Salinger

by David Shields

  PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger had planned a meeting with a young pen pal amour at the Edinburgh airport. Upon meeting her there, Salinger expressed his embarrassment and guilt to Margaret. The young girl had simply turned out to be ugly.

  JOYCE MAYNARD: Salinger evidently saw her and left. He told her he would see her again, and he asked her to send back the letters so that he could keep them for her when she came over to visit him. She mailed all of the letters back to Salinger and never heard from him again.

  MARGARET SALINGER: His search for landsmen led him increasingly to relations in two dimensions: with his fictional Glass family, or with living “pen pals” he met in letters, which lasted until meeting in person when the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood presence of them would, with the inevitability of watching a classic tragedy unfold, invariably sow the seeds of the relationship’s undoing.

  JOYCE MAYNARD: There was another story about Jerry, and this one I heard not from the woman herself, because I don’t think that she was in a state to report it, but somebody else told me, a man who knew Jerry in town. Jerry corresponded with a young woman and had invited her to come and see him. She had actually moved to the town of Hanover to be near him, and she had come to see him, but he had very swiftly tired of her.

  Jerry told a neighbor that he didn’t know how to get rid of the woman; she kept coming round and he reported her to the police, filing a complaint against her. I’m not going to ascribe total blame for this next event to Salinger, but I do understand the power of his dismissals and how crushing it could be. The woman had a total breakdown and was hospitalized in Concord, New Hampshire.

  MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: Salinger’s books are in some crazy sense love letters to people he’d be reluctant to meet. In particular, they’re love letters to the lost—all versions of the fat lady who’s so normal she loves to laugh at the television set, and you’re doing it for the fat lady; he’s doing it for his fat lady readers.

  —

  JOYCE MAYNARD: I had a good friend named Joe, who was a Vietnam vet—100 percent disability for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. We were sitting in my kitchen one day, the year that Audrey [Maynard’s daughter] turned eighteen, and I was talking to him about the strange and unexplainable anxiety I was feeling about her going away from home. I’d always been a pretty relaxed and comfortable parent. He listened to me speak for a while and finally said, “So tell me, Joyce, what happened to you when you were eighteen?” I’d never mentioned Jerry Salinger to him, but I knew right away what the answer to that question was.

  Joe suffered a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder breakdown when his oldest son reached the age Joe was when he went off to Vietnam. I remember waiting until my children went off to their father’s house that weekend; by this time, I was divorced for a number of years. I went to the back of my closet, where there was a shoebox, didn’t even know right away where that box was. I hadn’t looked at the letters from Jerry Salinger in twenty-some years.

  I took them out, laid them out on my bed, and began to read them. They were letters I’d known very well. I could have recited some of them, I’d read them so carefully when I was young. I was reading them now as a forty-three-year-old woman, and the voice that moved me and melted my heart when I was eighteen struck me in a very different way at forty-three.

  As hard as I had worked as a writer, and as much work as I had been doing over those twenty years, a crucial piece that I hadn’t addressed made it almost impossible for me to be honest and authentic about anything else.

  In the winter of 1984 I was living in New Hampshire, married to my husband, Steve, and pregnant with our third child, our son, Willy. We had made a very rare trip to New York City to attend the publication party for a book in which I had an essay. It was a collection of essays by women writers who had published “Hers” columns in the New York Times, so there was a roomful of women writers. I was feeling a little unglamorous and unsophisticated and un–New Yorkish at that party, eight months pregnant, surrounded by slim, sophisticated New York writers. One came up to me and said—this happened periodically, somebody would refer to Salinger, and it was always an awkward moment when they did, because I didn’t speak of him and I never knew what to say—but this was a particularly awkward moment because I was at this party and couldn’t just walk away. She was a well-known writer, also in the collection. She came up to me and, apropos of nothing, said, “You know, I had an au pair girl who got letters from J. D. Salinger.”

