Salinger

by David Shields

  For most readers, if “Seymour” comes right up to the precipice of legibility, logic, and sense, “Hapworth 16, 1924” (The New Yorker, June 19, 1965) falls into the crevice. Wisdom delivery system overrules realistic representation: seven-year-old Seymour delivering arias on philosophy and religion. Buddy types up Seymour’s impossibly rococo letter for us, adding an extra layer of discipleship between us and the godhead, in a way that’s exactly reminiscent of the layers of discipleship in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, a quotation from which appears on Seymour and Buddy’s beaverboard. Seymour says, “Raja-Yoga and Bhaki-Yoga, two heartrending, handy, quite tiny volumes, perfect for the pockets of any average, mobile boys our age, by Vivekananda of India. He is one of the most exciting, original and best equipped giants of this century I have ever run into; my personal sympathy for him will never be outgrown or exhausted as long as I live, mark my words; I would easily give ten years of my life, possibly more, if I could have shaken his hand or at least said a brisk, respectful hello to him on some busy street in Calcutta or elsewhere.” This is literal hagiography.

  After Catcher, Salinger was no longer a novelist per se, and in a sense it’s possible to see him as no longer especially devoted to fiction writing, at least as conventionally understood. He was seeking to write, and indeed was writing “wisdom literature”—metaphysical uplift—adapting Eastern satori for Western consumption. As Som P. Ranchan writes in An Adventure in Vedanta: J. D. Salinger’s The Glass Family:

  One of the visions of the great Vedantist Vivekananda was to bring the message of Vadanta from the cloisters and the forest where it was first discovered and propounded by the sages and the disciples into the mainstream of daily existence. It is a tribute to the creative genius of Salinger that he has done it. He has brought it into the routine of teaching, acting. He has brought it into a New York apartment, into its living room, bedroom. He has brought the Ganges from the head of Siva into the tub where Zooey splashes like a porpoise while reading his [brother’s] letter replete with Zen satories and Vedantin affirmations. He has broadcast it coast to coast through a quiz program and that too from the voices of children. He makes us smoke it through cigarettes and cigars. While we inhale the acrid smoke from the freshly-lit cigars of Zooey, as we travel in taxis with crooked taximeters, while rummaging through loaded ashtrays, he makes Vedanta real—something that Raja Rao the self-confessed Vedantist could not do. Vedanta thus ceases to be the sacred preserve of the monks. . . . In a word, the vision of Ramakrishna is made real with such fun, mischief, metaphysical seriousness and profound, symbolic gravity. Finally, it must be said that Salinger has profound grasp of the methods of action exemplified in Franny and Zooey, of worship leading to gnosis exemplified in Buddy, and of gnosis and love exemplified in Seymour, and in the beginning and the end and behind them all, exemplars of various approaches stands the dynamic Mother Bessie who is the crazy, cosmic vibration of Prema, and love.

  In “ ‘The Holy Refusal’: A Vedantic Interpretation of J. D. Salinger’s Silence,” Dipti Pattanaik writes, “Thus the conventional quest theme of Catcher gradually gives way to stories which deal more and more with mysticism. From the busiest places in the world Salinger moves in his later stories to narcissistic autonomous families and cocooned individuals. Like the shift of themes there is predictable shrinking of language. From Holden’s slang, signifying a language of mass consumption, there is movement towards a solipsistic voice—a voice that is often a monologue (Buddy’s), confiding secrets ([Seymour’s] letter), offering an advice (Zooey’s advice to Franny), or speaking to and about itself (Buddy as an artist talking about the intricacies of writing a fiction)—almost a voice of the monastery.”

  Indeed, Salinger’s late novellas—“Zooey,” “Seymour,” “Hapworth,” with their loose form, overlapping tales, diary entries, letters, Socratic dialogues, dueling swami-wisdom jousting tournaments—resemble nothing so much as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. The man and writer who had once been opposed to all established authorities and guidelines had succumbed to the rules of a religion and, in so doing, had absolutely nowhere to go but deeper into the forest of his own silence.

