Salinger (25 page)

In other words, Salinger made good copy. The fact that he had never been profiled made him even more appealing. Determined to break Salinger’s wall of silence,
Newsweek
sent Mel
Elfin to Cornish to investigate. Once there, Elfin interviewed as many friends and neighbors of Salinger as he could. He even tried to talk to Salinger himself but, not surprisingly, Salinger
eluded him. The resulting article ran in the magazine on May 30, 1960. It was near the beginning of the article that friends told Elfin how Salinger could talk for hours about subjects like music,
detective novels, Japanese poetry, Zen Buddhism, and yoga. “There was a time when he would go home and stand on his head,” one friend revealed, “but that was before he got
married.”

Later in the article, Elfin painted a picture of Salinger’s work routine, which was much different—and significantly more intense—than the one reported by friends when he had
originally moved to Cornish. Friends who knew him in 1960 said that Salinger began his day at five or six in the morning when he would walk down from his house to his studio out back—“a
tiny concrete shelter with a translucent roof.” Inside, as he chain-smoked cigarettes while he worked, it was not unusual for Salinger to “put in as many as fifteen or sixteen hours a
day at his typewriter.”

As a witness to this schedule, Elfin found Bertrand Yeaton, an artist who was a friend of Salinger’s. “Jerry works like a dog,” said Yeaton, one of the few people who had
actually been in Salinger’s
study. “He’s a meticulous craftsman who constantly revises, polishes, and rewrites. On the wall of the studio, Jerry has a
series of cup hooks to which he clips sheaves of notes. They must deal with various characters and situations, because when an idea occurs to him he takes down the clip, makes the appropriate
notation, and places it back on the proper hook. He also has a ledger in which he has pasted sheets of typewritten manuscripts on one page and on the opposite one has arrows, memos, and other notes
for revisions.”

Naturally,
Newsweek
assigned a photographer to go to Cornish. Oddly enough, on the day the photographer was there, he ran across Salinger right away as Salinger was walking along the
road near his house with his daughter, who was then four and a half years old. The photographer approached Salinger, who was so polite the photographer felt shamed into telling him why he was in
Cornish—to take a picture of him for
Newsweek.
Salinger thanked the photographer for not trying to “sneak” a picture; then he said to him a line that was supposed to
explain why he had turned into the recluse he was. “My method of work is such that any interruption throws me off,” Salinger said. “I can’t have my picture taken or have an
interview until I’ve completed what I’ve set out to do.”

What exactly Salinger meant by that comment was unclear. What
was
clear was this: Whether or not his intentions behind becoming a recluse were pure, the more Salinger said he
didn’t want any press coverage, the more the media wanted to cover him. A simple concept may have been at work here: If one tells a person he can’t know about something, the person only
wants to know about it more. On some
level, then, the public was interested in Salinger
because
he didn’t want them to know anything about him. So by doing
nothing—nothing but selling substantial quantities of books—Salinger had become the subject of a profile in one of the country’s two major newsmagazines. As it turned out, it was
just the beginning of the press attention Salinger would receive over the next year or so. For an author who didn’t want to be written about, few authors would be written about more.

2

The years 1961 and 1962 would mark the high point of Salinger’s career to date. By early 1961,
The Catcher in the Rye
had sold
1.25 million copies—an astonishing quantity for a serious novel about a teenage boy’s coming-of-age. This meant the novel was selling over 100,000 copies a year. Of course, most of the
sales resulted from the novel becoming a staple of reading lists in colleges and prep schools and from university English departments making Salinger one of the contemporary authors academics were
taking seriously. There were other indicators of Salinger’s appeal. For example, so many fans had written to the
New Yorker
for copies of back issues containing Salinger’s
stories that the magazine’s supply of those issues was exhausted.

Because of this success, because of the subject matter of his fiction, and because he had chosen to live his life in seclusion, a legend was growing around Salinger. Rumors filtered through his
body of fans as one told another what was being said about him. One rumor had Salinger posting a notice on the bulletin board in the offices of
the
New Yorker,
asking for an apartment in a “quiet Buddhist neighborhood.” Another had him and Claire, so much like Franny anyway, going into restaurants, where they would sit silently at their table
moving their lips but not speaking, as if they were soundlessly mouthing the Jesus Prayer.

These and other rumors were addressed in an article written by Edward Kosner that appeared in the
New York Post
on April 30, 1961. The piece was a follow-up to the
Newsweek
article that ran the year before, and it predicted what was going to happen when Salinger published his new book. In his article Kosner mentioned just some of the people he had approached who would
not talk about Salinger. At the
New Yorker,
William Shawn said, “Salinger simply does not want to be written about,” while an insider at the Harold Ober Agency said,
“This man wants his privacy.” Regardless, Kosner tried to paint some semblance of a portrait of Salinger, even though no one, not even Salinger’s neighbors in Cornish, would talk
to him on or off the record. Naturally, the portrait Kosner painted was sketchy: Salinger lived on one hundred acres in a five-room house designed by the architect and sculptor Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, who was famous for creating the statue of Abraham Lincoln that had supposedly inspired the president’s memorial in Washington, D.C. Set on a hill overlooking the Connecticut
River and the Green Mountains in Vermont, the house seemed ideal for Salinger’s family—Claire, now twenty-seven; Peggy, five; and Matthew, fifteen months. Salinger regularly attended
town meetings with his wife, Kosner said, but mostly what he did, the one thing he loved to do more than anything else, was write.

After the hoopla over Kosner’s
Post
piece died down, