Salinger (28 page)

Salinger was involved in other literary skirmishes as well. “In April of 1965,” Tom Wolfe says, “the
New York
magazine section of the
New York
Herald-Tribune
ran in two issues a very long piece I wrote about the
New Yorker.
I think I only mentioned Salinger because it was a profile of Shawn and a critique of the
New
Yorker
on the occasion of their fortieth
anniversary. They had been needling us so we decided to do a profile of Shawn. They originated the term ‘profile’;
it was their baby. So it developed into the most unbelievable rhubarb you have ever heard of with Shawn, having gotten an advance copy of the first installment, trying desperately to get the thing
quashed. To this day, I’m not sure what on earth he was so upset about. The revelations were rather innocuous. Salinger came into the picture subsequently. Somebody—I was always told it
was Lillian Ross—organized a campaign that included telegrams being sent to Jock Whitney, the
Tribune
’s owner.

“Salinger was one of those who sent a telegram. His was very clear and succinct and angry. As I recall, I was accused of yellow journalism. Salinger’s letter was printed in
New
York
magazine a couple of weeks later, along with a whole bunch from other
New Yorker
people. As these messages were arriving, though, they all came to Whitney who was startled by all
of them. He went into the office of the editor, Jim Bellows. He had with him one letter from Shawn himself. Whitney said, ‘Jim, what do we do about this?’ Jim said, ‘I’ll
show you! He picked up the phone and called
Time
and
Newsweek
and read them the letter from Shawn. Of course, they devoted the press section to the
Herald-Tribune
piece.
After that, we were accused of dreaming up the piece to increase our circulation.”

2

In 1966, Salinger had been married to Claire for a little over a decade. Immediately after their wedding, S. J. Perelman had expressed to
friends his concern about the marriage. Perelman did not
believe Claire would be able to withstand the all-consuming isolation that was awaiting her; as it turned out, he
was right. Without a doubt, Salinger was single-minded in his determination to write, which left Claire alone for long periods of time. Her loneliness was compounded by the fact that in this part
of New Hampshire there was nothing to do. In the decade they had been married, the couple did little traveling. They had not taken summer vacations; they had not routinely gone to Europe or the
Caribbean during Christmas holidays, as many of their friends did. Claire would tell a doctor that she came to feel alone, unfulfilled and, on occasion, unloved. When she tried to explain her
feelings to her husband, he did not seem interested, which only made matters worse.

Beyond this, Claire had few luxuries in her life. They had some friends, they went to occasional town meetings and social functions, but they did not have an active life outside their home. Both
Salingers took parenting seriously and gave time to their children; ultimately, however, they did little else. Consequently, Claire had almost nothing to do besides function in her dual role of
homemaker and mother. With Salinger’s income, she did not have to work, so she devoted herself to her children, and from all reports she was an excellent mother.

For his part, Salinger had one priority above everything else in life—his writing. For years, he had spent long days working in his bunker, devoting as many as fifteen or sixteen hours at
a stretch to writing. Over the last couple of years, he had become even more obsessed. In fact, sometimes he didn’t bother to go in at night,
choosing to sleep in the
bunker on a cot instead of returning to his and Claire’s bedroom. Eventually, it was not unusual for Salinger to stay locked in the bunker for a week or two at a time. “Claire Salinger
was a wonderful, devoted mother,” says Ethel Nelson, the Salingers’ housekeeper (her husband worked as their groundskeeper) during the years Salinger published the Glass stories.
“But Jerry was never there. He was just never home. He was always down in his studio. He had a studio down a quarter of a mile from the house and he was always there. He’d be there for
two weeks at a time. He had a little stove he could heat food on. But when he got into his writing mode, that was it. He just stayed right down there. Nobody, but nobody, interrupted
him.”

How odd it must have been for Claire. Her husband was so close to their house she could look out the window and see him, but she could not have any communication with him because, short of an
emergency, he was not to be disturbed no matter how long he stayed locked in his cell. “I think it was tough on Claire,” Nelson says. “During those periods of time I guess she
didn’t want to see him, really, if you know what I mean. Actually, I never even heard them talk to one another. When you were with one, the other was never around. I never really saw them
together that much. When I was there, Jerry was always down in his little writing room.”

The marriage had other sources of tension, such as Salinger’s insistence on eating only organic foods prepared with cold-pressed oils. “There was some gossip around Cornish at the
time about the trouble with the Salingers’ marriage,” says Warren French, who would
one day live in Cornish Flats. “Part of the problem centered around
Salinger’s unusual eating habits.”

There were, of course, bigger problems than sleeping arrangements and eating habits, as there almost always are when a marriage begins to fail. Here was the problem that couldn’t be fixed:
Not only had Salinger’s feelings about Claire changed, but, most shattering, he had told her so. In one or more of their fights, this was how he put it: He was not sure he loved her anymore;
because of this, he was not certain he wanted their marriage to continue. Claire was devastated. She could not believe her husband could say such a thing to her; after all,
she
was the one
who had had to endure his strange demands, his sometimes difficult personality, his long bouts of writing. What was the problem? How had she changed? Could it boil down to this?—that she
simply was no longer the nineteen-year-old who had just left behind “the last minutes of her girlhood.”

