Salinger

by David Shields

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, March 28, 1949:

  Dear Jean,

  Yours is the only letter I’ve ever had with seagulls in it. Even before I opened the letter, I could hear the flapping of wings inside the envelope. I’ve set a little pre-summer work deadline for myself, and I may not get much of a chance to write you for a few weeks. But if you have time, you write to me—all right? I miss you and think of you.

  Jerry

  JEAN MILLER: I remember once getting into a big fight on my village green in Homer, New York, after we returned from Florida, with another girl. We had each other down in the grass, and she gave me a black eye and a bloody nose, and I limped home and I called Jerry. Well, he just thought that was wonderful.

  He didn’t say, like my mother, “You’re too old to be fighting.” He was a grown-up on my side. He was always on my side. He didn’t judge me. He said, “Well, maybe you should take some karate lessons. Maybe I could get you a Charles Atlas book for young girls. Maybe you’ve got to do something to build up your muscles.” He wasn’t even laughing. Of course, I was crying. That’s what I mean when I say he took me very seriously.

  We used to play softball in our front yard, and he’d want to know how many hits I had, how many times I struck out. He loved people my age. He’d instruct me via letter or via phone on my tennis backhand. He didn’t want me to be literary. He wanted to talk about my childhood pursuits.

  J. D. SALINGER (“The Laughing Man,” Nine Stories, 1953):

  Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself, even if I’d wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.

  JEAN MILLER: I remember early on thinking, “How am I going to write this man?” I could be as chatty as him, but I began worrying about sentence structure at the age of fourteen because of him. And there was really no one to ask. I wasn’t going to ask my mother, and no one else knew I knew him. There was nobody who knew. I had no one to ask how to write these letters. There was a lot in me that I did not say to him because I didn’t have the nerve to say. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen to me if I opened up, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I think he sent me about fifty or sixty letters.

  SHANE SALERNO: Jean later explained to me that Salinger actually wrote many more than sixty letters to her, but that her mother threw away many of them.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, April 16, 1949:

  I’ve been working steadily for weeks, and just finished a very long story. I like it, but the New Yorker doesn’t see eye to eye with me on it.

  People seem so sure that a writer’s life is a gay one. No office to go to, no regular hours. All the independence and travel opportunities in the world. And it may be a gay life for some writers. I haven’t found it that way.

  JEAN MILLER: He didn’t like Stamford, and after a while he moved back in with his family on Park Avenue. That’s a very funny letter, because he was in his old childhood room and he lists the things that were there to haunt him: invisible-ink pens and rejection slips and hysterical draft notices and invitations to weddings and tennis rackets and Charles Atlas books falling out of the closet when he opened the door. It was very comical, but he was not pleased to be staying back at his parents’ home.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, June 3, 1949:

  I grew up in this room, and all the unthrilling landmarks still stare at me in the face. If I open a closet door, I’m liable to get hit on the head with an Old Tom Swift book. Or a tennis racket with shriveled strings. My desk drawers are full of stale memories too. You’re going to be fifteen soon, aren’t you? My best to you, Jean.

  Jerry

  JEAN MILLER: The next time we met was probably in the spring, when I was in New York City with my family. He came to meet us, and I took a walk with him. I remember exactly what I had on. I had a little tan suit on with little white gloves and a little straw hat. We were walking down the street and the straw hat blew off and I thought, “Oh, how embarrassing.” I was very intimidated in New York, anyway. Tall buildings, beautiful hotels. I was a very small-town girl, which probably was part of my appeal to him. He loved the idea of my hat blowing off; he used to refer to it later. He ran like a child to get my hat and stomped on it because the wind would take it away again. And I remember thinking, “He’s really having fun.”

  I was amazed that he would get into this game of chasing my hat. I remember he had very long legs, and he couldn’t run very well, and I remember those knees sort of knocking together as he came back and formally gave me my hat, which was a little bit bashed, and put it back on my head. He laughed about it for about fifteen minutes.

  My parents were not about to let me out in New York on my own. I just wasn’t equipped to do that. He made an arrangement with them. The four of us went out to dinner that night.

  He found a cottage to rent in Westport, which he described as being in the woods about a mile from town. He was very pleased at first, but decided that [Westport] was too writer-conscious, so he got his own apartment on East 57th Street. By then it was after Catcher in the Rye had been published.

  He was getting a lot of attention in New York. After the novel came out, he was very sought after, and he hated that. He hated people’s questions. He hated people’s praises. He hated people’s criticisms. Maybe the criticisms were the worst. People were a distraction. I was having dinner with my parents and Jerry, and a waiter handed Jerry a note from a woman. Jerry went over to her table and spoke to the woman for a couple of minutes and came back. He showed me the note: “Are you J. D. Salinger?” It was all very casual and my only indication of his celebrity.

  I always saw boys my own age. At one point I met a boy on a trip to Europe and visited him at Middlebury, where I boasted that I was a friend of J. D. Salinger’s. I was more cognizant then that he was famous. The boy I told this to called him up for an interview. He told the boy he didn’t do interviews. Jerry reprimanded me gently. He said, “If he was a beau of yours, [I] should have said yes and shot him on the spot.” In a distant way he was very tender.

