Salinger

by David Shields

  Joyce Maynard, 1973.

  He raised his hand and was waving as if he were somebody coming in off a boat. He actually jumped over the banister; there was something very boyish about him and very graceful. He was like a soft-shoe artist, and we just started right in. Finally I was here. I threw my arms around him. I hugged him. He hugged me back. The very first thing Salinger said was, “You’re wearing the watch.” It was a very large watch, a man’s watch. Clearly he’d really studied my photograph in the New York Times.

  “We are landsmen, all right,” he said.

  My heart lifted. I had spent less than an hour in the company of Jerry Salinger, but I was feeling something I’d never experienced before.

  “I’ve waited a long time for you,” he said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you belong here.”

  I jumped in the front seat of his little BMW. I’d never known anybody who had a standard-shift BMW. I felt like I was in a French film. He drove fast and skillfully, but now and then he looked over at me sitting on the passenger side and smiled. We drove very fast along New Hampshire and Vermont roads, under covered bridges, winding up the hill to his house. It was hard to know where to begin. On the other hand, there seemed no need to say anything. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I felt no need for speech.

  There was nothing particularly fancy about the house. Books stacked everywhere. Movies stacked everywhere. In Peggy’s room there were just stacks and stacks of movie reels. The living room had soft velvet couches and piles and piles of New Yorker magazines. Deck in the front looking out at Mt. Ascutney. There were no personal items, photograph albums, photographs, letters. And then there was another wing of the house, which was his bedroom and his writing room, but I didn’t see that until later.

  Nothing seemed strange to me; it was as if this were the most natural thing in the world. It confirmed what I had been raised to believe: I was going to do important things, and I was going to spend time with this wonderful man. I was going to learn many things.

  He made a bowl of popcorn, threaded a film through the projector, turned out the lights, and it was movie time. That first night, we watched The 39 Steps; that was one of his absolute favorites. Afterward we talked and I went to bed.

  I slept in Peggy’s bedroom. She was out, playing basketball, and then off with her boyfriend; she was going to be gone very late. And Matthew was also spending the night. So I did meet Matthew, who was a very lovable, happy, funny, charming twelve-year-old boy.

  Salinger’s house, where he lived from 1967 to 2010.

  Peggy came in in the middle of the night, very late. I recognized on that first visit he was very critical of her in ways that he wasn’t of his son, but she was strong and tough. Not too many people challenged J. D. Salinger, and she did. I don’t think Margaret was more rebellious than any other sixteen-year-old. She was just doing her job, which amazed me, because I hadn’t done my job.

  I don’t remember feeling embarrassed that I was here, visiting their father. Everything was unusual. J. D. Salinger was unusual. What was normal life? This was J. D. Salinger’s life.

  There was no question that I was going to see him again. Ten days after I’d begun my summer job as an editorial intern with the New York Times, Jerry drove five hours to pick me up. I was house-sitting a Manhattan brownstone for the summer; when he pulled up in front of the brownstone on West 73rd Street, I came running into his arms. He stroked my hair. “God, I’ve been waiting forever for this,” he said.

  We bought a bag of bagels and lox on the Upper West Side. Then he turned right around and we drove, very fast, the full five hours straight back to New Hampshire.

  Over the course of that summer, I probably visited Jerry two or three times, for the weekend. I still had my job in New York, and he’d come down to see me; he stayed at the house on West 73rd once. But by July I missed him too much. I wanted to be with him all the time. I’ll put it a little differently: I felt I needed to be with him all the time. I began to feel what the relationship required was for me to be with him all the time. I don’t suppose that I was really listening to my own feelings as much as what I felt were the requirements for me—and that had been my story all my life. So I turned in my notice at the New York Times. In fact it was no notice at all. I said, “I’m leaving,” then I called up the family who had given me responsibility for their house on West 73rd and said, “You’re going to need to find another house sitter.” And within a couple of days, I was gone. I published, I think, two editorials; two editorials written by me were published in the New York Times—without my name attached, of course—that summer. And then I moved into Jerry’s house, but still with the belief that I was going back to Yale in the fall.

