Salinger

by David Shields

  I drove down to New York with Jerry to have my photograph taken for the book. I posed in Central Park with him standing just off to the side, watching. I met editors to discuss promotion of the book. We never discussed how on earth Jerry was going to maintain his privacy—I won’t even call it privacy; the secrecy of our relationship—with a major publisher’s publicity campaign well under way to promote the book. I don’t really believe that Jerry felt we had a future anymore. He just didn’t tell me. I can even feel some sympathy for him: I suspect he didn’t know how on earth he was to get out of this mess.

  One day I heard the telephone ring and wasn’t supposed to answer it, ever, so I listened to Jerry answer the phone and there was a very brief conversation, then a click. He emerged from his office with a kind of anger on his face I had never seen anywhere. He said, “Time magazine has got my number; you have ruined my life.” The call had been a reporter from Time and it became, a week later, an item in Time’s gossipy “Newsmakers” column: “Former Yale coed, Joyce Maynard, is living with J. D. Salinger.”

  Worried about Jerry, I decided not to promote the book. I would just let it be put out there without my presence. My editor at Doubleday, Elsa van Bergen, wrote me a letter expressing her concern and dismay about my decision not to participate in the publicity. What Elsa said in her letter made sense to me, and for a moment, reading it, I felt a small surge of hopefulness. Maybe I didn’t have to close myself off from the world altogether. Perhaps my continued interest in things like bookstore appearances and interviews was not unforgivable. I brought the letter to Jerry, who read it only partway through, then folded it neatly and handed it back to me with a sigh. “Perhaps you’re like the rest of them after all,” he said.

  I felt like a fraud. In the name of protecting Salinger, I had betrayed myself. There was no way to write the story of myself without explaining the story of Salinger.

  During all this period, although it became increasingly dark, I never thought of leaving. I never imagined that the relationship would end. I continued to envision and actively discuss a future, although the dream of a romantic sexual relationship was over before it began. The dream of parenthood replaced it; what I wanted most was a family. I pictured having a child with Jerry, and it was always very specific: I pictured a little girl. How this child was to be conceived I can’t imagine because nothing was happening that would have made that possible, although we actually had a name for this child.

  It was a name that Jerry came up with in a dream: “Bint.” The little girl was always referred to as “Bint.”

  Only much later, after I published At Home in the World, did I get a letter from a British scholar who said, “Do you know what the word ‘Bint’ actually means? It’s a word that means ‘whore,’ worse than ‘wench’; it’s a very ugly word for a woman.” I didn’t know that at the time. We were going to have Bint because one of the things you do if the present isn’t so great is think about the future.

  Apart from our trips to New York City, we’d never actually been anywhere together. Jerry announced we were going to take a trip to Florida in March, during Matthew and Peggy’s school vacation. Truthfully, I would have loved to have taken a trip that was just the two of us, but I was not about to argue about anything in that relationship. I was happy to be going to Florida because it was very cold, dark, and snowy that winter, like most winters in New Hampshire, but it was particularly cold and dark in my memory of it. Jerry was a serious follower and student of homeopathic medicine. He located a homeopathic practitioner in Daytona Beach whom he wanted to consult about my inability to have sex. This was not, of course, described to Matthew and Peggy, who thought we were just going to Florida for a vacation.

  On day two [of the Florida vacation], Jerry left Matthew and Peggy at the hotel pool and we went off to see the doctor. He didn’t identify himself as J. D. Salinger, of course; he called himself John Boletus (“boletus” is a type of mushroom), and I was his friend whom he was assisting with her problem. Jerry didn’t identify himself as my sexual partner. I was silent throughout this entire meeting, but Jerry explained the nature of the problem in very clinical terms and then stepped out of the room so she could examine me. I’d never been examined that way by a doctor before. She invited him back into the room and discussed, mostly with Mr. Boletus, various homeopathic remedies that might be used on me. We paid and left.

  Matthew wanted to, I think, fly a kite, or he wanted to play in the water, or he wanted to do something that a twelve-year-old boy would, understandably, want to do with his dad on a vacation. After Jerry played with Matthew in the water for a while, he came back to the towel where I was sitting. He looked very tired—not just tired; he looked weary—and he said to me, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m finished with all of this. I’ll never have any more children.” I said, “Then I can’t stay.” And he said, “You’d better leave now then.”

  I think I knew I had to leave right then: I picked up my towel off the sand and I started walking back toward the hotel. Staggering is probably more like it. And I know I believed that he would come after me. But he didn’t. He stayed on the beach with the children. And I went back into the hotel room. And I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have a charge card, I really didn’t have anything, I was just there in Daytona Beach with my towel. I called my mother, and I said I have to come home now. And then she said, well, I’ll try to find you a flight. But there was no flight until the next day. So I had to spend one more night there.

  We carried on in a kind of a way and we went out to dinner. Then we did what we usually did: we saw a movie. We went back to the room and I should say that we had two hotel rooms, one of which was Matthew and Jerry; the other was Peggy and me. We shared a room. Peggy and I were never friends. Peggy didn’t really talk to me and I was afraid of Peggy, but Peggy and I were in a room together. So I knew that I still couldn’t make a sound. I lay in the bed just kind of trembling, and I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to see Jerry, so when it was very late and I thought that Peggy was asleep and Matthew was asleep, I went in and I got Jerry.