  At that point he had moved to Cornish, New Hampshire. He said his friends were concerned about his move to isolation, particularly the ones who liked his fiction. They thought he would lose touch with people and therefore have nothing to write about. It didn’t mean he was a hermit. He just didn’t want to be with writers. And he certainly didn’t want to be the toast of New York. He said there were literary parasites and he didn’t want anything to do with them.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, April 30, 1953:

  I planted some vegetables yesterday. Since then, I’ve gone out every hour on the hour to see if anything’s come up. Have no idea how long it takes for a seed to turn into a carrot.

  JEAN MILLER: I was at a place called Briarcliff Junior College, in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which isn’t far from New York City.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, April 30, 1953:

  You don’t think you’ll be invited back to Briarcliff next year? Maybe you’re exaggerating. If the school has any real sense, it’ll take you back. You’re probably the only girl with any style there. Lousy grades, maybe, but style.

  Jean Miller, age seventeen.

  JEAN MILLER: I remember when I would speak to him about school he was very down on education. “Don’t believe everything your professors say,” he would tell me. “They’re just giving you information. Get your own information on your own terms. Stay detached.” This was a theme throughout Jerry’s life—professors insisting in a pedantic way on students regurgitating knowledge. No direct experience of learning, of spontaneity, of creating.

  I think you can see it in [Salinger’s fictional character] Teddy, who says, “I would bring in an elephant, and I wouldn’t tell the children that this elephant was an elephant or that it was gray or that is a trunk or t
his is an ear. I would let them have that direct experience themselves. I wouldn’t tell them grass was green. Green is just a color.” Jerry quoted Mary Baker Eddy: “Nothing is good or bad; it’s what we think that makes it so.” His whole life was built on this: trying to reach the state of grace through mysticism. If it hadn’t been for Jerry Salinger, I never would have gone through the—gone below the surface at all in my life. A Bhagavad Gita quest. A seriousness in my life: questioning things, learning things, learning things on my own.

  Jerry would often send me airline tickets to come visit him.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, October 5, 1953:

  What a good girl you are, and if things go too roughly this winter—what with parental pressure, etc.—you can arrive up here any time you feel like it, bag and baggage, cigarette holder and all, and I’ll share my homely fare with you.

  It’s easy and quick to fly up here. North East Airlines, out of LaGuardia, makes West Lebanon in an hour and forty-five minutes, and that’s only ten minutes by car from me. Smith’s taxi service, in Windsor, now know where the hell my house is.

  JEAN MILLER: I remember his Cornish home; it was difficult to get there. I was very aware that Jerry Salinger didn’t want to be talked about as J. D. Salinger. I might have spoken vaguely about my friend Jerry to my friends, that I was going to New Hampshire some weekend to see him. But I would never say, “I am seeing J. D. Salinger.” After that experience with that boy, I was even more careful.

  There was never an inkling of anything physical between us until much later. I would go up to Cornish; I’d spend the night with him in the same bed. Me over here, him over there. This happened several times because there was no place else to sleep. We were camping out. It’s absolutely the truth. It was a genderless relationship. We were friends. We were buddies. Sex did not come into it.

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

  I was oddly touched that you’d made the bed before we left the house. It amounts to a beau geste, and I’m duly grateful.

  JEAN MILLER: I remember once, probably pretty early on, we were in a bookstore. I tentatively picked out Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He looked at me and said, “You don’t want to read that.” I put it right back. He was very puritanical. He enjoyed being childlike. He didn’t like adults particularly. I probably would have fallen into bed with him at about the age of three if he’d asked me, but he didn’t. Somehow it never occurred. As long as it didn’t occur to him, it didn’t occur to me.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger’s seduction process: adore childhood innocence in a pubescent girl, seduce it and her into (barely) adulthood, reproduce the assignation in his writing, and compare actual physical contact to Esmé or Zen—a comparison no human can survive.

  JEAN MILLER: He had a wonderful view of Mount Ascutney. I remember sitting by the fire and dancing with him at night to Lawrence Welk or Liberace or something like that. He liked to dance, Jerry. It was fun. We would look at the people on television dancing and we just would waltz, laughing all the time. He laughed a lot. He seemed filled with joy a great deal of the time. He could be like that when he had guests, too. He was such a big character.

  I also remember seeing two beautifully leather-bound books, The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. And I know from back in Daytona days that he fought being a consumer. He did not want to want things, but leather was a great temptation for him. He just couldn’t resist doing that.

  He said to me, “I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me, and we just see each other and have this great time.” He told me in October 1953 that nothing had changed for him since Dayton Beach.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, October 1953:

  It still seems completely good and meaningful to see your face and be with you.

  I simply think you’re a beautiful girl in every sense.

  JEAN MILLER: At one point, he asked me to move in with him. That letter doesn’t survive. I showed it to a friend of mine, a boy from Amherst. I never, ever would have done it because my parents had too much control over me. But I did think about it. And I thought I could never really survive up there. I had been there. I could see what would be expected of me, which was pretty much drudgery, and I was just too spoiled. I had too much self-interest to really take that invitation seriously.

