Salinger

by David Shields

  ROBERT CALLAGY: If you take this opinion to an extreme, what it says is that you can’t quote anything that has not been published before, and if you attempt to paraphrase, you’re at serious peril. Copyright law was created to protect an author in a property right, not to permit an author to obliterate the past.

  JOHN DEAN: To be reversed by the Court of Appeals was a little bit of a reach. In a sense, Salinger got lucky on this one.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: I was appalled to hear that Hamilton couldn’t even abstract or write about Jerry’s letters to Oona. Psychologically, that makes sense because they talk about the litigiousness of the paranoid. I suppose that’s what Jerry is: he’s paranoid. He always thinks people are going to encroach on his privacy.

  ELEANOR BLAU: The Supreme Court yesterday let stand a lower-court ruling blocking publication of an unauthorized biography of J. D. Salinger.

  Without comment or dissent, the justices declined to act on the decision last January by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City that the biographer, Ian Hamilton, had unfairly used unpublished letters written by Mr. Salinger.

  Random House, Inc., the publisher of J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life, said the company and Mr. Hamilton would decide in the next few weeks which of two steps to take.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: In a sense Salinger had killed Hamilton’s book, period.

  PHOEBE HOBAN: If, in fact, unpublished letters are copyrightable, then biographers and journalists are highly constrained. It was a precedent-setting case. . . . Ian Hamilton was not allowed to publish his original biography.

  JOHN DEAN: For any of us who’ve ever wondered about Salinger’s reclusiveness, there were some answers that came as a result of his lawsuit. This is not something somebody does who is afraid of a little publicity, because there’s nothing private about a lawsuit. Which shows the adamancy with which he believes in his privacy and the extent to which he is willing to go, which was obviously a painful route for him.

  To continue to protect that privacy, in a broader sense, there are some controls he could ask for in the court; he could ask the judge, who knew he was reclusive and very private, to keep this as private as possible. But the fact that it went as far as it did, went through the process the way it did, shows that he was determined to prevail in the case. A deposition is more fun to take than to give. I’ve been on both sides, and believe me—it’s easier to ask the questions than answer them. To do it for any length of time is always difficult.

  When an author writes a book and becomes successful, in a sense he’s saying, “Look at what I’m writing.” He’s thrusting himself out there. But I have a tremendous empathy for those who would like to retain their privacy. It is very difficult to do once you become a public figure. Salinger’s effort to do so by stopping all public appearances is about as extreme as possible. Now is he a public figure? Yes, he is.

  —

  DAVID SHIELDS: In January 1987, at the same time Salinger was under siege on the legal front, not only was William Shawn eased out at the New Yorker, but the owner of the magazine, S. I. Newhouse, chose as his replacement Robert Gottlieb, the editor in chief of the book publisher Knopf, rather than Charles McGrath, the magazine’s deputy editor and presumed successor. Salinger signed a three-paragraph petition that 153 other writers, editors, cartoonists, and New Yorker staff members also signed, urging Gottlieb to turn down the position, to no avail. Salinger’s last and best defender, who had overruled the other editors’ unanimous rejection of “Zooey” and had served as Salinger’s only editor until 1965, was out. So too, in a sense, was Salinger.

  —

  PAUL ALEXANDER: In 1987 Salinger created an enormous amount of buzz throughout the entertainment business. While he was embroiled in the lawsuit with Ian Hamilton, Salinger fell in love with another television actress, Catherine Oxenberg, who was appearing on Dynasty. She was young, beautiful, and vivacious, and she and the show attracted a huge following. According to Ian Hamilton, Salinger fell in love with Oxenberg the moment he saw her on television. Salinger had an M.O. for television actresses. He would call them up on the phone and say, “I’m J. D. Salinger and I wrote The Catcher in the Rye.” Talk about a pickup line! According to Hamilton, Salinger traveled to the West Coast to pursue Oxenberg. Press reports at the time said Salinger showed up at the studio unannounced and had to be escorted away from the studio. When these newspaper reports appeared, Salinger had his attorneys find Oxenberg’s agent and threaten a lawsuit, but no lawsuit was ever filed.

