Salinger

by David Shields

  JOHN WENKE: As the first wave of attention subsided, Salinger breathed a sigh of relief.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: In 1952, a year after The Catcher in the Rye was published, Salinger said that he found the media attention accompanying his fame to be “professionally and personally demoralizing” and that he was looking forward to the day when he would see his photograph from the dust jacket of The Catcher in the Rye “flapping against a lamp-post in a cold, wet Lexington Avenue wind, in company with, say, the editorial page of the Daily Mirror.”

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  PAUL ALEXANDER: In the fall of 1951, as The Catcher in the Rye remained on the New York Times bestseller list, Salinger tried to get his life back to normal. In his East Side apartment, he worked on another story, this one a long and unusual piece called “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.” Wry and whimsical, it was not like the other stories he had been writing. When he was not working, Salinger kept up with the worsening health of Harold Ross. In mid-November, New Yorker editor Gus Lobrano wrote to Salinger with disappointing news. The New Yorker editors were rejecting “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period,” which Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, had recently submitted to them. Deciding not to buy the story had turned into a terrible ordeal for them, Lobrano said, but ultimately the editors did not feel the piece succeeded. The notion behind the story was too complicated, Lobrano believed; its events were “too compressed.” Finally, the piece seemed almost willfully strange, which Lobrano knew wasn’t true, but that was how it seemed. Salinger was affected by this rejection more than most, not only because he had worked hard on the story, but because he had reached the point where the New Yorker accepted almost any story he submitted to them. On November 15, Salinger wrote to Lobrano to tell him he was profoundly disheartened by the rejection.

  JOHN LEGGETT: I am aware of a party that took place in New York at this time for Hamish Hamilton, Salinger’s British publisher. There were young people present; Salinger was attracted to a girl and proposed an adventure with her—another of those vanishing-to-Cornish adventures, which of course didn’t take place. It wound up in typically Salingerian fashion: his resentment of the Harvard boys who were present—anger, shouts in the street. It was a real Jerry Salinger event: the cocktail party that got out of hand. He was attracted to women and felt he was able to persuade them. It may have been a game that he played—mashing, so to speak, on girls, persuading them that they should go off with him tomorrow or the next day. Many of the girls were persuaded; this was likely to wind up in bad feelings because of the escorts the girls had come with. He had a lot of girlfriends and a lot of experiences like this. That’s what the talk was, anyway.

  THE WIFE OF AN EDITOR: I was not prepared for the extraordinary impact of his physical presence. There was a black aura about him. He was dressed in black; he had black hair, dark eyes, and he was of course extremely tall. I was kind of spellbound. But I was married, and I was pregnant. We talked, and we liked each other very much, I thought. Then it was time for us to leave—I had gone to the party with my husband and another couple, two friends of ours—and I went upstairs to where the coats were. I was just getting my coat when Jerry came into the room. He came over to me and said that we ought to run away together. I said, “But I’m pregnant.” And he said, “That doesn’t matter. We can still run away.” He really seemed to mean it. I can’t say I wasn’t flattered, and even a bit tempted maybe.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger is Holden-like in a variety of ways, not least of which is his tendency to wildly overcommit and then disappear, always executing the disappearance with an actor’s instinct for the perfect gesture.

  J. D. SALINGER (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951):

  If you want to know the truth, I don’t even know why I started all that stuff with her [Sally]. I mean about going away somewhere, to Massachusetts and Vermont and all. I probably wouldn’t’ve taken her even if she’d wanted to go with me. She wouldn’t have been anybody to go with. The terrible part, though, is that I meant it when I asked her. That’s the terrible part. I swear to God I’m a madman.

