DAVID SHIELDS: Following Mockler’s many visits to Claire at the hospital, he proposed marriage to her and—in the wake of Salinger’s silence—she accepted, but in the summer of 1954 Salinger visited her; she was reading The Way of a Pilgrim. Salinger drew her away from Mockler and his Christian fundamentalism via Vedanta, the Hindu philosophy that was overtaking Salinger’s life. Claire soon divorced Mockler. Four months shy of graduation from Radcliffe, she was forced by Salinger to choose between him and a college degree.
SHANE SALERNO: Claire’s feeling for Salinger remained strong, and after breaking off the marriage to Mockler, Claire moved in with Salinger. They married on February 17, 1955, in Barnard, Vermont. Salinger and Claire drove through sleet on a bleak February day to get married by a justice of the peace. On the marriage certificate Salinger said this was his first marriage, completely removing any legal trace of his first wife, Sylvia Welter.
Jerome D. Salinger and Claire Douglas’s marriage certificate.
JOHN SKOW: Uncharacteristically, Salinger threw a party to celebrate his marriage. It was attended by his mother, his sister (about whom little is known except that she is a dress buyer at Bloomingdale’s and has been divorced twice). Claire’s first husband was also present. A little later, at the Cornish town meeting, pranksters elected Salinger Town Hargreave—an honorary office unseriously given to the most recently married man; he is supposed to round up pigs whenever they get loose. Salinger was unamused.
PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger’s wedding present to Claire was the manuscript of “Franny”; Franny appears to be based on Claire, and it’s not difficult to see Salinger’s portrait of Franny’s painfully conventional boyfriend, Lane Coutell, as being none-too-subtle mockery of Mockler.
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BEN YAGODA: Salinger’s long story “Franny,” published in 1955, created a sensation. People were talking about it all across the country—the characters, the situations, and especially what had happened to make the main character Franny faint. Was it an existential crisis, or was she pregnant?
JOHN WENKE: When he wrote “Franny” I think Salinger really still wanted to be a popular writer. On the one hand, it was very chic at that time to be a falling-apart rich girl who is having a religious crisis, and I think that became a culturally revolutionary act in the mid-fifties, particularly with the more sanitized Eisenhower administration modality.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Gus Lobrano, New Yorker editor, December 20, 1955:
I’ve been putting this off and putting this off. Mostly because of the Nineteenth Floor criticism that Franny might be pregnant—it seemed to me such a deadly idea, if it was the main one that the reader came away with.
DAVID SHIELDS: Many New Yorker readers thought Franny was pregnant. “She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment—then broke down.” If pregnancy is not the main idea here, what is? That Franny, a mythological female, is suffering a postwar nervous breakdown? The mystic’s confused searching for meaning is fulfilled through the use of young girls’ bodies. The womb is the reincarnated war wound. Franny is prayerful witness to the necessity of her creator’s war survival.
MAXWELL GEISMAR: As in any good Scott Fitzgerald tale, it is the weekend of the Yale game. . . . In his Burberry raincoat, Lane Coutell is reading Franny’s passionate love letter. . . . Franny, listening to him “with a special semblance of absorption,” is overcome by her distaste for his vanity, his complacency. It is not only him, it is his whole life of habits, values, standards that she cannot bear. She ends up not only with an indictment of upper-class American society, but almost all of Western culture itself.
J. D. SALINGER (“Franny,” The New Yorker, January 29, 1955):
Lane had sampled his [martini], then sat back and briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding himself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt.
PAUL LEVINE: Alienated from her Ivy League boyfriend and everything he represents, she turns inward, with the help of a mystical book about a Russian peasant who found God [in tune] with his heart beat when he repeated the “Christ prayer” over and over. Suffering from psychosomatic cramps induced by an environment she can no longer stomach, Franny rejects the comfort of a public restaurant for the awkward privacy of a lavatory, where, in a curiously fetal position, she can pray.