  We went into the only place where we could be alone, which was the bathroom. And I said please. I can’t leave you. Please. Let me stay. I don’t have to have any children. It was the last piece I think of me that I relinquished at that moment. And he said no, you need to go. And the next morning I packed my bathing suit and my flip-flops in my bag, and I rode the elevator down to the lobby with him. He called for a taxi and he leaned over and said to the driver, This girl needs to go to the airport now, and gave me, put two $50 bills in my hand.

  And I drove away

  I don’t remember how I got back to New Hampshire. I know snow covered the steps to his house when I climbed them. The heat was off; it was very cold. I packed up all my things and called my mother to come and pick me up. The last thing I did, rather melodramatically, before I left the house, was to write, in the ice on the window, BINT. I went home.

  Three weeks later, my memoir Looking Back was published—a 160-page book ostensibly about my life as an eighteen-year-old, in which I never mentioned that my father was an alcoholic or that I, the anointed youth spokesperson of 1973, had dropped out of her Ivy League college and moved in with a fifty-three-year-old man who happened to be J. D. Salinger. None of it appeared in the book, although it was written in his house.

  Cover of the book Joyce Maynard wrote while living with Salinger, who was five feet away when this picture was taken.

  After he was gone from my life, I called him. It’s embarrassing to think how long and how pitifully I pursued him. Calling him and begging him to come and see me, talk to me, take me back. I felt as if I was in exile. The same voice that had spoken to me with such exquisite tenderness and concern was almost unrecognizably cold. And I knew his heart had left the room. I continued to send him letters. I called him for way too long—trying to get back to that place I had known, that little patch of sunlight I felt I had briefly inhabited with him. I lived a v
ery solitary life. I was on my own at this point. When I called Jerry, it was clear that my calls were excruciating to him. He just wanted me gone. He wanted me off the phone. I don’t think he ever quite hung up on me, but in essence he didn’t have to. His response was so dismissive and withering. I couldn’t bear it. He finally said, “Go away. Stop calling me.” He said, “I have nothing to say to you.” I would say, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to go.”

  I bought a house in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and I was living there and really trying to create a life Salinger would think was a good one. It was never enough just to have the good life. It had to be a life that he thought was a good one. I bought books. I made a little writing space for myself, which I kept asking him to come and visit and see. Finally, I think just to get me off his back, he agreed that he would drive by, and I was extraordinarily excited and anxious. I remember preparing for days for his visit—cooking a meal by the specifications that I knew would meet his standard. He arrived about ten minutes late with Matthew and left about fifteen minutes later. That was the last time I saw him for over twenty years.

  The house Joyce Maynard bought in New Hampshire after her relationship with Salinger ended.

  Once, when he and I were still together, in the car on the way back to Jerry’s house, he made a comment that took my sister by surprise. “I suppose you always looked up to Joyce, as younger sisters do,” he said.

  That was odd. Rona was not only four years older but married, with a baby. I had even told Jerry the story of my sister’s sense of displacement at my birth. And I had just recently turned nineteen.

  “Joyce is four years younger than I am, actually,” she told him quietly. “I’m twenty-three.”

  “Oh well,” Jerry said, taking the BMW into fifth gear. “You’re both little girls to me.”

  A thought entered my head: What if I’m getting too old for him?

  One day at around this time, my mother said to me, “Your face certainly is getting round. I guess we don’t need to worry anymore about that concentration camp look of yours.”

  Conversation with Salinger #10

  PAUL ALEXANDER: In early November 1974, New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh took a phone call. Who was on the other end? J. D. Salinger. She had called his agent earlier in the day and asked for an interview. A variety of men, all using the name John Greenberg, had been traveling around the country, selling pirated copies of his uncollected short stories. Salinger had filed a lawsuit against the bookstores that were selling the books, and she had been following up on the story.

  New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh on assignment.

  SHANE SALERNO: David Victor Harris is Lacey Fosburgh’s widower.

  DAVID VICTOR HARRIS: Lacey had just moved [to the Bay Area], and she was now on the National desk working out of the San Francisco Bureau of the Times. She had had this throwaway assignment covering this standard lawsuit, and suddenly it became a groundbreaker.

  Lacey and I were sitting in the kitchen, looking out at the backyard of my house in Menlo Park. The phone rang. I answered it, and a male voice asked, “Is Lacey Fosburgh there?” I got her and she picked up the phone. The first thing he said to her was, “This is a man called Salinger.”

  She goes [whispers to Harris], “Salinger, Salinger. Give me some paper, give me some paper.” So I was scurrying around, grabbing some paper, and she was furiously writing notes on anything that was around.

