Salinger
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A MILLION MILES AWAY IN HIS TOWER
Completely devoted to the fourth stage of Vedanta—renunciation of the world—Salinger spends the last two decades of his life in isolation in Cornish, readying himself for the next world and his work for posthumous publication.
ETHEL NELSON: The woman he’s with now [Colleen O’Neill] I’ve met, and she’s delightful. From what I understand, their marriage came to be so that she could take care of him, because at this time he’s pretty feeble and he really needs someone there with him. He couldn’t be alone and he couldn’t very well have a nurse or a person taking care of him in there and not be married. A relative would be fine, but a single person—out.
JULIE McDERMOTT: I have no idea when she came to Cornish, or where Jerry met her, or any of the basics of their relationship. I only know that when I started working at the co-op [in Hanover], they were together. She never said, “I’m married to him.” She never said, “This is my husband.” I just assumed that they were a couple and that they were together. You found out bits of information, that they were husband and wife. At one point, someone said something to him about his daughter, and he said, “That’s not my daughter; that’s my wife!” He was quite adamant that people knew exactly who Colleen was.
As a couple, Colleen and Jerry were not what I would have pictured. I would have thought that maybe he would be with someone older, but I had heard that wasn’t his preference. I think that she loves him as a person and for who he is. She doesn’t want to expose him to the public eye. One time, Colleen and I were carrying on a conversation and I found out that she was a nurse. She also owns her own quilting business.
She’s a wonderful person. I really could be fond of her if I got to know her more. I saw her once at a department store and we talked quite extensively. I had just gotten my hair cut and she was telling me that it looked nice. She was buying undergarments for Jerry. They were never really an affectionate couple that I could tell. Every once in a while, Colleen would put her arm on Jerry’s shoulder, but to hug or show affection of any sort—they didn’t do that. Jerry would look around and be really anxious to try to find out where Colleen was, if she was down at the meat counter instead of at the deli section. He was always pushing the cart really fast so that she would have to hurry along. I could tell sometimes that Mr. Salinger was agitated and that he really wanted to be quick about what he was doing in the store.
Colleen keeps her personal life really quiet; having been with him throughout the years, she doesn’t want people to know any more about her life than Jerry does his. Maybe he’s impressed that upon her. The more people know, the more they can use it against you. I heard one time J. D. Salinger was on a cruise. He signed a credit slip. Someone picked it up off the table and sold it on eBay. I believe he took legal action against that person.
SHANE SALERNO: Salinger once wrote to Hemingway that he was going to attempt to find a girl like Catherine Barkley, the nurse heroine of A Farewell to Arms: British, regal, beautiful. Apparently, he found her in Colleen O’Neill.
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DAVID SHIELDS: Because it’s such an extreme lab experiment—Salinger’s isolation—it matters to a lot of people what Salinger wrote the last forty-five years of his life. Among contemporary American writers, there are many more or less isolated writers: Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo. Is it a phenomenon exclusive to male writers of that approximate generation? In any case, very few writers have ever isolated themselves as thoroughly as Salinger has, or have refrained from publishing for half a century. Salinger dodged Betty Eppes’s question regarding whether he’s continued to write about the Glass family. In the deposition he gave to Hamilton’s lawyer, he refused to say what genre the work falls into. Well, “unclassifiable” can mean genius, but it can also mean inchoate. Very, very few writers produce memorable work after, say, age seventy-five, but Salinger stopped publishing at age forty-six.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: When I interviewed Truman Capote in 1980, we talked about Salinger. Capote said that he knew on good authority that Salinger was writing, or had already written, five or six novellas, and that the New Yorker had rejected all of them. So I said to Capote, “Do you really believe the New Yorker at this stage would reject J. D. Salinger’s work?” “Oh, of course they would,” he said. “They’re not artists.”
PAUL ALEXANDER: I talked to Roger Angell, who’s been a fiction editor at the New Yorker for years and years. He told me, definitively, that if any Salinger story had come in, from 1965 on, they would have found a way to publish it, if for no other reason than its historical value. It’s hard to imagine Capote would know something that Angell, a fiction editor at the magazine, didn’t know.
PHOEBE HOBAN: Yes, it’s credible that Salinger sent stories to the New Yorker over the last three or four decades that were turned down. I’ve heard that Shawn turned down at least one manuscript when he was still editor. Salinger had trust in Shawn, who was very protective of him. Think about it this way: Salinger took himself out of the world forty years ago. It’s very possible Salinger is completely out of touch with reality and there’s no way he can reflect that reality in a meaningful way in literature anymore. It’s very possible that the stories he sent in suffered from that and that people who loved him and his work didn’t want those works to be published because of it.
I think he still wrote about the Glasses, but the Glasses can’t grow up. Where can they go? You can’t keep writing indefinitely about this family of whimsical child geniuses who never grow up. If they grow up, they’re no longer the Glasses. I just can’t believe he left the Glasses. I think they were his family and he continued to write about them.