By the summer of 1966, Claire could no longer cope with the pressures of her marriage. So distraught she was physically ill, she began to get treatment from Dr. Gerard Gaudrault, a Claremont,
New Hampshire, physician. Gaudrault later described Claire as an unhappy woman when he first treated her: “She complained of nervous tensions, sleeplessness and loss of weight, and gave me a
history of marital problems with her husband which allegedly caused her condition. My examination indicated that the condition I found would naturally follow from the complaints of marital discord
given to me.”

Perhaps it was a doctor’s objective opinion that motivated Claire to get a divorce. Whatever the reason, as the summer of 1966 passed
and she saw Dr. Gaudrault,
Claire concluded she had no choice but to end the marriage. Claire hired a lawyer at the firm of Buckley and Zopf in Claremont, and on September 9, 1966, filed a libel action for divorce in the
Superior Court of Sullivan County in Newport, New Hampshire.

In the divorce papers, Claire, the libelant, detailed the reasons she wanted a divorce from her husband, the libelee, who was ordered to appear before the court on the first Tuesday in October.
Claire stated that “the libelee, wholly regardless of his marriage covenants and duties has so treated the libelant as to injure her health and endanger her reason in that for a long period
of time the libelee has treated the libelant with indifference, has for long periods of time refused to communicate with her, has declared that he does not love her and has no desire to have their
marriage continue, by reason of which conduct the libelant has had her sleep disturbed, her nerves upset and has been subjected to nervous and mental strain, and has had to seek medical assistance
to effect a cure of her condition, and a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.”

Over the next year, the Salingers remained married, but their relationship did not improve. On September 21, 1967, Claire made yet another visit in the many she paid to Dr. Gaudrault. “I
found some improvement in her condition,” Gaudrault wrote around this time, “but the continuance of her marriage appears to prevent a complete recovery. It is my opinion that her health
has been seriously injured as a result of this marital condition, and that a continuance of the
marriage would seriously injure her health and cause continued physical and
mental upset.”

Since it seemed difficult to turn back, the Salingers proceeded with their divorce, which was granted effective October 3, 1967, by a judge who signed the order on October 13. The cause of the
divorce was “treatment as seriously to injure health and endanger reason.” According to the stipulation agreement, Claire was awarded “the care, custody, education and training of
the minor children” with Salinger having “rights of reasonable visitation”; “the homestead of the parties . . . described in a deed of Carlotta Saint-Gaudens Dodge dated
February 16, 1953” while “the real estate standing in the name of J. D. Salinger as conveyed to him by Arthur J. Frankland and Elizabeth K. Frankland by a deed dated September 12, 1966
[would remain] disencumbered of all claims of the libelant”; “the household furniture, furnishings, and equipment of the household”; “one motor vehicle, a Rover”; and
“the support of the minor children of the parties [in] the sum of Eight Thousand Dollars ($8,000.00) per year, payable semi-annually” with the understanding that Salinger would
supplement that amount “to meet costs of education for the children of the parties when such children are enrolled in private schools or schools requiring the payment of tuitions.” In
short, Claire got everything—custody of the children, the house and property, the household furnishings, a car, and a significant amount of child support with the promise that Salinger would
pay for private-school and college tuition. All Salinger got was a nearby piece of property, which he had bought a year earlier. If it was freedom he
wanted, he had it, but
that freedom had destroyed him financially, at least for the time being.

3

In the months after the divorce, Salinger focused on trying to get on with his life. Over the last year, he had finished building a house on his
new property, where he would live. He saw his children as much as possible; he particularly enjoyed taking them on nature walks. He continued to rely on the mental and emotional support he received
from practicing Zen Buddhism, a religion that had come to dominate his spiritual thinking. Despite everything that was happening, all the myriad changes that were taking place, Salinger continued
to do the one thing he had done since he was a teenage cadet at the Valley Forge Military Academy—write.

Towards the end of 1968, Burnett wrote to Salinger one more time to ask for a story for an anthology. The anthology was called
This Is My Best,
and it was not related to
Story
magazine in any way. Naturally, as he had done each time in the past, Salinger refused to give a story to Burnett, who forced the issue in letters first to Olding and then to Salinger. It was
amazing that Burnett would think Salinger might give him a story, especially after Salinger had written an introduction he did not use. Maybe Burnett believed he simply had nothing to lose. In the
end, Salinger’s decision was the same as it had been in previous years. On January 18, 1969, Salinger wrote Burnett telling him he did not have any fiction, either published or unpublished,
that he wanted to include in an anthology.
Then Salinger reminded him, as if he had to, that they had been through this in the past many times before. Otherwise, Salinger
wished him well.

By 1970, even though he continued to write, sometimes on a daily basis, Salinger had made up his mind that he was not going to publish again, at least not for the foreseeable
future. He had grown weary of the intrusions into his privacy that had developed because he published books. He had become disgusted with the way editors and publishers treated him with disrespect
and disregard. On the issue of money, he had earned enough through the years from the four books he had published that he found himself in the position of being able to walk away from publishing
altogether. At some point in 1970, that was exactly what he did, too. Repaying a $75,000 advance to Little, Brown for a new book of fiction, Salinger resigned himself to the idea that he would go
on writing without feeling the need to publish what he wrote. From all indications, he did just that. He continued to write. He simply didn’t publish.