Biographers like to pretend that they are capable of “exploring” their subjects’ inner lives, but in truth they tend to have little patience for sustained episodes of self-sufficiency: a happy marriage, a lengthy convalescence, an unbroken regimen of silent toil, even a year or two in prison usually constitute bad news. Something can be made out of such plateaus if there are documents, but even with documents no life is more forbidding than a life that has been tamed, or set in order, or that is running to a hidden plan. And when, as in the case of J. D. Salinger, the inner life becomes virtually indistinguishable from any life that we might sensibly call “outer,” then even the most intrepid chronicler knows himself to be facing an impasse. When Salinger embraced Eastern religion he was not just in retreat from a corrupt America; he was also imposing on his biographical pursuers a troublesome narrative longueur. After all, you can’t eavesdrop on a man at prayer, nor (if you are us) can you bury your post-sixties skepticism to the extent of pretending solemnly to fathom what might have come to pass between this eager convert and his new Easternized idea of God.
But then again, our interest was in Salinger the writer, the externalizer. We would simply have to wait and see what happened to the work, post-Ramakrishna. “Teddy” did not encourage optimism. Rather like Salinger’s own life, it was in flight from realism—a bad sign because we already knew from this writer’s early work that he has a tendency to preach. We also knew that “the work” has always been for Salinger near sacred, and that ever since he linked up with The New Yorker, his protective attitude to what he writes has steadily hardened into a position. He is already known in literary circles as a writer to be handled with great care. Now, post-Ramakrishna, his natural prickliness can be thought of as vocational. When critics fail to grasp what he is up to, or when Ivy League intellectuals wax superior about his low-grade education, he can now answer them with the scornful radiance of the otherwise-impelled.
It would be a few years before Oriental mysticism became a fashion in the United States, and it is impossible to calculate how much Salinger’s example had to do with directing future styles of hippiedom. Later on, he would angrily dissociate himself from the faddists of the 1960s. In 1953, Zen was just beginning to make its mark: Suzuki’s introductory texts had, after all, been in print since 1949. And the American psyche was getting ready to somehow settle with Japan; that is to say, James Michener had already begun work on Sayonara. Even so, most literary city slickers would have found Salinger’s new Easternism both dotty and intimidating.
Hamish Hamilton, certainly, was not overjoyed to be in receipt of Ramakrishna’s weighty text. After six months Salinger had to prod him into a response, and Hamilton confessed: “I feel terribly guilty about the Ramakrishna book. I am usually meticulous about acknowledging letters, and even more so books, but in this case I seem to have slipped up. I received it safely and read much of it with enjoyment, though some I confess defeated me.” Luckily, another British publisher was talking of bringing out an abridged edition and may thus “have pretty well spoilt the market for the complete book.”1
Salinger was evidently prepared to overlook this lapse. For the next year he persistently pressed Hamilton to take an interest in the handful of American writers he considered to be not beyond the pale: Peter de Vries, S. J. Perelman, William Maxwell, and Eudora Welty. And he was now definite in his readiness to bring out a volume of short stories—indeed, arrangements for this publication were made well before he moved to Cornish. Nine Stories appeared in the United States in April 1953 and from Hamish Hamilton in Britain two months later. The ninth story in the book was “Teddy.”
Aside from a glowing full-page welcome from Eudora Welty in The New York Times Book Review, the principal reviews, though almost unanimously favorable, had a curiously grudging edge. There was an acknowledgment of Salinger’s “surface brilliance,” but also a suspicion that there was something too brilliant going on here, that there must surely be a secret emptiness. “He is extremely deft, sometimes over-sophisticated, in his surface technique,” said Seymour Krim, in Commonweal; and Gene Baro took this reservation a step further in the New York Herald Tribune: “Salinger’s vision tempers an all-embracing sentimentality with a personal sophistication, so that these stories run to a kind of intellectual and emotional chic.” In Britain, the Times Literary Supplement spoke of “a writer trapped by his own cleverness.”
Salinger from very early on said that he would rather be called lousy than promising, and these were just the sort of notices that he despised—condescending, unspecific, and somehow managing to suggest that “brilliance” was an everyday, to-be-taken-for-granted item of fictioneer’s equipment. After The Catcher in the Rye’s beautifully sustained pretense of artlessness, reviewers perhaps felt cheated by the evident shrewdness of Salinger’s craftsmanship in these nine tales. The invisible author is almost rudely self-confident, even in his most oblique effects, and in stories like “The Laughing Man” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” there is a strong charge of sheer narrative enjoyment—Salinger has been having a good time. Reviewers often feel that authors of this stamp invite deflation.
Commercially, though, the book was a success—remarkably so for a volume of short stories. Boosted by the paperback appearance of The Catcher in the Rye (and the appearance with it of the beginnings of a campus readership), Nine Stories rose to ninth position on the New York Times best-seller list and stayed in the top twenty for three months.
In Britain, Salinger’s book of stories was published under the title For Esmé—with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories, a type of formulation that Salinger had specifically refused to countenance a few months earlier. In November 1952, Hamilton had written to Salinger putting the view that the title Nine Stories “would be about as big a handicap as could be provided for any book at birth, and we sincerely hope you weren’t serious.”2 Hamilton himself has no recollection of what happened next but by May 1953 Salinger seems to have succumbed to his publisher’s objections—an act of breathtaking compliance and not to be repeated.
In Britain the book was respectfully reviewed, but sold few copies of its first printing: The booksellers’ subscription was a mere one thousand. It would be another five years before The Catcher in the Rye appeared in a British paperback edition. (Commercial note: Nine Stories was also sold to Denmark and Germany, where The Catcher in the Rye had already been translated. The Catcher, by 1954, was available also in France, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, although its peak as an international best seller would come in the early to mid-sixties; by 1970 it was translated into thirty languages. Nine Stories never enjoyed this breadth of distribution, although individual stories, particularly “Bananafish” and “For Esmé,” have appeared around the world in magazines and anthologies.)
There are no Caulfields in Nine Stories, no Gladwallers. Seymour Glass makes his debut, and so too (although the connection is not stressed) do Walter Glass and Boo Boo Tannenbaum (one of the Glass sisters). Apart from “For Esmé”—which, oddly, considering its popularity, is the one piece that has a lingeringly “early” feel to it—the collection is fairly thoroughly cleansed of penetrable autobiography. It is as if Salinger knew that in his later stories for the slicks there had been elements of straight confession. “The Laughing Man” is located in Salinger’s own childhood corner of New York, and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” reads as if it is at least partly drawn from life, but even in these there is no sense of a writer enthralled by the detail of his own experience. Nor is there any strained inventiveness. From The New Yorker Salinger learned how to move with poise between these once-damaging extremes. In Nine Stories this stylistic self-assurance is liberating: It makes for a new economy and self-denial.
Although Salinger’s work has for a time become less autobiographical, his biography in 1953 begins to read like a sequel to his novel. His first few months in his new country home can almost be read as an endearing imitation of the kind of grown-up life Holden Caulfield had envisaged for himself. Holden had said he would “drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont, and all around there, see. It’s beautiful as hell up there. It really is. …” He would live by a brook, he said, and “chop all our own wood in the winter time.” Or he would maybe pretend to be a deaf-mute and “build me a little cabin … right near the woods, but not right in them. … I’d cook all my own food, and later on, if I wanted to get married or something, I’d meet this beautiful girl that was also a deaf-mute, and we’d get married.”
Space, solitude, and silence—these were the recurring elements of Holden’s dream. And if he did anything at all, it would be priestly-pastoral, and only for the young:
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye.3
Within weeks of setting up house in Cornish, Salinger had gathered around him not “thousands of little kids” but certainly a small collection of child friends. He would meet them in a Windsor coffee shop, a haunt popular with teenage (fifteen-to sixteen-year-old) kids from Windsor High School. One of them recalls:
He used to be a ball of fun. … He had a great sense of humor—very dry. We used to love it when he came in and I think he enjoyed it too. He was forever entertaining the high school kids—he bought us meals and drinks. He was very interested in the basketball and football games—especially basketball. After the Spa, we used to pile into his jeep and go up to his house. It was always open house up there. No matter what time, it didn’t matter. He was always glad to see everybody.
Salinger would sometimes drive his young friends to out-of-town basketball games or, in loco parentis, chaperone the girls to college dances. Another friend remembers:
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 at school, and we all looked up to him, especially the renegades. He’d play whatever record we asked for on his hi-fi … and when we started to leave he’d always want to play just one more. He seemed to love having us around, but I’d sit there and wonder, Why is he doing this? Finally I decided that he was writing another book about teenagers and we were his guinea pigs. I don’t mean he was looking down his nose at us, or had us on a pin or anything like that. He was very sincere. There’s nothing phony about him.4
In the fall of 1953, one of the Windsor High School group, a girl called Shirley Blaney, asked Salinger if she and a friend could interview him for a high school page that came out weekly in the Claremont Daily Eagle. Salinger agreed. As Life magazine later described it:
While Salinger ate his lunch and the two girls drank Cokes in one of the Spa’s wooden booths, journalistic history was made. Shirley Blaney and the Daily Eagle, without quite knowing what they were doing, pulled off one of the great scoops of literary history.5
It appears, however, that the Daily Eagle did know what it was doing. Four days later, on November 13,1953, the Salinger interview appeared, not on the high school page, but as an Eagle scoop. It was the last interview Salinger has ever given to anyone.6 From the day of its publication he began to distance himself from his high school chums, as if they had all somehow betrayed him, let him down. According to Life: “The next time a carload of them drove up to Salinger’s home, he did not seem to be at home, although the Jeep was parked across the road.” When they tried again, they found the house “totally hidden behind a solid, impenetrable, man-tall, woven wood fence.”
Before the Eagle interview, Salinger had made no attempt to hide away in Cornish. It was as if he believed that the town itself was his retreat, that his neighbors could be seen as trusty allies. He was not yet famous enough for these supposed loyalties to be put to any sort of final test; for the moment it was sufficient that literary New York was escaped. There was no great risk at this time in attending—as he did—the odd local cocktail party, or in dropping by the house of the artist who lived at the bottom of his road. Indeed, the artist—Bertram Yeaton—was quite useful. Salinger didn’t have a telephone, and if his publisher or agent wished to contact him, they would phone Yeaton’s house and leave a message.
This kind of small-town togetherness seems to have delighted Salinger at first. He consulted with local agriculturists about how to get the best from his corn crop, or how to put in rosebushes. And he bought a chain saw to clear some of his woody acres. Now and then, he would even give small cocktail gatherings himself, entertaining some of the local teachers and retired military officers with advice on Zen and yoga, and demonstrating the lotus position to anyone who cared to learn. On one occasion, “a young woman who made it promptly got a leg cramp and it took the combined efforts of all the guests to get her untangled again.”
It was at one of these local get-togethers that Salinger met a nineteen-year-old Radcliffe student named Claire Douglas. Claire was the daughter of a well-known British art critic, Robert Langton Douglas, who had moved his family to New York in 1940 to avoid the London blitz. Douglas was something of a character, renowned for his several marriages and love affairs. He was sixty-three years old when he married Claire’s mother, Jean Stewart, in 1928, and already had several children by his two earlier marriages. Claire was born in 1933. During the last years of his life, Douglas worked as a cataloguer-writer for Duveen’s in New York, and after he died in 1951, Claire’s mother married his employer, Edward Fowles.
Even in this brief curriculum, there was much that Salinger would have found intriguing. Almost by accident, Claire had links with The New Yorker: Her family lived in the same East Sixty-sixth Street apartment block as The New Yorker writer Francis Steegmuller (indeed, the party at which they met was given by Steegmuller’s friends), and Joseph Duveen was the subject of a new biography by S. N. Behrman (the book originally appeared in serial form as a New Yorker profile). Also Claire’s huge family of half brothers and half sisters would have appealed to him. One of her half brothers was the celebrated British air ace Sholto Douglas; among the others there was said to be a nun, an airline pilot, a professor of economics, and a bohemian poet photographer.
And Claire herself had some distinctive claims on Salinger’s attention. She was only nineteen when they met, but all accounts of her suggest that she looked younger. At Shipley School and at Radcliffe her passion was for poetry and theater. Her class prediction imagines her as the “Sarah Bernhardt of her generation.” Also her “Why Can’t I?” rejoinder in the college yearbook had a splendidly Vedantic ring: “Why can’t I live nine lives?”