  JOHN LEGGETT: I was rather surprised to go to a cocktail party, and there he was. It was someplace on the East Side where a lot of young people involved in publishing were gathered. Joe [Fox, an editor at Random House] said, “Salinger’s that guy standing over there,” and to me this was terribly exciting. Then Joe told me, “He’s coming to dinner.” It was a time when we would go to cocktail parties, then we’d all go out to French restaurants in that part of Manhattan. We went to this restaurant and they shoved tables together and, sure enough, there was Salinger. He sat down at the table and we were all thrilled to be in his presence. He got up and muttered to somebody that he had to make a phone call, disappeared, and never came back. We all felt this man had eluded us once more. He’s off in the night and gone. He didn’t want to join up or be a real person with us.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: I met him a long, long time ago. Way back in ’51, ’52. And we went out quite a few times. Five or six times, I think. He’s seven years older than I am. I had a great friend by the name of S. J. Perelman, who was an extraordinary humorist and writer for the New Yorker. He introduced me to Jerry because Jerry had mentioned to him that he was interested in Zen Buddhism. Sid thought that I could talk with Jerry about Buddhism, but I couldn’t because he was interested in Zen Buddhism, which is a meditative kind of Buddhism, and I was more interested in Mahayana Buddhism, which is more like Tibetan Buddhism is now. He said travel was pointless. What mattered was inner travel.

  [For our first date] he came and he picked me up at my mother’s house, which was on 72nd Street and Park [Avenue]. He came in, and he was very, very tall. Very thin. Elongated and attenuated, like a candlestick, a Giacometti statue, you know, not like a lantern. And he had these wonderful eyes, the color of black coffee. Very intense. You could feel it suddenly, his extremely intense presence. Jerry looked very neat and dapper in a navy blue blazer with three brass buttons. He had on a white shirt and a regimental striped tie, what he later described in one of his stories as “Eastern Seaboard regimentals,” with charcoal gray trousers. He looked very spiffy, very clean-shaven; his hair was in place—that lovely dark hair he had. We went to his place, which was on the ground floor of an apartment building on 57th Street, on Second or Third Avenue, about 300 East 57th. His place was very, very neat. Very clean. He wanted to show it to me. In the little kitchenette the cans and all the glasses were arranged in parade formation. There was a picture on the wall of himself in uniform. We talked for a while. He seemed quiet, shy: he didn’t speak much at all. He rebuffed all personal questions. He wasn’t easy to talk with, really. I was used to people who laughed a lot more and told jokes or who said funny things, but he didn’t. He was very serious and quiet. He didn’t ask questions or anything. I was the one asking him questions, because Jerry at that point had just written The Catcher in the Rye. And he’d also had lots of short stories in the New Yorker. I was familiar with his work and I wanted to ask him about it. We had dinner at an Italian place nearby that he liked.

  I admired his writings so. I admired talent and was willing to put up with personal idiosyncrasies that might not be adorable, just for the sake of being with somebody whose writing truly interested me. I mean, I loved his writing. No one else has ever done short stories like those. “Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” He had a new voice, an original voice. You can always tell a Salinger short story.

  I’d say, “What are you gonna do?” or “What did you do last week?” And he’d say, “Well, now that was when Holden was doing something or other.” He would say, “Well, Holden loved the Metropolitan Museum. We can go there.” “Holden would like this” or “He wouldn’t like that.” Or “Phoebe would like this” or “Phoebe wouldn’t like that.” He totally identified with Seymour Glass and Franny and Holden. He talked about them as if they were totally real people, and I began to feel they were as real to me as
they were to him. He was the only writer I’ve ever known who talked about his characters in that way.

  He talked about [New Yorker editors William] Shawn and [Harold] Ross. And then, without any difference at all, he’d talk about his own characters, about Holden Caulfield, about Esmé, about the whole Glass family—Seymour Glass or Bessie Glass or Boo Boo Tannenbaum. I think that’s why his stories were so good, because they were completely intense, and the people were really real. They were all fresh. Some people write dialogue with words that are tin-canned. But his words were always very fresh.