  JEAN MILLER: The trip to Hollywood to see Catherine Oxenberg—I just didn’t want that to be true, but I knew how he felt about child actresses. It was just acting, so it was just as phony as anything else. It’s just as phony as a rock musician playing the same thing over and over again and getting the audience all riled up, and then stalking off the stage filled with ego.

  DAVID SHIELDS: He wants to be a pure dharma being, but he falls head over heels for Catherine Oxenberg. Nearly every Salinger story traces the same circular movement: a character wants to escape the world, wants to graduate beyond desire and ego and other people, but by the end, the protagonist always comes back to the ordinary human drudge, to just living. Salinger’s life is a failed Salinger novel: he never truly re-embraces existence.

  —

  PHOEBE HOBAN: Ian Hamilton took a postmodern gambit and wrote a really crummy book about his search for Salinger and how he wasn’t allowed to write about Salinger.

  MYLES WEBER: Hamilton asserted that Salinger became more famous by trying not to be famous; that he sold more books by not publishing any more books; that, in fact, it was his deliberate design.

  MORDECAI RICHLER: Mr. Hamilton’s biography is tainted by a nastiness born of frustration, perhaps, but hardly excused by it. Mr. Salinger is never given the benefit of the doubt. He is described as a “callow self-advancer.” Aged twenty-two, we are told, “the Salinger we were on the track of was surely getting less and less lovably Holden-ish each day. So far, our eavesdropping had yielded almost nothing in the way of human frailty and warmth.” This vengeful book is also marred by Mr. Hamilton’s coy, tiresome device of splitting himself in two, as it were, referring to Mr. Salinger’s biographer in the third person.

  —

  DAVID REMNICK: In the spring of 1988, the editors of the New York Post sent a pair of photographers to New Hampshire with instructions to find J. D. Salinger and take his picture. If the phrase “take his picture” had any sense of violence or, at least, violation left in it at all, if it still retained the undertone of certain people who are convinced that a photographer threatens them with the theft of their souls, then it applied here. There is no mystery why the Post pursued its prey. . . . His withdrawal became for journalists a story demanding resolution, intervention, and exposure. Inevitably the Post got its man. The paper ran a photograph on the cover of a gaunt sixty-nine-year-old man recoiling, as if anticipating catastrophe. In that instant, the look in Salinger’s eyes was one of such terror that it is a wonder he survived it.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: One day in April 1988—under the banner headline “GOTCHA CATCHER!”—the New York Post ran a full-page photograph of Salinger on its front cover. Obviously agitated in the picture, Salinger has one fist pulled back as if he is about to punch the camera. Paul Adao and Steve Connelly, both freelance paparazzi, had gone to New Hampshire, as had become the custom of so many fans and journalists through the years, and stalked Salinger for several days until they saw him coming out of the post office in Windsor. Clicking away, they photographed him as he walked up and spoke to them. “Listen,” he said sternly, “I don’t want to be interviewed. I don’t want any part of this.”

  MYLES WEBER: An editor of the New York Post defended the work of his journalists by saying that, in fact, it was Salinger who was interfering with his journalists doing their job.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: [Adao and Connelly] left, but three days later they returned and talked to people about Salinger again until they spo
tted him leaving the Purity Supreme supermarket in West Lebanon, New Hampshire.

  Adao blocked Salinger’s car into its parking space, and after Connelly got out of their car, both of them began taking pictures of him. Furious, Salinger came at them, smashing his grocery cart into Connelly and hitting Adao, still in the car’s driver’s seat, with his fist. It was one of the times Salinger was drawing his fist back to swing at Adao that the photographer caught the gesture on film. Soon, giving up, Salinger covered his face with his hands and tried to open the door to his jeep, but the photographers kept snapping shots. Several shoppers stopped to gather around what had turned into a minor mêlée. “What are you doing to him?” one finally shouted out at the photographers. “He’s a convicted murderer!” Adao yelled back, a comment Adao later said he regretted. Finally, Salinger got into his jeep and, when Adao saw that Salinger was about to back into his car, he moved the car and Salinger drove away.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Margaret says, “He still drives his Jeep like a nutcase, or a sane person being shelled, same regulation haircut, only gray now.”

