Salinger

by David Shields

  MARK HOWLAND: For a New York boy—a Park Avenue boy—Cornish is a tremendous change. A life-altering change, daily-routine change. There’s a certain self-sufficiency in cutting your own wood that I imagine appealed to him.

  JOHN SKOW: That winter [of 1953] he happily carried water from his stream and cut wood with a chain saw. For company he hiked across the river to Windsor, Vermont, and passed the time with teenagers in a juke joint called Nap’s Lunch. The kids loved him, but mothers worried that the tall, solemn writer fellow from New York would put their children in a book.

  JEAN MILLER: He wanted the peace and quiet to do his work, and this is where he found it. He felt that he couldn’t live in an apartment in New York with all the distractions.

  ETHEL NELSON: In 1953 Windsor, Vermont, like most towns, was pretty laid-back. Cornish, New Hampshire, is right across the covered bridge, and I guess that’s why a lot of people were moving into the area—because they liked the quietness. Most people left other people alone. They didn’t try to bring you into their lives, and they didn’t want you to try to come into their lives. You met on the street, you said hello, and you went on your way.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Immediately upon arriving in Cornish, I was struck by the bucolic beauty of the place. The wooded hills were a shock of yellows, oranges, greens, and reds. Besides the landscape, the other fact I noticed about Cornish was that, for all intents and purposes, it’s a town that doesn’t exist. It has no business district—no shops, no restaurants, no offices, no gas stations.

  JEAN MILLER: It didn’t mean that he was a hermit, you know; he had plenty of social life. Certainly when I knew him he did in Cornish, in Windsor, in Vermont. He didn’t want to be with writers and certainly didn’t want to be the toast of New York. He felt that would just be ruinous to his writing, to succumb to anybody else’s opinion.

  The only opinion that mattered to him was his own opinion. And that’s it. He often said that to me, “The only opinion that should be important to you is your own opinion.”

  Cornish was an ideal situation. He wandered all around, looking for ideal situations. He finally found it. It was in a field, but he did have some neighbors.

  He wasn’t in flight. He was protecting himself. His motives were really very pure. He just wanted to write, and this looked like an isolated enough place where he could get his work done. Plus do a few things like have a little farm and have vegetables and chop wood and take walks, and he would get enough physical exercise.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: It may well be he didn’t want any of that social interaction and decided he was going to retreat into solitude. A writer writes alone in a room with no distractions. The minute he’s distracted he loses the cathedral in which he must perform, which is himself.

  —

  MICHAEL CLARKSON: His best friends, perhaps his only friends, were kids. He related to them. He talked to them about what it was like to be a teenager.

  PHOEBE HOBAN: Salinger himself resented having to grow up and lose that contact you have with innocence before corruption and what Holden would call phoniness creep in.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: I think Cornish was a castle to which he retreated; it protected him from the rest of the world.

  DAVID SHIELDS: People in New York City, which is one of the most parochial places on the planet, thought of Salinger as having moved to Antarctica. In fact, he was within a few hours’ drive of both Boston and New York, and in the coming decades he’d frequently return to Manhattan.

  A. E. HOTCHNER: I checked with [fiction editor of Collier’s] Don Congdon about him. Don said, “We’ve lost track of him. Jerry has just absolutely deserted all of us and we don’t hear from him.” And he was a very close friend of Don’s.

  S. J. PERELMAN, excerpt from letter to Leila Hadley Luce:

  We have a date to meet Jerry Salinger and have dinner with him up there [in Vermont], entailing a 50-mile drive for him from his mountain retreat at Windsor. He has been holed in there all this time presumably foraging verbs and gerundives. Personally I’d go crazy all alone on a crag, and I fully expect him to break into wild laughter during the meal and goose waitresses.

  ETHEL NELSON: I was part of a high school gang Jerry used to take in his jeep to ball games [shortly after he moved to Cornish]. He was just one of the guys. I don’t think anybody was awestruck. He had written Catcher in the Rye, but we really didn’t know about that. We just enjoyed him because he was someone willing to be there and take us to games and he was fun to be around. He was a good guy. You know, back then, who thought about what you did? I was a student at Windsor High School with a girl named Shirlie Blaney. She was a year ahead of me, but we all went to the games together. If it was an away game, Jerry would be there with his jeep, and we’d all climb in and as many as could squeeze in went. The rest had to find another way to go.

  It was an old open jeep; it didn’t have a hood on it or anything. It was all open and it was fun. All the girls wanted to go. We would go to the game, and then a lot of the girls who were allowed to would continue on by going to the restaurants and having meals with him. I wasn’t allowed to. My parents were pretty strict, so I would find a ride home because I lived in Cornish and we were in Windsor. There was a soda fountain in Windsor that most of us gathered at, and Jerry used to come right in and be a part of it. He seemed to like the youth. Jerry was such an energetic person that he put energy out to everyone around him, and it was so contagious. The girls were screaming and laughing and giddy and you could get a headache pretty easy. I guess that’s why the guys didn’t go along, because there was so much noise. Jerry was a careful driver. You wouldn’t think of it to hear all the noise. I can hear it just sitting here, thinking about it. I guess he allowed us to be ourselves, whereas at home with Mom and Dad you were always trying to be the perfect child to do whatever they expected of you. With Jerry around, you could do what you wanted and not think you were going to be reprimanded. It was all laughter. That’s how the whole time was—all laughter. It was neat.

