Salinger

by David Shields

  Listening to the children’s chorus, you would experience levitation if you were a more denominational man. That is, you’re seeking religious salvation, and you’ll find it in Esmé, whose voice leads the way. You leave the church before the chorus director’s speaking voice can entirely break the spell. The adult world ruins the child world for you. You can’t exist in the former (your mother-in-law asks you to send her cashmere yarn first chance you get away from “camp”) and you don’t belong in the latter (you can’t marry a twelve-year-old and, anyway, she will turn into a woman soon enough).

  Proof of this: she’s wearing a military-looking wristwatch that is marking that very passage into adulthood. Are you deeply in love with your wife? No, because she’s an adult. War damage is everywhere: Esmé’s father was killed in North Africa; her mother (in all likelihood) in the Blitz. The book begins with a Zen koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Here is another one: “What did one wall say to the other wall?” The only way past a koan is to progress beyond rationality; the only way past the damage is a leap into the mystical, which is almost always accessed through the unself-consciousness of a child, who—in this case, Esmé—is asking you to write a story, which is, of course, the very story we are reading and you are writing. You notice that, after the rainstorm, a lot of the wave in Esmé’s hair is coming back; also, quite a bit more to the point, when she crosses her feet, she aligns the toes of her shoes, she’s wearing white socks, and her ankles and feet are lovely. Wanting to kiss her, you kiss her brother, Charles—give him a loud, wet smacker—but you hate that both Charles and Esmé are headed toward a less sentimental way of life, that is, they will grow up and become self-conscious, lose their gorgeous access to their own feelings.

  As for you, you’re getting better acquainted with squalor all the time. You haven’t come through the war with all your faculties intact. You’ve had a nervous breakdown, spending two weeks in a military mental hospital. You look like a goddam corpse. You had been triple-reading paragraphs; now you’re triple-reading sentences. You’ve been chain-smoking for weeks. Your gums are bleeding. The goddam side of your face is jumping all over the place. You press your hands against your temples (in an earlier incarnation, you shot yourself to death in the right temple). To you, life is hell, and hell is the incapacity to love, and your incapacity to love is because Esmé etc. Temporary expiation: you grab the wastebasket and vomit. You’re truly saved when Esmé sends you a broken watch, temporarily arresting time and temporarily joining her life to yours. The age difference disappears: you can live, in your imagination, through her imagination, forever.

  After the war, you return home. Home sweet home. Christ. You’re losing your goddam mind. You’re thinking you may go back in the army—with your little helmet and big, fat desk and nice, big mosquito net. At least it’s oblivion. Your wife has fled you to be with an untraumatized man. You’re too weak for her. You’re weak—that’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Every night you have to keep yourself from opening every goddam closet door in the apartment, expecting to find a bunch of bastards hiding all over the place. (You’ll never not be in the CIC.) She’s an animal. You’re not a goddam animal. You must be bigger/better than that. To you, the body is the site of all woe. You want an adult woman to save you and she can’t, even if she holds a flashlight while you change a tire, buys you a suit that fits, or quotes a romantic poem. You’re not savable, salvageable. No real woman can be equal to the mythic wilderness of your mind/imagination. No real woman or family can coexist with your postwar rage and sentimental pioneering in Cornish/Hürtgen.

  What, then, is the way out? Is there any alternative to suicide the nth? Will you always be at best a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss? The thought wouldn’t be endurable for more than a few seconds. But here it comes: a transcendent experience, a case of genuine mysticism: a hefty woman is changing the truss on a wooden dummy in a shop window. She is, of course, the Fat Lady. She is Jesus Christ Himself, Buddy. When she sees you, she falls down (being thirty and hefty, she’s beside the point), but the sun speeds toward the bridge of your nose at the rate of ninety-three million miles a second. Blinded and frightened, you put your hand on the window glass to keep your balance. The Transcendent Experience lasts no more than a few seconds, but when you get your sight back, the woman has left the window, leaving behind a shimmering field of exquisite, twice-blessed, enamel flowers.

  What has happened? Have you levitated or been obliterated? Both, of course, and a child will again solve that particular koan:

  Although, in this incarnation, you are only ten years old, you remind yourself to find your father’s dog tags and wear them whenever possible—“it won’t kill you and he will like it.” In your opinion, life is a gift horse. You wonder why people think it’s so important to be emotional. Your mother and father don’t think a person is human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or annoying or unjust. Your father thinks you’re inhuman. If you have emotions, you don’t remember when you ever used them; you don’t see what they are good for. You love God, but not sentimentally. You love your parents, but only in the sense that you have a strong affinity for them. In an earlier incarnation, you were a man from India making very nice spiritual progress. Your father thinks you’re freakish because you meditate. Your mother worries that thinking about God is bad for your health. You think it’s silly to be afraid of dying; all you do is get the heck out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s done it thousands and thousands of times. You know that you have a swimming lesson in about five minutes, and you know that your sister, Booper, is going to push you in and you will fracture your skull and die.

