Salinger (2 page)

I had been given the general directions to Salinger’s house by a woman known locally as the Bridge Lady. The Bridge Lady had acquired her name because over the years she had spent
inordinate amounts of time at her own instigation during the spring, summer, and fall in a makeshift information booth near the covered bridge that spans the Connecticut River to connect Cornish
with Windsor, Vermont, a town that
does
exist since it has its share of stores, restaurants, public buildings, gasoline stations, and the like. The covered bridge in question is the
longest one in the country, so the Bridge Lady has been able to create a sort of purpose for herself by recounting a history of the bridge for tourists who stop at her information booth. Since the
Bridge Lady and her husband worked for Salinger in the early 1960s (she was the housekeeper, he the groundskeeper), she talked with me about him a bit, although she was reluctant to give me
specific directions to his house. Instead she told me, somewhat vaguely, to look among the dirt roads that wind along one particular mountain. Naturally, almost all of the residents of Cornish
know
the directions to Salinger’s house. Over time, countless tourists have asked
about it, just as they have inquired about other local attractions, such as
the covered bridge.

Once I located the house, I retraced the route and noted the directions so that I could find it again in the future. On that cool autumn day in October, I turned left coming off the covered
bridge from Windsor and drove down the main road that wound along the river. On my right I passed a side road which, a sign informed me, lead to the Saint-Gaudens Historical Site. Soon, I passed a
green historic marker commemorating the old Cornish Colony. The marker stood near the Blow-Me-Down Mill, a three-story stone structure with wood siding. Past the mill, at the Chase Cemetery, a
small graveyard surrounded by a white picket fence, I turned right onto a narrow asphalt road. Next I drove just over a mile, passing a three-story slat-shingled mansion and then two huge red barns
built among green sloping hills, until I turned right at a small abandoned guard house.

Going up the asphalt road, I passed Austin Farms. Just beyond the farms, the asphalt road turned into a dirt road, which then ran under a long heavy canopy created by rows of tall green trees
growing on either side of the road. In time, to my left, I saw a red house that appeared to be a converted barn. Next, continuing up the road, I topped a hill, which was bordered by spacious
pastures—pastures, I later learned, that belonged to J. D. Salinger. Driving up the road, I stopped at an old dilapidated barn. Finally, I looked up through the trees on the hill in front of
me and I saw it—Salinger’s house. Looking about, I noticed several signs displayed here and there on
posts and trees. It was the same sign I would see on the two
trees next to his driveway. The sign read:

I had come here on this day in October to sit in my car on the side of the dirt road and look up at the house on the hill because the man who lived there had written
The Catcher in the
Rye,
and because, since the publication of that book in 1951, he had lived his life in such a way as to make locating his house a noteworthy event. Why this has happened, why through the years
a steady stream of admirers has made its way to Cornish, says a lot about fame and celebrity and, more specifically, the manner in which American society has come to glorify fame and celebrity in
the latter part of the twentieth century. Most importantly, it also says something about the enduring power of art. For this much is true without question: If Salinger had not written a masterpiece
that ranks among the best of its genre ever to be written, if he had not also written a group of stories that stand among the most original produced by any American author, few fans, including
myself, would have made such an effort to find the house on the hill where he lives.

None of this was on my mind that afternoon in October 1994 as I sat in my car and looked up at his house. I only knew that I loved
some of his stories and all of
The
Catcher in the Rye,
that I found the Salinger myth strangely appealing, and that, because of these two facts, I had gotten in my car this morning in New York City, driven some two hundred and
sixty miles to Cornish, New Hampshire, and searched Cornish’s dirt roads until I found the house I knew to be his. Then, while I sat there with the car windows down, I suddenly heard the
faint sound of gravel crackling under the weight of tires. Slowly the sound became louder and louder until I saw a car emerge from the thicket of trees to head down the hill and stop at the
driveway’s entrance. When I looked more closely, when I focused my attention on the car’s driver, I saw who it was—Salinger himself. After pausing at the driveway’s
entrance, he pulled out onto the dirt road. It was then I could see him best. Haggard, hunched-over, his hair white and thinning, he looked like a very old man. If Holden Caulfield is frozen in
time, always the youthful, evanescent teenager, his creator clearly was not; it was shocking to witness Salinger in his mid-seventies. Finally, as I continued to stare, as I thought to myself that
I was looking at J. D. Salinger, he accelerated the car, and, leaving as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

In the careers of most modern and contemporary writers, a pattern of activity emerges. After the writer establishes himself, he produces his work, and periodically, about every
three or four years, he releases that work by way of a publisher to the public. There are exceptions, since publishing-industry norms may or may not serve idiosyncratic writers. The author may be
less prolific, as in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, because he struggles with a piece of writing for years before he can let it go. Or he or she may write only one book, which ends up being a
masterpiece, as Harper Lee did with
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Or the author may die before the public comes to appreciate the full genius of his or her work, as was the case with Sylvia
Plath. However, most authors, even those inspired by true genius, write and publish on a regular basis, primarily because they want to communicate with an audience. In all likelihood, that same
impulse
forces the writer to make himself available to his readers in the various ways writers have access to—by giving readings, for example, or answering fan mail.
After all, should an author be successful, it is the readers, the people who buy the books, who allow him to enjoy the success he has achieved.