  I didn’t quite go into early labor, but it was that intense of a response. I felt my whole body shift. Up until that moment I knew that I had lost the love and high regard of Salinger, but I believed I occupied an absolute place in his heart and mind. I alone had experienced this, to me, intimate, sacred correspondence. Suddenly this woman I’d never met was telling me that her au pair had a packet of letters from Salinger. I was stunned, but I said nothing.

  Quite a few years later I contacted her again and asked her to tell me more about the au pair girl and the letters. She explained the story: there had been a young woman named Colleen who had been a nursing student and then a nurse in Maryland. Colleen lived with her for a time, helping her take care of her children. At one point Colleen went up to Hanover to visit a boyfriend, got off a bus, and Salinger had given her a ride into town. They’d struck up a conversation and then had a correspondence. Colleen continued to see her boyfriend; she didn’t picture her correspondence with Salinger as a romantic situation. The writer went on to say that her au pair, Colleen, had married her boyfriend, and she had attended the wedding. She said, “I’ll send you a photograph from the wedding.” So a week or so passed and in an envelope came this photograph of a very pretty, smiling young woman wearing a taffeta dress, with her arm around a nice-looking young man.

  Joyce Maynard with her first husband, Steve Bethel.

  —

  MARK HOWLAND: In 1997 there was a lot of publicity about “Hapworth” coming out as a book. The word was that Salinger had to have absolute control over everything, including typeface and font size.

  JONATHAN SCHWARTZ: There were rumors that Salinger was talking to a Virginia publisher about publishing “Hapworth.” Apparently they met several times.

  IAN SHAPIRO: In 1988, Roger Lathbury, an English professor at George Mason University and owner of a small literary publishing outfit based in his house in Alexandria [Virginia], decided on a lark to write to J. D. Salinger, asking if he could publish “Hapworth 16, 1924,” Salinger’s last published work, which appeared as a story in the New Yorker in 1965 and never made it into book form. Amazingly, Salinger wrote back promptly, saying, essentially, “I’ll think about it.” Then, nothing. For eight years. Until July 26, 1996, when Lathbury, just having completed teaching his morning classes, picked up the phone in his home office.

  ROGER LATHBURY: Here was the voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Lathbury.” People don’t know how small the operation is here. His voice had a New York accent . . . and sounded like the recording of Walt Whitman that’s available. He identified who he was—I don’t remember if he said, “This is J. D. Salinger” or “This is Salinger”—and I said, “Well, um . . . I am delighted that you called.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: Lathbury and Salinger arranged a meeting in Washington, D.C., at the cafeteria of the National Gallery of Art.

  ROGER LATHBURY: I was a bit nervous. . . . His back was by the wall. He was waiting patiently. I shook hands with him and apologized for being late. . . . He was trying to make me feel at ease, but he was probably nervous, too.

  IAN SHAPIRO: Salinger insisted on having no dust jacket, only a bare cover with cloth of great durability—buckram. They talked pica lengths, fonts, and space between lines. They were going to do a press run somewhere in the low thousands. No advertising whatsoever. But for how much? Lathbury remembers that Salinger did not ask for an advance and that any money to be made would come from sales.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Lathbury filed a Library of Congress cataloging record for the boo
k, a necessary first step toward publication. A very small magazine in Virginia heard that Lathbury had filed this information and called him to find out more.

  ROGER LATHBURY: I foolishly gave an interview, but I thought nobody would see the article.

  DAVID SHIELDS: A reporter for the Washington Post saw Lathbury’s interview and broke the news. Ego. Ego.

  DAVID STREITFELD: J. D. Salinger, whose life has been one long campaign to erase himself from the public eye, is reversing himself somewhat at the age of 78. Next month will see the publication of Hapworth 16, 1924, the first new Salinger book in 34 years. Salinger is one of the most enduring and influential postwar American writers, and any New York publisher would have paid a bundle for the rights to the story, which appeared in the New Yorker in 1965. But in the literary coup of the decade, the book will be issued by Orchises Press, a small press in Alexandria run by George Mason University English professor Roger Lathbury.