  After the picture appeared on the front page of the Post, a controversy ensued, with many readers disapproving of the way the paparazzi had stalked Salinger. Later, Don DeLillo said that photograph inspired him to write Mao II.

  DON DeLILLO: The withheld work of art is the only eloquence that’s left.

  —

  JOHN DEAN: Clearly Salinger has not withdrawn from society. He is very aware of what’s happening as it is related to him. He’s probably got counsel keeping an eye on things and alerting him to misuses of his name.

  DAVID SHIELDS: While he hadn’t fully withdrawn from society, he was clearly retreating. In 1990, Dorothy Olding, Salinger’s agent for fifty years, had a stroke. Her assistant, Phyllis Westberg, became his agent. Two years later, his editor, champion, and friend William Shawn died.

  —

  WILLIAM H. HONAN: Mr. Salinger’s modest house, surrounded by three plain garage-like structures, including the author’s writing studio, is positioned for privacy. To reach it, one crosses an old covered bridge high above a roaring brook and grinds for several miles up a steeply winding, hard-packed dirt road. The last 100 yards are an extremely steep grade, and the Salinger house, nearly invisible from the road, seems almost an eagle’s nest with a panoramic view of Mount Ascutney across the Connecticut River in Vermont. An immense white satellite dish behind the house suggests that Mr. Salinger is still in touch with the outside world, at least through television.

  DAVID SHIELDS: In Cornish, Salinger surrounded himself with the dense, tall evergreens, the cold, dark winters, and the isolating terrain of Hürtgen, but now from a commanding position: he could easily detect approaching dangers—not artillery, of course, just literary tourists who wanted to invade his hilltop perch. He needs life to feel difficult.

  LILLIAN ROSS: He liked living in New Hampshire, but he often found fun and relief by coming down to New York to have supper with me and Bill Shawn. In a note he sent after the three of us got together for the last time, he wrote, “It will set me up for months. I was at peace.”

  —

  SHANE SALERNO: Paul Fitzgerald was one of the “Four Musketeers” who served alongside Salinger during the war in the counterintelligence section of the 4th Division. From D-Day to Kaufering IV, Salinger and Fitzgerald were always together. The two men maintained a strong and warm relationship until Salinger’s death in 2010, writing each other frequently. The excerpts from Salinger’s letters to Fitzgerald that appear throughout this book have never been published before.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald (July 27, 1990):

  I’m impressed, mightily, at the easy way you reel off the names of just about the whole CIC detachment people, victims, whatever it was we were. . . . Am very glad you’re well and happy, Paul. Stay that way. It takes some doing, at times, but do it anyway.

  SHANE SALERNO: In September 1991, on a cross-country car trip, Fitzgerald surprised Salinger at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

  PAUL FITZGERALD, diary entry, September 26, 1991:

  Windsor, Vermont/Cornish, New Hampshire: Just across the Delaware River is a town called Cornish. The directions proved correct. Way on top of a wooded rolling hill sat Salinger’s abode. When he came to the door he looked inquisitive. Looking into the face of a baldheaded person changed by 46 years. I recognize him, tho he appeared much less vital—the eyes mellowed by age and serenity in the paradise. He was emotionally warm and welcoming. Entertaining his son and daughter-in-law. Invited in. They were having dinner.

  Salinger and Paul Fitzgerald in Cornish, September 26, 1991.

  PAUL FITZGERALD, diary entry, September 27, 1991:

  Called on Salinger “way up the hill” at 3:15. Talked about old times. He’s a very warm person. Denise [Fitzgerald’s wife] liked him very much. His view is magnificent. He has 300 acres up here. Took off for parts unknown at 5.

  —

  ASSOCIATED PRESS: J. D. Salinger’s home was heavily damaged in a fire early today. No one was injured. Mr. Salinger’s wife, Colleen O’Neill, reported the blaze, Fire Chief Mike Monette said. He would not say if the reclusive writer was home at the time. The cause of the fire and damage estimates have not been determined.