According to one account, Claire Douglas, at the time of her meeting with Salinger, was already involved with a Harvard Business School graduate (he need be known here only as C.M.) and sometime in 1954 she married him. The marriage lasted but a few months, and after the separation Claire went to live with Salinger in Cornish: Her marriage, it seems, had merely interrupted their romance.7 If all this is true, then the interruption must have been painful for Salinger, his loved one married to a Harvard man. It seems that it was during the months of Claire’s marriage to C.M. that Salinger worked on his long story “Franny,” a story that takes on an extra venom if it is seen against the background of his relationship with Claire.
It is almost certainly “Franny” that Salinger speaks of when he writes to Roger Machell in January 1954 about a long story he is working on. Machell had wanted Salinger to drive down to New York for a dinner party, but Salinger pleads that even the smallest disruption of his work schedule could be ruinous. The suggestion is that this is not the first time that Machell’s overtures had been rebuffed. But then Machell had already learned that Salinger was unlike most of his other authors; he also knew that an important change had taken place since their first meeting in 1951. “I would say he’s basically emotional rather than intellectual. The conveniences of life mean nothing to him. He doesn’t care about such things as food, wine, etc. When he came over to England he always made it clear he wanted to be left alone. When he’s not pounding the typewriter, he’s contemplating the Infinite. He’s a profoundly serious guy possessed by a search for God.”8
Machell said this in 1961, but he could as easily have said it 1954. Salinger’s pounding of the typewriter and his search for God were now inseparable disciplines, and to be “intellectual” was not a discipline at all. In “Franny,” a brightly tense young girl student spends a football weekend with her Ivy League boyfriend, Lane Coutell. According to the testimony of Claire’s half brother Gavin, Franny was quite clearly drawn from life—Salinger, it seems, had carefully scattered a few blatant (to those who knew Claire) clues: “The navy blue bag with the white leather binding,” for example, was the very bag that Claire had with her when she had gone off to spend a weekend with C.M.
C.M. in the tale, however, is not represented as a business school graduate but as something far worse—a literary academic, a sterile, patronizing “section man” who thinks Flaubert was “neurotically attracted to the mot juste,” was a “word-squeezer” who lacked “testicularity.” Lane had been given an A for a paper based on this perception, and was still basking in the triumph. The really “good boys”—boys like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—he believed “just wrote. Know what I mean?” and had none of Flaubert’s emasculated scruples. Franny, in the story, is equipped with just the kind of contempt that this approach would have aroused, had been arousing for some years, in Salinger. She knows Coutell’s type from her own college: “… the English Department has about ten little section men running around ruining things for people,” and she is “so sick of pedants and conceited little tearer-downers I could scream.”
The story’s essential oppositions are declared right from the start: art versus academia, truth versus reason. Lane, of course, is baffled by his girlfriend’s vehemence, and irritated too that a promising-looking weekend is in danger of collapse. With malign exactness, Salinger captures Lane’s gradually deepening dismay as he realizes that Franny is not going to play his game. He has taken her to a fancy restaurant and she orders a chicken sandwich. “But I can’t just work up an appetite because you want me to.” He suggests that they have drinks later on with a mutual friend named Wally Campbell, but Franny can’t remember who he is. “It’s just that for four solid years I’ve kept seeing Wally Campbells wherever I go.” And she is not just contemptuous of Campbell’s intellectual pretensions. She also despises the whole milieu in which those pretensions are allowed to flourish. Lane strikes back. “You’re making one belluva sweeping generalization,” he declares, and goes on to point out that at Franny’s college, “You’ve got two of the best men in the country in your goddam English Department. Manlius. Esposito. God, I wish we had them here. At least, they’re poets, for Chrissake.”
Franny’s reply to this is really a restatement of the Raymond Ford distinction between versifiers (who invent) and real poets (who discover): “They’re not. That’s partly what’s so awful. I mean they’re not real poets. They’re just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they’re not poets.” Coutell is scandalized: Does a poet have to be dead, he asks, or bohemian before he can be accepted as a “real poet”? “What do you want—some bastard with wavy hair?” Franny replies:
“I know this much, is all. If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful.” We know that Salinger himself has had ambitions as a poet, and in The Inverted Forest he has granted an insight into the kind of poetry he values. Gavin Douglas has testified that throughout the 1950s Salinger was writing or translating haiku and had composed other poems that were “too far out or far too personal” for publication. “He doesn’t want to be thought of as an intellectual New York sort of poet.”