  MYLES WEBER: The book was listed for publication through Amazon and on the publishing company’s website.

  SHANE SALERNO: In early February 1997, Hapworth 16, 1924 was—via prepublication orders—the #3 bestselling book on Amazon.

  ROGER LATHBURY: This is a book meant for readers, not for collectors. Part of the reason for not revealing a press run is to discourage investing. I want people to read the story.

  JONATHAN SCHWARTZ: When word got out [that the book was going to be published], Michiko Kakutani, the lead book critic at the New York Times, excoriated this story that had not been in print since 1965.

  MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Seymour was the one who said that “all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.” Seymour was supposed to be the one who saw more. It is something of a shock, then, to meet the Seymour presented in “Hapworth,” an obnoxious child given to angry outbursts. “No single day passes,” this Seymour writes, “that I do not listen to the heartless indifferences and stupidities passing from the [camp] counselors’ lips without secretly wishing I could improve matters quite substantially by bashing a few culprits over the head with an excellent shovel or stout club!” . . . In fact, with “Hapworth,” Mr. Salinger seems to be giving critics a send-up of what he contends they want. Accused of writing only youthful characters, he has given us a 7-year-old narrator who talks like a peevish old man. Accused of never addressing the question of sexual love, he has given us a young boy who speaks like a lewd adult. Accused of loving his characters too much, he has given us a hero who’s deeply distasteful. And accused of being too superficially charming, he has given us a nearly impenetrable narrative, filled with digressions, narcissistic asides and ridiculous shaggy-dog circumlocutions.

  DAVID SHIELDS: According to Lathbury, Salinger broke off contact with him due to Lathbury’s unintentional betrayal of confidence, but isn’t it plausible to think that this was only Salinger’s cover story for his bruised feelings about Kakutani’s critique? Perhaps Salinger was testing the water for the possible publication of future Glass stories, and when the “newspaper of record” weighed in so heavily against, he retreated.

  ROGER LATHBURY: My general feeling is anguish. I am very sorry. Those stories by Salinger provide release and delight for millions of people, and I could have helped to do that. I never reached back out. I thought about writing some letters [to Salinger], but it wouldn’t have done any good.

  MYLES WEBER: It was reportedly withdrawn due to Salinger’s distaste for all that publicity, which really wasn’t much publicity at all by most publishers’ and writers’ standards. That’s one of the largest pieces of ammunition that scholars have to accuse Salinger of constructing an author persona, of having a deliberate agenda.

  DAVID SHIELDS: In 2004 Lathbury revealed that he had lost the rights to publish “Hapworth” but refused to say how or why; in 2009 he showed up in a Washington Post profile, still refusing to talk about exactly what had happened.

  JOHN WENKE: The aborted publication of “Hapworth 16, 1924” as a book is a perfect case study. The mystique really drives the obsession: people just want something else by Salinger.

  There’s no aesthetic reason that I can think of for why Salinger would want “Hapworth” to be in print. The very fact that he’d had a deal with a small press in Virginia indicates that he was perfectly aware of the kinds of things likely to happen. I got phone calls from half a dozen newspapers about the publication of that book. I even got a call from [Australian Broadcasting Company] Radio in Sydney. I had to tell people that it’s not a new book; it’s something that he published in 1965 and anybody can walk to the library and pull down the issue of the New Yorker it’s in and read it. But he engineered that, and he did it very consciously, knowing there would be this stir.

  RON ROSENBAUM: [“Hapworth” is] like the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Salinger cult. The real fascination is that somewhere buried in it you might find the key to Salinger’s mysterious silence ever since.

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: “Hapworth” is a triumph; that’s the voice more than any other that reaches me. Why does that story upset people so much? There’s something about the purity of it, the integrity of it: the boldness of a boy looking us in the eye and telling us things that he makes us believe, even though he’s predicting his own death.

  Cover of June 1997 Esquire.