  In the article that inspired him to write to me, I had mentioned that I was a virgin. I talked of the sexually open climate at Yale my freshman year and how uncomfortable it was to be a virgin there. One of the many offers that had come my way, as a result of that article, was an invitation from Mademoiselle to write an article, which was published that summer, called “The Embarrassment of Virginity,” with a photograph of me sitting in my dormitory room being a virgin.

  The next time I came up from New York for the weekend, it was different, and I guess I knew that it was going to be, although I didn’t have a clue how it would happen because I had kissed two boys in my life and no men. Nothing was discussed. He took me into his room, and I didn’t ask any questions when he took my clothes off. I had no frame of reference, didn’t know how else it could be, but it wasn’t a particularly tender romantic scene. We got into the bed and he kissed me and then he began to—I’m very careful when I use the phrase “make love,” because it gets thrown around a lot, and this actually was not really making love—an attempt was made to have intercourse. There was no discussion of birth control, although I was eighteen years old, but it was not possible, anyway. I couldn’t do it. It didn’t happen. The muscles of my vagina simply clamped shut and would not release. After a few minutes we stopped.

  It was excruciatingly painful and I almost instantly developed a headache the likes of which I had never experienced. My whole head was exploding. I felt very embarrassed; that was my chief emotion. We didn’t discuss it, and over the course of the weekend it was attempted on numerous other occasions and the same thing happened. At the time, I was mortified and felt like an absolute failure and a freak. He said gently, “Tomorrow I’ll look up your symptoms in the Materia Medica,” an ancient Chinese homeopathic text. Jerry spent a great deal of time researching homeopathic remedies for me to assist my condition.

  Nothing that took place with Jerry Salinger had remotely the aspect of a boyfriend-girlfriend, dating relationship. I was his sidekick, his partner, his protégée, his student. I was his student of writing, I was his student of life, and I was (and I was certainly a failure here) his Zen acolyte. I studied, through him, health principles and homeopathy, but I was not his girlfriend.

  He assigned to me some of the responsibilities of a sexual partner. I’d follow him into the bedroom. We’d stand together at the sink, brushing our teeth. I’d take off my contact lenses, go into the bedroom, take off my jeans and underwear, and put on my long flannel nightgown. Jerry would come into the room. He’d undress, put on his nightshirt, and climb onto his side of the bed. I’d get onto mine. His hand would reach for my shoulders. He’d stroke my hair, then take hold of my head with surprising firmness, and guide me under the covers. Under the covers, with their smell of laundry detergent, I’d close my eyes. Tears would be streaming down my cheeks. Still, I wouldn’t stop. So long as I kept doing this, I knew he would love me.

  He certainly said he loved me, always, almost from the beginning. I certainly told him every day that I was with him that I loved him, but it was its own category.

  Joyce Maynard, meditating.

  We had a very set routine—the things that we did and the foods that we ate and the times that we did these things. We were very early risers. The fi
rst thing we did was have a bowl of Birds Eye frozen Tiny Tender Peas, not cooked, but with warm water poured over them so they’d defrost a little bit, so they were just cool. There was a book whose principles he subscribed to called Food Is Your Best Medicine. He was a believer in raw food; he was actually way ahead of his time in many ways. Then we’d meditate, or at least he would meditate and I would try to meditate. Jerry tried to make me into a student of Zen to leave worldly things behind, but my mind kept on wandering to things of the world, which was a big problem.

  Cover of Food Is Your Best Medicine.

