Salinger

by David Shields

  DAVID HUDDLE: Think about how clean, precise, exact, and devastating “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is. Place that beside the garrulous, chatty, tedious voice in “Hapworth 16, 1924.” It’s almost as if the mental acuity of Salinger is diminishing right in front of you.

  JOHN WENKE: Salinger may have laughed or been disgusted at “Hapworth” ’s reception. He made an artistic choice to valorize the involuted ramblings of his alter ego, Buddy Glass. The creation of Seymour is Salinger bowing out, creating a character he knew would be unpopular. It is artistic contempt coupled with an aesthetic of silence. The creation of “Hapworth” was his goodbye song to this world.

  GERALDINE McGOWAN: “Hapworth” turned a lot of people away, and that suited Salinger perfectly. All the complaints that it was too cumbersome to read gave him the idea that now he was writing real art again.

  LESLIE EPSTEIN: Why does that story upset people so much? “Hapworth” has a purity and integrity to it: the boldness of a boy looking us in the eye and telling us things that he makes us believe, even though he’s predicting the future, predicting his own death. (“I’ll live about as long as a good telephone pole, about thirty years.”) He shot himself at thirty-one. People thought it was a trick. It wasn’t a trick. I think it was the culmination of this struggle in Salinger to come to terms with the bullet that went through Seymour’s brain. I think he succeeded in doing it in “Hapworth.”

  IAN HAMILTON: Nobody writes about suicide as much as Salinger without actively considering it himself. And [“Hapworth”] looks like an act of literary suicide for Salinger as well as a character suicide for Seymour. I believe Salinger keeps delaying publication because he’s not quite ready to die.

  DAVID SHIELDS: On the flap copy of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, Salinger had made clear that he had more Glass stories in the works and that they would see publication soon. Nonetheless, there is little question that Salinger was driving toward no longer publishing his work, as he needed to do this to fulfill his Vedantic beliefs: withdraw from society, renounce the world. The 1965 attack on the New Yorker and Shawn and the baffled silence that greeted “Hapworth” must have accelerated that decision to go silent, even as Vladimir Nabokov was calling Salinger and Updike “by far the two finest artists in recent years.”

  —

  ETHEL NELSON: I don’t think Claire thought that was going to be her life with Jerry—left to do all the things for the children and make all the decisions for weeks, weeks at a time. She was alone.

  SHANE SALERNO: In the summer of 1966, Claire and Jerry Salinger told their children that they were getting divorced. On September 9, 1966, Claire filed for divorce.

  DAVID SHIELDS: According to Salinger’s sister, Doris, Salinger should never have married.

  DR. GERARD L. GAUDRAULT: Mrs. Claire Salinger has been treated by me professionally on occasions since the summer of 1966. She complained of nervous tension, 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. I gave treatment to her for the conditions I found, and in my most recent examination of her, on September 21, 1967, I found some improvement in her condition, 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.

  MARGARET SALINGER: No one said, “Don’t talk about this. Don’t think that.” I mean, you don’t have to to a kid. Kids pick up what the elephants are in the room that the family is not talking about.

  CLAIRE DOUGLAS: 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 libelee has treated libellant 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.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: When you read the divorce papers, it’s clear that Claire was going to become the primary custodian of the children and he was going to provide them with support and pay for their education. Claire may have planned out where they were going to go to school and how they were going to go to school, and Salinger was going to pay for it, but interestingly enough, Salinger, who had failed in prep school, didn’t mind at all sending his children to prep school. There is some inherent contradiction in that, but Salinger’s life is full of inherent contradictions.

  GERALDINE McGOWAN: When I read the divorce papers, it occurred to me that it nearly matches what happens in one of the short stories [“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”]: “ ‘What is hell? I maintain that is the suffering of being unable to love.’ ”

  TIME: Divorced: J. D. Salinger, 48, solitary author, whose Glass family chronicles have been produced painfully and slowly (only one story in the New Yorker in the past eight years); by Claire Salinger, 33, his second wife; after twelve years of marriage, two children; in Newport, N.H. She charged treatment “to injure health and endanger reason” based on his indifference and refusal to communicate. He did not contest.

  SHANE SALERNO: At the same time that Salinger was retreating from the New York publishing world and isolating himself from Claire, his sister, Doris, a fashion coordinator for Bloomingdale’s, was repeatedly quoted about the latest fashions in the New York Times style pages. Claire had been scared that her modeling job would turn Salinger off, but if he truly hated the frivolity of fashion and materialism, why didn’t he repudiate Doris?

