Salinger

by David Shields

  Sometimes he would take me out for an evening in New York. I remember once seeing the George Washington Bridge lit up and thinking how absolutely beautiful—it was insane how beautiful it was. He laughed and said, “Jean, you’ve got to learn not to say the obvious.”

  One night he took me for drinks at the Maxwells’ [William Maxwell, the writer and New Yorker fiction editor, and his wife, Emily], and I remember that particularly because I loved them both. I had a little watch that my grandmother had given me. It was a Tiffany watch and I kept losing it, leaving it in Cornish or leaving it here or there, and Jerry said something about the watch that wasn’t true. I don’t know what it could have been. But I contradicted him and both the Maxwells said, “Good for you, Jean, good for you.” As though I, this little girl, had contradicted Jerry, and Jerry wasn’t used to being contradicted.

  Only once did I ever hear him speak of being a half-Jew. It was dinner at the Maxwells’. I gathered that his Jewishness was a problem to him. He asked me to sort of back into the ending of “Down at the Dinghy.” “Don’t be shocked.” Or “You may be shocked. I had to write the story. I’m sorry I wrote it, but I had to write the story just once.”

  I think he was enjoying me as a child all those years. I’m the one who changed it. We were in the backseat of a taxi and I turned and kissed him. It was very natural. I wanted to kiss him, so I kissed him. I suppose I gave him permission—“It’s okay now”—but it would never have come from him. Well, probably it would have, but I did it first. My daughter thinks it was important to him to wait for me to reach the age of eighteen before we had sex. I don’t think that.

  Soon after the cab kiss we went to Montreal for the weekend. I don’t remember very much about it, but I do remember sitting in a restaurant and there was a lovely-looking girl who looked very shy and uncomfortable. I remember Jerry commenting on her. There were also two very businessmen-like people talking about mysticism.

  We went up to our room and we went to bed. I told him I was a virgin, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t want the responsibility of that, I guess. The next day, having had my rite of passage, we flew back to Boston; from there, me on to New York and he on to West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Somehow, during the flight to Boston, he got the idea that his connecting plane was canceled. I began laughing because I was delighted that we could spend the afternoon together. I saw this veil come down over his face. I saw the look on his face. It was just a look of horror and hurt. It was terrible and conveyed everything. I knew it was over. I knew I had fallen off that pedestal.

  I didn’t have a plane until later in the day. He went right to the desk, got the ticket changed, hustled me right onto an earlier plane. There was no questioning, discussion, no ambiguity. I had come between him and his work, and it was over. I got maybe one or two letters from him after that, which don’t survive because I was too upset. I suffered, but I also blame myself. After all these years I should have known what he told me. Read the letters. All those letters say, “My work has to come first.”

  It was extreme, particularly after what had just happened to us the night before, but it had to be. I had no choice but to accept it. I think he all of a sudden realized I was a phony, and that’s his word, “phony.” That’s what I think he thought. Because of being a virgin, which I had never told him. All of a sudden he saw me in an entirely different light.

  There was never any question in his mind that he was a writer and that’s what he was meant to do: write. It was a Bhagavad Gita duty, as far as he was concerned, although he hated the word “duty.” His work was ordained by God. It was his way to enlightenment. He was put on this earth to write. And I became a distraction; it took only two minutes to become a distraction. I was just devastated. I suffered, but I got over it. I had to get over it.

  Zen was something that he talked about a lot. In one of his letters, he said, “I’m sorry you couldn’t go to the basketball game tonight. There was Zen there.” Zen is where you find it. These were perfect moments for him.

  In 1955 I was in Daytona again. I was in the Ocean Room, dancing. I looked out a window, and there was Jerry Salinger with this beautiful girl. They sort of looked married to me. Married or not, they were together. They just were a beautiful couple. He was a very good-looking man. She was a lovely-looking woman.

