Life magazine photo of Salinger’s dog peeking out from under the fence.
ETHEL NELSON: The only ones I ever saw were Claire and the two children, never saw Jerry. He more or less lived down in that bunker. When he was writing a book, you did not bother him. Claire was not allowed to bother him. You couldn’t call him; you couldn’t go down, knock on the door; you left him alone until he came out. So I only saw Claire, and I would do light housework and play with the children, keep them busy. But you’d think she was a single parent as far as seeing Jerry around. I just never saw him.
MARC WEINGARTEN: Newsweek had a big coup with the bunker reveal, and they also provided some telling insights into Salinger’s private life, such as the fact that Salinger, as a registered Republican, would have been a Nixon man in 1960. And that he liked Japanese poetry and detective novels.
The second magazine to weigh in on Salinger was Time. When the magazine’s subscribers checked their mailboxes the week of September 15, 1961, and found forty-one-year-old Salinger on the cover, it was a very, very big deal.
ROBERT BOYNTON: The cover of Time magazine in 1961 was reserved for statesmen and Nobel laureates.
September 15, 1961, cover of Time magazine.
MARC WEINGARTEN: Nikita Khrushchev was on the cover the week before. It instantly vaulted Salinger onto another plateau of fame.
STEVEN WHITFIELD: The image of Salinger on the cover of Time wasn’t a photograph; it was a drawing. It’s an imaginary portrait of Salinger with a cliff behind him. It conveys the sense that the author has enough integrity not to be part of the publicity machine.
PHOEBE HOBAN: My father, Russell Hoban, illustrated the 1961 Time magazine Salinger cover story when Franny and Zooey was published, and he had a vision of those characters as looking like haunted spirits in bedlam.
JOHN SKOW: It is sunny at the edge of the woods, but the tall man’s face is drawn and white. When he came to Cornish, N.H., nine years ago, he was friendly and talkative; now when he jeeps to town, he speaks only the few words necessary to buy food or newspapers. Outsiders trying to reach him are, in fact, reduced to passing notes or letters, to which there is usually no reply. Only a small group of friends has ever been inside his hilltop house. Not long ago, when he and his family were away, a couple of neighbors could stand it no longer, put on dungarees and climbed over the 61/2-ft. fence to take a look around.
What they saw behind a cluster of birches was a simple, one-story New England house painted barnred, a modest vegetable garden, and—100 yards and across a stream from the house—a little concrete cell with a skylight. The cell contains a fireplace, a long table with a typewriter, books and a filing cabinet. Here the pale man usually sits, sometimes writing quickly, other times throwing logs into the fire for hours and making long lists of words until he finds the right one. The writer is Jerome David Salinger, and almost all his fictional characters seem more real, more plausible, than he.
The appearance this week of his new book, Franny and Zooey, actually two long, related stories that originally ran in The New Yorker, is not just a literary event but, to countless fans, an epiphany. Weeks before the official publication date, Salinger’s followers queued up, and bookstores sold out their first supplies. To a large extent, the excitement is fueled by memories of Salinger’s most famous work. For all of the characters set to paper by American authors since the war, only Holden Caulfield, the gallant scatologer of The Catcher in the Rye, has taken flesh permanently, as George F. Babbitt, Jay Gatsby, Lieut. Henry, and Eugene Gant took flesh in the ’20s and ’30s. . . . As nearly as possible in an age in which all relations are public, J. D. Salinger lives the life of a recluse. He says that he needs the isolation to keep his creativity intact, that he must not be interrupted “during working years.” But the effort of evading the world must by now be almost more tiring than a certain amount of normal sociability would be. One critic and fellow novelist, Harvey Swados, has in fact suggested, pettishly, that Salinger’s reputation is in part a consequence of his “tantalizing physical inaccessibility.” . . . He will turn and run if addressed on the street by a stranger, and his picture has not appeared on a dust jacket since the first two printings of Catcher (it was yanked off the third edition at his request). He has refused offers from at least three book clubs for Franny and Zooey.
JEAN MILLER: A friend who was at a cocktail party met a Time magazine reporter who said, “We’re working on a story about J. D. Salinger,” and my friend said, “Well, I went to school with a girl who knew him very well.” And they tracked me down.
I was married and living in Maryland in a farmhouse, pretty much away from anywhere. All of a sudden this very tall man appeared in the doorway. He was from Time, and he said he understood that I knew Jerry Salinger, and I said, “Only slightly.” We sat in the living room and stared at each other for about fifteen minutes. I can remember it as though it were yesterday. He said, “Why is it that people who knew him won’t talk about him?” I said it’s because Jerry doesn’t want the people who knew him to talk about him. And he finally left. The magazine article said I wouldn’t talk because I was recently married. I don’t know why they said that. It had nothing to do with it.
MARC WEINGARTEN: Time magazine went so far as to track down Salinger’s sister, Doris, who was a buyer at Bloomingdale’s, and these are the reporter’s notes from that moment: “Doris, tall, handsome woman in late 40s, hair medium brown, well groomed. She acted put upon. ‘I wouldn’t do anything in the world my brother didn’t approve of. I don’t want to be rude, but you put me in a very difficult position. Why don’t you just leave us alone?’ ”
Salinger residence, 1961.