  Salinger had met his match with Lacey. He was playing against a pro. She was certainly capable of taking his charm and running with it, and I’m sure part of what kept him on the phone was this lovely female voice that sounded as good as she looked. He had no idea what she looked like, of course, but I’m sure that didn’t keep him from flirting on the phone and wanting to connect with this woman. She led him right down that path. She let him talk about himself and make his connection with her. Obviously, he was upset about this pirated publication. These were stories he did not want in circulation—stories from his early writing period he did not feel were mature work; he wanted them just to die in old magazine pages at the library. That was his motivation for making the phone call. The rest was up to Lacey, who had this incredible capacity to get people to talk. When she turned her charm on you (and I don’t mean some sleazy kind of charm; it was a far more genuine article than that: she was gracious, she was open, she was caring), she had a way of eliciting stuff from you that you would never say otherwise.

  Lacey Fosburgh.

  This was a little legal story, which seemed destined to be buried on page 18. Lacey had been working on it for more than a day. She had checked out the guy who was being charged in the suit and she had talked to some lawyers and put in the obligatory call to Salinger’s lawyer and agent, saying she wanted to talk to Salinger, but she had no expectation that Salinger would call back. Nobody, least of all Lacey, expected anybody was going to talk to J. D. Salinger. When it did happen, it caught her totally by surprise.

  She got Salinger to comment on the short stories in the pirated editions. She got him to tell her how he felt about the ordeal. I could see Lacey was keeping him going. Every time Salinger stopped talking, she was trying to roll it over and get him to answer more questions. She was a very good interviewer. She obviously had hooked him and was furiously scribbling these notes.

  After Salinger hung up, Lacey immediately got on the phone with the National desk of the New York Times to say, “Hey, I just talked to Salinger.” Everything began roaring along, and suddenly she was over on the typewriter jamming out this piece. They were treating it big and she knew it was big, so she was cranking out the piece the rest of the day. She had to drive up to the San Francisco Bureau to actually transmit it on the computer system that was up there, but the next day [Sunday] there it was—front page. Which was extraordinary. This was before the Times format had changed, so running soft news on the front page was a big deal.

  LACEY FOSBURGH: What prompted Mr. Salinger to speak . . . was what he regards as the latest and most severe of all invasions of his private world: the publication of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2. During the last two months, about 25,000 copies of these books, priced at $3 to $5 for each volume, have been sold—first here in San Francisco, then in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, according to Mr. Salinger, his lawyers and book dealers around the country.

  SAN FRANCISCO BOOK DEALER: They’re selling like hotcakes. Everybody wants one.

  LACEY FOSBURGH: Since last April, copies of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vols. 1 and 2, have reportedly been peddled in person to bookstores . . . by men who always call themselves John Greenberg and say they come from Berkeley, California. Their descriptions have varied from city to city.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: For Salinger fans, the most important thing Salinger told Fosburgh was that he continued to write on a daily basis. I think that was the whole point of the phone call. He was annoyed and angry with the pirated editions, but a lawsuit was taking care of that. He wanted the public to know that he was still writing and what he was not doing was publishing. In 1970 J. D. Salinger paid back—with interest—Little, Brown the $75,000 advance it had given him for his next book. Salinger was willing to draw that distinction between writing and publishing; he had been drawing that distinction since 1965. This was the first interview that Salinger had granted since 1953. He painted a self-portrait of someone who was still completely devoted to his craft.

  J. D. SALINGER (quoted in the New York Times, November 3, 1974):

  I’m not trying to hide the gaucheries of my youth. I just don’t think they’re worthy of publication. I wrote them a long time ago and I never had any intention of publishing them [in a book]. I wanted them to die a perfectly natural death. Some stories, my property, have been stolen. It’s an illicit act. Suppose you had a coat you liked and somebody went into your closet and stole it—that’s how I feel. It’s amazing some law-and-order agency can’t do s
omething about this. I’m just trying to protect what privacy I have left.

  There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure. I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I’m doing is trying to protect myself and my work. I’ve survived a lot of things and I’ll probably survive this.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger had made a habit of telling the world that he was a recluse. But if he were really a recluse, he wouldn’t have picked up the phone and called a reporter from the New York Times. He’d say he was a recluse, but his actions were those of someone who was very clearly manipulating the subject of his reclusiveness. He’d sold millions and millions of books. He was an extremely sophisticated man. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  —

  RICHARD STAYTON: In the early ’70s, I was living in San Francisco and heard there was a new work by J. D. Salinger out. You could always find books at the secondhand bookstores in Berkeley, so I went over to Berkeley and on Telegraph Avenue found these two volumes, two slim paperbacks. I didn’t have a lot of money in those days, so I just bought volume one. I took it home and was very excited to find all these early Salinger stories, including ones with Holden Caulfield, pre–Catcher in the Rye. When I went back to buy the second volume, not only were both volumes gone, but the store owners declined to admit they’d ever sold the first volume, which was absolutely baffling to me. I went to several secondhand bookstores: nobody had ever heard of the book. I’d lost my mind, evidently. I found an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that explained why I’d never be able to buy volume two of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger: “A collection of early short stories by J. D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was once widely available in San Francisco, but has largely disappeared, local bookstore proprietors said today.” I didn’t want to violate J. D. Salinger’s beliefs, but I certainly wanted volume two, and I’ve never found it.