Salinger (33 page)

Ernest Jones had written the following about Holden Caulfield in a piece called “Case History of All of Us,” which appeared in the
Nation
on September 1, 1951:

In 1981, as he continued living in solitude, Salinger became fascinated with Elaine Joyce, the television actress who was currently appearing, along with Bernard Hughes, on the
sitcom
Mr. Merlin.
The widow of entertainer Bobby Van, Joyce was thirty-six, Salinger was sixty-two. After watching her for several weeks on
Mr. Merlin,
Salinger approached Joyce the same way he had Maynard. “I was doing a series,” says Joyce, “and he wrote me a letter. I get fan mail all the time but I was shocked. I really
didn’t believe it. It was a letter of introduction to me about my work.” As Maynard had done before her, although she could not have known anything about it, Joyce responded to
Salinger, which led to an exchange of letters. “It took me forever,” she says, “but I wrote back and then we wrote to each other quite a bit.”

As he had with Maynard, Salinger eventually arranged for the two of them to meet. After that, a relationship developed. The couple spent a lot of time in New York. “We were very, very
private,” Joyce admits, “but you do what you do when you date—you shop, you go to dinner, you go to the theater. It was just as he wanted it.” The only real suggestion the
public had that the two were involved occurred in May 1982 when the press reported Salinger showing up for an opening night at a dinner theater in Jacksonville, Florida, where Joyce was appearing
in the play
6 Rms Riv Vu.
But to conceal their affair, Joyce denied knowing him. “We were involved for a few years all the way through the middle eighties,” Joyce says.
“You could say there was a romance.”

That romance ended and then, in the late 1980s, Salinger met Colleen O’Neill, a young woman from New Hampshire who was the director of the annual Cornish town fair. “Jerry used to
come and walk around the fairgrounds with her,” says Burnace Fitch Johnson,
the former Cornish town clerk, “Colleen would have to repeat things to him when
people spoke to him because he’s quite deaf.” It would be some time still before the true nature of their relationship was revealed.

1

In 1982, another controversy concerning Salinger erupted in the literary community as a result of a comment Truman Capote made to Lawrence
Grobel, a journalist who had interviewed Capote extensively over the years. When Grobel asked which writers would have their reputations improved if they “dropped dead tomorrow,” Capote
answered by saying, “Well, it would help J. D. Salinger.” In an exchange that Grobel would include in a book about Capote, Grobel shot back that “figuratively speaking”
Salinger had died long ago.

“Yes, well, he might as well make it legal,” Capote snapped.

Then, when Grobel asked why Salinger had stopped writing, Capote, who had been a regular contributor to the
New Yorker
for many years, said this: “I’m told, on very good
authority, that he hasn’t stopped writing at all. That he’s written at least five or six short novels and that all of them have been turned down by the
New Yorker
and that
he won’t publish anywhere except the
New Yorker.
And that all of them are very strange and all about Zen Buddhism.”

Grobel couldn’t fathom why the
New Yorker
would turn down anything by Salinger. Would the magazine do that?

“Yes,” Capote said simply, and that was the end of the discussion.

On this topic, however, Roger Angell, who joined the fiction department at the
New Yorker
in the 1950s, is emphatic. “Nonsense!” he says. “Salinger has not submitted to
the
New Yorker
since the mid-1960s when ‘Hapworth’ appeared. Shawn wouldn’t have turned any stories down. Robert Gottlieb wouldn’t have turned them down. Tina Brown
wouldn’t have turned them down. It just doesn’t make any sense. This is what happens to people when they become enigmas.”

Salinger had bigger problems to worry about than insulting comments made by Truman Capote. Recently, Salinger had received word from family and friends that Ian Hamilton, the
British poet who was also known for writing a biography of Robert Lowell, had started a biography of Salinger. Hamilton had been requesting interviews of people who knew him, just as numerous
journalists had done in the past. Obviously, if there was one figure in the twentieth century who didn’t want his biography written, it was Salinger. As soon as he found out about the book,
Salinger made every effort to encourage his family and friends not to cooperate with Hamilton. In January 1985, for example, Salinger, who had recently taken a fall on
an
ice-covered hill and broken his sternum, wrote to William Faison, Elizabeth Murray’s brother who had been his friend at Valley Forge, to put a request to him in no uncertain terms: Do not
talk to Ian Hamilton, Salinger said—not under any conditions.