  I began to worship him, which is maybe too strong a word, but I was still young. It had nothing to do with his physical appearance. It was his powerful, brilliant mind. His sheer strength of character. Of the rightness and wrongness of things. The way you should look at things. He was a very persuasive man. He never talked about people.

  I’m afraid you do compare other men that come in and out of your life to him. His intensity and his curiosity. His—I was going to say “charm,” but I don’t know that he necessarily did have charm. His knowledge. Scratch “knowledge.” His wisdom. I’ve known people that have approached it, but not totally. I had a wonderful husband who approached it. But I mean there’s no point in looking.

  Here was this fascinating man who seemed to like me, and I think in one of the letters he says that we have put each other on pedestals. And if anything is to become of us, we’ll have to get rid of those pedestals. We were just sort of dancing on these pedestals, not getting any closer. Both of us would’ve had to fall off a pedestal. Otherwise I cannot imagine a marriage.

  He never told me his real vulnerabilities. We weren’t terribly close. I did not feel like a unit with him against the world, as I did with my husband. I was in awe of him. I was tongue-tied. I was gun-shy. He was up there and I was down here. I really didn’t know what there could be in me that could affect him.

  Jerry Salinger remembered me always on that pier in Daytona Beach, and I was beginning to change. He wrote about my change. He went on to say in another letter how little really he knew about me. There were great parts of me that he didn’t know.

  I had grown from a little girl to a young woman. My feelings for him developed as I developed. I think he thought I was much brighter than I really was. I’m not saying I’m stupid, but I am saying that I just don’t think I was the sensitive person he thought I was. I just knew it in my gut. And there was no point in me trying to be. I was a woman and I was trying to look my best, and when I would meet him, I would do the best I could. We used to meet at the Biltmore under the clock, or he would take me to the Palm Room at the Plaza, where I’d loved to go as a little child. He took me once as a little girl to the Palm to listen to the violins and have tea sandwiches.

  Or we’d go to the theater. I remember seeing the Lunts onstage once. I don’t remember what play. And that’s when he said to me, “Would you like to be an actress? Have you thought of being an actress? I think you should maybe think about being an actress.”

  He took me to the Stork Club; it was great fun. Other times we’d go to the Blue Angel to hear music. Wonderful atmosphere and greedy-looking people sitting around eating fat steaks and smoking cigars with lots of drinks. You felt as if you were in an important place. I was a woman. He was courting me. We would do things that courting couples do: go to the theater or go to nightclubs.

  When he first saw me, he told me, I was talking to an older lady and I yawned, but I stifled the yawn—which is what Esmé does in the story, when she’s singing in the choir. He told me he could not have written “Esmé” had he not met me.

  Jean Miller, age eighteen.

  But he never told me he was in love with me. He wouldn’t always come to New York to see me. He wrote me in one of his letters that he’d made promises to himself. He had to write in Cornish, and he was writing something very autumn, with autumn thoughts, right now, and he couldn’t face concrete. In his letter he said what an unromantic man he must seem at that moment, that I’d have every right to tell him to go jump in the lake and to go off with some less neurotic person.

  He needed to put himself into a cell-like existence. I don’t know that Jerry Sal
inger necessarily liked the country. I think he probably grew to like the country, but the only thing he wanted to do was write. He went someplace to write that he knew he was going to be comfortable in, and he made it work for himself.

  Since deciding to write, he didn’t really have a free life. He couldn’t take even so much as a drive in the country without having the weight of words on him, pushing him down, whereas a businessman could go for a drive in the country and turn it off. Really he could take his typewriter anywhere. His traveling was not really traveling. It was just taking his typewriter someplace else geographically.

  SHARON STEEL: In a letter to Michael Mitchell (the artist who designed the original jacket for The Catcher in the Rye) dated May 22, 1951, Salinger writes from London, detailing his experiences sharing drinks with a Vogue model he met on the ship. (“No real fun, though.”) . . .

  Later, he hangs out with Laurence Olivier (“a very nice guy”) and his wife, Vivien Leigh, whom he calls “a charmer.” Salinger finds himself at a party—where he accidentally snorts gin up his nose—with the Australian ballet dancer Robert Helpmann, described as a “sinister looking pansy,” and argues with Enid Starkie about Kafka. He also goes to see a play and compares the theater in New York City to that in London’s West End. “The audiences here are just as stupid as they [are] in New York, but the productions are much, much better,” he writes to his “Buddyroo,” Mitchell.

  JEAN MILLER: His work was his karmic duty. His work was what he had. His work was his whole being. He was so focused on his work. I mean he started out as a romantic and ended up pulling back. That’s the way I viewed it.

  I went to Briarcliff in 1952 and got out in 1954. I was nineteen or twenty. He would come to visit and we would go out to dinner. I remember particularly that he came when I’d had a fencing lesson. Fencing always made me perspire, so my hair looked wonderful. I remember being very pleased about that. He’d be standing at the door, not really wanting to come in, not wanting to be recognized. He’d whisk me away and we’d go up to a restaurant near the Tappan Zee Bridge.