In 1954, when Salinger was writing “Franny,” American poetry was indeed firmly based in the academies, and it was pleased to be there: Cerebral complexity and an attachment to traditional forms were still the principal requirements and T. S. Eliot was the model. A poet of the Salinger/Raymond Ford disposition would certainly have felt himself to be out of the fashionable mainstream. Indeed, it is surely no accident that the only two lines of Raymond Ford’s that we’re allowed to see are offered as a kind of riposte to Eliot’s sterile vision:
Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.
The poets Franny yearns for would be the ones who “discovered” this mysterious, subterranean source of fecundity, but such a discovery is most unlikely in a society dominated by the teachable, by the English departments that, in 1954, were at the peak of their influence. This was, in Randall Jarrell’s diagnosis, the “age of criticism” and such poets as there were had come to depend on the universities for their livelihood and their prestige. A criticism that was geared to a quasi-scientific reverence for “difficulty” could only engender a poetry that was written to be taught—precisely the sort of “terribly fascinating, syntaxy” poetry that Franny and her author loathed.
Although offered as a story of religious affirmation, “Franny” is actually a cold-eyed polemic against academia, Salinger’s enemy, and his obsession, for some fifteen years. Franny herself seeks, and has partly found, an “alternative education” in the yogalike disciplines recommended in the little green book she carries in her handbag, but it is made clear that she has been forced into this position by the world of Lane Coutell. Like Holden Caulfield, Franny feels that she might well be driven mad by the stupidity and self-interest of others.
All I know is I’m losing my mind. I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting—it is, it is. I don’t care what anybody says.9
Unlike Holden, though, she has discovered a way out—or forward, as she believes—in the discipline of prayer; incessant prayer, as in bhaktiyoga, which Ramakrishna prescribes as the “religion for this age.” “What is bhaktiyoga? It is to keep the mind on God by chanting His name and glories.” If you do this, says Franny, “eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active.”
Something happens after a while. I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing.10
Lane’s response is to warn against the dangers of “heart trouble.”
But then Lane, we are meant to register, is supremely a product of the times. In 1953, the editors of Partisan Review had offered a description of the “ideal reader.” Such a paragon, they said, would be “aware of the major tendencies in contemporary criticism … concerned with the structure and fate of society … and informed or (wishing) to become informed about new currents in psychoanalysis and other humanistic sciences.”11 Lane Coutell, it could be said, entirely fits the bill. He believes in “tendencies in contemporary criticism,” in psychoanalysis, and he is scornful of mysticism (“You actually believe that stuff, or what?”). Although he doesn’t say so, we can be sure he believes himself to be “concerned with the structure and face of modern society.”
How many of these affiliations were shared by Claire Douglas’s C.M. cannot be known (Gavin Douglas said he “wasn’t a bad guy, I rather liked him, but he was a jerk”). Nor can we judge the effectiveness of “Franny” as an instrument in Salinger’s courtship of Claire. The record merely states that “Franny” was published in The New Yorker on January 29, 1955, and Salinger was married to Claire Douglas on February 17. The wedding took place in Barnard, Vermont, and shortly afterward Salinger’s Cornish neighbors jocularly elected him Town Hargreave. This title, it seems, is given to the community’s “most recently married man” and the idea was that if “anybody’s hogs got loose, it was the Hargreave’s job to round them up and bring them back.” Salinger, apparently, was not amused.
