Salinger (36 page)

But the media coverage had only started. Reuters issued an article on its newswire entitled “Reclusive Author to Publish First New Book in 34 Years”; the article was picked up by
papers all across the country. CNN covered the story as well; so did the
Guardian
in England, where, in a subhead to its piece, the newspaper announced that “the publicity-shy author
of
The Catcher in the Rye
has found an
obscure press after his own heart.” The pending publication of the book was even mentioned on
Saturday Night Live.
Included in the “Weekend Update” segment of the show, the joke went like this. When J. D. Salinger was asked why he was releasing a new book after all these years, he answered,
“Get the hell off my lawn.”

Then, on February twentieth, Michiko Kakutani, the lead daily book critic for the
New York Times,
published an article called “From Salinger, a New Dash of Mystery.” She
started off by calling “Hapworth” “disappointing”—she had found a June 19, 1965 back issue of the
New Yorker
and reread the story—before she asked the
obvious question. After not publishing a book for thirty-four years, why would Salinger bring out a new one at this point and why would that book consist only of “Hapworth”? “One
can only speculate,” Kakutani wrote, “that the author wanted to remind his readers of his existence, that he wanted to achieve a kind of closure by putting his last published story
between book covers, that he wanted readers to reappraise the Glass family (and by extension his body of work) through a story that, within the Glass canon, is nothing less than
revisionistic.”

When Kakutani herself looked at the Glass family saga, she came away with her own assessment of that body of work. “There is a darker side to [the Glasses’] estrangement [from
society]: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, a familial self-involvement that borders on the incestuous and an inability to relate to other people that, in Seymour’s case at
least, will have tragic consequences indeed.” Then, evaluating the Glass canon today, Kakutani found that “the
tales have grown increasingly elliptical over the
years,” that “the stories have grown increasingly self-conscious and self-reflective,” and that the reader cannot help but notice “the solipsism of the Glass family itself,
underscoring the rarefied, self-enclosed air of all the stories they inhabit.”

This was startling criticism coming from the
New York Times
—a stark dismissal of a good portion of Salinger’s oeuvre. What’s more, Kakutani blamed the solipsism of the
Glass stories on Salinger’s own life, saying that in his fiction he realized his prediction that he would one day “disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and
mannerisms.” Kakutani wrote: “This falling off in his work, perhaps, is a palpable consequence of Mr. Salinger’s own Glass-like withdrawal from the public world: withdrawal
feeding self-absorption and self-absorption feeding tetchy disdain.” The failure of the Glass stories, then, could be linked directly to Salinger’s own failure to deal with the real
world. As Salinger became more cut off from society, his stories became more inward, which ultimately destroyed them. Evidence of this was “Hapworth” itself, a piece that was, Kakutani
concluded, “a sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.”

“In the end it was Kakutani’s article in the
New York Times
that made Salinger change his mind about publishing the book
Hapworth,
” says Jonathan Schwartz, the
radio personality who has closely followed Salinger for many years. “Can you imagine how he felt having his last published story, and by extension the entire group of Glass stories, dismissed
by Michiko Kakutani in the
New York Times
? It had to make him have second thoughts about bringing out
Hapworth
as a book.” It
was not long after
Kakutani’s article appeared that Orchises Press announced that its plans to publish
Hapworth 16, 1924
had been put on hold indefinitely.

Perhaps the most curious publication to result from the
Hapworth 16, 1924
ordeal was the June 1997
Esquire
cover story called “The Haunted Life of J. D.
Salinger.” Written by Ron Rosenbaum, the article was a long meditation on Salinger and what Rosenbaum termed his “Great Wall of Silence.” Comparing him to other recluses and
near-recluses on the current literary scene (that club includes Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and William Wharton), Rosenbaum concluded that Salinger was by far the most reclusive, which would
qualify him to be, as the magazine put it, “the last private person in America.”

As other journalists had done before him, Rosenbaum went to Cornish, found Salinger’s house, and waited at the foot of his driveway until he saw him drive off in his car. Watching Salinger
leave that day, Rosenbaum had an unusual take on the experience. “In the silence left behind, I felt terrible,” Rosenbaum wrote. There was no clear indication that Salinger had even
seen him, but Rosenbaum responded to the event with visceral, dramatic charm. “I felt a wave of remorse strike me. I had wanted to be known to S. as a serious seeker, someone who understood
him and his silence, someone who respected his silent privacy—but perhaps someone he might
want
to speak to (because of my exegetical insights, of course). But now I felt that,
inevitably, it looked to S. as if I were a door stepper. I felt my
intrusive driveway presence might inadvertently change S.’s mind about releasing
‘Hapworth,’ about releasing anything—that I might have thus ineradicably altered the course of literary history.”

While he was probably overstating the case, Rosenbaum did bring up a relevant point. Why had Salinger chosen to live his life the way he had, and, more specifically—the same question
Kakutani asked—why had he chosen to publish a new book now? “The problem,” Rosenbaum wrote, “the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer . . . is
the literary equivalent of the problems of theology, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problems of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human
suffering.” So Salinger’s silence was God-like, according to this way of thinking, and the publication of a new book in the midst of that silence was the equivalent of some divine or
semi-divine act.

