Salinger

by David Shields

  “The Male Goodbye,” 1946. Hamilton writes that, in a 1946 letter to Murray, Salinger refers to “The Male Goodbye,” which is the first story he wrote following his separation from his first wife, Sylvia. The story cannot be found anywhere now.

  “The Boy in the People Shooting Hat,” 1948. In About Town, Yagoda reproduces a photocopy of the New Yorker editor Gus Lobrano’s rejection letter, which indicates that in this story Bobby and Stradlater fight over June Gallagher. Holden, who also fights with Stradlater over June, says that his red hunting hat is “a people shooting hat.” The story cannot be found anywhere now.

  “A Summer Accident,” 1949. Yagoda states that Salinger returned his focus to The Catcher in the Rye after the New Yorker turned down this story. The story cannot be found anywhere now.

  “Requiem for the Phantom of the Opera,” 1951. In a 1951 letter to Lobrano, Salinger refers to this story, which was turned down by the New Yorker in January and cannot be found anywhere now.

  “The Daughter of the Late, Great Man,” 1959. Sublette indicates that, in a 1959 letter to Burnett, Salinger attempted to buy the story, which he had submitted many years before and which Burnett, preparing to revive the magazine, had found in the Story magazine files. Burnett compared “The Daughter of the Late, Great Man” to his earlier stories that Burnett had published: “The Long Debut of Lois Taggett” and “Elaine.” However, Burnett returned the story (which is listed in the table of contents for The Young Folks) to Salinger when he declined permission to publish it. A reasonable conjecture is that this 1959 story can be located among the papers in Salinger’s literary estate.

  “A Young Man in a Stuffed Shirt,” 1959. Sublette states that, in a 1959 letter to Burnett, Salinger attempted to buy this story as well, which Burnett had also found in the Story files. Again, Burnett returned the story (which is listed in the table of contents for The Young Folks) to Salinger when he declined permission to publish it. A reasonable conjecture is that this 1959 story can be located among the papers in Salinger’s literary estate.

  “Man-Forsaken Men,” December 9, 1959. Salinger’s letter to the editor of the New York Post Magazine, in which he argues against prisoners being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole: “The New York State lifer is one of the most crossed-off, man-forsaken men on earth.” The magazine chose the headline. The full letter—which some scholars believe Salinger’s friend Judge Learned Hand may have encouraged him to write—is printed in Fiene’s “A Bibliographical Study of J. D. Salinger: Life, Work and Reputation.”

  Manuscript about Harold Ross, William Shawn, and the New Yorker. In 1959 James Thurber published a memoir, The Years with Ross, which was highly critical of Ross, the magazine’s founding editor. In defense, Salinger wrote an approximately twenty-five-to-thirty-page letter about Ross, which he sent to the Saturday Review. Fiene states that, in an October 8, 1962, letter, Hallowell Bowser, the general editor of the Saturday Review, said that Salinger’s letter was “rejected because of its length and unusual style”; that is, as James Bryan indicates in “Salinger and His Short Fiction” (1968), “the piece must have been, as I heard, embarrassingly fulsome.” A reasonable conjecture is that this long letter can be located among the papers in Salinger’s literary estate.

  THE GLASS FAMILY

  Les Glass: The family’s patriarch, Les is a Jewish vaudeville performer on the Pantages circuit. From 1921 to 1923 he and his wife, Bessie—along with their five oldest children—tour Australia. In Manhattan they live first in the Hotel Almanac, on Riverside Drive and 110th Street, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, and later in an apartment in the East Seventies. In 1925, at his retirement party, he meets a man who signs up Seymour and Buddy to perform as regulars on a new national radio quiz show called It’s a Wise Child. All of the Glass children take turns appearing on the show—their parents teach all of them how to dance and juggle—and their combined earnings send all of them through college. Later, Les works as a talent scout in Los Angeles for a movie company. In “Seymour: An Introduction,” after losing badly in a pinochle game, he visits the apartment that the adult Seymour and Buddy share on Seventy-ninth Street near Madison Avenue. Keeping his overcoat on the whole time and scowling, he checks Buddy’s hands for nicotine stains, asks Seymour how many cigarettes a day he smokes, and becomes even more agitated upon discovering a fly in his highball. His mood lifts when he looks up and sees a photo on the wall of Bessie and himself, because it reminds him of the family’s vaudeville tour through Australia.

