Salinger (19 page)

Four days later, a memorial service was held for Ross at Frank Campbell’s Funeral Home in Manhattan. Salinger attended the service, as did the entire
New Yorker
“family,” most of whom were deeply saddened by the death and more than a little concerned about the magazine’s future. Lobrano was rumored to be a potential successor to Ross.
Another editor was also being mentioned—William Shawn. A
mysterious figure in the publishing world, mostly because of his obsession with strictly maintaining his
privacy, Shawn was a character in his own right. For years, when he ate lunch in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel, which was located near the
New Yorker
offices, then at 25 West 43rd
Street, he ordered cornflakes. But a cornflakes lunch was just one idiosyncrasy; Shawn had many.

“He wouldn’t live above the second floor,” says Mary D. Kierstead, who worked for Shawn for years as his secretary before she joined the magazine’s fiction department.
“At the theater he had to sit way back in the orchestra because he wouldn’t sit down near the stage in case of fire. What do we call this? He was neurotic. There was always the rumor,
totally unverified, that he was supposed to have been the child who was going to be kidnapped in a famous kidnapping in Chicago but another child was taken instead. There were also things like, he
didn’t like air-conditioning and he was always dressed too warmly. Then there was the business with the tunnels. He didn’t like to go through tunnels. And elevators—at the
New
Yorker
offices the elevators were automated but one was kept with a human just to take Mr. Shawn up and down because he had a phobia about being stuck in an elevator. He had other charming
idiosyncrasies. On the phone he always sounded like a little boy—he had a child’s voice.” As for those phobias—such as his elevator phobia—there were many rumors
circulating in the New York literary circles at the time. “The gossip was he carried a hatchet in his briefcase in case he got stuck in an elevator,” says Tom Wolfe. “That’s
just how powerful his elevator phobia was.”

The year 1951 had been a good one for Salinger. After working on it for a decade, he had finally published
The Catcher in the Rye.
Much to his surprise, it stayed on
the
New York Times
best-seller list for the last half of 1951. The book was not a best-seller in England.

In late January, William Shawn was named as Ross’s replacement at the
New Yorker,
a development Salinger watched with great interest. Suspicious of academics yet
intellectual, dry-witted yet capable of appreciating slapstick humor—Shawn, who had been at the magazine since the late 1930s, had a sense of where the
New Yorker
had been in its
past and where it needed to go in its future in order to survive. Years later, it would be said that, as the publisher was trying to make up his mind about a successor to Ross, Shawn typed up an
announcement saying he, Shawn, was the replacement and anonymously posted the memorandum on a bulletin board—
that
was how the selection of Shawn was made. Another piece of
New
Yorker
folklore, the story was made up; more than likely, Ross’s replacement was merely picked by a hiring committee, the same way editorial positions are filled at most magazines.

Around this time, Salinger was dealing with other publishing issues. On February 19, Burnett wrote to ask if Salinger would contribute to an issue of
Story
devoted to “the most outstanding” writers to have been published in the journal. “It is a long time since we have seen a story by you,” Burnett said in his letter. What
Burnett did not know, but what he would soon figure out, was that Salinger continued to blame him for Lippincott’s failure to publish
The Young Folks.
As a result, he no longer
wanted to publish his work in
Story.
When Salinger refused to accept Burnett’s invitation, Burnett was distressed. He simply couldn’t fathom why Salinger was angry at him.

In early 1952, with the success of
The Catcher in the Rye
behind him—on March 2 the book made its final appearance on the
New York Times
best-seller list, showing up at
number 12—Salinger had more pleasant publishing business on his mind. First, he was about to decide that he should release a collection of his short stories. A book whose contents would be
completely different from
The Young Folks,
it would be made up mostly from stories he had published in the
New Yorker.
Recently Salinger had met with Roger Machell in New York to
tell him of his interest in bringing out a story collection. When Hamish Hamilton heard the news, he was elated, sending Salinger a letter to assure him that he “long[ed] to hear more.”
The story collection, Hamilton said, could be in the range of sixty thousand words. In March, Salinger wrote back to Hamilton. He was planning on coming to England in June, Salinger said, and they
could talk then about releasing a story collection sometime in the not-too-distant future. This was more or less how Salinger left
the situation when he departed New York
for a vacation in Florida and Mexico.

As it happened, Salinger was gone on this trip for some time. While he was away, officials at the Valley Forge Military Academy selected him as one of its distinguished alumni. Salinger was
asked to attend a ceremony at the school as part of this honor. Someone answering Salinger’s mail wrote back to say he would not be able to attend because he was in Mexico. On June 25, back
in New York, Salinger wrote the school’s officials himself to thank them for the award, although it did unsettle him. He just did not like this kind of public attention, he wrote in his
letter.

At the moment, Salinger was becoming more involved in Hindu studies, often attending seminars and lectures at the Ramakrishna Vivekanada Center. In addition, he continued to think about future
career moves. Of course, currently those moves were affected by the release of the reprint of
The Catcher in the Rye,
which occurred in the summer of 1952.