Almost all writers play by the rules of the game, which have evolved in the publishing-industry establishment—they do so, of course, because they want to stay in the good graces of the
publishers, the people who make the rules—but, in a career that has spanned over half a century, J. D. Salinger has refused to comply with even the most basic of those rules. Only
once—teaching a class at Sarah Lawrence—has he appeared before an audience at all. He has made phone calls to journalists and has had chance encounters with some; he has sat for a
deposition or two, but he has never done a traditional interview. After the initial printings of his first book, he soon refused to allow his publisher to use a photograph of himself on the dust
jacket of any of his books. He has never communicated with his readers; over the years he has even gone so far as to instruct his agents to throw away his fan mail without even bothering to show it
to him.

But there’s more. At one point in his career, he decided he didn’t want his stories reproduced in anthologies; then he demanded that the four books he did publish between 1951 and
1963 could remain in print in paperback
only
if each edition featured the text between two plain covers and nothing else—no advertising copy on the front cover, no glowing blurbs on
the back cover, no biographical information about the author anywhere, nothing resembling the trappings a
publisher uses to sell and promote an author and his work. Finally,
after 1965, even though he has often gone out of his way to let the public know he was continuing to write, he stopped publishing his work in either magazines or book form. By doing this, Salinger
has achieved a kind of perverse celebrity: He has become a famous writer who writes but doesn’t publish.

Consequently, Salinger’s reputation, at least in the latter part of his life, is based not on the books he has written but on the books he allowed to be published. Of course,
The
Catcher in the Rye
is his major work. “Salinger is a writer of great charm and purposefully limited scope and a perfection within that narrow compass,” says Harold Bloom.
“
The Catcher in the Rye
struck a nerve for one generation but it seems to appeal to sensitive young people in later generations as well. Its sensitivity fits the sensitivity of young
people who are going to develop a consciousness and a distrust of the adult world. Probably it will survive.” Tom Wolfe agrees: “
The Catcher in the Rye
captures the mood of the
adolescent who wants desperately to fit in but doesn’t want to seem as if he does, who wants to act flippantly but who, underneath that flippancy, has great sorrow.”

Certainly, the slender novel, published in 1951, afforded Salinger the career he has had. If he had not been the author of
The Catcher in the Rye,
Nine Stories,
published in
1953, surely would not have been as successful as it was, even though it contained three short stories—“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “For Esmé—With Love and
Squalor,” and “Teddy”—that are now considered by many critics to be models of the form. If he had not been the author of
The Catcher in the Rye,
Franny and Zooey
—two long stories previously published in the
New Yorker
that Salinger released as a book in 1961—would not have been a runaway
New
York Times
best-seller, a publishing event deemed so noteworthy
Time
magazine put Salinger on its cover. If he had not been the author of
The Catcher in the Rye,
Raise
High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,
a book of two more long
New Yorker
stories Salinger collected in 1963, would not have been a best-seller either. Then
again, without question, the publication of these books increased the sales of
The Catcher in the Rye,
which had sold 3.5 million copies by 1961, 10 million copies by 1981, and 15 million
copies by 1996. In late 1997, forty-five years after the paperback edition first appeared, the novel was still listed in the mid-seventies on the
USA Today
Top 100 paperback best-seller
list.

All of this was helped considerably, at least from the standpoint of promotion, when in 1953 Salinger became a recluse. By cutting himself off from his audience, Salinger ensured that any
contact he did make with the public merited coverage by the media. As a result, through the years he was able to see news reports about some of the most mundane events in his life—a
photograph in
Time
of his going to the grocery store or an item in
Newsweek
about his showing up at the retirement party of an Army buddy. It has been argued that Salinger became
famous for wanting not to be famous. However, simply because he turned into a recluse does not mean he didn’t want fame. In fact, one could argue that by taking the position he did—and
keeping it—he ensured he
would
remain famous for being a recluse. In short, whether he contrived to or not, Salinger has stayed in the public eye by
withdrawing
from it.

At some point one has to ask the obvious: Why did Salinger go into seclusion and remain there? Did he want to avoid attacks by critics and colleagues, such as the one
Norman Mailer made against him in his 1959 essay “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” when Mailer dismissed Salinger as being “no more than
the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”? (The remark itself would become notorious.) Or this one from Joan Didion, which appeared in the
National Review
: “What gives
[
Franny and Zooey
] its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as
Positive Thinking
for the upper middle classes, as
Double Your
Energy and Live Without Fatigue
for Sarah Lawrence girls.” Or did something else motivate Salinger too? Did he arouse in his reading audience expectations he could not fulfill? Did he
burn out? Was he never fully able to function in an adult world? Or, another theory, did he feel some drive within himself—emotional, sexual, or psychological—about which he wanted as
few people as possible to know at any cost? Was there some instinct he had that was so troubling to him he was willing to alter the very way he lived his life to keep it secret?