PAUL ALEXANDER: “Franny” is an indictment (as is, of course, Catcher in the Rye). What Salinger is attacking is not specific, but general, even societal. Franny hates insincere people and phonies, yet she is forced to deal with them at college. Even worse, she’s dating one, and for that she has no one to blame but herself, maybe, although in the course of the story she never accepts responsibility for her failure to break up with him. Instead, “Franny” seems to imply that because the world is full of phonies, all one can do is retreat from it into some form of religion. In Franny’s case, she seeks solace in the Jesus Prayer. Ultimately, however, even religion is not enough. As she tries to cope with her life by clinging to religion, she slips deeper into mental distress, until she is barely able to hold on to her sanity. In Catcher in the Rye, Holden ends up in a mental institution. Franny ends up in an unfamiliar room, babbling a prayer to herself, unsure of where she is and where she is going next.
JAMES LUNDQUIST: The Way of a Pilgrim and the Jesus Prayer are by no means being put forth as answers to anything by Salinger. . . . A major idea in Zen . . . is that people who are too critical of others, who are too concerned with the analysis of particulars, fail to reach an understanding of the oneness of all things, and eventually disintegrate themselves.
THE WAY OF A PILGRIM: We must pray unceasingly, always and in all places . . . not only when we are awake, but even while we are asleep.
JOHN WENKE: It’s a hunger that Franny, for example, feels and responds to with the Jesus Prayer. It’s not so much the prayer; it’s the desire for something that will fill that hole. And Salinger’s characters are people who have holes that can’t be filled.
THE JESUS PRAYER: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.
SHANE SALERNO: There was so much goodwill built up for Salinger after Catcher and Nine Stories that he was once again seen to be leading the culture, years ahead of the Beats and early Zen adopters. He had once again caught the moment before the moment arrived, but he was in deeper trouble than he realized. At the time, he didn’t think he was undergoing a crisis, but he was—a marital crisis and an artistic crisis and a religious crisis. Years later Salinger would thank his spiritual guide Swami Vivekananda for getting him through this “long dark night.”
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HENRY GRUNWALD: Stories about his wife [Claire] are even rarer and equally cherished as collector’s items. There is, for instance, the occasion when Salinger was meeting an English publisher at the Stork Club, and Claire and a friend sat at a nearby table, pretending to be tarts. Or the time, after “Franny” was published, when friends would come upon Salinger and Claire, their lips moving silently. It was a private charade—an acting out of the near-final lines in the story: “Her lips began to move, forming soundless words.”
SHANE SALERNO: Salinger and Claire set about building a life for themselves in step with the purity of their religious beliefs and independent of the conventional 1950s obsession with status and appearance. It was a life of simplicity, with an emphasis on nature and spirituality. The couple vowed to respect all living things and, according to Gavin Douglas, Claire’s brother, refused to kill even the tiniest of insects. Their afternoons were filled with meditation and yoga; at night, they snuggled together and read The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. From the beginning of their marriage, Salinger worried that Claire would be unable to adapt to the solitude and simplicity of life in Cornish.
ARTHUR
J. PAIS: Claire Salinger was attracted to Yogananda’s thinking, too, and got into Kriya yoga. A greater hero for the couple was Lahiri Mahasaya, Yogananda’s guru, who was a married man, proving that yogic attainments could be open to family men and women.
PARAMAHANSA YOGANANDA: You have been chosen to bring spiritual solace through Kriya Yoga to numerous earnest seekers. The millions who are encumbered by family ties and heavy worldly duties will take new heart from you, a householder like themselves. You should guide them to understand that the highest yogic achievements are not barred to the family man. . . .
No necessity compels you to leave this world, for inwardly you have already sundered its every karmic tie. Not of this world, you must yet be in it.
“My son,” Babaji said, embracing me, “your role in this incarnation must be played before the gaze of the multitude. Prenatally blessed by many lives of lonely meditation, you must now mingle in the world of men.”