  When Salinger and Claire divorced, she was granted, with no contest, custody of the children. She was also granted the original ninety acres that Salinger had purchased in Cornish as well as the cottage. Salinger never fought that award. He must have known that had Claire not been awarded the cottage, the land, and a considerable amount of money, she would have left Cornish. She would have taken the children with her. He allowed the divorce agreement to stand in the hope that Claire would remain in Cornish and therefore he would have his children across the road. He wound up building another home for himself, within walking distance.

  After the divorce, Salinger stopped going to the bunker. He started writing in a room above the garage in the new house but would never publish again. His decision is best explained by how seriously he took the following passage from the Bhagavad Gita, II, 47–49: “You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working.”

  ETHEL NELSON: I had a family to bring up. We moved to Connecticut. I was out of the area for a while, and when I came back and heard that Jerry and Claire had gotten divorced, I was crushed, because I hate divorce. And then I thought of Claire and what I’d seen her go through. Her children were about all grown at the time I came back to Cornish, so I thought, “She’s free. Claire’s free. Now she can go and become her own person.” The original house is just down the road from where he is now. I think [Margaret] hit the nail on the head somewhat when she said [in her 2000 book, Dream Catcher] that if you weren’t perfect, Dad didn’t want anything to do with you. He wanted perfection. If you let him down in any way, you were no longer to be associated with him. He would not be your friend. He would not speak to you.

  My mom and dad brought us kids up in a loving home. Claire did the same. Claire was a lady, and she deserved to be treated like one. Jerry didn’t treat her like one. So I was glad to hear that she was free. Sorry. I’m sorry. That
was hard. I just didn’t like seeing anyone go through that.

  I just had no idea. I’m glad I was a poor man’s daughter, I really am.

  SHARON STEEL: In a letter to Michael Mitchell dated October 16, 1966, Salinger [writes that] Peggy and Matthew are in New York City for a visit and a trip to the dentist. They stay at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, in the same suite that the Beatles stayed in the last time they played New York. Peggy loves this, and Salinger loves her and Matthew—he reads in bed while they sleep in the same room, and considers them both “pretty hot stuff.” The next day, he takes them to a bookstore and lunch at Reuben’s, followed by “a walk on a darkened Fifth Avenue.” In the meantime, Salinger stopped by the New Yorker offices. He tells Mitchell that he misses him quite a lot, and hopes that he’s found love again since his divorce [from his ex-wife Bet].

  EDWARD JACKSON BENNETT: I had moved to Cornish to live alone for a year. I was going through a divorce, and after attending to the responsibilities as publisher of the Claremont (N.H.) Daily Eagle, my remote cottage in Cornish was a place to retire alone to read, write, take long walks on remote country roads, and to generally lick my wounds and reassess life. As the harsh winter of 1968 gave way to long days of March sunshine, I would often make up a small pitcher of martinis on Sundays and sit outside in the sunshine.

  Salinger with his neighbors at the Cornish Fair.

  On such a Sunday, J. D. Salinger sauntered by. We waved our usual silent exchange; then on the spur of the moment I said, “Come up and have a martini.”

  Salinger paused. Then he made his move, striding up to me with a hand extended. We made no introductions, nor were names exchanged. Instead we chatted about the hard winter, the birds, and whether or not we’d be planting peas this May in the upland country.

  Salinger thanked me for the libation, but before he left I said, “I see by Friday’s Eagle that we do have something in common besides being silent neighbors.”

  I pointed out to him a clipping which listed divorces granted at the January term of court. The name “Salinger” appeared next to “Bennett.” Our divorce decrees had been granted, quite coincidentally, at the same time. A trace of what might be called a smile creased Salinger’s somber countenance.

  “You have a point there,” he said, “and perhaps we share other similarities, too. Thanks for the drink.”

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger never published again after “Hapworth 16, 1924.” Claire Douglas became a clinical psychologist, writer, and Jungian analyst. She trained at the New York Association for Analytical Psychology and has successfully reinvented herself; in fact, as of 2013 she has published more books than her ex-husband has. She lectures and writes books and articles on Jung and women’s psychology. Everything she’s done has been independent of the fact that she was once married to J. D. Salinger. She has never spoken on the record about him. A 2013 biographical note about Douglas ends with this: “She is deeply grateful to live and still practice in a house on a bluff looking out over the Pacific Ocean.”

  J. D. SALINGER (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951):

  “This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”

  Salinger at home, in his bedroom, postdivorce, April 1968.

  SHARON STEEL: On December 27, 1966, Salinger writes another letter to Michael Mitchell. This letter finds Salinger purging his hatred for New York City, a place that makes him feel lost. All the haunts he once enjoyed are gone—with the exception of the Museum of Natural History. A lifetime before the hipsterfication of Kings County, however, Salinger wishes he could explore Brooklyn. He has a faint hope of meeting an old Hasid “from the eighteenth century” who will invite him to his house for some soup or tea. Salinger goes on to discuss how difficult it is to find love after you’ve lost it. “You can’t erase a person,” he tells Mitchell, “anymore than they can erase you.”

