Salinger (21 page)

While Salinger worked at fixing up his home, he went into Windsor to meet the local teenagers at places like Nap’s Lunch and Harrington’s Spa, two coffee shops that were high-school
hangouts. Before long, Salinger began to drive the kids to “away” basketball games and swim meets and escort them—the girls, that is—to dances at nearby colleges. In no time
he had become a fixture at many of the teenagers’ high-school and social functions. Eventually, Salinger started entertaining the teenagers at his house with impromptu parties and gab
sessions, during which everyone ate potato chips and played records on the phonograph.

As the spring and summer passed, Salinger became even closer to the kids. It was as if he had insinuated himself into their group, only he was almost two full decades older than they were.
“I never saw anyone fit in the way he did,” one member of the group, Shirlie Blaney, later recalled. “He was just like one of the gang, except that he never did anything silly the
way the rest of us did. He always knew who was going with whom, and if anybody was having trouble in school, and we all looked up to him, especially the renegades. He played whatever record we
asked for on his hi-fi—my favorite was
Swan Lake
—and when we started to leave he’d always want to play just one more.”

By the early fall, Salinger had become so comfortable with the clique of teenagers that when Shirlie Blaney asked him if she could
interview him (years later, Salinger
would say she told him it was for either the high-school newspaper or a class assignment), Salinger agreed to sit down and talk with her. It was something he had done only once before and then with
his
New Yorker
friend William Maxwell for the
Book-of-the-Month Club News.
The interview took place one day in early November in Windsor over lunch at Harrington’s Spa. So
there they were—Salinger sitting in a wooden booth with Blaney and one of her friends, the girls drinking Cokes and Salinger eating his lunch. Scheduled to graduate from Windsor High School
in 1954, Blaney asked Salinger a series of questions. He answered all of them.

He was born on January 1, 1919, in New York City, he said. He attended public grammar schools, the Valley Forge Military Academy, and New York University before he traveled to Poland to learn
the ham shipping business, which he hated. After spending ten months in Vienna, he returned to America to attend Ursinus College and then Columbia University. During all of this time, or at least
during the years after Valley Forge, he was writing. He began publishing stories when he was twenty-one. Following that, he worked on the cruise liner
Kungsholm
in the West Indies
“as an entertainer.” At twenty-three, he was drafted into the Army. His novel,
The Catcher in the Rye,
took him ten years to write, he said; starting work on it in 1941, he did
not publish it until 1951. When Blaney asked Salinger if
Catcher
was autobiographical, he gave her a telling answer. “Sort of,” Salinger said that day over lunch at
Harrington’s Spa. “I was much relieved when I finished [the novel]. My boyhood was very much the
same as that of the boy in the book, and it was a great relief
telling people about it.”

One of his stories, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” had been made into the movie
My Foolish Heart,
Blaney pointed out. Salinger did not tell her how much he detested the
picture—and Hollywood; he simply acknowledged the picture’s existence. When Blaney asked him what he liked to write about most, Salinger confirmed the obvious. The majority of his
stories were written about people under the age of twenty-one; many concerned characters under the age of twelve. Soon after this, Salinger ended the interview.

Blaney published her article on November 13, not in the school newspaper as Salinger had anticipated, but in the
Claremont Daily Eagle,
Claremont, New Hampshire’s daily newspaper.
Blaney began her piece with a brief description of Salinger. A man with “an interesting life story,” Salinger was “a very good friend of all high-school students,” although
he had “many other friends as well.” “He keeps very much to himself,” Blaney wrote, “wanting only to be left alone to write. He is a tall and foreign-looking man of
thirty-four, with a pleasing personality.”

Salinger’s personality turned out to be somewhat less than “pleasing” once Blaney’s article appeared. Horrified that the piece ran in a local daily newspaper, Salinger
felt Blaney had betrayed him. It was following this episode that Salinger cut himself off completely from the Windsor teenagers he had been seeking out as friends for so many months. He never
socialized with any of them again. The next time a carload of them drove up to his house in Cornish, he pretended not to be at home. Not too long afterward, he built a tall fence around the
house.

As weeks turned into months, Salinger began to venture out to various parties and community gatherings attended by local adults. At these parties, Salinger mixed with people
who lived in or around Cornish. On such occasions, he was known to talk about his favorite topics, such as detective novels and Eastern religion. Then, at one party in nearby Manchester, Vermont,
Salinger found himself instantly attracted to someone who was, ironically, anything but an adult. Claire Douglas was a Radcliffe College student. Her father, Salinger would later learn, was Robert
Langton Douglas, the famous British art critic who in 1940 had moved his family from England to New York, although it was hard to determine exactly what arrangement of people Douglas defined as his
“family.” When in 1928 Douglas married Claire’s mother, an enchanting Dublin native named Jean Stewart, he was sixty-three and had been married twice before to women with whom he
had children. Claire was born in 1933, which made her, on that evening in Manchester, Vermont, nineteen years old.

Claire was fashionable. She was attractive in a “pretty” sort of way. She was, for her age, intellectual, though her intellectualism was mixed with a drive to learn about subjects
like spirituality and religion. She had a captivating, friendly personality. Of everything, though, one could not help but be taken by her youthful appearance. She was, simply put, a young-looking
nineteen. She could have passed for Lolita herself.