Life’s feature on Salinger, which was the last of the three major pieces to run, arguably had the greatest impact. For one thing, it was a huge spread: nine pages. But the main event was the fact that one of the magazine’s photographers had snapped a picture of the great man. This was like getting a picture of Bigfoot. Salinger is wearing a one-piece jumpsuit, leaning on a cane. His face is gaunt; he wears a downcast expression. In short, he looks terribly unhappy. That one picture would crystallize the Salinger legend for decades to come.
ERNEST HAVEMANN: At one side of the road, on a brief clearing which serves as an outdoor garage, stood Salinger’s two cars: his old beat-up Jeep, a new gray Borgward. On the other side was that forbidding fence. I parked next to the Jeep and walked to the gate. It was solid like the rest of the fence, and was locked. I called hello. It was a rather tremulous hello; I confess it. I was intimidated by that fence.
On the other side a baby began to cry. A screen door quickly slammed. A woman’s voice quietly comforted the child. And then the gate opened—not wide, a tentative slit. A young woman with blondish hair, barefoot, and without makeup, stood there, holding her startled baby in her arms. Behind her was a little girl who had a friendly and expectant look as if she hoped I had brought a playmate. I was meeting the author’s 27-year-old wife, British-born, Radcliffe-educated Claire Douglas Salinger, his 5-year-old daughter, Peggy, and his 18-month-old son Matthew. When I announced myself as a journalist, Mrs. Salinger’s eyes said unmistakably, “Oh, Lord, not another one!” She sighed and told me that she has a set piece for visitors who want to meet her husband, the gist of it being absolutely no. There was no point in making her recite it.
GLENN GORDON CARON: I remember reading in Life magazine about this man Salinger who lived in an isolated country house, didn’t want visitors, didn’t want to discuss himself. I was puzzled, because I suddenly realized there were famous people, who have extraordinary lives, and then there were the rest of us—but here was a man who had an opportunity to have, at a young age, what you thought was an extraordinary life, and he was saying, “I’d rather not, please go away.”
MARC WEINGARTEN: Newsweek and Life pointed out that Salinger had this charmingly dilapidated mailbox on the country road with his name imprinted on it. Both magazines ran pictures of this mailbox, as if it were a major
“get.” Now, I ask you, if Salinger truly wanted to be left alone, why the hell would be put his name—in block letters, no less—on that mailbox? You don’t necessarily need to have your name on a mailbox. It’s because he wanted people, reporters especially, to lean in and crane their necks, but only just a little. He was teasing people with his reticence.
ROBERT BOYNTON: The magazines were just trying to understand what the pathology is of this guy who has fame at his fingertips and hasn’t used it, hasn’t partaken of it in any way. And then there’s this crazed paparazzi, investigative-reporter approach: people peeking over the wall, invading his property. It’s all about the spectacle of trying to figure out this enigma. He doesn’t go to parties. He doesn’t have a house in the Hamptons. He just focuses on this one thing: writing. Talking to him would be like interviewing a monk and asking him about his prayers and his daily routine. I’d ask Salinger: “What exactly is it you do every day?”
GEORGE STEINER: He has adopted a T. E. Lawrence technique of partial concealment. He does not sign books at Brentano’s nor teach creative writing at Black Mountain. “I was with the Fourth Division during the war. I almost always write about very young people.” That’s about all he wants us to know.
MARC WEINGARTEN: Photographers hiding in bushes for days in the rain just to get a photograph of Salinger! Fans are coming from miles away and camping out in Cornish—literally making pilgrimages, as if on a religious quest. All for this man, who wrote one novel and a handful of stories in a decade. It’s madness, really.
What does Salinger make of all this? It had been nearly a decade since Catcher was released; he has published only a handful of stories in the interim. Then Franny and Zooey comes out and, boom, the incandescent light of the media shines on him. He was being besieged by the worst possible enemy of his post-Catcher existence: reporters with large readerships. It is really the first time in American literary history that a prominent writer actually ran away from attention.
—
J. D. SALINGER (dedication to Franny and Zooey, 1961):
As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor, and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.
PAUL ALEXANDER: The admission that Shawn was his best friend because Shawn loved long shots, protected unprolific writers, and defended flamboyant people—all of these, of course, were references to the way Salinger must have viewed himself. The “heaven help him” comment was Salinger’s clue to let his readers know he understood that by naming Shawn as his best friend he was unleashing a stream of ardent fans onto Shawn, who would harass him in hopes of finding out more about Salinger—a fate Shawn could not have cherished.
SHANE SALERNO: Both Salinger and Shawn are supposed to be deeply private, even reclusive men, and yet the gesture of this dedication could not be more exhibitionistic. Would a true “recluse” do that?
J. D. SALINGER (Franny and Zooey flap copy, 1961):
“Franny” came out in The New Yorker in 1955 and was swiftly followed, in 1957, by “Zooey.” Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I am doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I am very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill.