2

In the early 1980s, Random House had commissioned Hamilton to undertake a Salinger biography, since nothing like it had been written.
Hamilton sold the publisher on the concept of approaching the book as if he were researching and writing a mystery. Who was Salinger and why was he hiding? Hamilton’s hope, he said in his
book proposal, was that, while he did his research, he might actually be able to lure Salinger out into the public eye. Maybe, just maybe, he could even convince Salinger to give him an interview
“to set the record straight.”

Random House bought the book—for an advance of $100,000—and, despite the obstacles Salinger put in his way, Hamilton went about the process of researching and writing the book, which
he titled
J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life.
Hamilton then began guiding it through the normal publishing process. That process included a legal vetting of the manuscript by the
publisher’s lawyers. After the vetting was completed, the book was scheduled to be released in the fall of 1986. In the late spring, as the galleys for the book were making the rounds in the
New York publishing circles, Salinger got a copy. Of course, he was horrified that a book about his life was going to be published at all, but he was particularly enraged when he discovered
that Hamilton had included in the book parts of letters Salinger had written to people through the years—letters Salinger’s friends had either sold or donated to
several university research libraries where Hamilton had read them. While he was writing the book, Hamilton made one key mistake. Even though he did not get Salinger’s permission to quote
from the unpublished letters, he had included passages from those letters in his text. The total number of words Hamilton used from Salinger’s unpublished letters was about three hundred.

Determined to stop the release of
A Writing Life,
Salinger retained a lawyer in New York, Marcia B. Paul, who immediately put Hamilton, Random House, and William Heinemann
(Hamilton’s British publisher) on notice that Salinger was going to claim copyright infringement because Hamilton had used excerpts from Salinger’s unpublished letters without
permission. Hamilton rewrote the manuscript, paring down the number of words he quoted to as few as possible, a number so small his lawyers believed he was protected by the fair-use clause of the
U.S. copyright law. Random House lawyers submitted the new version of the book to Salinger’s lawyers on September 18, 1986. A week later, Salinger’s lawyers filed suit in the Southern
District Court in Manhattan. “For the past two decades I have elected, for personal reasons, to leave the public spotlight entirely,” Salinger stated in court papers that were actually
written by his attorneys. “I have shunned all publicity for over twenty years and I have not published any material during that time. I have become, in every sense of the word, a private
citizen. I have filed the instant action and seek to restrain publication of a book . . . which is a blatant infringement of my copyrights in certain of my heretofore unpublished
letters.”

On October third, the Southern District Court issued a temporary restraining order to stop the release of
J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life.
Additional information
had to be gathered by the courts to determine whether the book’s release should be blocked permanently—information that would come in the form of affidavits and depositions. It was odd
to hear Salinger saying words like “heretofore”—a word he had probably never used in his published prose, certainly not seriously. However, if Salinger’s own voice did not
emerge from the court papers, it would come through clearly in the deposition he was forced to give in the fall of 1986.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon on October 10, 1986, and Salinger sat in a conference room in the law offices of Satterlee Stephens, a high-profile, white-shoe firm
located in the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue in New York City. Accompanied by his lawyer, Marcia Paul, Salinger was there to be questioned by Random House’s lawyer, Robert Callagy, an
understated yet aggressive man who was an experienced litigator. A witness to the event says that Salinger wore an attractive business suit with a shirt and tie. Despite his age, sixty-eight, he
looked to be in good health and excellent physical condition, even though his hair had fully grayed and he was somewhat deaf. For the first time in his life, Salinger was going to have to do
something he had previously gone out of his way to avoid at any cost: answer questions about his life and work.

Salinger was focused. He kept his cool. He often answered questions, reluctantly. During the early part of the deposition, Callagy asked him about a number of topics.
Salinger answered questions about the way one of his stories had been made into a movie. He also expressed unhappiness with book publishers. Callagy was particularly curious about how much Salinger
had been writing since he had stopped publishing in the mid-1960s.

“Mr. Salinger,” Callagy asked him at another juncture in the afternoon, “when was the last time that you wrote any work of fiction for publication?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” Salinger said.

“At any time during the past twenty years,” Callagy asked, “have you written a work of fiction for publication?”

“That has been published, you mean?”

“That has been published.”

“No . . . ” Salinger said.