With his new wife he was all the more disposed to keep his distance from the neighbors; indeed, some Cornish residents have said that his concern for privacy was not thought to be all that remarkable until after he got married. For the first year of his marriage, he and Claire set about devising a life of uncompromising purity: According to Gavin, they would grow their own food but would not kill even the tiniest of creatures. Salinger himself had a pioneer-style idealism as he set about controlling his domain:
He wanted to be self-sufficient. He had this vegetable garden, and Maxwell and all the others would send him things to grow. It was a primitive sort of life—you can call it Zen or whatever you like. Once he took me to the ruins of an old farmhouse on his property that he said had been built about revolutionary times. He showed me the old well and said that’s where they’d gotten the water. Then he showed me the barn where they’d kept their cattle. He said, “They’re gone. They couldn’t make it. But I’m here now. And I’m going to make the land profitable.” It was an affirmation, see, a statement of belief in humanity. He takes that self-sufficiency very hard.12
Throughout the spring and summer of 1955 Salinger worked on a twenty-thousand-word epithalamium entitled “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” It is the story of a wedding that turns into an elopement, and it is Salinger’s first extended exploration of the fictional family that from now on will be the focus of everything he writes. The Glass family has already made a few appearances, but its full structure, genealogy, and vital statistics have never been spelled out.
Salinger’s earlier family, the Caulfields, had been smaller and rather less complicated than the Glass ménage turns out to be, but the two broods have much in common. The Caulfields—although the names sometimes changed—were always a family of four: Vincent (or D.B.), the writer; Holden, the wild boy; Kenneth (or Allie), the dead seer; and Phoebe, the cute little voice of innocence. The Caulfield parents were both in the theater—until The Catcher in the Rye, in which Mr. Caulfield turns into a businessman who now and then invests in Broadway shows.
An unpublished story called “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” (written in the mid-1940s) is the most Glass-like of Salinger’s early tales and it shows, in a helpfully overt manner, how he used these invented brothers and sisters as a means of exploring his own separate selves. Bound as they are (in fiction) within the “body” of a single family, these selves can be set in opposition without risking any final break. Thus, in “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” we have the poet-saint (Kenneth), the angry disaffiliate (Holden), the literary careerist (Vincent and/or D.B.), and the clairvoyant juvenile (Phoebe). Each of these could be said to stand for an important element in Salinger’s own nature, as he perceived it at the time. The story was written at a period when Salinger was anguished about his own motives as a writer; he had detected in himself an authorial vengefulness that didn’t at all fit with his artist-saint sense of vocation. In the story he tries to fathom this conflict by means of a dialogue between Vincent (in his twenties) and Kenneth (aged twelve). Kenneth persuades Vincent to destroy a short story he has written in which one of the characters is badly used; Kenneth wishes that Vincent would stop doing this sort of thing. Later on, Kenneth is killed in a swimming accident for which Vincent blames himself.13
In the Glass family, Seymour takes the Kenneth role, and we already know—from “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”—that he too, by 1955, is dead. Buddy, his younger brother by two years (born in 1919, like Salinger himself), assumes the part of Vincent, the almost worldly writer figure endlessly fascinated by Seymour’s loftiness of spirit. In “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” which he narrates, Buddy is remembering the day of Seymour’s wedding. The bride is Muriel (“a zero in my opinion but terrific-looking”), and Buddy has been summoned to attend the ceremony. The summons and the judgment of Muriel come from the third Glass child, Boo Boo. She herself can’t make it to the wedding (she is on duty with the WAVES) and more or less begs Buddy to be there. This is not easy, because Buddy is in an army hospital—the year is 1942—recovering from pleurisy.
After Boo Boo, there is Walter (whose death in the Pacific has already been reported in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”) and his twin brother, Waker (a Catholic priest about whom we learn very little; he is in a conscientious objector camp in Maryland). And then there are the children—Franny, now eight, and her brother Zooey, age thirteen. Franny and Zooey are on the West Coast with their parents, who are in show business, but at a somewhat lower level than the Caulfields; they are “retired Pantages Circuit vaudevillians.” At the time of the wedding, Mr. Glass is “hustling talent for a motion picture studio.”
All the Glass children are, or were, precocious. As the Black brothers, Seymour and Buddy had in 1927 appeared in a children’s radio quiz program called It’s a Wise Child, and since then each succeeding Glass has served time on the show. Franny and Zooey are the current stars. Seymour, oddly enough, has enjoyed considerable success in academia: A student at Columbia when he was fourteen, he is a “professor” in civilian life.
And now he is getting married. In late May 1942, Buddy is the only Glass near enough to New York to attend the wedding, so he does, perspiring and in pain. Seymour, though, fails to show up at the ceremony and Buddy gets stranded in a limousine filled with indignant, Muriel-related guests. This is a marvelously comic sequence—almost Salinger’s last essay in mordant, out-of-doors social observation. None of the disgruntled guests in the limousine knows quite who Buddy is, so they are able to let rip on Seymour’s terrible behavior. Muriel’s mother (recently psychoanalyzed) had, it seems, already diagnosed the groom as a “latent homosexual and a schizoid.” And it transpires that the night before, Seymour had met with his intended bride and told her that he was “too happy” to attend the wedding. “Does that sound like somebody normal? Does that sound like somebody in their right mind?”
Toward the end of the story, Buddy reads a diary of Seymour’s in which there is an account of his prewedding qualms. Seymour had begged Muriel “to just go off alone with me and get married. I’m too keyed up to be with people. I feel as though I’m about to be born. Sacred, sacred day.” And he goes on:
I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected—never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.
Sometime after discovering Seymour’s diary, Buddy learns that Seymour and Muriel had indeed managed to elope.
We never meet Seymour in the story, but we can instantly recognize him as the “saintly artist” type, redeemed from alienation and misanthropy by his attachment to Eastern divines. For Seymour “the human voice conspires to desecrate everything on earth” (there is a near-saintly deaf-mute in “Raise High the Roof Beam,” who must be a kind of joke sequel to Holden Caulfield’s fantasy), but Seymour is striving to transcend this sort of negative discrimination: “I’ll champion indiscrimination till doomsday. … Followed purely, it’s the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way.” This path of indiscrimination means that Muriel’s mother, an “irritating, opinionated woman,” must be seen as “unimaginably brave” because “she might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living.” It also seems to mean that Muriel’s coldness should be worshiped as “her simplicity, her terrible honesty.” But how does a “discriminating man” learn how to indiscriminate? Does he pretend, for example, that bad poetry is really good? Seymour believes that such a man “would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry.”
Seymour, we learn, has had encounters with psychoanalysis and has even “more or less” promised his new wife to try again “one of these days.” The diagnosis last time was that he suffered from a “perfection complex,” that he found even the smallest falling short almost impossible to bear. How can this be squared with the Taoist path of indiscrimination? And is he not doomed always to be misread, to have his perfectionism misinterpreted as something sinister or aggressive? In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the child Sybil is frightened when Seymour kisses the arch of her foot. Six years earlier (according to “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”) Seymour had written in his diary: “I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.” At the age of twelve the boy Seymour had thrown a stone at a girl he admired and injured her quite badly; he had thrown the stone, he said, “because she looked so beautiful.”
My companion was now looking as if he’d like to throw a stone at me—and not because he found my musings about Seymour Glass at all attractive. So far as he was concerned, we’d been drumming our gumshoed heels for almost a whole chapter, and he was in no mood for any further fancy talk. “Obviously, Seymour Glass is Salinger in thin disguise: Why not come out and say so? It’s evident Salinger has a saint complex. He wants to be a saint. The trouble is, he doesn’t have a saintly personality; quite the opposite—he is egotistical, ill tempered, unforgiving. But he wants to be a saint because saints are above the human, they are unstoppably superior. So what does he do? He stops writing about people, those imperfects, and starts writing about saints. He invents a saint, one that belongs to him, that is him: a saint who writes beautiful poetry, who has a breakdown in the war, who marries the wrong woman, who commits suicide. Well, all right, Salinger doesn’t commit suicide, but he does the next best thing: He disappears, he stops living in the world, he makes himself semiposthumous. You can talk about him but you can’t talk to him, just like Seymour Glass. But I can see from your face you think this is too unbearably crude; you prefer the delicate suggestion, the wispy probability, the gentle teasing out of parallels, and so on. But we are writing biography, not criticism, are we not?”
It was not easy to persuade an alter ego in this mood that here we had a case in which biography and criticism were one, and that in getting to the heart of Seymour and Buddy Glass we were getting closer to the heart of Salinger than we ever would by knowing what time he got up in the morning, or how many cigarettes he smoked, or any of that circumstantial stuff, which, in any case, we hadn’t got. The “life” was immobilized; when Salinger wasn’t praying, or growing vegetables, he was writing. There was nothing at all that we could do about that, was there?
“We could do some scene setting, couldn’t we?” There was something almost pitiful in this entreaty. “We could go up there to Cornish and do some word pictures of the town, talk to a few ex-neighbors, or track down some of those kids he used to hang around with. I know that’s against the rules, but we have already used quotations from those kids that we dug out of the Time archive. Some of them will be in their forties now …”
It was tempting, I agreed, but no; in our case, the rules of trespass were quite clear, and the first rule was not to go within a hundred miles of Cornish. But it was time, certainly, that my companion got one of his lucky breaks. He had been in these sulks before, as I had been in mine. Last time, it had been around the year of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. Here was the most important event in Salinger’s career and we had almost nothing on it apart from a few review clippings and a single interview. His movements during the early fifties were unknown to us; our “map” for these months was a taunting blank. We had written to the publisher Little, Brown for “any information” but had been told that there was nobody still at the firm who had had anything to do with Salinger. John Woodburn, his editor, was dead.
What about the British end? We wrote to Roger Machell; he was ready to talk to us, but sadly he too died a few days before our scheduled meeting. We wrote to Hamish Hamilton Ltd. several times but it was moving offices and could not track down any Salinger papers; indeed, it doubted if there were any. And Hamish Hamilton himself had long before retired to Italy. He had already given us some personal reminiscences by letter but could not be expected to have access to the office files. But then, weeks later, the office itself called in the shape of a slightly ragged-sounding secretary. “This is Hamish Hamilton. We have a package for you in reception. To do with J. D. Salinger [which she rhymed with “singer” or “gunslinger”]. The package was in our hands some twenty minutes later. It contained about thirty letters from Salinger to Hamish Hamilton and Roger Machell, dating from the beginning of their relationship in 1951 through to the somewhat bitter end in 1960, which we will be coming to in Chapter 10.
Remarkably, the letters were not photocopies; they were the yellowing originals. Once again we marveled at the lax security we trespassers had to contend with. Salinger was supposed to be elusive, we exclaimed, but so far—without resorting to subterfuge or theft or even mild persuasion—we had accumulated more than a hundred letters covering almost every month of his adult life. And now we were being given not just access to letters, but the letters themselves—the only copies, probably, unless Salinger kept carbons. Shocking, really.
And that was how we got ourselves through the early 1950s. The letters to Hamilton were strong on dates and places. They gave us Salinger’s account of his relations with John Woodburn, his response to the reviews of The Catcher in the Rye, his anxiety about the Olivier encounter, and so on. And their tone was revealing. They were wordy letters, but rather self-consciously affectionate; and there was a wariness about them, a wanting to impress. Clearly, Hamish Hamilton was thought by Salinger to be a cultivated English gent to be addressed accordingly. But there was a pathos, too, in observing how badly Salinger wanted to be friends, to have an older brother figure he could trust.
By 1956, the moment of our present gloom, the relationship with Hamilton and Machell was beginning to turn cool. Salinger’s letters were cordial enough, but more aloof and businesslike. After all, in spite of their seeming virtues, these men were of the metropolis, book merchants, and they moved in a world of deals and dinners that Salinger had repudiated. “If he stops talking to them, where does that leave us?” To get through the late fifties, yes, we were (I supposed) rather badly in need of what my companion has now taken to describing as a “Hamish Hamilton-type coup.”
1. Hamish Hamilton to JDS, November 25, 1952.
2. Ibid.
3. JDS, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Bantam, 1977) p. 173.
4. Interviews with Time reporters, 1961 (Time archive).
5. Ernest Havemann, “The Search for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger: The Recluse in the Rye,” Life, November 3, 1961.
6. Shirley Blaney, “Twin State Telescope,” Claremont (N.H.) Daily Eagle, November 13, 1953.
7. Gavin Douglas, interview with Time reporters, 1961 (Time archive).
8. Roger Machell, interview with Time reporters, 1961 (Time archive).
9. JDS, Franny and Zooey (New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 29–30.
10. Ibid., p. 37.
11. The New Partisan Reader, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953), p. vi.
12. Douglas, loc. cit.
13. JDS, “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” unpublished ms. (Firestone Library).