RENATA ADLER: Salinger had invited me for a short visit to his house in the country. He said that the reason he chose not to publish the material he had been working on was to spare Mr. Shawn the burden of having to read, and to decide whether to publish, Salinger writing about sex. This went too far. The writer who originated, and was the most extreme example of, a recoil from publication and publicity had become something of a prisoner of his sympathy for the editor who had become, yet again, a source of disinclination to publish. A doctrinal circle of pure inhibition seemed to have closed.
JOYCE MAYNARD: Jerry loved the Glass family. Jerry did not love his real family. I’m not speaking of his children—he loved his children—but the Glass family were the ones he talked about as if they were his family. In my memory there was actually a book; he’d made a book of the background of all the members of the Glass family. I just had a general sense there was this book, almost a genealogy of the Glass family. Not that I ever saw it. Jerry loved and was protective of those characters, as if they were his children.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Unless he was a totally crazy man who went off into his studio and sat there and stared out the window, we have to believe what Joyce Maynard saw when she was with him, what the Time researchers saw when they jumped over his fence to steal a look at what he was doing.
WALTER SCOTT: Salinger has been seen in the Dartmouth College library hard at work on a novel, purportedly based on his World War II experiences. He is expected to finish the book sometime this year.
RICHARD HAITCH: “He’s just working, working and working—that’s all,” says his literary agent in New York, Dorothy Olding. Is he writing for publication? “I just don’t know,” Miss Olding says.
RICHARD BROOKS: Another friend, Jonathan Schwartz, tells how his girlfriend, Susan, spent the night at Salinger’s house after pretending that her car had broken down. After eating a meal of his staple diet, nuts and peas, she too saw the safe and the books. . . .
Phyllis Westbery, Salinger’s agent at Harold Ober Associates in New York, would not comment on whether there were any unpublished books. However, Westbery did say that she spoke to Salinger on a “very regular basis” about what he was doing.
To those who have seen him, Salinger comes across as a person who has for most of his adult life been e
motionally stuck in his late teens. . . . Salinger, who is eighty, does not seem to have had an obviously unhappy childhood. He is described by friends who knew him at the time as “confident and even swaggering.” But when he was twenty-five he seems to have had a nervous breakdown while serving in the U.S. army at the end of the second world war in Europe. . . . He walks about in a blue mechanic’s uniform and, when he does go to local restaurants, eats in the kitchen to avoid people.
MATTHEW SALINGER: My sister and I used to tell people when they asked about my father that he wasn’t a writer; he was a plumber.
LILLIAN ROSS: At one point during the more than half century of our friendship, J. D. Salinger told me he had an idea that someday, when “all the fiction had run out,” he might try to do something straight, “really factual, formally distinguishing myself from the Glass boys and Holden Caulfield and the other first-person narrators I’ve used.” It might be readable, maybe funny, he said, and “not just smell like a regular autobiography.” The main thing was that he would use straight facts and “thereby put off or stymie one or two vultures—freelancers or English-department scavengers—who might come around and bother the children and the family before the body is even cold.”
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HILLEL ITALIE: Salinger’s place in Cornish history is mostly that he lived here. He was not the town sage, the town drunk, or even, reputation aside, the town eccentric. He was simply the tall, dark-eyed man who liked to watch the horses at the county fair, buy lettuce at the market or invite children inside for hot cocoa.
KATIE ZEZIMA: Mr. Salinger was a regular at the $12 roast beef dinners at First Congregational Church in Hartland, Vermont. He would arrive about an hour and a half early and pass the time by writing in a small, spiral-bound notebook, said Jeannie Frazer, a church member. Mr. Salinger usually dressed in corduroys and a sweater, she said, and would not speak. He sat at the head of the table, near where the pies were placed.
ETHEL NELSON: We went to many suppers and Jerry was always there as Jerry. He wasn’t made up in a disguise at all. You still couldn’t go up and say hi. Colleen will not allow you to approach him. It’s still going on. It’s never going to end. If you approach him at these suppers, she will step between you and him. When we go to these suppers, Jerry and Colleen are always the first ones there: they’d get the very first seats and they would go up toward the front so they couldn’t be seen readily. At one point I wanted to go up and speak to him, because I hadn’t seen him in quite a few years, but I was promptly told by one of the people I was sitting with, “Don’t, because she won’t let you near him.” Colleen is a giving person and I think she saw a need there and she fulfilled it. She could take care of him. She could make his elderly life a little more comfortable.
DAVID SHIELDS: They went to the suppers, but Salinger kept himself closed off at them. Approach. Avoid. Attract attention. Spurn it.
In 2009 Margaret Tewksbury, a fellow organic gardener, also in her nineties, who lived in Windsor, related that although he still visited her, Salinger’s health had declined. “He’s so deaf you have to yell.”
JOHN CURRAN: Salinger would occasionally take in a basketball game at Dartmouth, in Hanover.