  Three key Vedantic tenets, as summarized by Bardach: “You are not your body”; “You are not your mind”; “Renounce name and fame.” Relief from Salinger’s anatomy; relief from postwar psychic trauma; the last forty-five years of his life. His commitment to Vedanta was, by far, the most serious and long-lasting commitment of his life. His religious devotion exists in direct relation to his postwar trauma—it’s a heartbreaking attempt to retire it—but it wound up being his second suicide mission. War killed him the first time; Vedanta, the second.

  Conversation with Salinger #9

  A. SCOTT BERG: I never met Salinger, but I came close. In the early 1970s, when I was researching my book on Max Perkins [the legendary editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe], I spent a lot of time with all the Perkins relatives. Some of them lived up in the ancestral home of the Everetts and the Perkinses, which is in Windsor, Vermont. Right across the longest covered bridge in the United States, which crosses the Connecticut River, is Cornish, New Hampshire.

  I went up to visit Max Perkins’s sister, a woman named Fanny Cox—Mrs. Archibald Cox Sr., the mother of the Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox. She invited me to dinner. As we were sitting at dinner, I said, “Gosh, you know, as I was driving up, it occurred to me that across the covered bridge is Cornish, New Hampshire. J. D. Salinger lives over there. Have you ever seen him?” She said, “Well, why do you want to know?” I said, “I was just curious.” She said, “As a matter of fact, he sat in that chair you’re sitting in just last night. I served him dinner, just the way I’m serving you dinner.” I said, “You’re—you’re kidding.” She said, “No. He comes over here regularly because he comes over to pick up his mail and do some shopping on this side of the river.”

  Fanny Cox was then in her eighties. She looked like this great American pioneer woman, something between Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath and Beulah Bondi [a character actress who specialized in maternal roles; she played Mrs. Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life]. She was the United States of America. We chatted about Max Perkins and this and that. Then I said, “Listen, J. D. Salinger was here? He was here just last night?” She said, “Oh, are you a great fan of J. D. Salinger?” I said, “Actually, I’m not really, but he’s J. D. Salinger. Shouldn’t I want to go to Cornish to see him?” She said, “Well, do you have anything to say to him?” I said, “Not really.” She said, “If I had J. D. Salinger to dinner, what would you want to know?” I said, “I’d want to know if he’s still writing.” She said, “Yes, he’s still writing.” I said, “Okay.” She said, “Is there anything else you’d want to know?” I said, “No, just that he’s okay.” She said, “He’s fine. So there is no reason for you ever to see him, is there?” Dinner was over. That was that. It’s the closest I got to J. D. Salinger.

  16

  DEAR MISS MAYNARD

  CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1972–1973

  Joyce Maynard is a world-weary eighteen-year-old Yale freshman who becomes famous when, on April 23, 1972, she publishes a New York Times Magazine cover story, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” about what it’s like to be a world-weary eighteen-year-old Yale freshman: “We inherited a previous generation’s hand-me-downs and took in the seams, turned up the hems, to make our new fashions. We took drugs from the college kids and made them a high-school commonplace. We got the Beatles, but not those lovable look-alikes in matching suits with barber cuts and songs that made you want to cry. They came to us like a bad joke—aged, bearded, discordant. And we inherited the Vietnam War just after the crest of the wave—too late to burn draft cards and too early not to be drafted. The boys of 1953—my year—will be the last to go.”

  Salinger, fifty-three, who doesn’t believe in author photographs, is captivated by Maynard’s cover photograph and dying-swan syntax. During their nine-month relationship he will wind up t
elling Maynard, “I couldn’t have created a character as perfect as you.” Maynard will later say, “In his letters he appears to be talking about me. Reading what he has to say now, I see something else. His letters are about himself.” Here, in excerpts from these letters—which were later sold and removed from the public record, but which we have now obtained—is the only self-portrait available of a man who had removed himself from the public eye decades before.