DAVID SHIELDS: Margaret Salinger credited Lahiri Mahasaya’s advice for giving her father and mother the approval needed to go ahead not only with the marriage but the birth of their daughter.
CLAIRE DOUGLAS: On the train home to Cornish that evening [after seeing a yogi in Washington, D.C., in early 1955], Jerry and I made love in our sleeper car. . . . I’m certain I became pregnant with [Margaret] that night.
Drawing of Claire, pregnant.
PAUL ALEXANDER: On December 10, 1955, J. D. Salinger became a father. His daughter, Margaret, was born. It was obviously an ecstatic event for Salinger, the birth of his first child. But, ironically, the way he viewed Claire changed after that. Before that, she had been very much the image of the late teens, early twenties woman he was initially fascinated by. Now she was a mature woman. She was the mother of his child. And so, while he was still attracted to her, because she had given him this great gift, his view of her changed, and the birth of the child had a permanent effect on their relationship.
Claire was a smart, attractive, and—one would assume—energetic woman who had come from a proper family in England. She had attended Radcliffe. She was a woman who was connected to the world. And because of the routine of Salinger’s writing life, that ended.
THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA: A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts, and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on “woman and gold,” I say, “Shame on him!” But I say that a man is blessed indeed who eats, drinks, and roams about, but who keeps his mind from “woman and gold.”
[In response to a disciple who was still having sex with his wife,] Ramakrishna says, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You have children, and still you enjoy intercourse with your wife. Don’t you hate yourself for thus leading an animal life? Don’t you hate yourself for dallying with a body which contains only blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta?”
CLAIRE DOUGLAS: We did not make love very often. The body was evil.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Swami Nikhilananda, 1972:
Between extreme indifference to the body and the most extreme and zealous attention to it (Hatha Yoga), there seems to be no useful middle ground whatever, and that seems to me one more unnecessary sadness in Maya.
SHANE SALERNO: During this time, the mid-1950s, Salinger met and developed a close relationship with one of his neighbors, Judge Learned Hand, who was Margaret Salinger’s godfather and whom the New York Times has said “belongs with John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo: among the eminences of the American judiciary.” Often called the “tenth justice of the Supreme Court,” he was viewed by Salinger as a “true Karma Yogi.” Salinger’s description here conveys how deeply involved he now was with the language and vision of Vedanta. In a letter to Hand, Salinger wonders “whether I’m still [plying] my trade as a short story writer or whether I’ve gone over to propagandizing for the loin-cloth group.”
To make matters worse for Claire, Salinger was absorbed by his work throughout the first year of their marriage. He frequently took trips to New York City, where he would hole up in the New Yorker offices and work. S. J. Perelman, the New Yorker humorist who’d gotten to know Salinger as a colleague at the magazine, visited him often in Cornish.
LEILA HADLEY LUCE: Sid [S. J. Perelman] said, “It’s very strange: he’s got this concrete bunker where he works, but he’s got a great big statue of Buddha in the garden, and he’s got a lot of these Buddhist priests around him.” Sid thought [Claire] was just a collegiate type of girl.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Jean Miller, 1954:
The house was very still when I got here, and I sat down and thought for hours. In the end, it seemed to me that if I’m to get my work done, if I’m to do my “duty” (a word I hate) properly—that is, more or less in the Bhagavad Gita sense of the word—I ought to and must stay away from the city.
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SHANE SALERNO: Claire must have dreamed about a life with Salinger and a family in the quiet woods of New Hampshire, but she quickly learned that he already had a family: the Glasses.
SANFORD GOLDSTEIN: You’ve got this very, very bright family, the Glass family. It’s a very concentrated picture of troubled humanity and we want to know them. We want them to get beyond their problems; we want to learn from them.