  Even when he spoke, he was not easy to talk with because if it was raining and I said, “Oh, I don’t mind, I like to walk in the rain,” he’d say, “Oh my goodness, what a cliché.” I didn’t realize walking in the rain was a cliché at that point, but he did. Every cliché I used, he would say, “Oh, that’s a cliché. How can you say that?” I felt very self-conscious talking with him, because he was, of course, a perfectionist. He was much more concerned with his own life, what he was doing, what he was thinking, than what anybody else was, not just me, but everybody else. He would comment on what I said. For instance, at one point I said, “Oh, I’d love to have a Cranach painting—that would be so wonderful to have.” He said, “You want to own a painting? Why do you want to own a painting? You can have it all in your head. You don’t need to own anything. You don’t need to own any of it.” And that was an interesting idea to me—that one could have everything in one’s mind rather than in a material way.

  Jerry would say, you know, “There are some people who like to please, and there are other people who want people to please them.” And Jerry was definitely in that second category. He wanted people to please him. He got very distressed if an editor changed the title of the story or if anybody wanted to change anything in any of his stories; he wanted everything just the way he had it. Only at the New Yorker were the editors respectful of writers.

  He felt that authors were the ones who should dictate how their work should be presented. I mean, people would think that was very arrogant, but Jerry was self-absorbed. He wanted nothing to come between him and his characters. He moved them about the stage, like God. It’s like being omnipotent, to move the characters the way you want them. And you wouldn’t want any interference with this. I think he wanted to be alone. He wasn’t interested so much in what other people thought—except for his stories, obviously, where he got everything beautifully, marvelously, perfectly done. A few lines of dialogue, and you knew these people. All these stories were so perfect of their kind. But for the people outside of his stories, he wasn’t interested.

  He didn’t come on with any great charismatic push or anything. He just sort of came in quietly. And very dear. Now I was about twenty-five, and he was seven years older. But it was a very Platonic going out. I mean, he didn’t try to kiss me or hug me or squeeze me or anything, the way other people did. He was perfectly friendly and nice. But formal, you know. We just talked. Maybe I was too old for him. I think he liked younger girls. I was only seven years younger. I think he preferred them twelve years younger. Well, younger than that.

  I think he liked putting me down. There was something sadistic about it. He was very much like Raymond Ford, that character of his in “The Inverted Forest.” It wasn’t a sexual power; it was a mental power. You felt he had the power to imprison someone mentally. It was as if one’s mind were at risk rather than one’s virtue.

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  PAUL ALEXANDER: That fall [1951], Salinger began to consider leaving New York. He was tired of living in the city and longed for a quiet solitude he thought he could find in the country. He also so disliked the personal attention he was getting because of Catcher that he wanted to isolate himself.

  J. D. SALINGER, letter to Harold Ross, October 6, 1951:

  Dear Mr. Ross,

  Just to say that I’m afraid I can’t take you up on your kind invitation. . . . I’m much too jumpy these days to do any visiting. . . . I’m in bed with a case of shingles.

  JAMES LUNDQUIST: He escaped some of the publicity following the success of his novel when it was published in 1951, by going to Europe. The next year he visited Mexico.

  TONY BILL: I don’t think there’s anything more difficult than dealing with early fame and success. I would like to think that Salinger figured it out early on, the way Holden figures out who’s a phony—that Salinger figured out fame is one of the worst things that can happen to a human being. It’s a form of brainwashing—a very, very unpleasant burden to bear. You can’t have a life. You’re denied a real life when you’re famous. I would consider it a huge curse to not be able to walk down the street or walk into a restaurant without being recognized. It’s a horrible burden to bear. And it changes people almost as certainly as brainwashing can change them.

  JOHN UPDIKE: Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.

  EDWARD NORTON: Maybe what he did was liberate himself to actually experience the world more truthfully. With some anonymity intact. Because being known is not a liberation. It’s a cage.

  ALEX KERSHAW: He wrote, at a young age, an instant or near-instant classic. And he was held up as one of the greatest writers of his generation. He then turned around and said, “You know what? Big deal. There’s more to life than that.”

  A. E. HOTCHNER: I think the wash of that undulation of praise drove him, to some extent, out of the city.

  SANFORD GOLDSTEIN: This is the Zen way. Don’t think of applause. Don’t think of ego. Don’t think of fame. Don’t think of money. Focus on the writing, writing for yourself.