  Bessie (Gallagher) Glass: Born in Dublin to Roman Catholic parents, Bessie was once a “widely acknowledged public beauty, a vaudevillian, a dancer, a very light dancer,” but by 1957 she has become a “medium stout dancer” whose age is “fiercely indeterminate.” In “Zooey” she wears a hairnet and an old Japanese kimono to which she has added “two oversize hip pockets which contained two or three packs of cigarettes, several match folders, a screwdriver, a claw-end hammer, a Boy Scout knife that had once belonged to one of her sons, and an enamel faucet handle or two, plus an assortment of screws, nails, hinges, and ball bearing casters—all of which tended to make Mrs. Glass chink faintly as she moved about in her large apartment.” As adults, all of her children worship her as the embodiment of common sense and straightforward love.

  Seymour Glass: Worshipped by his six siblings as genius and saint, by age six Seymour has read everything he can find in the local library about God. At seven his Hindu meditation exercises allow him to glimpse his previous and future incarnations. Between ten and fifteen he’s the star of It’s a Wise Child. He attends Columbia University at fifteen; at eighteen he receives his Ph.D. and becomes a professor. Nearing a full professorship at twenty-one, he speaks German and French fluently and reads Chinese and Japanese. In 1941 he’s drafted into the army; on leave in 1942, he marries Muriel Fedder, whose earnest simplicity he hopes will balance his otherworldliness. At twenty-five Seymour is going bald; he’s five-foot-ten-and-a-half, with a receding chin, large nose, large ears, and teeth stained yellow from nicotine and wears ill-fitting clothes. During World War II he serves in Europe and has a nervous breakdown. After the end of the war, before being sent home, he spends three weeks in the psychiatric wards of army hospitals. Two weeks after his arrival in the United States, on a second honeymoon with Muriel, he commits suicide. His siblings try to live by his teachings, which combine wisdom from the Old and New Testaments, Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta.

  Webb Gallagher (Buddy) Glass: Born in 1919 (the year in which Salinger is born), the second oldest Glass sibling, an author, and, as such, Salinger’s self-acknowledged alter ego, Buddy narrates “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Zooey,” and “Seymour: An Introduction.” Transcriber of the letter that Seymour, at seven, writes home from summer camp (“Hapworth 16, 1924”), he also claims authorship of The Catcher in the Rye and the stories “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “Teddy.” He teaches creative writing at a girls’ junior college in upstate New York, but he considers his purpose in life to be Seymour’s disciple and chronicler. Buddy is proud of his physical resemblance to Seymour, with whom he shares a receding chin and large nose. However, he believes he has always been a snappier dresser than Seymour.

  Beatrice (Boo Boo) Tannenbaum: Born in 1920, the third oldest of the Glass children, Boo Boo works as a secretary for an admiral in the navy during World War II. In “Down at the Dinghy,” she, her husband, and her three children live in Tuckahoe, an affluent town in Westchester. Boo Boo is a “small, almost hipless girl of twenty five,” and “her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was—in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces—a stunning and final girl.” When she asks her son, Lionel, why he is so upset and wants to run away from home, he tells her that he overheard their maid call his father a “big—sloppy—kike.” Lionel, four, doesn’t understand, and Boo Boo doesn’t endeavor to explain, anti-Semitism. Instead, she consoles him by telling him that wha
t the maid said “isn’t the worst that could happen.”

  Walter F. Glass: Walt was born in 1921, twelve minutes ahead of his twin, Waker. In “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” the central character, Eloise Wengler, says that Walt, her college boyfriend, is the sweetest and funniest person she has ever known. When Walt is drafted into the army, he tells Eloise that he’s advancing in the service in a different direction from everyone else: “He said that when he’d get his first promotion, instead of getting stripes he’d have his sleeves taken away from him. He said when he’d get to be a general, he’d be stark naked. All he’d be wearing would be a little infantry button in his navel.” In the fall of 1945, while serving with Occupation forces in Japan, Walt is killed in a freak explosion.