But consider the facts. First, Salinger was not bringing out one of the new manuscripts he was rumored to have finished; he was releasing in book form the last story he had published in a
magazine. In this way, no additional document would be added to the Salinger canon. Second, he had picked an obscure press run by a college professor who preferred to sell books by mail order
instead of through stores. “My philosophy is that books are pushed at people for wrong reasons,” Lathbury told the
Washington Post.
“There’s a marketing mentality
that has little to do with the literary experience. I want people to know
Hapworth 16, 1924
is available. I don’t want to force it on anyone.” Beyond this, under strict orders
from Salinger, Lathbury agreed not to
publicize the book in any way, not to reveal how many copies were being published, not to disclose any information about Salinger or
the business dealings he had had with Salinger, and not to send out review copies of the book to critics. (“They’ll buy it—or better yet, not review it,” Lathbury also told
the
Washington Post.
) Finally, after the publication date of
Hapworth 16, 1924
was announced for March 1997, it was first moved to June and then postponed indefinitely. When asked
why the publication of a finished manuscript that was not being rewritten had to be delayed, Lathbury said, “I don’t know”—
he
was not the reason for the delay. As
for the potential popularity of the book, Lathbury revealed that the waiting list of readers who want to buy the book by mail was as long as “the bread lines of the thirties.”

It was as if Salinger had decided that, should he break the silence he had created, he was going to milk that act for all it was worth. Make the event itself so weird, so offbeat, no journalist
could resist covering it. Then, after it was clear one had the attention of the press, drag out the process as long as possible.

Then again, the end result of the vast majority of the actions Salinger had taken in his career had achieved the same result. By cutting himself off from the public, by cutting himself off the
way he had done, he made sure the public would remain fascinated with him. By refusing to publish any new work, by letting the public know he had new work he was not publishing, he ensured a
continued fascination in the four books that were in print. But that was not enough. To guarantee that there was no way the public could forget him, he periodically surfaced in the press by doing
something that was sure to
attract publicity—giving a calculatedly strange interview to Betty Eppes when she came up from Baton Rouge, calling a reporter from the
New York Times
to complain about pirated editions of his short stories, and showing up from time to time at events certain to be covered in the media. William Wharton did not do this; he
never broke his anonymity. Thomas Pynchon did not do this; he continued to refuse even to be photographed. However, the way Salinger handled the publicity he said he did not want was a bit too
contrived to get attention itself. Salinger became the Greta Garbo of literature, and then periodically, when it may have seemed he was about to be forgotten, he resurfaced briefly, just to remind
the public that he wanted to be
left alone.
The whole act could have been cute or whimsical; only, it felt as if it were being put on by a master showman, a genius spin doctor, a
public-relations wizard hawking a story the public couldn’t get enough of.

For much of his adult life, Salinger made a living—and not a bad one at that—mostly off the publication of four books. From 1951 until 1997,
The Catcher in the Rye
sold
approximately fifteen million copies in the United States;
Nine Stories,
Franny and Zooey,
and
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
combined
to sell into the millions as well. Worldwide, from 1951 to the present,
Catcher
is said to have sold some sixty million copies. Salinger’s books have sold in large numbers because
year after year he has been on the minds of the reading public. Just how he accomplished this feat was strange and complicated and open to debate, but it comes down to this: Either Salinger simply
retreated to what he hoped would be the
seclusion of his mountaintop estate in New Hampshire and the fans and the press followed him there, always hounding him against his
wishes; or perhaps, just perhaps, he moved where he did on purpose, fully aware of the legend he was going to create, and made sure through the years that periodically he dropped enough clues about
himself to tease the fans and the press into seeking him out.

It must have been as if he’d seen a ghost.

On the afternoon of November 5, 1997, Salinger, a gaunt, white-haired man who would turn seventy-nine on New Year’s Day, headed through his house to the kitchen and the back door. Tall and
moderately built, he did not move with the same ease and grace he once had. In fact, over the last three years, friends and neighbors had noticed he had started to show his age, slow down. He was
rarely seen around town anymore, as he had been in previous years; he no longer showed up at local events, such as monthly town meetings or the annual fair. Nor did he make as many of his regular
trips into Manhattan to stay at the Algonquin Hotel, take in Broadway shows, and while away the hours browsing at the Gotham Book Mart. Instead, feeling the gradual encroachment of old age taking
over, he spent more and more time secluded in his house, often allowing Colleen, his much younger wife,
to run his errands for him. One task she did not have to perform was
picking up his mail at the post office. After having his mail delivered to a post-office box for years, Salinger had arranged to have the postman bring the mail directly to his house. It was a
subtle, but representative, change in his daily schedule.

Salinger had lived in this house since his divorce. Today, when he reached the back door, he found standing before him on the doorstep a woman he had not seen in years. Her arrival was an
inconvenient interruption for him, a watershed moment for her. He didn’t remember that today was her birthday—her forty-fourth. Instead, he just stared at her, this lanky, intense,
dark-haired woman who by now was a virtual stranger to him. A life of hard work and stress—a failed marriage, three children, and an active writing career that included the publication of
seven books and countless magazine and newspaper articles—had not been particularly kind to her physical appearance. She barely resembled the bright-faced teenager Salinger had an affair with
back in 1972, when she was nineteen and he was fifty-three. In fact, two different rounds of breast-implant surgery—first silicone, then saline—had done little to offset the effect of
aging on this woman. So there they were, face-to-face, transfixed in one of those painful, awkward moments—two former lovers who had neither seen nor spoken to each other in almost a quarter
of a century.