  Dear Miss Maynard,

  A few unsolicited words in strictest privacy, if you can bear it, from a countryman, of sorts, one who is not only an equally half-and-half and right-handed New Hampshire resident but, even more rare and exciting, perhaps the last active Mousketeer east of the White House. . . . My guess is that you’ll be receiving a pretty interesting-peculiar assortment of letters as a result of this past Sunday’s Times Magazine. In my probably over-earnest way, I ask you to be almost inhumanly cautious about accepting any offers or invitations that come in from anybody and everybody—publishers, editors, Mademoiselle staff people, television talk-show hosts, movie people, etc.

  Do, please, watch over your own talent with some realistic (or duly cynical or bitter) awareness that no one else is really fit to do it. I know a little bit about the risks and rather doubtful attractions of early publication.

  I think you’re sounder of mind, limb, and psyche than I ever was at eighteen. Better wired. . . . You’re twice the writer and observer at eighteen that I was—ten times, if not more. I was immature, melodramatic, full of self-protective lies, ruses. I wrote and wrote, but badly, really badly. . . . I needn’t have suggested so glumly that you let things build rather slowly. “Fame and success.” No great worry for you because you’re both clever and intelligent, I think. One good mouthful of it and the taste for it alters, drastically or Subtly. Surely “fame” for a practicing writer is mostly comprised of assorted forms of conspicuousness, and nearly all of them, while they last, interruptive and more.

  Be determinedly wise.

  I feel a need to make it pretty clear to you, first, that I’m not wise, at all, and it would shake me more than a little if you thought I might be. I’m mainly just middleaged, suspicious, untrusting, solipsist—a “dirty Capricornian” some new and valued friend called me at dinner in N.Y. last week, in the same awful boat with Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon.

  I’ve spent a great part of my life in grave and increasingly sad doubt about almost every value I’ve ever had a good, long look at. My little conclusions about this and that sometimes almost sound wise to me, even, but I’m not really taken in, because I really and truly haven’t the character, the strength of character, to be wise.

  I’d like to clear the way for us to be friends without any hitchy illusions. I think we almost certainly are friends. Landsmen, if you know that old intelligent Central European word.

  I’m not surprised that you see already that the written word from strangers holds frightening power. . . . More formidable still, strangers use that power with such maddening insensitivity, lack of responsibility. . . . Half the time, one isn’t even written to—one’s written at. In my heaviest publishing years, the whole damn setup very nearly undid me. I must say I handled the whole thing, all those years, with something horribly close to masterly incompetence. I did just about everything wrong, responded to everything in the most uncool way imaginable. A few letters, over the years—a very few—were on the wonderful side. . . . The odd, rare letter from a sort of kinsman or kinswoman or kinschild. But those were very rare, and I can tell you without fake modesty (because it has nothing to do with modesty) that maybe no fiction writer living has had more bagfuls of public mail than I have.

  Friends, relatives—they’re hell on the practising writer, too. My relatives, at least—the ones I begrudgingly and gracelessly and forcibly acknowledge as relatives—I grew to loathe during my years of most conspicuous success. Every relative of mine took unto herself or himself an emotional piece of action. Or worse. . . . You’ve seen a little of that in the last couple of weeks, haven’t you. The new life in the dining hall at Yale. Envy, resentment, fawning.

  I think I’m as sure as I am of anything that you are a natural writer, if there is such a thing. . . . So, please, let neither yourself nor any maddening friends or relatives or lovers or critics give you any great or lasting doubts about that. . . . Do your work, do the kind of writing you like to do, and try very hard to be cool about the rest, to allow nobody in newsstandland to push your private buttons. Let nobody out there make you either grieve or worry inordinately—or, just as important, maybe more, let nobody’s opinion or two-cents about your output make you inordinately happy.

  I’m sort of a fifty-three-year-old pantywaist and indoors country type.

  I love to shoot pool, or used to.

  If you’d like to go on Mr.-Salingering me, please do—whatever suits you—but nearly everybody calls me Jerry except myself.