  Most of the time, the jeep filled up fast. You didn’t think of him as an adult. He was, but he was laid-back, fun to be around, very handsome, very smooth-skinned and very thin, and always willing to take you where you wanted to go, like he had all the time in the world. The guys seemed to have the vehicles, but we girls were stranded, and Shirlie Blaney ended up quite friendly with Jerry and they went on several dates.

  In all my high school years with Shirlie Blaney, I don’t think I ever met her parents. I really didn’t know them. Shirlie was like most of us: if we wanted to do something bad enough, Mom and Dad were never going to know about it until it was too late. I have a feeling her parents probably didn’t know all that was going on.

  While Jerry was picking us up and taking us for rides to different places, he and Shirlie would talk; she was editor of the yearbook. She did a lot of newspaper work during high school, so they did have this connection, this love for writing, and that might have been a big reason why Shirlie and Jerry got drawn together—because they had this writing business that they wanted to talk to each other about and maybe build each other up a bit on.

  The people did know that he was a writer. Nobody really gave it much thought, least of all us kids. Everyone always asks, “Why did he hang around with the kids?” Well, because we didn’t care about what he did. We were friends. Until Shirlie Blaney blew that.

  Shirlie Blaney’s yearbook photo.

  Shirlie started getting serious about Jerry and wanted to be more than a friend. When they started going together, we all teased her a bit. I mean, here was Jerry Salinger the writer, and who did she think she was? She said, “You’d be surprised what I’m going to do with this.” She just continued going out with him.

  SHIRLIE BLANEY: I knew all about him before I ever met him.

  ETHEL NELSON: When Jerry came down to pick us girls up to go to the games, he and Shirlie would be in the front seats, and they would do a lot of talking while we were on our way. She started going to his hom
e. He had a lot of things he wanted to teach her on the writing-type thing. There were four or five of us girls there, and we were all just wide-eyed over him, too. I think if he had given any of us the eye, we probably would have jumped in with both feet and been very proud to have done it.

  During the time Shirlie Blaney was going with Jerry—I don’t know if I have the right to use the word “dating,” but they were getting together, and we would call that a date—she was very popular in school. She was a beautiful girl; she had beautiful blond hair. The boys in school wanted to get together with her, too.

  SHIRLIE BLANEY: He seemed to be delighted. He cried, “Come on in,” and started bringing out the Cokes and potato chips. After a while he began playing some records on his hi-fi; he had hundreds of records, classics and show tunes. We were there a long time and I finally told my date, “Come on, let’s get out of here; Jerry doesn’t want to be bothered with us.” But every time we started to leave Jerry would say, “Stick around. I’ll play another record.” . . . He’d play whatever record we asked for on his hi-fi—my favorite was Swan Lake—and when we started to leave he’d always want to play just one more. . . . I couldn’t understand why he put up with us, but he didn’t seem to want us to go. I never saw anyone fit in the way he did. He was just like one of the gang, except that he never did anything silly the way the rest of us did. He always knew who was going with whom, and if anybody was having trouble at school, and we all looked up to him, especially the renegades. . . . He seemed to love having us around, but I’d sit there and wonder, Why is he doing this?

  SUSAN J. BOUTWELL and ALEX HANSON: [Joyce Burrington] Pierce was a 19-year-old Windsor High graduate back in the days when Salinger would drive into town in his little Hillman sports car, his pet schnauzer riding in the back. Salinger would visit with the Windsor teens, watching their high school football games, attending movies with them and inviting them to his house to listen to Billie Holliday records or play with his Ouija board, recalled Pierce.

  JOYCE BURRINGTON PIERCE: My father was a bit leery of us spending so much time with him. He’d say, “You girls are going to end up in a book.” I read all of his stories looking for me.

  SHIRLIE BLANEY: Finally I decided that he was writing another book about teenagers and we were his guinea pigs. I don’t mean that he was looking down his nose at us or had us on a pin or anything like that. He was very sincere. There’s nothing phony about him. He’s a very nice person. Once I told him that I thought I’d like to be a writer, that I was lying awake at night trying to think of ideas. He nodded very sympathetically and said, “That’s the best way. Be sure to get up and write them down, so you don’t forget them.”

  —

  JOHN C. UNRUE: Salinger has a great need to preserve the innocence in young people—to stop time as much as possible.

  JOHN WAIN: [Salinger] seems to understand children as no English-speaking writer has done since Lewis Carroll.

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

  The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different.

  DAVID YAFFE: Salinger often conflates sexuality and young girls. There is something weirdly lecherous about Salinger’s description of Phoebe sleeping. On the one hand, it’s a very pure image. But on the other hand there are gratuitous descriptions of Phoebe drooling on her pillow, and Salinger seems to take great delight in these descriptions—just the way that they’re written.

