Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (112 page)

On demobilisation, Salinger, for reasons which are obscure, chose to stay in Germany as a civilian working for the Defense Department. Even more puzzling, he married a German woman, Sylvia Welter, wangling her French papers
(‘fraternisation’ – marriage with the former enemy – was forbidden). Sylvia is recorded as having been a fanatic anti-Semitic Nazi and the marriage dissolved almost as soon as it formed. Salinger returned to New York in 1946 and took up residence in his former stamping ground, Greenwich Village. For a few years his lifestyle was bohemian – drink, girls, cards and a dedication to the perfection of his stories. ‘Bananafish’ (published in the
New Yorker
, in January 1948) introduced at length the Glass family, his main subject matter over the next two decades. The saintly Seymour Glass, back from war, disgusted with the human race, commits suicide (his earlier life emerged, collage-like, in later stories). The title alludes to a story within the story, told on the beach to a little girl, Sybil, about the fabulous fish whose piggish gluttony (like the monkey’s hand in the peanut jar) is his downfall.

‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ (published in the
New Yorker
in April 1950) also sets the fallen world of adulthood against the Wordsworthian purity of the child. In Devon, England, two months before the Normandy invasion, ‘Sergeant X’ meets a young, charmingly precocious girl, Esmé (manifestly upper class). On learning that the American writes, she lodges a request for a story, adding, ‘I’m an avid reader’:

I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.

‘It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.’ She reflected. ‘I prefer stories about squalor.’

‘About what?’ I said, leaning forward.

‘Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.’

The story is a perfect example of Salinger’s control of idiom infused with tactful symbolism: Esmé’s father’s broken watch – her later gift to him – is the last object described in the story: time has gone wrong.

Amazingly Salinger had difficulty in getting
The Catcher in the Rye
accepted. One editor thought Holden ‘crazy’. Who wanted that? Holden – the ‘great phony-slayer’ (Mary McCarthy’s description) eventually appeared in print in July 1951. Only the children in Holden’s world are unphony – his dead brother Allie and his little sister, Phoebe. He has run away from school – but he will never arrive at where he is running towards, any more than Dorothy will get over the rainbow. Holden will never, in his own image, be the catcher, saving children from the ‘fall’ (the cliff on the edge of the rye field – adulthood, we deduce). What he needs – and will never get – is someone to ‘catch’ him. On the run in New York, staked by a handout from his grandmother, Holden drops out for three days: he drinks, has an unsuccessful date with an old flame, calls up a prostitute, is mugged by her pimp, and is hit on by a gay teacher (a ‘flit’), writing it all up from a hospital in California. Is it what therapists nowadays call ‘journaling’ – an exercise to facilitate cure? Or is it a memoir?

As the 1950s moved on, Salinger turned away from the literary world (‘It’s a
goddam embarrassment, publishing’) into writing as pure meditation, a private, unshared act of ‘self realization’ in which readers were unwelcome intruders. The gobbets of the Glassiad which he released, grudgingly (to an increasingly disaffected
New Yorker
), perplexed his admirers. He did not seem to care. He found congenial cosmic reassurance in Zen and Buddhism, Taoism and Vedanta. In 1952, he left New York for Waldenesque seclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire, building a workshop in the garden (his ‘bunker’) of his 90-acre property. In 1955 he had married a woman fifteen years his junior, Claire Douglas.

It was assumed that he was working on the Glass Family saga and its seven offspring that had begun with ‘Bananafish’. Particles emerged into print with ‘Franny’ (1955), ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955), ‘Zooey’ (1957) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959). He made the cover of
Time
in September 1961 and his last foray into print with a new work was ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, a novella that took up 80 pages in the
New Yorker
. It takes the form of a letter from summer camp written by seven-year-old Seymour Glass (the suicidal character in ‘Banana-fish’). ‘Hapworth 16’ was received badly – and Salinger took the reception badly.

His marriage to Claire Douglas produced two children and lasted twelve years (a very long time by Salinger’s standards: his two other longest relationships were with his beloved Schnauzer Benny and his trusty typewriter). His religious prohibition on sex-for-pleasure evidently contributed to the break-up, as did the Thoreauesque life at Cornish. It seems the characters in his fiction were as real to him as any actual humans. When Elia Kazan implored him for permission to dramatise
Catcher
for the Broadway stage, Salinger declined on the grounds that ‘I fear Holden wouldn’t like it.’ As the years passed he buried his tracks (letters, private papers) as methodically as he could, and had a series of relationships with increasingly younger women.

Joyce Maynard, an eighteen-year-old student when he first became involved with her in 1972, published a venomous account of their early-1970s relationship, which caused him chagrin. In 1986, he used every resource of American law successfully to neutralise a biography by Ian Hamilton, who wrote a rueful un-biography instead. It confirmed a widespread suspicion that America’s most famous novelist had finally flipped. As his last public act, in 2009, Salinger again successfully used the lawyer to suppress a follow-up to
Catcher in the Rye
, ‘60 years on’. He married, for the third time, in 1992 – a woman forty years his junior. The bunker protected him for almost half a century. The fearsome literary estate he set up, before his death, may well keep what the bunker contained out of posterity’s view for ever.

Like, some of these other Tankers I knew used to swap bottles of liquor with infantrymen in exchange for prisoners, and then just shoot ’em for fun. I used to say, ‘Goddamn it, will you stop shooting those prisoners!’ And they would just shrug and say, ‘Hell, they’d shoot us if they caught us!’
Willeford recalling his war-time experience as a tank commander

Charles Willeford lived more life, and a harder life, than most writers. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, his father died of TB in 1922 and his mother of the same disease shortly after. He was brought by relatives in Los Angeles and ran away, aged thirteen, hoboing through America. In 1939, he joined the army, marrying before being posted overseas to Europe in 1942. A non-commissioned tank commander, Willeford fought at the Battle of the Bulge (not too far from J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut), won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre. He remained in the army after the war, running a services’ radio station in Japan until 1949. His first publication, a book of poetry, was published in 1948.