A couple of stories in the series besides “Franny” and “Zooey” have already been published in The New Yorker, and some new material is scheduled to appear there soon or Soon. I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper, too, but I expect to be fussing with it, to use a popular trade term, for some time to come. (“Polishing” is another dandy word that comes to mind.) I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.
It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog.
SHANE SALERNO: When Salinger wrote in Catcher, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it,” that simple line had the effect of sending a signal to a certain type of reader and drew seekers to his driveway for decades. In the same way, the flap copy for Franny and Zooey—describing his working methods, his fictional alter ego, his grand plan for future Glass stories, and especially the secrecy and mystery of it all—significantly heightened interest in him and made him a fascinating subject for press attention.
MARC WEINGARTEN: Salinger was really the first celebrity recluse; Howard Hughes hadn’t really gone around the bend quite yet, and even Garbo wasn’t as monastic as Salinger. Well, who doesn’t want to know more about a recluse? Salinger had transcended mere literary fame; he was now a public figure whose renown functioned independently of what he had accomplished as a writer. Salinger was a source of intrigue because he was so tantalizingly inscrutable and mysterious.
Of course, the residual effect of all this intrigue was that it was great for sales. Franny and Zooey sold 125,000 copies the first two weeks, reached the top spot of the New York Times bestseller list, and stayed number one for 26 weeks, selling 938,000 copies in its first year.
GRANVILLE HICKS: There are, I am convinced, millions of young Americans who feel closer to Salinger than to any other writer.
JOYCE MAYNARD: He despises literary prizes, reviews, New York intellectuals. He hates artiness in writing and writerliness and writers who seem to court an image with as much calculation as movie stars—tweedy types sucking on cigars on their book jackets or exquisitely sensitive-looking women in black turtlenecks. Jerry knows all their names and follows what they’ve been up to more closely than I would have supposed, and possesses little but contempt for what he sees of the literary world.
SHANE SALERNO: Donald Fiene was a former high school English teacher who had been fired for recommending The Catcher in the Rye to his students. He first wrote to Salinger in 1960, and Salinger wrote him back a long and sincere letter, ending with this: “I suppose the sad truth is that you’ve come down with a case of personal principles, and I don’t honestly wish you a cure.”
Perhaps believing that they had established a relationship with this exchange, Fiene wrote to Salinger again in 1961, this time requesting Salinger’s cooperation and assistance in the preparation of the first complete bibliography of Salinger’s work and translations. Salinger, not surprisingly, declined and cited as a reason the grief that recent press attention had caused his friends, his family, and, most important, his work.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Donald Fiene, July 30, 1961:
I’m a living, working writer, and I’m trying rather desperately to hang on to what little undocumented peace and privacy I have left.
I don’t think you have any idea how hellish the summer has been for my family and me. My close friends, my family in New York have been bothered.
ERNEST HAVEMANN: Salinger has suffered; anybody can tell that just from reading his stories. . . . It is the suffering that makes Catcher so agonizingly identifiable and irresistible to young people of all ages. He suffered in the war, and his war stories are great because every sensitive person suffered in the war, or expects to suffer in the next one.
—
PHILIP ROTH:
The response of college students to the works of J. D. Salinger should indicate to us that perhaps he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times, but instead, has managed to put his finger on what is most significant in the struggle going on between the self (all selves, not just the writer’s) and the culture.
JOHN ROMANO: Reading Franny and Zooey, girls found a way of sounding like the interesting people they wanted to be. And I use the word “girls” advisedly. These are eighteen-year-olds. There’s always a risk for the writer that he’ll become part of our nostalgia for previous versions of ourselves, and in Salinger’s case, his writing participated very much in our creating of ourselves.
JOHN SKOW: The characters of Salinger’s most astonishing legend belong to a gaudy and eccentric family named Glass. The chronicle of the clan’s fortunes is far from finished (the Glasses have so far made their appearance only in “Franny,” “Zooey,” and five other stories), but it is already one of the indelible family sagas to appear in the U.S. The elder Glasses are Irish-Jewish vaudevillians now retired to a life of comfortable reminiscence. Les Glass and Bessie Gallagher, professionally known as Gallagher & Glass, achieved “more than just passing notability on the old Pantages and Orpheum circuits.” They are descended from “an astonishingly long and motley double-file of professional entertainers”; Les’ grandfather, for instance, was “a quite famous Polish-Jewish carnival clown named Zozo, who had a penchant—right up to the end, one necessarily gathers—for diving from immense heights into small containers of water.” The seven children, too, have been professionals; they were all prodigies, and they all appeared, at one time or another, on a radio kiddy-quiz show called, slyly enough, It’s a Wise Child.
Any author who promises board and room to seven fictional child prodigies would seem to be diving into a container of water that is very small indeed. The Glass children, moreover, are brave, clean, reverent, and overwhelmingly lovable. Yet they never become the seven deadly siblings (at least they are never all deadly at the same time). The Irish strain makes them formidably talkative and occasionally fey. The Jewish strain lends the family warmth as well as a talent for Talmudic brooding. The vaudeville heritage provides theatricality.
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