  DAVID SHIELDS: This was the first time—in 1992—that the public learned of Salinger’s third wife, forty years his junior. Colleen, a nursing student who worked as an au pair for someone else and married in the early 1980s, met Salinger, corresponded with him, and left her husband for the author.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Colleen directed the annual Cornish town fair.

  BURNACE FITCH JOHNSON: Jerry used to come and walk around the fairgrounds with her. Colleen would have to repeat things to him when people spoke to him, because he’s quite deaf.

  WILLIAM H. HONAN: Not even a fire that consumed at least half his home on Tuesday could smoke out the reclusive J. D. Salinger, author of the classic novel of adolescent rebellion, The Catcher in the Rye. Mr. Salinger is almost equally famous for having elevated privacy to an art form.

  His fastidiously preserved seclusion was threatened on Tuesday when his third wife, Colleen, reported a fire in their home to the volunteer fire department. Within minutes, the blazing house was surrounded by fire trucks and emergency vehicles from Cornish, the New Hampshire towns of Plainfield, Meriden, and Claremont, and two small towns in Vermont, Windsor and West Windsor.

  Mike Monette, Cornish’s fire chief, said the fire was brought under control in about an hour. No injuries were reported, he said, but “damage to the house was extensive.” Neither he nor anyone else was able to say whether any of the author’s unpublished manuscripts were destroyed.

  On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Salinger, now 73 years old, cavorted around his property playing hide-and-seek with a reporter and a photographer who had come to learn how he was bearing up.

  When first spied, Mr. Salinger, lanky and with snow-white hair, was outside his house talking to his wife and a local building contractor. As strangers approached, Mr. Salinger, like the fleet chipmunks that dash across his driveway, scurried into his charred retreat. The contractor barred the way of the pursuing reporter and pleaded, “You’ve got to understand, this is a man who is really serious about his privacy.”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Salinger’s wife, who is considerably younger than her husband, strode vigorously toward a blue Mazda pickup truck in the driveway.

  “I have things to do!” she announced, brushing aside all questions and glaring as she leaped into the vehicle and roared away. . . .

  Mr. Salinger has kept aloof from his neighbors in Cornish as well as from prying journalists and the public. For example, Clara Perry, who was Mr. Salinger’s next-door neighbor for 20 years, ran a kindergarten attended by both of Mr. Salinger’s children, Matt, an actor, and Margaret Ann, now both grown. Mrs. Perry refers to him affectionately as Jerry but says that neither she nor her husband [was] ever invited into Mr. Salinger’s house.
. . .

  Mrs. Perry said that she and her six children had never cracked one of Mr. Salinger’s books because The Catcher in the Rye was banned at the Windsor public school they attended.

  After the book became accepted, she said, the Windsor school used to send groups of students to visit with him. “But pretty soon he stopped that,” Mrs. Perry said. “It got to be too much for him.”

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from postcard to Paul Fitzgerald, December 1993:

  Thanks, too, for your concern about the fire and the house, old friend. . . . The house has been pretty much re-built, and we’re now in it, at long last. . . . All kinds of D-Day commemorative stuff is slated to take place next June, or so I hear. In America, France, Germany. Speeches, no doubt. Lots of old guys standing around in Hawaiian shirts and little overseas caps. Still, there’ll be some long thoughts, here and there, surely. Myself, I think mostly of how young we all were.

  SHARON STEEL: A fire ravaged Salinger’s home, and destroyed everything except a piece of his bedroom and, [as Salinger said,] “providentially,” his workroom, where he kept his papers and manuscripts.

  —

  JOYCE MAYNARD: There was this one woman overseas who had well over a hundred pages of letters from Salinger. He decided to come and visit her. He flew to London to meet her, and the excitement must have been extraordinary, I can imagine, because I know the excitement I felt when I pulled up to the Hanover Inn after just eight weeks of correspondence, and these two had been corresponding for much longer. She was a young woman, but it turned out she was not a particularly pretty woman. She was very tall and big-boned and kind of awkward.

  DAVID SHIELDS: On this trip—to Edinburgh, actually—Salinger took his daughter with him. He said he said they were going to tour the Scottish settings for 39 Steps, the Hitchcock movie he especially loved.