  PTSD—with its endless embodied flashbacks—is a form of reincarnation, is it not? The little girl is no longer a figure of redemption; Booper pushes you to the death you eagerly embrace because you have found, in Vedanta, the source of solace: a reincarnation myth. Better luck next time. No pain—one can hope—the next go-round. Just as you forced your first wife to watch your first suicide, you are now traumatizing Booper, punishing her for being human; she will relive her participation in your death the rest of her life. Your genius/heroic/suicides/near-suicides throughout your various incarnations are a pacific/hostile action against the world’s war. Walking into the wound is more important to you than the world that caused the wound. Suicide is enlightenment. You are in this world but not of it. You are now free to be with those you love, whether they are religions or historical figures, personal friends or fictional characters.

  Conversation with Salinger #6

  PAT YORK: In 1966 I was invited to photograph the actors Marlon Brando and Robert Forster in the film version of Carson McCullers’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye. It was a night shoot starting at dusk and continuing until daybreak, with the location at the Mitchel Military Base on Long Island. . . .

  As usual on a film set, there was time spent waiting for scenes to be set up. During one of those breaks a handsome mature man approached me and started a conversation. He kept telling me he loved my voice and also asked many questions about my views on certain topics, my likes and dislikes. There was no opportunity to ask him about himself, as he was questioning me without a break and kept telling me how much he liked my voice. I thanked him but could not understand his obsession with my vocal cords.

  Finally he mentioned that he could not believe I had no trace of an accent and inquired what part of Italy I was from. I told him I was an American who had been born in Jamaica and attended a French school in England and had also been tutored in Germany, with the rest of my education in the States.

  He looked stunned. He told me that he had been asking various people who I was and had been told by at least three that I was Italian. We both laughed, and I introduced myself and he then gave me his name: J. D. Salinger. . . .

  I knew that Salinger had become a recluse, and I couldn’t equate this fac
t with the man I was speaking with so freely. I told him how much I loved “The Catcher in the Rye” and that my young son, Rick, had just read the book and could talk about nothing else. Its author said he would like to be in touch with Rick and asked for his name and address. . . .

  J. D. Salinger did have a correspondence with my son. A few years later, Rick was studying in Paris. We met for dinner one evening and he was desolate. His apartment had been ransacked and, among other items, the suitcase where he kept all Salinger’s letters had been taken. He didn’t care about losing many other possessions, but he couldn’t accept that his idol’s correspondence had been stolen.

  PART II

  GARHASTHYA

  HOUSEHOLDER DUTIES

  13

  HIS LONG DARK NIGHT

  CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE; NEW YORK CITY, 1953–1960

  From the late 1940s onward, Salinger becomes increasingly committed to Eastern philosophy and religion, especially Vedanta. Visiting the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, going on retreats in upstate New York, and reading sacred Hindu texts, he bases virtually every decision of his life on Vedanta’s tenets. Vedanta’s prescription for the second stage of a man’s life: become a householder—marry and create and support a family. Salinger marries Claire Douglas, the model for his story “Franny,” and is a member of three families: his own; the fictional Glass family; and a third, the New Yorker of editor William Shawn, enabler of Salinger’s obsessions, especially purity and silence and (ultimately) the purity of silence. Salinger writes, obsessively, in a bunker separated from the main house. Salinger talks as if his fictional characters exist in the world outside the page. He exists in a no-man’s-land among his fictional families, the Glass and Caulfield clans, the pre- and postwar worlds, and the lives of young women he tries to seduce into his imagination and life. As paterfamilias, he is juggling these multiple families. He is trying to save postwar, childhood innocence from his own postwar trauma. The implicit tension is bound to cause destruction.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Following the episode with Shirlie Blaney, Salinger decided to go out and reconnect with people in his community. He was looking to become friendly with older people, going around to various parties he was invited to.

  SHANE SALERNO: In fall 1950, Salinger, who was thirty-one, met Claire Douglas, who was sixteen—a senior at Shipley, a girls’ boarding school in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania—at a party given by Bee Stein, an artist, and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, a translator and writer for the New Yorker. Claire’s parents lived in the same apartment building as Steegmuller and Stein, on East 66th Street.

  MARGARET SALINGER: She arrived at the party looking strikingly beautiful, with the wide-eyed, vulnerable, on-the-brink look of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Leslie Caron in Gigi . . . Claire wore her chestnut hair smoothed back from her lovely forehead. . . . The night my parents met . . . she was wearing a mid-blue linen dress with a darker blue velvet collar, simple and elegant as a wild iris.

  CLAIRE DOUGLAS: God, I loved that dress. . . . It matched my eyes perfectly. I’ve never worn anything more beautiful in my life.

  SHANE SALERNO: At the party Jerry and Claire couldn’t talk much, because they came with other people, but the next day Salinger called to thank Bee Stein and ask for Claire’s address at Shipley. The next week she received a letter from him. He phoned and wrote to her throughout the 1950–51 school year.

  Claire Douglas as a Radcliffe student.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: The moment Salinger saw her he was infatuated with her. She was attractive and very personable. She was pretty in a charming sort of way, and she had a softness and a delicateness to her that Salinger found very appealing. . . . As Salinger grew older, he was consistently attracted to women in their late teens. There was the young woman in Vienna, then Oona O’Neill, and now there was Claire.