Discharged, and divorced, following an unsuccessful attempt to study art in Peru, Willeford joined up again in 1949 – this time round, the US Air Force. He would remain in uniform until 1956, remarrying and publishing three novels along the way. According to his blurbs he was thereafter variously a professional horse trainer, a boxer, a radio announcer, and an artist in France. He acquired a degree and taught English from 1967 to 1985, at the Miami-Dade Community College, in Florida. He divorced for a second time in 1976. For some years Willeford had reviewed mystery novels for the
Miami Herald
and had himself written a handful of crime and PI potboilers. They promised nothing wonderful. But in the four last years of his life, beginning with
Miami Blues
(1984), he produced a cluster of works which are among the best things ever done in the genre. They feature the series hero, Detective ‘Hoke’ Moseley, and are set in a closely observed Florida criminal underworld, in the aftermath of the huge Cuban (‘Mariel’) influx of the 1970s, when a spiteful Castro emptied his jails and asylums onto America’s shores.

The Moseley novels are tinged with a wry comedy, summed up in one of his favourite epigrams from the congenially sardonic Karl Kraus: ‘Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.’ An ironic portrait of the hero emerges over the course of the Moseley sequence. When first encountered, he lives (if that is the word) in a hotel – the Eldorado – where he has a rent-free room in return for moonlighting as hotel detective. He is barred promotion by the Homicide Division’s affirmative action
policy, which favours Blacks, Latins and women. In pursuit of a psychopathic robber in
Miami Blues
, Hoke is beaten to a pulp, has his dentures destroyed, and his service revolver and badge stolen. The robber goes on a criminal rampage, impersonating Hoke with the stolen ID – the final insult.

One of the unusual aspects of the series is the progression in the hero’s life from one novel to another, rendering it a genuine sequence rather than a series. In
New Hope for the Dead
(1985; epigraph: ‘Man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to sit quietly in his room’ – Pascal), Hoke has risen somewhat. He is on active homicide duty, but has an awkward partner, Ellita Sanchez, with whom, such being life on the street, he eventually shacks up. A complication is his ex-wife dumping their two daughters on him after she has taken off with a black baseball player.
Sideswipe
(1987; epigraph: ‘There’s a lot of bastards out there!’ – William Carlos Williams) finds Hoke, a pregnant Ellita and his two teenage daughters living cosily in a suburban rented house.
The Way We Die Now
(1988; epigraph: ‘No one owns life. But anyone with a frying pan owns death’ – William Burroughs) finds Hoke still working on the ‘cold case’ file. Domestically his life is happier than it has ever been, and he is thirty-five pounds heavier on Ellita’s cooking. He has ‘all the advantages of a family man (except for a regular sex life) and few, if any, of the disadvantages.’ It cannot, of course, last.

Nor, alas, did its author. Having received a massive $225,000 advance, Willeford died as the glowing reviews were coming in. He was buried, in recognition of his distinguished war service, at Arlington National Cemetery. Epitaph: ‘A hell of a lot better writer than you might think’?

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Asimov was born in Petrovichi in the USSR, the son of a prosperous miller unlucky enough to be a Jew in a savagely anti-Semitic time and place. They were luckier than some. Asimov’s family contrived to emigrate to the USA, and the infant Isaac was naturalised in 1928. Asimov Sr went on to run a candy store in Brooklyn. At
home Yiddish was Isaac’s first language. He grew up a brilliant, over-achieving high school pupil, going on to take degrees in biochemistry at Columbia University, culminating in a Ph.D. in 1948. A year later, Dr Asimov (he relished the title, even more than Jewish mothers proverbially do) was appointed to a teaching post in biochemistry at Boston University. He would lecture in its school of medicine for the remainder of his professional career, with a break for war service, 1942–6. He was proud, to the point of arrogance, of the Asimov brain (and a long-serving Vice President of Mensa to certify its 200+ IQ score).

An early fan of pulp SF (much to his father’s disgust – although the Asimov candy stores had a profitable sideline in the product), Isaac came under the wing of the ferociously right-wing John W. Campbell, editor of
Astounding Science Fiction
, a man, it was said, who made Ayn Rand look like a pinko. Asimov published his first story with Campbell in 1939, an ominous year, and his first science fiction novel,
Pebble in the Sky
(Earth becomes radioactive, following nuclear war), was published in 1950 – a period when nuclear war was imminently expected and middle-class America was investing in fallout shelters and guns to defend them against working-class, shelterless, Americans. In that same year – 1950 – there appeared Asimov’s most famous volume,
I, Robot
, a collection of short stories published over previous years, expounding the author’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’. Those involved in the relevant scientific field have always taken them seriously. The most ambitious – verging on Messianic – of Asimov’s fictional projects, the ‘Foundation’ trilogy (1951–3), followed shortly after. It aimed to emulate, with the blunter tools of science fiction, Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Nothing small for Isaac Asimov.

The most prolific of writers, Asimov published some sixty works of SF, fifteen crime mysteries (which he began writing in 1956), a hundred or more popularising works of ‘science fact’, and scholarly treatises on Shakespeare, the Bible and quantum mechanics – 600 titles in all. He retired from full-time academic life to concentrate on writing in 1958, winning all the highest awards in SF with monotonous regularity.
The Gods Themselves
(1973) scooped up both the Hugo and the Nebula Prizes for that year. A Science Fiction Writers of America poll in 1979 voted ‘Nightfall’ the best SF story of all time (first published in 1941, it portrays a planet in which night comes only once a millennium).