suicide.

  JEAN MILLER: He talked about his novel quite a bit—how he was working on it and had been working on it. At least one story had been published about Holden. Jerry told me there was a great deal of Holden in him.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, undated:

  You say you still feel fourteen. I know the feeling. I’m thirty-four and too much of the time I still feel like a sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield.

  JEAN MILLER: One of the things that worried him about The Catcher in the Rye was that usually books are a hit one year and that’s the end of it. You’re gonna be constantly under pressure to write another book. I think that made him nervous because he wasn’t sure he could write another book, that he had a subject for another book; maybe he wanted to go back to short stories.

  According to Jerry, during fallow periods, you may not think you’re accomplishing anything, but it’s a form of preparation. And it seemed to him the best way to use the fallow years was to really examine your misery—really examine the position you’re in. That is the waiting time.

  He wasn’t worried about his book from an artistic point of view. He wasn’t even worried about it from a financial point of view. He was worried about how it was going to be received by people, particularly people he loved: his parents, various friends. He felt nervous about Holden’s language. Maybe people would find the language unnecessary. But he wanted people to know, absolutely, that he was trying to write a good book—not just a bestseller, a good book.

  I felt very free with him. Lent came, and I said I’m giving up popcorn for Lent. Anybody else I had said that to over the age of thirty would have said, “Fine, fine,” but much to my amazement he took it very seriously. He took me very seriously. And because of my age of fourteen, I was very grateful for that. No grown-up had ever really listened to me as though I were a person in my own right.

  He talked of Oona O’Neill quite lovingly. Naturalness was a big thing for Jerry. He thought she was unpretentious, almost childlike, and this would very much impress Jerry. Now whether that’s true really about Oona O’Neill or whether he just saw that in her, I have no idea. But he obviously loved her very much, even though he no longer saw her. My impression was that he thought she was wonderful. I heard no bitterness in his voice at all. He told me about some of the times he spent with her.

  He talked of his first wife a lot. I don’t know whether she was French or German, but they married in Europe after the war, and I don’t know how they met. He said they kept in touch telepathically.

  He did not talk to me about the war.

  My mother was taking a dim view of these walks on the beach I was taking with this man. She found out Jerry was J. D. Salinger. She read the New Yorker, and she said, “He looks just like Seymour.” He did, but I didn’t know the story yet. I had no idea who Seymour was. I didn’t care. My mother said, “A man like that is only after one thing, Jean; you better be careful.” She knew he had written “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

  Those times at the pier were the most carefree and fun: getting to know each other, enjoying each other. Those two days were probably the most fun we had together. Much later he said, “I wish I could have been able to keep you at that pier.” I had never talked to a creative man before. I had never talked to such an erudite man versed in so many subjects. He was very amusing, eyes twinkling and cracking jokes. He saw the humor in things, but it was a very kind humor. If I said something in a gossipy fashion about someone I didn’t know, maybe even something mean about someone, he would defend that person. He would say, “That person has something to offer, even if she’s an old woman and she’s fat. She’s not nosy; she has a great curiosity. You should try to look for good in people. Don’t see their worst traits all the time.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: As Zooey tells Franny, “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.” Salinger repeated this mantra constantly because he was trying to convince himself of the veracity of Zooey’s claim. The Fat Lady, Zooey explains to his sister, is Christ himself.

  JEAN MILLER: He wanted to know what I was studying. He wanted to know everything about me and tried, I think very subtly, to put some thoughts in my mind of how I might, in the future, center myself and make my life around something that I could work for rather than drifting. He made me start my education. It was the beginning of me thinking, and not necessarily in an intellectual way, although that, too, but to get in touch with my center.

  He was after that innocence and purity of childhood, which Zen tries to recapture. Living in the moment, fully, totally in the moment, as children do. A state of grace.

  He talked a lot about Judy Garland and child actors, the in
nocence of actors and the beauty of their purity. He liked the innocence of childhood before pretention set in: the clear, simple way she sang in The Wizard of Oz. The direct experience that children had. Learning to walk for the first time. Seeing a camera for the first time. Forming their own opinions. Getting their own experience. That’s very close to Zen.

  At the end of his stay in Daytona, his very last day, he gave me a little white elephant as a talisman and said, “Even if we never see each other again, I wish you all the good.” He also said, “I’d like to kiss you goodbye, but you know I can’t.” It was just a given that we were going to write each other. Before we parted he went up to my mother and said in the lobby of the Sheraton, “I am going to marry your daughter.” Well, I can’t imagine my mother’s reaction to that.

  Jean Miller’s mother in front of the Sheraton Plaza Hotel.

  He wrote immediately; a letter arrived right away, mailed to the Princess Issena Hotel, Daytona, where we were staying. He was living in Stamford, Connecticut. The address was on the letterhead, and he asked me to write him, and would it be all right for him to write me, and I wrote back, “Of course it would be okay.”

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, March 19, 1949:

  Dear Jean,

  I arrived in New York with my room key from the Sheraton in my pocket.

  It’s good to think that you’re still in Daytona, walking in the sun, sitting in those green canvas chairs by the pool, playing tennis in your red sweater.

  Hope you’ll write to me at great length, Jean. It’s cold and bleak up here. Not a seagull in sight. (The seagull has come to be my favorite bird.)

  Yours, Jerry

  JEAN MILLER: We began exchanging letters. And later he began sending quite a few Western Union telegrams. He always talked about his work. I wrote him about his story “The Laughing Man.” I said I had trouble with the vocabulary, and he wrote back saying that he had trouble with the vocabulary, too. That it was the kind of story that needed big words to hold it together.