  Conversation with Salinger #7

  TOM WOLFE: Charlie Portis wrote True Grit and The Dog of the South. Before all that, he was a reporter on the New York Herald Tribune. We worked [there] at the same time [the early-1960s], and I remember Charlie telling me he was sent up to New Hampshire, to Concord, on some political story. He was heading back to New York on one of these little commuter flights. This was a propeller plane, and two men sitting right in front of him, one on one side of the aisle on the outside seat, one on the outside seat of the other side of the aisle, realized they know each other. They had to shout almost, because of the noise of the airplane. The one on one side said, “Well, I’ll be damned. Jerry! I haven’t seen you in so long! What the hell have you been up to?”

  It dawned on Charlie Portis that this was J. D. Salinger. He was filling in almost the last ten years of his life for his friend, and Charlie, like any good newspaperman, is taking this down, a mile a minute.

  When they landed, he went up to Salinger partly just to make absolutely dead sure this was J. D. Salinger. He said, “Mr. Salinger,” and this guy turned around. Charlie said, “Hi, my name is Charles Portis. I’m from the New York Herald Tribune. I just happened to be sitting behind you.” He said he got no further than that when Salinger turned white.

  Salinger said, “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.”

  Charlie said to me, “You know? I wouldn’t. That guy looked so awful.”

  Conversation with Salinger #8

  ETHEL NELSON: With Jerry’s withdrawal, the part that hurt the very most for me is when my mom and I went to his new house. He had the first house where his kids grew up, and then he moved to this other house across the road. His new house had a big porch on it and a driveway, so he could could step on the porch and look down at the driveway; he hollered at us to go away and don’t come up. I said, “Jerry, we’re here for the Red Cross drive. You always give to it.” He said, “You take any more steps toward me and I’m going to shoot at the ground right in front of you.” He had his gun in his hand. He did not want people trespassing on his land. He said, “You wait a minute. I’ll go in and write a check and I’ll throw it down to you.” That’s how distrusting of people he had become. And that hurt, because we’d always been friends.

  PART III

  VANAPRASTHYA

  WITHDRAWAL FROM SOCIETY

  15

  SEYMOUR’S SECOND SUICIDE

  CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, 1953–2010

  The one constant in Salinger’s life, from the early 1950s until his death in 2010, was Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, which transformed him from a writer of fiction into a disseminator of mysticism, destroying his work and, over time, causing him to turn silent in order to fulfill the final stages of his religious doctrine. As a writer, when he was lost, he was found, and when he was found, he was lost: at his height, Salinger was writing to save his own soul; by the end, to the degree he was writing at all, he was writing to inform you how you could save your soul.

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  DAVID SHIELDS and SHANE SALERNO: Salinger’s mother was born into a Catholic family and converted to Judaism; his father was Jewish. Salinger could follow neither faith. He explored Scientology, Hinduism, Ayurveda, Christian Science, and Zen Buddhism; as drawn as he was to Buddhism, he recoiled from its atheism. He also explored bodily therapies, such as Kriya yoga, homeopathy, acupuncture, and macrobiotics.

  In 1988, Ian Hamilton wrote, “For some years, Salinger has needed to set his gaze on some high purpose, and his dedication to his craft has often had a monkish tinge. Up until 1952, the order he aimed to belong to was an order based on ‘talent’ as if it were the same thing as ‘enlightenment’ and [now he] will seek in the curricula of holy men as a way of dissolving wh
at has all along been for him an irritating, hard to manage separation between art and life, that is to say, his art, his life.”

  In our research we have discovered that as early as 1946 Salinger learned about Vedanta Hinduism from Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge, which explains the most important ideas of Advaita Vedanta. The book’s epigraph—“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; / thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard”—is from Katha Upanishad, a holy text of Hinduism, and the novel consists of Laurence “Larry” Durrell’s search for spiritual meaning after his best friend dies in World War I while saving Larry’s life. According to Margaret, even before Catcher was published in 1951, Salinger had become friends with the Zen adept D. T. Suzuki, had meditated at a “Zen center”—actually, the retreat of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center—in the Thousand Islands region of northern New York, and was thinking seriously of becoming a monk.

  After Catcher, Salinger became increasingly devoted to and influenced by Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, the religious and philosophical teachings that Swami Vivekananda brought to the West in 1893. Salinger’s discovery of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (translated by Swami Nikhilananda and Joseph Campbell and published by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York) was a major event in his life, second only to the war. The damage the war wrought compelled him to seek not only transcendence but erasure.