GERALDINE McGOWAN: One of the odd things about comparing real children to the Glass children is nobody would want their children to be the Glass children. They’re all suffering terribly. They’re all in a lot of pain most of the time. Salinger’s real children may have thought their father preferred the Glass children. That is part of the dysfunctional quality associated with Salinger, because if you loved your children, why would you ever wish upon them that life?
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, February 3, 1960:
We have a second child due very shortly, and I’ve been working overtime to beat the clock. You must have a pretty good idea by now how little peace there is around the house when a new baby is around. And I agree with you about old friendships. Especially war ones.
ETHEL NELSON: When I started taking care of his kids, it was through Wayne, my husband, because he was already working for Jerry down there. Claire was due to have Matthew and they had a little girl, Margaret. They needed help keeping Margaret busy so that Claire could do what she had to do. Jerry knew me from back when he hung out with me and my friends in the Windsor High School days, so the hiring process was pretty simple.
My job was to take care of Margaret, who we called Peggy. She was about four or five years old at the time and a sweet girl, very sweet. And Jerry, I knew he was around, but I never saw him because he was down [the hill], working on his books, and just didn’t come up around the house at all. I really don’t know if the children got to know him very much in the early years. I’ve seen some pictures where he carried Peggy around, but how many times did that happen?
The house was a cute house, kind of like a dollhouse, right near the road and with a big fence for protection. I think there were a few flowers out front. Claire attempted to make a garden and have everything look nice, but it was not friendly soil. It hadn’t been worked up or fed for years and years. The land was very rustic, with lots of woods around and fields. Behind the house you had a deep incline, which is where Jerry built the other building so he could write down there.
It wasn’t a house; it was just a small building. I would think of it like a dynamite house. That’s where he would go down, anytime, day or night, go in and shut the door, and you wouldn’t see him for a week or longer, because he got into a writing mode and had to be left totally alone. I don’t think it was much more than a room, room and a half, his writing building.
Wayne cleared brush, cut down trees that were bothersome, mowed the lawns, did gardener types of things. Wayne would go down and work around the woods and kept the path cleared between the house and the writing building.
I never went down there. Wayne did one day; he was
out there working, and Jerry went to the door and asked him if he wanted something cold to drink. Wayne sat down and chatted with Jerry, which I know today is a very rare thing. They just got to talking, and Jerry asked Wayne if he’d like an autographed copy of The Catcher in the Rye. And Wayne said, “No, that’s all right, Jerry, but thank you. I don’t read all that much.” My husband was just a farm boy; he didn’t think too much about it. I guess that signed copy would be worth quite a bit of money today. Wayne told me there was quite a mess of papers down there. I guess all authors have a mess of papers, but I don’t know any other authors.
When I was working for Claire, I very seldom ever saw Jerry. I would go in and straighten up the kitchen and talk with Margaret, and Matthew being the baby, I didn’t have to do too much with him. That’s where Claire was busy. I never fixed a meal. Claire was great at that sort of thing. She was a good cook. I just cleaned up, played with Margaret, and went home.
I’d get there at eight-thirty. If there were dishes around, I’d do them up. Usually Peggy was still with Mom and in the other room, and then she would come out and I’d have the housework part done. We went out for walks, not too far. Jerry wouldn’t allow you to go too far, so we’d go out on the side of the house and we’d pick flowers and bring them into Mom, or Margaret would get up on a stool and help me with the dishes. Or we would get things out for her to color. We spent a lot of time just chatting together. Peggy was a neat kid. I could keep her busier by being outside, walking and looking at flowers and talking about things outside that way. But you know, three- or four-year-olds, you can’t talk a whole lot to them about stuff.
She was happy; Margaret was always very happy. Always had that big smile. I don’t recall anyone having to speak to her more than once, so she was being brought up well to listen when things were said. I think she really needed a friend young in life. You always picture those kinds of kids as being brought up happy. I just hate to think of children growing up so lonely, so alone. I don’t think they ever really knew a home life, and I feel sorry for that. Every child needs a home life.
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