  They were walking along. It was above the pool on a walkway, and they looked very comfortable together. They were obviously out for an after-dinner walk. I can’t say they looked ecstatically happy. They weren’t necessarily arm in arm, but they didn’t look unhappy. They looked simpatico.

  I was very taken back. I was looking out this window, dancing with somebody, and there he was. I was driving down Main Street the next day and I saw him walking from a bar where I had been with him, where he and my father used to have drinks together, with this woman on his arm who became his second wife, Claire Salinger.

  How did I feel? I didn’t feel good, but I was powerless to do anything about it. That was the last time I ever saw him. I was shocked when I saw him at that window, but he saw me. I know that. Our eyes met. He saw me. And the next time I looked again, he was gone. They were gone. I had known it ended quite a while before that moment.

  He always told me that when you run into somebody, if you get all shy, there’s still something there.

  When Jerry Salinger was through with somebody, he was through. I knew that he was very definitely out of my life. I adored him and we had a wonderful five years, for which I am very grateful. I am very grateful to have known him. He changed me, but I didn’t know it at the time.

  He was an avuncular figure in my life. He was my buddy. I never felt—except for the letters—I never felt adored by him. I never felt that he in any way needed me. I felt very close to him, but it seems to me we had parallel lives until the end, and then that turned out to be a disaster. I was damaged by our relationship, in the end. I was. However, that is offset by almost five years of learning, joy, fun, my mind opening up to all sorts of things.

  Jerry sent me two books for Christmas: “To Jean, from Jerry, December 1953”—Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery and The Sutra of Hui Neng. Then he wrote me a long letter explaining to me as best as he could about Zen, which is living in the moment. It’s having direct experience, forgetting your ego, losing your ego. People should work against having egos. Childlike, pure, nothing between you and experience: that is the way, according to Jerry Salinger, life should be lived. His great lesson was detachment. All through my life there’s a part of me that asked, “Would Jerry Salinger approve of this?” I can go five years without giving him a thought, but if there’s a moral dilemma and I’m trying to figure out what the next right step is, Jerry Salinger might pop in my head. I think, “Well, I better not do it that way.” Of course, it’s difficult if you’ve been with a man like Jerry Salinger; you do compare other men who come in and out of your life to him. His intensity and his curiosity. His wisdom.

  Besides the letters I have from him, there is one thing that will always serve as a memory of that special time long ago, and that is Jerry’s wonderful story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” He told me he could not have written it if he had not met me.

  10

  IS THE KID IN THIS BOOK CRAZY?

  STAMFORD AND WESTPORT

  Written over a decade but based on the first thirty years of his life, Salinger’s most popular book, The Catcher in the Rye, is published to both loud applause and stinging criticism.

  Idiomatic, profane, both antiestablishment and invested in the establishment, the novel becomes over the next sixty years a book that tens of millions around the world read and love and see as almost a user’s manual for disaffected adolescence. Although the reader is unlikely to know the extent to which Salinger’s Post-traumatic Stress Disorder informed Catcher, the book is a worldwide phenomenon because he has buried that trauma inside Holden. All of us are broken; everyone, at some point, especially in adolescence, feels irreparably damaged
, and we all need healing. Catcher provides this healing, but just barely. You don’t even know how—there is just enough of an uplift at the end, but you don’t feel you’ve been given a cure-all; you just feel healed on some deep, inarticulable level.

  —

  SHANE SALERNO: Holden Caulfield was crazy.

  That’s what Harcourt, Brace & Co. told Salinger about his greatest creation. The New Yorker told him they just didn’t believe in the character of Holden.

  The double blow struck at Salinger’s two greatest fears: going insane and, far worse, being a phony.

  “My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book,” Salinger said, “and it was a great relief telling people about it.”

  Well, not at first.

  The Catcher in the Rye, the greatest antiestablishment book of all time and one of the biggest bestsellers in history, almost didn’t get published. A work that survived the worst horrors of World War II nearly got edited to hell in the jungles of the New York publishing world.

  Salinger carried the first six chapters with him on the beaches of Normandy and into the Hürtgen Forest, through the concentration camp, and into the psychiatric ward. Throughout the war he carried the novel in his imagination. It sustained his mind through the unsustainable and bore his heart through the unbearable. It stood between him and the cliff.

  The narrative—Salinger’s only novel—is told in the first-person voice of Holden Caulfield. That voice is Salinger, direct and unfiltered by the artifice of third-person camouflage. It’s his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his rage, his big beautiful middle finger to the phonies of the world.

  Ten years of agony to get it all down on paper.

  I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

  Back in 1940 Salinger had written a note to Whit Burnett, saying that he was working on a “longer, autobiographical piece.” He’d already written four short stories about Holden, considered writing a play about him—with child star Margaret O’Brien as Phoebe—and later told Hemingway that he wanted to play Holden himself.

  I started imitating one of those guys in the movies. In one of those musicals. I hate the movies like poison, but I get a bang imitating them. . . . All I need’s an audience. I’m an exhibitionist.

  It makes perfect sense: the book is a 214-page soliloquy. In 1944 Salinger told Burnett that he had six Holden Caulfield stories, but he wanted to save them for the novel he was writing, and that he now wanted to take his stories, all written in the third person, and use them as the basis for a novel narrated in the first person. That way, the prose would have a more immediate, personal feel.

  While he was still in Europe, Salinger wrote the first short story narrated by Holden himself, the real beginning of The Catcher in the Rye, called “I’m Crazy.”

  I stood there—boy, I was freezing to death—and I kept saying goodby to myself, “Goodby, Caulfield. Goodby, you slob.” I kept seeing myself throwing a football around, with Buhler and Jackson, just before it got dark on the September evenings, and I knew I’d never throw a football around ever again with the same guys at the same time. It was as though Buhler and Jackson and I had done something that had died and been buried, and only I knew about it, and no one was at the funeral but me.

  Salinger’s story “I’m Crazy,” featuring Holden Caulfield and published in Collier’s, December 22, 1945, shortly after his release from the Nuremberg mental hospital.

  “I’m Crazy” is, more or less, an outline for what would become The Catcher in the Rye. Holden recounts how he was kicked out of boarding school and offers some brief insights into his own personality. “Only a crazy guy would have stood” on a hilltop in the cold with only a thin jacket on, which is what he’s doing at the start of the story. “That’s me. Crazy. No kidding. I have a screw loose.” From there, he goes home unannounced to his parents’ apartment in New York; when he arrives, he wakes his younger sister, Phoebe, from a dead sleep.

  Old Phoebe didn’t even wake up. When the light was on and all, I sort of looked at her for a while. She was laying there asleep, with her face sort of on the side of the pillow. She had her mouth way open. It’s funny. You take adults, they look lousy when they’re asleep and have their mouths way open, but kids don’t. Kids look all right. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right.

  I went around the room, very quiet and all, looking at stuff for a while. I felt swell, for a change.

  Salinger had killed off the original Holden Caulfield in some published stories, in which a figure with the same name, who strikingly resembles the protagonist of the novel, is reported missing in action during World War II. The author had no compunction about bringing Holden back from the dead. Salinger was living in his parents’ Park Avenue apartment in November 1946 when “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” featuring Holden Morrisey Caulfield, finally appeared in the New Yorker on December 21, 1946, and by then he had finished a ninety-page novella called The Catcher in the Rye, but he knew he didn’t want to publish it in that form; he had more work to do on it.

  Salinger needed quiet if he was going to expand the novella. Radio producer Himan Brown had just bought a property in the country, six miles from the center of town near Westport, a place for himself and his family to go and relax on weekends. There was a large studio off the main house. In 1947, a real estate agent came to Brown and said he had somebody who wanted to rent the place for eight or nine months.

  A writer.