Martha Beattie, fifty-five, of Boston, who coached his son, Matt Salinger, on the crew team at Phillips Academy-Andover in Andover, Mass., and met him once in the 1970s, saw him at games in Hanover twice in the past month—once at a women’s game, once at a men’s game.
Both times he was alone, sitting in the same spot, wearing big, round, tortoise-shell eyeglasses and a scarf, reading the program, she said. Each time, she said hello.
“He looked like a writer,” she said. “He was a little hunched over, but he didn’t look like ninety-one.”
KATIE ZEZIMA: He would, until recent years, vote in elections and attend town meetings at the Cornish Elementary School, and he went to the Plainfield General Store each day before it closed. He was often spotted at the Price Chopper supermarket in Windsor, separated from Cornish by a covered bridge and the now ice-jammed river, and he ate lunch alone at the Windsor Diner.
ASHLEY BLUM: Gwen Tetirick, one of Salinger’s neighbors, said that several times reporters or other visitors knocked on her family’s door asking for directions to Salinger’s home, but they would just pretend to not know who he was.
GWEN TETIRICK: We would just say “J. D. Salinger who?” They think we are a bunch of stupid hicks who don’t know who Salinger is.
ANABELLE CONE: In order to be accepted by the town you have to follow the code. One of the codes of Cornish is you don’t run your mouth about Salinger.
MIKE ACKERMAN: [Salinger] was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.
TOM LEONARD: Locals concur that Salinger is seen out far more infrequently than in the past. Apart from the supermarket, he and his wife occasionally go to a local café in Windsor, the nearest town, for coffee and a sandwich (“he likes the spinach and mushroom wraps,” said the manager), and a restaurant there.
ASHLEY BLUM: During the last two years of his life, when he could no longer go to the [church] dinners himself, he would have an attendee pick up dinner for him.
SUSAN J. BOUTWELL and ALEX HANSON: His wife stopped by the last two Saturdays to purchase roast beef, mashed potatoes, and cole slaw to bring home to Cornish, said Larry Frazer, one of the meal’s organizers.
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Salinger and Colleen O’Neill, smiling, 2008.
CHARLES McGRATH: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he had lived in seclusion for more than fifty years. He was ninety-one.
Salinger’s literary representative, Harold Ober Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite having broken his hip in May,” the agency said, “his health had been excellent until a rather sudden decline after the new year. He was not in any pain before or at the time of his death.”
HAROLD OBER ASSOCIATES: In keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work, and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time. Salinger had remarked that he was in this world but not of it. His body is gone, but the family hopes that he is still with those he loves, whether they are religious or historical figures, personal friends, or fictional characters.
COLLEEN O’NEILL: Cornish is a truly remarkable place. This beautiful spot afforded my husband a place of awayness from the world. The people of this town protected him and his right to his privacy for many years. I hope, and believe, they will do the same for me.
DOUG HACKETT: Obviously, we’re prepared for whatever happens, but we’re hoping people allow the family to grieve in peace, and honor him the way he lived, which is quietly.
LILLIAN ROSS: No one else could make me laugh—genuinely laugh aloud—as he could. His positives are familiar to Colleen O’Neill, his wife of the last several decades, to his son, Matthew, and to whatever other sacred and private relationships he had.
JOHN CURRAN: Matt Salinger answered the doorbell at the home Thursday by rolling open a kitchen window and speaking through it.
“My father was a great father,” was all he said.
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JENNIFER SCHUESSLER: J. D. Salinger, who died last month at 91, had a perfect best-seller record, sending all four of his books onto the list. “The Catcher in the Rye” spent 29 weeks on the list, peaking at No. 4. “Nine Stories” made it to No. 9. “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” collections of previously published stories released after Salinger had retreated to self-imposed literary silence in rural New Hampshire, both reached No. 1.
RICK MOODY: Ernest Hemingway famously said of Mark Twain’s legacy that “we all of us came out from under Huck Finn’s skirts.” The same can be said, for contemporary writers, of Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s impossible to be an American writer now and not feel the influence of Holden and of Salinger generally. The most perceptible way that we feel this is in Salinger’s understanding of voice, the loose, colloquial, humane voice of Holden Caulfield, that very personal first-person, which became the template for so much American literature that came after. You can hear him in Bright Lights, Big City; you can hear him in Less Than Zero; you can hear him even in a television program like My So-Called Life.
The second part of Salinger’s outsized legacy has to do with his commitment to the theme of family. I’m thinking especially of the four novellas that make up the last works he published in his lifetime, Franny and Zooey and then the two works titled “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction.” Over the course of these novellas, Salinger’s commitment to the Glass family, the protagonists of these works, deepened to an almost obsessive level, and while the Glass family was anything but functional, since it was noteworthy for suicide, religious obsession, and game show appearances, Salinger was never less than devoted to them, and to the complexity of their interactions. A whole literature of the so-called dysfunctional family, including at least one work, The Ice Storm, by this writer, was spawned by these Glass chronicles.