  Salinger discovered that her father was Robert Langdon Douglas, the well-known British art critic. Interestingly enough, she had been a product of a marriage in which her father was significantly older than her mother, so it wasn’t unusual for her to be attracted to Salinger.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Claire came from an illustrious family: her much older half-brother, William Sholto Douglas, served in the British Royal Air Force for most of the 1914–47 period, including both world wars. He commanded postwar British occupation forces in Germany for a year before becoming the chairman of British European Airways. He also became a member of the peerage and the House of Lords. Her father, who enlisted in World War I at age fifty, was an expert in Sienese art. He died in Florence in 1951. Claire was used to being around older men who’d fought in the world wars. Like Salinger, she was also half-Irish.

  MARGARET SALINGER: Her childhood was not one that set her up with any kind of foundation. She was sent off to convent boarding school at age five, in and out of eight different foster homes, off to another boarding school.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger is interested in very, very young women—girls, really—but so are a lot of men. What’s revealing about Salinger’s fixation on girls is that he views them, essentially, as escapes to a time when no one “had ever heard of Cherbourg or Saint Lô, or Hürtgen Forest or Luxembourg.” (Salinger, “The Stranger,” Collier’s, December 1, 1945.)

  GERALDINE McGOWAN: Salinger was an extraordinarily attractive person, with tons of charisma, and from what we know he bombarded everybody with affection at the beginning of the relationship. They were the best, they were the loveliest, they were the smartest, they were gifted. And then he gets them and it ends.

  DAVID SHIELDS: The summer after her freshman year at Radcliffe, Claire returned to New York City to model for Lord & Taylor.

  SHANE SALERNO: Claire would visit Jerry’s apartment on East 57th Street, where she’d spend the night on his black sheets, but they wouldn’t have sex. Salinger was already under the influence of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna: “avoid woman and gold.”

  CLAIRE DOUGLAS: The black sheets and the black bookshelves, black coffee table, and so on matched his depression. He really had black holes where he could hardly move, barely talk.

  SHANE SALERNO: Claire hid certain facts in the early stages of her relationship with Salinger. She hid her Lord & Taylor modeling job from him because she knew his response would be negative.

  In 1953, after Salinger had moved to New Hampshire, he visited Claire at Radcliffe, where he wooed her with long conversations and riverside strolls. But in between the visits, he remained distant, and Claire would feel abandoned. When Salinger surprised her by asking her to drop out of school and move in with him in Cornish, she refused. Hurt, he disappeared. Claire was distraught and drove up to Cornish to speak to him, but he was nowhere to be found.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger disappeared when Claire first hedged about moving into his house.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger left to spend several months in Europe.

  SHANE SALERNO: During this time, he also continued to be in touch with Jean Miller.

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

  I’ve never loved anyone enough, it seems to me, to go up and break the glass walls I’ve put the person inside. It makes it very hard on everybody concerned. Maybe one day I’ll change. I honestly don’t know. I’ve never really felt integrated enough to love anyone freely. I’ve never felt enough like just one man, instead of twenty men.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Claire collapsed physically and mentally. She endured mononucleosis and an appendectomy, landing her in the hospital for quite a period of time. A Harvard Business School grad named Coleman Mockler who was infatuated with her repeatedly visited her in the hospital.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Claire was an echo of eighteen-year-old Oona O’Neill a decade earlier and a pre-echo of Yale freshman Joyce Maynard two decades later. Salinger’s sexual and romantic imagination circled obsessively around the same, usually dark-haired, boyishly built, gamine figure, from Miriam to Doris, Sylvia, Jean Miller, and onward. He was also repeating the Oona-Chaplin-Salinger
triangle.

  Claire was already entwined with Mockler, who was newly and deeply involved with fundamentalist Christianity. She and Mocker spent the summer together in Europe. When she returned in mid-September, Salinger wouldn’t take her calls.

  SHANE SALERNO: In an undated 1953 letter he informs Jean Miller that his recently published collection of stories, Nine Stories, is “selling very well, but I won’t get any of the money till September.” (The book reached the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list and was on the list for fifteen weeks.) In subsequent letters to her, he begins to discuss Eastern philosophy.

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

  The word is Ko-an, or just Koan. And a Koan is an intellectually insoluble problem given to Zen monks by their masters. I was just telling you a few of them as they came to my mind.

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

  I’ve had two invitations for dinner this weekend from local people. I’ve lied and said I’m going to Boston. I suppose I’ll have to go now. Damn people.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, 1954:

  About those two books I sent you. The little archery book isn’t an orthodox Zen text or anything like that, but it’s nice—the Zen is pure. And besides the beauty of Zen is constantly absorbed in the fact that Zen is where you find it.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, 1954:

  I know it’s worrying some of my friends, especially the ones who like my fiction. I think some of them guess that I may turn into a really monastic type sooner or later, give up my fiction, never marry, etc. Nothing is further from my mind at this point. What a low and specious thing “religion” would be if it were to lead me to negate art, love.