  Waker Glass: Both Waker and his twin brother, Walter, are infants during the Glass family’s tour of Australia. As do the other Glass children, the twins receive wide-ranging religious instruction from their older brothers, Seymour and Buddy. At nine, Waker gives away his well-over-budget birthday present, a brand-new bicycle, to an unknown boy in Central Park. When his parents say he should have just given the boy a nice long ride on his bike, Waker says, “The boy didn’t want a nice, long ride, he wanted the bicycle. He’d never had one, the boy; he’d always wanted one.” Later, Waker converts to Catholicism, spends World War II in a conscientious objectors’ camp, and after the war becomes a Carthusian monk.

  Zachary (Zooey) Glass: Zooey is born in 1930, the second-youngest of the Glasses, nine years after the twins, Walker and Waker, and five years before Franny. Next to Seymour, Zooey is the audience’s favorite on It’s a Wise Child. He understands Seymour better than Buddy does; in “Zooey,” he’s able to use Seymour’s teachings to pull his sister Franny out of her spiritual crisis: for instance, that you should work not for reward but for the sake of doing it as well as you can. An actor, Zooey is a leading man in television movies. Although he is slight of build and one of his ears protrudes more than the other, “Zooey’s face was close to being a wholly beautiful face,” because there is “an authentic esprit” superimposed across it.

  Frances (Franny) Glass: Born in 1935, Franny is the youngest of the Glass children—eighteen years younger than her oldest brother, Seymour. When Franny is a ten-month-old baby, crying, Seymour reads her a Taoist tale in order to calm her down. Later, Franny swears she remembers the event. In “Franny,” she’s a twenty-year-old college student who is obsessed with The Way of a Pilgrim, a book of Russian spirituality. Her Ivy League boyfriend, Lane Coutell, doesn’t share her admiration for the book, but he considers Franny “an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt.” In the course of the novella, Franny has a nervous breakdown. Her older brothers Seymour and Buddy have been nurturing her mysticism since her infancy and, as a result, she has trouble interacting with the ordinary—in herself and everyone around her.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SHANE SALERNO:

  This book had its origins on a rare rainy day in Los Angeles when I saw two photographs of J. D. Salinger, one superimposed over the other in a used bookstore known as much for its dust as its books. The first photograph was the iconic image of Salinger from the 1951 back jacket of The Catcher in the Rye. The second was taken many years later and depicted a haunted man in the winter of a difficult life. I spent nine years working on this book, trying to reconcile those two photographs and tell as complete a story as possible about Jerome David Salinger.

  This book initially grew out of a documentary film I directed called Salinger, which was released theatrically in 2013 by The Weinstein Company and is forthcoming in 2014 from American Masters on PBS. While the origin of this book can be found in many of the interviews I conducted for that film, the book took on a life of its own when David Shields and I began studying the thousands of pages of interview transcripts, organizing and editing the interview passages into sections and chapters, conducting important new research, and adding our own analyses and commentaries.

  Most biographies include photographs of and letters to and from the biographical subject, but in the case of someone as secretive as Salinger, photographs of Salinger and letters from him were extremely difficult to come by. For nearly a decade, I conducted a worldwide search for information that would help to unravel the enigma that is Salinger. I am honored to present it here and extremely grateful to everyone who provided photographs and letters; without this material, this book would not have been possible, and it would certainly not be anywhere nearly as complete an account as it is now.