  He would meditate for a long time and I would get restless and then we would get to work writing. He would put on a one-piece canvas jumpsuit with snaps up the front and he’d put it on like a uniform. It was kind of like he was a soldier or something, only he was going off to wage his war at the typewriter. He sat on a high chair at his high desk in his writing room and worked on his typewriter, a very old typewriter that clicked. I heard typing every day. I saw two thick manuscripts. I’ve written nine books now. I know what the size of a book manuscript looks like, and these were thick. I never read anything. He did show me one thing, although it wasn’t like I got to sit down and read it, and that was an archive of the Glass family; it was almost a genealogy. He was as protective of those characters as if they were his children. I never laid eyes on a page that he was writing. Never. And there was one other space that was off the bedroom and I believe that was his safe. We met at lunch to discuss life, and I would show him my pages. I had signed up to write an expansion of the New York Times piece into a book.

  Salinger in his jumpsuit.

  I knew, without asking, the nature of Jerry’s view of publishers. “Give me two hours in the dentist chair before I’ll spend another minute in a publisher’s office,” he said. “All those insufferable literary types, thoroughly pleased with themselves, who haven’t read a line of Tolstoy since college. All feverishly courting bestsellerdom. Not that the absence of any true original gift or insight keeps them from demanding all manner of pointless alterations to a writer’s work, for the sole purpose of proving their own irreplaceable talents. They’ve got to offer up all these bright ideas. Unable to produce a single original line themselves, they’re bound and determined to put their stamp squarely on your work. It happened to me plenty of times. Polite suggestions that I change this or that, put in more romance, take out more of that annoying ambiguity . . . slap some terribly clever illustration on the cover. . . . The minute you publish a book, you’d better understand, it’s out of your hands. In come the reviewers, aiming to make a name for themselves by destroying your own. And they will. Make no mistake about it. It’s a goddamn embarrassment, publishing. The poor boob who lets himself in for it might as well walk down Madison Avenue with his pants down.”

  Every afternoon we drove down the hill and bought the New York Times. And many of those afternoons, as we came down the hill and passed the mailbox, there would be some seeker standing at the foot of the driveway. In all of the time that I was there, nobody ever knocked at the door. It was an unwritten rule of the religion perhaps. Then we’d come back and watch TV. He loved Mary Tyler Moore, Andy Griffith—Ron Howard with his fishing pole over his shoulder. We used to watch the Lawrence Welk Show. It was partly sort of a kitsch thing that we did, but it was also about watching America. He officially cut himself off from a great deal of the world but maintained a huge interest in observing it. We’d watch the show and we would dance. I was, you know, a girl of the ’60s and ’70s. I didn’t know couples dancing. And he was a very good dancer, so we would dance in the living room to Lawrence Welk while all of my contemporaries were off in New Haven, doing drugs and listening to Led Zeppelin. Sometimes we’d go to the movies—not very much—because mostly we watched old movies in Jerry’s living room.

  Joyce Maynard’s drawing of herself sitting on Salinger’s lap.

  Joyce Maynard’s drawing of herself dancing with Salinger to Lawrence Welk.

  He loved Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Lady Vanishes, W. C. Fields. He loved Lost Horizon. He had a deep interest in Marlon Brando. Jerry’s first love had been acting, and he was a wonderful performer. Very funny. And he had a beautiful voice. He said that the only person who could ever play Holden Caulfield was himself. But even he acknowledged he was too old for that, although, in some ways, he was playing Holden Caulfield forever. He had been pursued, of course, for years for the movie rights to Catcher in the Rye, but the one who was determined to play Holden Caulfield was Jerry Lewis. He said Jerry Lewis always called him, but he said he would never let Hollywood make any movie of his again.

  It’s a long list of institutions that Jerry had contempt for: Western medicine, mainstream Hollywood (although I think he was secretly semi-dazzled by it), psychiatry, Ivy League education, families (there was another institution). I remember listening to very old recordings of the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller and an obscure German singer whose name I don’t remember but who was a singer from World War II. And then we’d go to bed.

  I moved into Jerry’s house that summer, still believing that I was going back to Yale in the fall. I had rented an apartment, using part of the book advance from my book that I was due to deliver within a few months and that I’d been working on. I had gone out and bought furniture. I bought plants. I got dishes. I unpacked my bags. I registered for classes. Jerry made a joke about how I’d probably meet some Joe College, and then I’d forget all about him.