  It’s hard to be real, but landsmen stand as good a chance of simply talking together by mail as anybody else.

  One of my time-eating interests, passions, is Medicine, anything that concerns healing, repairing, or just generally offsetting disintegration. . . . Both kids are tremendously experienced in recounting symptoms to me—a detailed, really careful recital of symptoms. It’s terribly touching, or at least is when I’m detached enough to think of it that way. In the end, it may be the one thing of any use that I may be able to give them.

  You may wonder what’s a Fiction Writer doing getting himself all wound up for years and years with medical philosophy, therapy. I’ve done more or less the same thing with some aspects of religious philosophy, mysticism, and a few other things. Sometimes I get sidetracked from my own fictions for long months at a time, even a year or two a time, and it’s sort of a worry to me, but not always. Somebody could glibly say that all interruption of work routines is probably “karmic,” and God knows I’ve used and abused and even wallowed in that brilliant and really perilous word in my life, but the word hasn’t been coming to my mind lately, and I’m glad and relieved about it—I seem to get along best when I let my mind steer clear of all attractive Far-Eastern glossary words, marvelous and sui-generis as those words can be.

  I loved all your letter, and the way your mind goes, works, and one of the reasons I couldn’t get a mailable letter out to you all weekend was that I caught myself writing to you as though we were of an age, alumni of the same years, wars, marriages, books, etc., and what you really are is an eighteen-year-old girl, though not like any other.

  I think there is no limit to what you can do in your lifetime if you want to, Joyce.

  This last thing, the Measure for Measure production, must have been a big strain. That whole production couldn’t sound more 1972, more With It. Almost every public step taken, in the arts or anywhere, seems to be in a nether direction, downward, maggot-ward. . . . I don’t know anything for sure about sex—I would swear no writer does or he wouldn’t have bothered all that much to be a writer in the first place—but I think the Masters and Johnson report was one of the worst things that could have happened to girls and boys, males and females, in our time. A good friend and counsellor of mine is a Reichian psychiatrist . . . and I asked him if he didn’t think the whole Masters and Johnson study was fallacious because it was made in our time and our culture, at a time when all true and real orgasmic normalcy is withheld or partially withheld, and he jumped up, in real excitement, and said yes.

  I watch a terrible amount of television. . . . I’m a natural watcher. I can watch the worst of anything on television if the set’s on. . . . I do know the show Let’s Make a Deal—all those afternoon souls who have been directed to squeal incontinently when they win the stereo-broiler-exercycle combinations, the same way those couples on The Newlyweds have been instructed to kiss or bump heads when their answers tally. . . . I’ve seen some of the early Andy Griffith–Mayberry half-hours, with Opie, Barney (who was once marvelously and incessantly called Bernie by some o
ut-of-town trollops).

  Oh, actors! I was one myself once. . . . I don’t really like theater as theater. I don’t like Curtains, I don’t like entrances, exits, movement on stage, larger-than-life readings of lines. I don’t like “beautiful” sets, I don’t like bare sets. Directors, producers, programs—there’s magic in it all, no doubt, but it acts on my system like small amounts of poison.

  I love, really love, writing for the printed page. . . . What I love, what intrigues me, is the little theater inside the private reader’s head. Maybe, in fact surely, not all private readers’ heads. . . . I don’t read much fiction anymore.

  I myself have never had Sheer Guts. I’ve chickened out of many things, but many. . . . I don’t think not having some courage necessarily disqualifies anyone from certain kinds of bravery. I myself have been peculiarly brave, unnoticeably brave, a few times in my life, and I have never felt like a “coward” for not having much natural or ready courage. . . .

  The very few people I have known whom I’ve considered to be out-and-out cowards were in most popular respects fearless insensitives. I once shared a foxhole for part of an afternoon with a nearly fearless lout, and it was a revelation.

  You’re surely not lacking anything important, Joyce. That piece you did for the Times Magazine Section was written by a girl who has everything.