  —

  SHANE SALERNO: Having written two hundred pages of her memoir At Home in the World, Joyce Maynard went to Cornish on her forty-fourth birthday, November 5, drove to Salinger’s house, walked up to the front porch, and anxiously knocked on the door, believing this confrontation would provide closure.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Writers know how vampiric other writers are. The only reason Maynard went to Cornish was to get a dramatic ending for her book.

  JOYCE MAYNARD: I borrowed a truck and made my way to Cornish. I found to my surprise that I knew just how to get to Salinger’s house. I drove up the hill and parked the truck; the house looked surprisingly the same, although there was a satellite dish on the roof now. The garden had been cut back for winter. I walked up the steps to the door and thought, “This is the kind of moment when I should be really scared.”

  But I wasn’t scared. I felt very calm. I knocked on the door. I heard a commotion in the kitchen and a woman called out to me, “What do you want?” I said to her, “I’ve come to see Jerry. Would you tell him Joyce Maynard’s here?” She turned and looked at me through the window and smiled. I recognized Colleen: the face of the au pair girl in the blue taffeta dress in the wedding picture sent to me years before, a little older now but still a lot younger than me. I stood there and waited. I didn’t want to have it said I ambushed him, that I had caught him unaware. Jerry was warned I was there and he had his own choice to make—to come to the door or not.

  I waited a long time (I’m guessing ten minutes at least) but I knew that he would come to the door, and he did. The door opened and he stood there, wearing a bathrobe, very tall still, though a little more hunched over. He still had all his hair, but it was white. His face was much more lined. It was a face familiar to me, but the expression on that face was of great rage, something more than rage—hatred—more than I have ever experienced.

  He shook his fist at me and said, “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you write me a letter?” I said, “Jerry, I’ve written you many letters; you’ve never answered them.” He asked again, “What are you doing here? Why have you come here?”

  “I’ve come to ask you a question, Jerry. What was my purpose in your life?” When I asked him, his face, already filled with contempt, was transformed into this mask. “You don’t deserve an answer to that question,” he said. I said, “Yes, I believe I do.”

  He exploded with a torrent of putrid language—the ugliest I’d ever heard—from this man who’d written some of the most beautiful words that had ever been written to me. He told me that I had led a shallow and meaningless existence, I was a worthless human being, and I’m actually grateful that he said those things to me because I knew
those things weren’t true. Although he’d still written the same great books, was still the same wonderful, original, funny writer, he was no sage to me. He was no spiritual guide and the position that he occupied on the planet was the same as the rest of us: a flawed human being.

  “I’ve heard you’re writing something,” he said. This was very like him: my book hadn’t even been written, yet word had leaked out in the press that I was going to be writing this memoir, and Jerry always watched what was going on and what was said about him in particular. He said it as if it were an obscene act to be writing a book. “Yes, I am writing a book; I’m a writer,” I told him. It’s odd. For all the years I’d been a writer, and all the books I’d written, I had never said “I’m a writer.” I always said “I write.”

  I realized this was the breakthrough that allowed me to write my book: I had nothing to be ashamed of. Other people may say differently. I told the story that I had lived.

  “The problem with you, Joyce,” he said, “is you love the world.”

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger is expressing the core principle of Vedanta’s fourth stage: renunciation of the world. Writing, publishing, Joyce Maynard in all her ambition—they are the exact opposite.

  JOYCE MAYNARD: When he said it, I felt as if he had just released me. Because to me that isn’t a problem at all. I said, “Yes, I do love the world and I have raised three children who love the world and I’m glad of that.” He replied, “I always knew this is what you’d amount to—nothing.” This was the man who had written me, who had told me to never forget that I was a real writer and to let nobody ever tell me differently. “And now you mean to exploit me.” I said to him—one of those rare moments when you actually do say the thing, you don’t just think of it later—I said, “Jerry, there may be somebody standing on this doorstep who exploited somebody else standing on this doorstep, but I leave it to you to determine which one is which.” I said goodbye. I am quite sure that is the last time in my life that I will ever see J. D. Salinger.