  I never attended a single class of my sophomore year. I withdrew from Yale two days later, forfeiting that fall’s tuition, plus my scholarship. I remember the movie that Jerry brought to screen when he came to get me. He brought the projector and everything to my apartment on George Street in New Haven, he set up the projector, and we watched A Night to Remember, the real Titanic movie. I piled my clothes in the back of his car. He’d brought the BMW, not the Blazer, so I left most of my possessions in the apartment.

  For most of that year, I lived with him, believing that despite the thirty-five years separating us, we would be together always. I didn’t think I’d ever leave again after that.

  When he was loving, he was extraordinarily tender and certainly funny. I found myself in a relationship with him that reminded me, with the exception of the drinking, of my relationship with my father. I was entertaining him, trying to make him happy, and not very successfully. The moment I moved in, I could do very little right. He said to me the day I moved in, “You’re behaving like a teenager,” which I was.

  I didn’t swim that summer, or ride my bike, or drive anywhere without Jerry, except one time, when I got to take the Blazer (never the BMW) to a Singer sewing machine store. I spent $400 on a Singer Golden Touch and Sew machine. “This baby would have come in handy in a foxhole,” he said as he lifted it out of the back of the car and carried the machine up the stairs for me. “Put one of these on your head and you wouldn’t have to worry about shrapnel fire.” I should have been buying an electric typewriter. I had to write a book in the next three months.

  My birthday in November passed as just an ordinary day. Three days later, Nixon was reelected. Neither of us voted.

  Only one time did I meet friends of his, and that was this memorable and disastrous lunch; I don’t have a clue what he was thinking. We drove into New York in the BMW, very fast, as always—a trip that took probably about five, six hours. We went to the Algonquin, and there was this tiny little man who I realize now was probably only in his late fifties, but he seemed very old to me at the time: William Shawn. I had heard about him for as long as I’d known Jerry. And with Shawn was Lillian Ross, whose work I knew; I’d read it and studied it and admired it. This was years before her book in which she disclosed this information, but I knew from Jerry that Lillian Ross and William Shawn had been lovers for years. It was a known thing in certain circles, but never referred to, even with Jerry.

  Lillian Ross and William Shawn.

  Lillian Ross, a writer at th
e New Yorker.

  We took our places around this table at the Algonquin. I remember being really excited that I was meeting the editor of the New Yorker and this writer whose work I’d read and thought was so wonderful. She asked me what sorts of things I’d written, and, well, my main publication had been in Seventeen magazine. So I began talking to her about writing for Seventeen, judging the Miss Teenage America pageant, and interviewing Julie Nixon Eisenhower. I realize now that she was rather baiting me, while I thought I was being amusing and entertaining. Ross shot Shawn a look. The same eye that I had so admired on the page looking critically and highly perceptively at other people’s foibles was suddenly turned to me. I can imagine the cruel “Talk of the Town” piece she could’ve written about me.

  When lunch was over, Jerry put me into a taxi, and we went directly to Bonwit Teller, rode the elevator up to whatever floor it was that sold the most elegant, most sophisticated coats of a sort worn most particularly by middle-aged, professional women in New York City. He bought me a very expensive, black, cashmere coat of the sort that Lillian Ross might’ve worn, which was not at all like what the rest of my wardrobe resembled. I’m sure I was wearing a miniskirt that day. I’m sure Jerry was ashamed of me; that’s why he wanted to put me in an expensive coat.

  I was writing Looking Back and it was going to be published in a few months. Every day I worked on the book, I showed him my manuscript pages; I read every page out loud to Jerry over the course of the months I spent writing it, much in the way I used to read my work out loud to my father and mother. Certain sections Jerry typed for me. He made handwritten comments in the margins on yellow legal pads. After he completed reading over my manuscript one morning, he said to me, “Plants and animals are the telling omissions in your recollections. Too many passing fads here. Too little that is lasting.”