So far in his life, Salinger had fairly consistently dated—or at least been attracted to—teenage girls. First, there had been the girl in
Vienna, then Oona,
now Claire. He had also written about pubescent and prepubescent girls in his fiction—the girls in “The Young Folks,” Barbara in “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at
All,” Leah in “A Girl I knew,” Mattie, Phoebe, Esmé, and so on. In his life and in his fiction, one obsession of Salinger’s was becoming clear. As Salinger
aged—and he was now thirty-four years old—he remained attracted to young women in their mid- to late teens.

Not long after the party in Manchester, Claire began seeing Salinger at his home in Cornish. If the local teenage girls who had visited Salinger had come to his house for platonic reasons,
Claire was apparently motivated by something else. Obviously she was not bothered by May-December relationships since she had grown up with parents who represented that very model. In fact, Claire
did not have any concerns about the fifteen-year age difference between Salinger and herself. Claire was, however, seeing someone else, a recent Harvard Business School graduate. They had been
dating long enough to have started discussing marriage.

But this did not keep Claire from dating Salinger too, and they soon embarked on a romance. As they spent time together, they talked about many topics, among them Zen Buddhism. Describing
Salinger to her family, Claire told them he lived in Cornish with his mother, his sister, fifteen Buddhist monks, and a yogi who stood on his head. The monks and the yogi may not have been in
Salinger’s house physically, but the essence of spirituality surely was.

By the end of 1953, Claire was seriously involved with Salinger, though she had not stopped seeing the Harvard Business School graduate.

2

In 1954, Claire married the Harvard Business School graduate. It must have been a rocky marriage at best, for it seems
that, even though she was married to this young man, Claire could not end her relationship with Salinger. Whatever she had with Salinger, whatever bond she had formed with him on an emotional or
spiritual level, was stronger than the union she forged with the young man she married. In the end her attraction to Salinger won out. After being married only a matter of months, the newlyweds
divorced, and Claire returned to Cornish—and Salinger.

While Salinger was dealing with this, he was charting various developments in his literary career. In 1954, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” was reprinted in
Short Story
Masterpieces,
edited for Dell by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” was reprinted in
Manhattan: Stories from the Heart of a Great
City,
edited for Bantam by Seymour Krim. During the year,
Nine Stories
appeared in paperback from New American Library and
The Catcher in the Rye
continued to post solid
sales figures. By 1954,
Catcher
had been published in Denmark, Germany, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Holland. On another front, Hamish Hamilton informed Salinger
that his friend Laurence Olivier had expressed interest in adapting “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” as a BBC radio drama. Each week, Olivier presented a half-hour radio
drama based on a famous story, Hamilton wired Salinger. To date, Olivier had used as source material stories by Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Melville, and Bret Hart. Olivier introduced the story,
then read a part. “He’s most anxious to include ‘For Esmé,’” Hamilton
wrote, “and hopes you will feel like agreeing.”
Salinger would be the only contemporary writer represented in the series.

Ultimately, Hamilton’s efforts on behalf of Olivier did no good. Salinger couldn’t go through with it. The anger he felt over what Hollywood had done to “Uncle Wiggily in
Connecticut” was simply too fresh in his mind. He wired Hamilton his answer. His decision may have been infuriating and perhaps even illogical, but his decision was
his
and it was
final. He wanted “For Esmé” to be a short story and not a BBC dramatization and that was that. Salinger had no trouble walking away from a deal most writers would have leapt
at—imagine the chance to have one’s short story adapted for the BBC by Laurence Olivier!—but he had done it. It was one of the first signs that Salinger was becoming even more
restrictive in what he would allow to happen to his work.

During 1954, Salinger worked on a story called “Franny,” one of the most ambitious pieces of fiction he had attempted. In December, Salinger and Lobrano
corresponded about “Franny,” which Lobrano was editing for publication. The main worry of the editors at the
New Yorker
was the possibility that many readers could think
Franny, a college student in the throes of a troubled relationship with her boyfriend Lane Coutell, might be pregnant. Since this would have been a scandal in the mid-1950s, the editors believed
Salinger needed to resolve in his mind whether or not she was pregnant, and then reveal that some way in the story. In point of fact, Salinger said in a
letter to Lobrano,
Franny was
not
pregnant. So he suggested that a small addition be made in the story; he wanted to insert in one key scene the line of dialogue, “Too goddam long between drinks. To
put it crassly.” If that didn’t resolve the trouble, Salinger said, he had two long additions that he would rather not use since they were obvious. Salinger ended his letter by saying
he had been moving around, working out of hotel rooms and the like, so he was not going to be able to get into New York to see people, like Lobrano, for Christmas.

Whatever decisions that had to be made about “Franny” were reached by late December or early January, for the piece appeared in the
New Yorker
on January 29, 1955. The
response to the story was greater than that received by any story Salinger had published so far. Indeed the magazine was flooded with even more letters than it got when it printed Shirley
Jackson’s “The Lottery.” That story had immediately attracted widespread attention and went on to be regarded as a model of the form.