In the fall of 1952, S. J. Perelman, a regular contributor to the
New Yorker,
like Salinger, introduced him to Leila Hadley, a young woman who had just written a book
called
Give Me the World,
an account of a three-month trip she took on a schooner. Hadley had recently visited Sri Lanka, where she had met a Buddhist monk at a monastery, and Perelman
thought Salinger would like to hear Hadley’s take on Eastern religions. So Perelman arranged for Hadley and Salinger to meet; if a romance evolved as well, so much the better.

On the evening they were to meet, Salinger picked up Hadley at her mother’s apartment at 150 East Seventy-second Street. The couple had a quiet dinner at a
neighborhood restaurant. “He was very tall and thin,” Hadley says. “He looked like a lanky Jimmy Stewart. And those eyes were incredible—like black coffee. With great depth,
they were extraordinary, memorable.” Over dinner, Hadley brought up Buddhism. “There was this one doctor in Sri Lanka with whom I had talked about Buddhism, and he had told me an
analogy about a person having a scab on ones knee and picking at it. He said how much better it would be if one didn’t have the scab at all. I told this to Jerry who was not impressed. I
should have been more erudite and mystical for him, but I wasn’t.”

Despite the awkwardness of their first date, Salinger took Hadley out several times during the next two months. They went to dinner; some nights they stopped by his apartment on East
Fifty-seventh Street. “It was a dark apartment on the first floor that was not expensive,” Hadley remembers. “Everything in the place was in that kind of parade-formation
neatness, creating a kind of clean and tidy look.” The strictly maintained neatness bothered Hadley, who, she admits, never really felt comfortable around Salinger. “With Jerry,”
Hadley says, “I always felt as if I was going to say the wrong thing, which is not something I usually feel with people. In the 1950s one was trained to make conversation, but he wasn’t
someone who was easy to talk to at all.”

Still, they
did
have conversations—many of them. “He talked about his ex-wife, who he carefully explained to me he met in dreams,” Hadley recalls. “He told me
all about the experiences of meeting his ex-wife in dreams. He also talked about Holden as if he
were a real live person. I would ask him about what he was doing at some
point in the past and he would say, ‘Well, that was when Holden was doing this or that.’ It was as if Holden really existed, which I couldn’t understand. Besides this, he talked
about his writing and a notebook he was keeping. He also told me he was writing about the Glass family. Everything I said was challenged. At one point I told him I wanted to own a painting by the
artist Cranach. And he said, ‘You don’t need to buy that painting; you can own it in your head.’ That was a very advanced idea for the 1950s. But Salinger was against materialism.
After all, attachment creates desire, desire creates suffering, so suffering can be avoided if . . . ” One last subject he talked about with Hadley was the war. “He did talk about the
war with me. I gather he had had a nervous breakdown because of the war. He didn’t say so specifically but he certainly hinted at it.”

That fall, Salinger began to consider leaving New York. He was tired of living in the city and longed for a quiet solitude he thought he could find in the country. He also
disliked the personal attention he was getting because of
Catcher
so much that he wanted to isolate himself. Because of this, when he began to look at different pieces of property, he
found a tract of land in New Hampshire off the Connecticut River near Windsor, Vermont, that he could not resist buying. The land belonged to Carlotta Saint-Gaudens Dodge, a granddaughter of
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the world-famous sculptor who had lived in the area until his death in 1907. The negotiations for the property
went smoothly—Salinger ended up
buying ninety acres—and the deal was finished not too long after New Year’s Day in 1953, with the date on the deed reading February 16, 1953. Of course, New Year’s Day was
Salinger’s thirty-fourth birthday—a day on which he was able to look to the future and see what his life was going to be like. In Cornish, the name of the New Hampshire town in which
the property was actually located, Salinger got a beautiful wooded piece of land with a view of the Connecticut River Valley. He also got a small, gambrel-roofed cottage that, while attractive,
needed both plumbing and a furnace. So what Salinger saw when he moved there in the dead of winter was a place that needed work but a place that was
his.
What’s more, it was far
enough away from normal civilization that he could live his life in seclusion.

As soon as he moved in, Salinger started making arrangements to winterize the cottage, deciding he would do much of the work himself. Until the house was modernized, however, Salinger had to
carry water from a nearby stream for cooking and bathing, and cut firewood in the surrounding forest to keep warm. It was an existence not unlike one Holden Caulfield fantasizes about in
The
Catcher in the Rye
when he dreams of buying a secluded cottage in a forest “up north” so that he and Sally could escape civilization. Soon after he moved into his cottage, Salinger
began venturing into Windsor, a quaint Vermont village located across from Cornish on the other side of the Connecticut River. Cornish, the town where he lived, had no banks, no stores, no
restaurants, no doctor’s offices, no business establishments to speak of.