  I would like to thank:

  Jonathan Karp, my publisher, for believing in this project from the very beginning and for pursuing it with incredible passion and conviction;

  Jofie Ferrari-Adler, my editor, for his thoughtful suggestions, spirited debates, and intelligent criticisms on issues that mattered;

  A. Scott Berg, the late (great) Gore Vidal, and Ben Yagoda for the kind advice they gave me during many phone calls when I thought I would never complete this project;

  military historian John McManus for his careful review of the World War II sections of this book and historian Robert Abzug for his detailed review of the material that formed the basis for the chapter on Kaufering, the subcamp of Dachau that Salinger walked into in 1945 and as these pages argue, never walked out of;

  the Fitzgerald family for allowing me to publish, for the first time, the extraordinary photos of J. D. Salinger taken by Paul Fitzgerald from 1945 to 1991 and Salinger’s letters to Paul from 1945 to 2008. For more than sixty years Paul Fitzgerald never spoke of his relationship with J. D. Salinger, and his name cannot be found in any previous article or book about Salinger. I want to thank his family for trusting me with telling this important part of Salinger’s story. The Fitzgerald photos and letters were invaluable to gaining a full understanding of J. D. Salinger’s complex life and I cannot imagine this book without them;

  Jean Miller for sharing—in these pages for the first time—her story and portions of Salinger’s letters. Jean has a remarkable story to tell, beginning when she met Salinger at the age of fourteen, that could not be fully contained in these pages. I look forward to her memoir on her relationship with Salinger;

  Eberhard Alsen for his many research trips to Germany, which I directed and funded over a six-year period. His commitment led to important new information and documents on Sylvia Welter, Salinger’s first wife, his stay in a mental hospital, and other aspects of Salinger’s service in World War II;

  I want to express my deep gratitude to my sources, the great majority of whom spoke to me on the record. I personally interviewed more than two hundred people over nine years, and while not everyone appears by name, their important contributions are reflected on every page. I am particularly indebted to the residents of Cornish, New Hampshire, and Windsor, Vermont, for answering my questions in person and over the phone and directing me to others who might do the same. I am also grateful to former colleagues of Salinger’s at the New Yorker who agreed to speak with me off the record. In every case where information was used from a source who would not go on the record, the information was confirmed by at least one additional independent source before appearing in these pages;

  the gifted and generous Don Winslow for keeping the “anytime, anywhere” promise that he made to me in the dedication of The Kings of Cool. You are a great writer and an extraordinary friend;

  Russell David Harper, revising editor of the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, for his careful vetting of this manuscript;

  Alonzo Wickers at Davis Wright Tremaine and Michael Donaldson at Donaldson and Callif for their intelligent, methodical, and truly exhaustive (and exhausting) legal vetting on this complex project, which spreads across three different mediums: publishing (Simon & Schuster), film (The Weinstein Company), and television (American Masters). I also want to thank Robert Offer and Shelby Weiser and Toni Bo
im of Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern who worked on this project daily for years, litigation counsel Max Sprecher and Emily Remes at Simon & Schuster.

  Despite the project’s consuming nine long years, critical information was still coming in during the final weeks (and even the final days) before going to print and I frustrated many with my insistence on writing and revising until the alarm bells rang. This certainly made for a better book but was a daily challenge for the hardworking men and women behind the scenes. I want to extend a very special thanks to Irene Kheradi for her unwavering support and enormous tolerance and her entire team at Simon & Schuster for their dedication, hard work, and long hours. Additionally I want to thank Nancy Singer for her tireless work and vision and Christopher Lin for his creative design. Everyone at Simon & Schuster worked under enormous time constraints in the closing months and this book would not have been possible without the commitment shown by every single department.

  Also, Deborah Randall for her extraordinary producing efforts over nine years. I simply could not have made Salinger without her counsel and many remarkable contributions.

  Anyone who writes about J. D. Salinger’s life owes a debt to the many writers and reporters who have covered him. I want to acknowledge two previous Salinger biographers, Ian Hamilton and, of course, Paul Alexander, the latter of whom gave countless hours of assistance, support, and counsel to this project for nearly a decade. I also want to acknowledge Joyce Maynard’s and Margaret Salinger’s memoirs. Readers can debate the complicated motivations behind these books, but they have made an important contribution to our understanding of the life and work of J. D. Salinger. I was also helped by the work of John Skow, Ron Rosenbaum, Ernest Havemann, James Lundquist, Warren French, Eberhard Alsen, Harold Bloom, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Joan Didion, Frederick L. Gwynn, Joseph L. Blotner, William F. Belcher, and James W. Lee. Each of these writers valuably assisted my efforts to unravel the mystery of J. D. Salinger;