ERNEST HAVEMANN: Near the end of the new book, Zooey tells his sister [Franny] about the time that Seymour urged him to shine his shoes before appearing on the [radio quiz program It’s a Wise Child]. Zooey objected that nobody could see his shoes, but Seymour insisted: “He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. . . . He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again. . . . This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies. . . . I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer. . . .” Then Zooey goes on to say, “There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. . . . And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . It’s Christ Himself, Christ Himself. . . .” And upon hearing these words, Franny, who has been having the symptoms of a nervous breakdown in connection with her religious strivings, relaxes and falls into a deep and soul-satisfying sleep, and the story is over.
ALFRED KAZIN: In each story [“Franny” and “Zooey”], the climax bears a burden of meaning that it would not have to bear in a novel; besides being stagey, the stories are exalted in a way that connects both of them into a single chronicle. . . . Both Franny and Zooey Glass are, indeed, pilgrims seeking their way in a society typified by the Fat Lady. Not only does the entertaining surface of Franny and Zooey depend on the conscious appealingness and youthfulness and generosity and sensitivity of Seymour’s brother and sister, but Salinger himself, in describing these two, so obviously feels such boundless affection for them that you finally get the sense of all these child prodigies and child entertainers being tied round and round with the veils of self-love in a culture which they—and Salinger—just despise.
S. J. ROWLAND: The cumulative effect is bright and tender rather than powerful, and poignant rather than deep: these are the strengths and limitations of Salinger as a writer. These granted, he has an almost Pauline understanding of the necessity, nature, and redemptive quality of love.
VED MEHTA: Salinger was the first one, at least in my consciousness, to put his finger on the fakery; to be an enlightened person, to be a good person, you had to avoid phoniness. You had to avoid all this fakery even if that made you become very solitary and cut off. At the same time—I’ll never forget—there is the wonderful scene about loving a fat lady, which was, in a way, the unconscious New Yorker principle: you didn’t reject people because they were fat or they were ugly; each human being had to be prized as him- or herself. I think it was very much the New Yorker ethos, a Shawn ethos, and I have no idea, actually, whether Salinger got that from Shawn or Shawn got that from Salinger.
STEPHEN GUIRGIS: When I started writing my play Jesus Hopped the A Train, I wrestled with the idea of God. I was stuck, and I read Franny and Zooey. It just blew me away. I’m still writing about religion, still trying to figure out how to get by in this life. Salinger’s explanation at the end of that book is as good as any I have to go on.
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PAUL ALEXANDER: During 1958, Salinger had begun work on “Seymour: An Introduction,” yet another novella about the Glass family, and the densest thing he had ever written. As a result, he found work on “Seymour” to be unusually difficult, much more so than anything he had written up until then. Throughout the fall of 1958, his work in Cornish was hampered by minor illnesses and the unavoidable distractions caused by Claire and the baby. Finally, in the spring of 1959, Salinger realized that if he were going to finish the novella, which the New Yorker was pressuring him to do, he needed to have a stretch of time during which he could focus only on his work. So he went to New York to work in the New Yorker offices, something writers did when they needed to devote large blocks of intense, uninterrupted work to a piece of prose. He had tried writing several days in an Atlantic City hotel room, but he had not been able to accomplish what he had hoped to.
PHOEBE HOBAN: In letters, he reported that his work habits were hard on Claire—and on himself. He worked so feverishly on one story that he got shingles. Working on the Glasses, he wrote, put him in a constant “trance.”
NEW YORKER INTERN: He was in New York, working on “Seymour.” He’d come up to the office at night and there’d be just the two of us in this big dark building. He was working seven days a week and it was the hardest work I’ve ever seen anyone do.
PAUL ALEXANDER: Eventually, Salinger worked so hard he made himself sick. Returning to Cornish, he stayed there long enough to get well; then he went back to New York for another several-days-long editing session in the New Yorker offices to finish the piece.
BEN YAGODA: The turning point with Salinger and the New Yorker and the Glass family came in 1957, with the publication of “Zooey,” which wasn’t as immediately accessible as the previous works. “Seymour: An Introduction” intensified this sense that he was getting more remote from readers. It added to the sense that Salinger was growing more wrapped up in his own world. Not that he didn’t still have ardent fans. There were still many people who snapped it up as soon as it came out.
WILLIAM WIEGAND: In “Seymour,” Buddy takes up one at a time the pertinent characteristics and activities of his brother. . . . If I pull myself together, Buddy says, Seymour who has killed himself may yet be reconstructed—his eyes, his nose, his ears may rematerialize, even his words may be heard without the echo of the tomb. . . . Buddy becomes almost indistinguishable from Seymour. Buddy himself notices this. The object-observed has become the observer. All the air has been pumped out of the bell jar. . . . Consequently the description of the relationship is so great an effort that Buddy breaks into a cold sweat or sinks to the floor. . . . He [Seymour] is ephemeral, and no matter how many homely anecdotes are told about him, he has grown too diffuse to look at in the daytime; his talents have become supernatural.