  J. D. SALINGER (“A Girl I Knew,” Good Housekeeping, February 1948):

  Leah’s knock on my door was always poetry—high, beautifully wavering, absolutely perpendicular poetry. Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls. I was always half-eaten away by respect and happiness when I opened the door for Leah.

  ETHEL NELSON: At that time, we never gave it a thought at all. Later, I know it was questioned as to why Jerry always went to the younger female sex partner. I really think it was because he wanted to stay young. I think he was afraid to grow old.

  —

  CATHERINE CRAWFORD: [One day he] was having lunch in a café where he always had lunch, and Shirlie Blaney saw him and asked if she could interview him for the high school paper. These were his friends, really, the people he liked to hang out with, and he didn’t see any harm in it; it seemed like he just wanted to do a favor for a friend.

  SHIRLIE BLANEY: Our page came out once a month—that is, if we were lucky. There wasn’t much news in Windsor. We were having our usual trouble filling the page this day, and then I happened to look out the window—we were up on the second floor—and there across the street was Jerry. I told another girl to come along and ran downstairs after him. I had a wonderful idea.

  I said “Jerry, I need a story for the paper. Tell me some things I can write about.”

  He said “What paper?“

  “Our high school page in the Eagle.”

  “Sure. Let’s go inside.”

  ETHEL NELSON: He gave her an interview with the promise from her that it was for the school paper—just the school paper. Shirlie wrote the article.

  Shirlie Blaney, editor of the high school yearbook, 1953.

  ERNEST HAVEMANN: The Windsor High School [paper] came out the following Monday . . . her interview was not there. That evening Salinger called her at home—a surprising action, it seems to me, for a man who hates publicity—and said, “That story wasn’t in the paper. What’s going on?”

  DAVID SHIELDS: There it is, the characteristic Salinger gesture: his deeply ambivalent, genuinely confused relationship to attention. Go away. Where did you go? Blaney’s article appeared not in the high school paper but in the local paper, the Daily Eagle.

  THE CLAREMONT DAILY EAGLE: During the preparation of the recent student edition of the Daily Eagle, Miss Shirlie Blaney, of the class of 1954 at Windsor High School, spied Jerome David Salinger, author of the bestseller Catcher in the Rye in a Windsor restaurant. Mr. Salinger, who recently bought a home in Cornish, obliged the reporter with the following interview.

  An author of many articles and a few stories, including Catcher in the Rye, was interviewed and provided us with an interesting life story.

  A very good friend of all the high school students, Mr. Salinger has many older friends as well, although he has been coming here only a few years. He keeps very much to himself, wanting only to be left alone to write. He is a tall and foreign looking man of 34, with a pleasing personality.

  Jerome David Salinger was born January 1, 1919, in New York. He went to public grammar schools while his high school years were spent at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. During this time he was writing. His college education included New York University, where he studied for two years.

  With his father, he went to Poland to learn the ham shipping business. He didn’t care for this, but he accomplished something by learning the German language. Later he was in Vienna for ten months but came back and went to Ursinus College. Due to lack of interest, he left at mid-year and went to Columbia University. All this time he was still writing. Mr. Salinger’s first story was published at the age of 21. He wrote for two years for the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and many more. He later worked on the liner Kungsholm in the West Indies, as an entertainer. He was still writing for magazines and college publications. At the age of 23, he was drafted. He spent two years in the Army, which he disliked because he wanted all of his time to write.

  He started working on Catcher in the Rye, a novel, in 1941 and finished it in the summer of 1951. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and later came out as a pocket book. The book is a study of a troubled adolescent boy. When asked if it was in any way autobiographical, Mr. Salinger said: “Sort of. I was much relieved when I finished it. My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book, and it was a great relief telling people about it.”<
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  About two years ago he decided to come to New England. He came through this section. He liked it so much that he bought his present home in Cornish. His plans for the future include going to Europe and Indonesia. He will go first to London perhaps to make a movie. One of his books, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, has been made into a movie, My Foolish Heart.

  About 75 percent of his stories are about people under 21 and 40 per cent of those about youngsters under 12. His second book was a collection of nine stories. They first appeared in the New Yorker.

  CATHERINE CRAWFORD: The daily newspaper, the Claremont Daily Eagle, published Shirlie’s story on their front page. This was the ultimate intrusion for Salinger.

  ETHEL NELSON: It really went well if it could have just stayed that friendship, but when Shirlie started getting serious—not just a friend but wanted to be more than that—I think that’s when Jerry put a stop to it all. He gave her an interview in good faith and she hurt him; she used him. Shirlie found a way to make some fast bucks, I think. He was very, very unhappy about that, and I think I would have been, too. There were a lot of personal things in there that were just for the local people, so he was very hurt by it. Then Jerry didn’t trust any of us. He was not our friend anymore.

  Jerry didn’t want to be approached by anybody, and if you started toward him, he would just put his head down and walk right away, so you knew immediately that wasn’t the right thing to do, and it was very hard. After I got married to Wayne in 1954, Wayne knew Jerry even better than I did because he worked for him off and on, cutting his wood, chopping the hay down in the field, and he was really friendly with him. I would go over with him to the house when he would work, but Jerry would never speak—so yeah, it hurt.