  “And that’s how I met a man called J. D. Salinger,” Brown told us. “He wanted to be near New York City, I suppose. He had a big, black dog—that was the problem. Some of the people wouldn’t rent to him with a dog. I liked the guy; he seemed young, maybe in his late twenties. I didn’t know too much about him, but I did know there was a writer called Salinger who wrote for the New Yorker, so when he came along, I knew him as the writer of these stories. That’s all I knew about him. He looked very presentable; the dog was a lovely, black dog, which I fell in love with, too.

  Salinger with Benny.

  “He said, ‘Oh, I love it’—the whole idea of a studio. I think he paid $100 a month or something like that. The room had lots of windows and was thirty by forty feet with maybe a twenty-two-, twenty-four-foot ceiling. It was a perfect place to be creative, I suppose; it had character. There was a staircase going up to the bedroom upstairs, and that’s where he wrote. He said to me, ‘I’ll be writing a book here.’ I have six acres in Stamford. There’s no traffic: it’s a side road, a riverbank road, so he would be completely to himself.”

  Salinger took the place from September to June 1947, then came back for a full year in 1948.

  “He was very quiet,” Brown said, “and he told me that all he would be doing was writing—no parties, no visitors. He would walk around, take the dog out. The house was up eighteen or twenty steps on a little hillside. He’d walk down, walk on the roads. It was a very private neighborhood.

  “He was very quiet about what he was doing. I could never really delve into what he was developing. I never really broke into his world of creativity. He always worked well; nothing bothered him about the house. He was in there, and if his typewriter was going, I never really knew what he was writing or what he was doing. He was very private. During the week, he was up there alone, writing, and I was in the city. This was his own world. And I knew enough not to intrude into it.”

  “I’ve taken a small place in Westport,” Salinger wrote to New Yorker editor Gus Lobrano, “and I’ve started work on the novel about the prep school boy.”

  Writer Peter De Vries recalled, “During Salinger’s brief stay in Westport, we became fast friends. I knew at the time he was writing the book, and I was enormously interested in the idea, without ever dreaming that I was being made privy to the early workings-out of a classic. I remembered saying that it all sounded very wonderful, but couldn’t he think up a more catchy title?”
/>
  De Vries’s son Jon remembered Salinger standing on his head and chugging double martinis. “He’d come over and express doubts about this book he was writing about this kid who said ‘goddam’ and ‘hell’ all the time.”

  Salinger probably wrote most of the book in Westport, but another friend said that he also holed up in a Manhattan hotel room, as well as in Carol Montgomery Newman’s office at the New Yorker—wherever he could shut himself away to get the book done. Now thirty years old, he had been either contemplating or writing this novel for much of his adult life. It was time to finish it.

  “I was eating a sandwich at my desk when our receptionist called,” Harcourt, Brace editor Robert Giroux recalled. This was 1949. Giroux had wanted to publish a collection of Salinger’s short stories. Salinger had tentatively agreed, but Giroux—who, like Salinger, had been an intelligence officer during the war—hadn’t heard anything from the author for quite a while.

  “ ‘Mr. Salinger is here,’ [my] secretary said, ‘and he wants to meet you.’

  “I said, ‘Salinger? Pierre Salinger?’

  “She said, ‘Jerome. His name is Jerome.’ ”

  “In he came,” Giroux recalled. “He was very tall, dark-haired, had a horse face. He was melancholy looking. It’s the truth—the first person I thought of when I saw him was Hamlet. ‘Giroux,’ he said. I said something like, ‘Right. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Salinger.’ ‘Giroux,’ he said again. ‘Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker] has recommended you to me. But I want to tell you that to start me out it would be much better to publish my first novel instead of my stories.’ I laughed, thinking, You want to be the publisher, you can have my seat. But I said, ‘I’m sure you’re right about that. . . . I will publish your novel. Tell me about it.’ He said, ‘Well, I can’t show it to you yet. It’s about half finished.’ I said, ‘Well, let me be the publisher.’ And he said yes, and we shook hands.”