JAMES LUNDQUIST: It is the idea of compromise that Buddy is mulling over at the age of forty when “Seymour: An Introduction” begins. He is speculating about his own career as a writer, a career that at first does seem like a considerable compromise when contrasted to that of Seymour. Buddy is a writer of fiction who must worry about communicating with the “general reader.” . . . The quotations from Kafka and Kierkegaard along with the corresponding implications of Zen art do suggest one thing—that the entire story is a fictional treatise on the artistic process.
GRANVILLE HICKS: Self-consciousness gives the story its peculiar quality, and although the tone is beautifully sustained, as always in Salinger’s later work, the self is exceedingly obtrusive.
JOHN WENKE: At the very outset Buddy Glass confronts the necessary (and intrinsically self-defeating) paradox of his condition. The only way to introduce the late Seymour is to use language; the use of language by nature is doomed to fail.
J. D. SALINGER (“Seymour: An Introduction,” The New Yorker, June 6, 1959):
There are one or two more fragmentary physical-type remarks I’d like to make, but I feel too strongly that my time is up. Also, it’s twenty to seven, and I have a nine-o’clock class. There’s just enough time for a half-hour nap, a shave, and maybe a cool, refreshing blood bath. I have an impulse—more of an old urban reflex than an impulse, thank God—to say something mildly caustic about the twenty-four young ladies, just back from big weekends at Cambridge or Hanover or New Haven, who will be waiting for me in Room 307, but I can’t finish writing a description of Seymour—even a bad description, even one where my ego, my perpetual lust to share top billing with him, is all over the place—without being conscious of the good, the real. This is too grand to be said (so I’m just the man to say it), but I can’t be my brother’s brother for nothing, and I know—not always, but I know—there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307. There isn’t one girl in there, including the Terrible Miss Zabel, who is not as much my sister as Boo Boo or Franny. They may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine. This thought manages to stun me: There’s no place I
’d really rather go right now than into Room 307. Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?
MICHAEL WALZER: [Since The Catcher in the Rye] Salinger has written almost entirely of the Glass family, a clan of seven precocious children, of Irish-Jewish stock and distinctly Buddhist tendencies. The main theme of these stories has been love. . . . The family here is a mythical gang, truly fraternal, truly affectionate; it is as if, remembering Holden’s loneliness, Salinger is determined never again to permit one of his characters to be alone.
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EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger’s withdrawal from those who should be closest to him took its first toll in early 1957, while he was finishing “Zooey.” On a trip to New York City, his wife, Claire, suddenly packed up their baby daughter, Margaret, and left him. Supported by her stepfather, Claire and her baby lived in New York City for four months until she gave in to Salinger’s pleading and returned to Cornish.
JOHN C. UNRUE: Early every morning Salinger went to that bunker with his lunch and wrote until late in the evening, giving strict orders that he was not to be disturbed for anything unless the house was burning down. I think Salinger built a bunker because he associated it with impenetrability. He regarded it as a safe place, a good place to write. Whether there were bombs falling, whether there were animals attacking, whatever, it was the place nobody could enter. It was the sacred place for him. It was important for Salinger to have a completely private space and a space that was uniquely his. It was almost a holy spot that no one else should ever come in.
STEPHEN GUIRGIS: I think he’s a guy who went into that bunker and wrote every day. He wrestled with himself and wrestled with demons and wrestled with the muse and tried to make good work. I can’t even imagine the degree of introspection, gut-wrenching, soul-searching discipline, commitment, self-abuse it must have taken to produce some of the work that he produced.
DAVID SHIELDS: It’s hard not to think of the bunker as a way to return to the war, World War II. The bunker would remind Salinger that he should be writing about the most serious matters of existence. The bunker also functions as a fence between yourself and the world. God forbid you might hear a radio from a car passing by or a bird flying overhead. As a writer, you want to be driven by your own aesthetic impulses, but the world has to come in to you, lest you disappear down your own alimentary canal. You have to have the world come in, and then you want to send messages out. It’s supposed to be a two-way communication system.
J. D. SALINGER (“Seymour: An Introduction,” The New Yorker, June 6, 1959):
Yet when I first read that young-widower-and-white-cat verse, back in 1948—or, rather, sat listening to it—I found it very hard to believe that Seymour hadn’t buried at least one wife that nobody in our family knew about. He hadn’t, of course. Not (and first blushes here, if any, will be the reader’s, not mine)—not in this incarnation, at any rate. . . . And while it’s possible that, at odd moments, tormenting or exhilarating, every married man—Seymour, just conceivably, though almost entirely for the sake of argument, not excluded—reflects on how life would be with the little woman out of the picture . . .
PAUL ALEXANDER: Claire and the domestic life she represented were always secondary to his almost maniacal drive to write, to write every day, to write all day long.
There was another problem that developed in the marriage. Salinger became obsessed with eating organic foods prepared only with certain cooking oils. Now you might think that that’s a minor development in one’s life, but when someone is exerting that level of control, controlling what his spouse is allowed to eat, it’s got to have an obvious and profound effect on the relationship.
Eventually, Claire simply couldn’t take it anymore: the isolation, the weird eating habits, the emotional abuse as a result of this isolation. She went to see a doctor in nearby Claremont and complained of restlessness, inability to sleep, loss of weight, all the classic signs of someone who was depressed.
THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA: It is “woman and gold” that binds man and robs him of his freedom. It is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he cannot act as he likes.
PAUL ALEXANDER: There would be long stretches of time when he wouldn’t come out of the bunker at all. He would stay down there. He put an army cot in there. He put a phone in. It was designed so that he literally never had to leave the bunker. He could stay down there and write, day and night, for days and days and days, eventually weeks on end. And you think about the life [the children’s babysitter Ethel Nelson] saw. Salinger’s family—they were up in one house, living their lives, and here he was, only a few yards away. Secluded, holed up in a bunker. Writing and writing and writing and writing, with clear instructions to Ethel and to Claire and the children not to be disturbed, ever, under any circumstances. What a bizarre existence this was.
DAVID SHIELDS: In 1961, when Margaret was five, she would sometimes walk through the woods to bring her father lunch in his bunker. In his bunker were a cot, a fireplace, and a manual typewriter. Claire and Margaret had reality to contend with, whereas the Glass family could be what his imagination needed them to be, wanted them to be. It was almost inevitable that when there was a competition between the two families that Salinger created, the Glass family would win out in the end.
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SHANE SALERNO: As director of linguistic studies at Behavioral Research Laboratories in Menlo Park, California, Gordon Lish asked Salinger, among many others, to write an essay for the Job Corps “Why Work” program.
GORDON LISH: In February 1962 the telephone operator at the Behavioral Research Lab said she had a Mr. Salinger on the phone for me, and because of the nature of the laboratory I thought that she was talking about Pierre Salinger, the press secretary to President Kennedy. So I was surprised to discover that it was J. D. Salinger. He started by saying, “You know who I am and you know I don’t reply to telephone calls and mail, and I’m only doing this because you seem to be hysterical or in some sort of difficulty.” That struck me as amazing since the telegram had gone out in the fall sometime and here it was winter. But that was the pretext of his phone call—he said I was in some kind of problem. Then he said, “You only want me to participate in this because I’m famous.” And I said, “No, no, no, it’s because you know how to speak to children.” He said, “No, I can’t. I can’t even speak to my own children.”
I said it was easy to speak to children if you open up your heart to them. After this, we talked for about twenty minutes, chiefly about children. His voice was very deep. Haggard-sounding, weary-sounding. He didn’t sound at all like I expected Salinger to sound. He didn’t sound verbal. He possessed none of the adroitness I would have anticipated. Anyway, he did tell me he never wrote anything if it was not about the Glasses and the Caulfields, adding that he had shelves and shelves filled with the stuff. So I said, “Well, gee, that will be fine. Just give me some of that.” Soon the phone call ended, and, of course, he didn’t agree to provide me with a piece on why he loved his work.
A. E. HOTCHNER: He retreated more and more into a cement bunkhouse and God knows what else, rejecting marriage and other things.
14
A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE FALL
CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1959–1965
I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall.
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951
Newsweek, Time, and Life write major investigative stories on Salinger; he refuses participation in the fame-making machinery, which, of course, does nothing but deepen the mythology that surrounds him. Literary critics attack his work, and Salinger retreats deeper into the bunker, producing in response the novella “Hapworth 16, 1924,” whose main impulse, manifested as stylistic indulgence, is to protect his death-dealing soul.
Salinger residence, 1961.
MEL ELFIN: Ever si
nce Jerome David Salinger’s one novel The Catcher in the Rye became a best seller nine years ago, readers have been asking questions and getting no answers about the most mysterious of modern writers. For example, in New York last week, telephone calls to Salinger’s literary agent, his publisher, The New Yorker (which prints his short stories), and even to that great stone storehouse of information the New York Public Library, produced monotonously discouraging replies: “Salinger? I’m sorry, there’s not much we can tell you.” . . .
Salinger has built an iron curtain of secrecy which extends not only to his family, but to the characters of his fiction as well. Not long ago stage director Elia Kazan was supposed to have cornered Salinger and pleaded for permission to stage The Catcher on Broadway. After listening to Kazan’s sales talk, Salinger, a tall, handsome man with a melancholy air, replied: “I cannot give my permission. I fear Holden wouldn’t like it.”
SHANE SALERNO: Newsweek was the first publication to reveal the existence of Salinger’s bunker.
MEL ELFIN: For Salinger, writing is an extremely difficult business. It means, for one thing, getting up at 5 or 6 a.m. and walking down the hill to his studio—a tiny concrete shelter with a translucent plastic roof. Salinger, who chain-smokes while he works, will often put in as many as fifteen or sixteen hours a day at his typewriter.
BERTRAND YEATON: Jerry works like a dog. He’s a meticulous craftsman who constantly revises, polishes, and rewrites. On the wall of the studio, Jerry has a series of cup hooks to which he clips sheafs of notes. They must deal with various characters and situations, because when an idea occurs to him he takes down the clips, makes the appropriate notation, and places it back on the proper hook. He also has a ledger in which he has pasted sheets of typewritten manuscript on one page and on the opposite one has arrows, memos, and other notes for revisions.
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