  JOHN GUARE: I could imagine a man saying I just want to live my life and write as much as I can and not be buffaloed by overpraise and savage dissection. And just saying, “Let me live my life as a writer in a nice town up in New Hampshire and I’ll come down to New York and see my friends when I want to.” It obviously gave him no pleasure, the life of a celebrated writer. Salinger had seen what fame did to Hemingway, who because of his adulation and his need to live in that spotlight could produce a book like Across the River and into the Trees, which is a self-parody because he was surrounded by people saying “Yes, yes, yes.”

  ARAM SAROYAN: After going through the war, Salinger went through the huge threshold of fame. He’d already had a nervous breakdown and probably had some level of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Salinger became very, very famous, the way Hemingway and Fitzgerald were in their heyday. And maybe, at that point, he just beat a hasty retreat and said, you know, “I need something else. I need peace, I need quiet. I need to get out of this. I’ve had quite a trip.”

  PAUL ALEXANDER: When you read Catcher in the Rye, you just know that some day, some way, Salinger is going to end up in a spot that he considers his seclusion. And Cornish, New Hampshire, was that for him.

  A. SCOTT BERG: When there was this sudden onslaught, he suddenly realized, “I don’t really need this and I don’t want this,” and I think that’s the moment he just turned on his heels and disappeared into the mountains of New Hampshire.

  William Maxwell’s wife, Emmy, with Salinger in Cornish, 1953.

  EDWARD NORTON: He was wise and true to his beliefs after being confronted with fame in a way that very, very few people are. Some people say he was crazy. He wasn’t crazy. The truth of the matter is, it’s the opposite: people who pursue fame are crazy. People who pursue fame are way crazier than people who have the wisdom to step away from it. Salinger liberated himself to experience life in a more authentic way than becoming the character J. D. Salinger. He got to walk around in the world and not be defined by some Time magazine version of his life.

  RICHARD STAYTON: We’re all pursing our different versions of the American dream: wealth, fame, glory, career, multiple houses, more real estate, possessions, possessions, possessions. Salinger is perha
ps the only successful novelist to turn his back on all that and not only turn his back on it in life but turn his back on it in his fiction. He turned his back on celebrity before celebrity was celebrity.

  MARGARET SALINGER: I know he and his sister, when he had a little bit of money in his pocket from the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, took a drive out into the country to find someplace where he could work and live in peace. And that dream is straight out of The Catcher. The house, our house in Cornish, when you read what Holden dreams of his little place that is partway in the sunshine where he asks Sally Hayes, I think it is, a girl he does not even like very much, to run away with him and “we’d have children and hide them away and teach them how to read and write ourselves.” Again and again I would find my mother stepping into the play he had written for his life; that reality would sort of form out of this stuff of fantasy and there you have it. There we are in Holden’s cabin.

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  PAUL ALEXANDER: [Salinger’s] 90-acre tract of land was high on a hill across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger bought the land from Carlota Saint-Gaudens, a granddaughter of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the celebrated Irish-born sculptor who had lived and worked in Cornish from 1885 to 1907. An artists’ colony formed around Saint-Gaudens, and Cornish became a popular summer resort for New Yorkers and Bostonians. It was trendy enough to attract Ethel Barrymore and Isadora Duncan, and Woodrow Wilson established the summer White House in Cornish from 1913 to 1915. The colony faded away after Saint-Gaudens’s death in 1907, though, and after World War I the seaside resorts on Cape Cod and the Hamptons began drawing visitors away from Cornish.

  SHANE SALERNO: On May 16, 1953, Salinger took official possession of the Cornish property.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger had bought a small, gambrel-roofed cottage that, while attractive, needed both plumbing and a furnace. So what Salinger saw when he moved there in the dead of winter was a place that needed work but a place that was his. What’s more, it was far enough away from normal civilization that he could live his life in seclusion. As soon as he moved in, Salinger started making arrangements to winterize the cottage, deciding he would do much of the work himself. Until the house was modernized, however, Salinger had to carry water from a nearby stream for cooking and bathing, and cut firewood in the surrounding forest to keep warm.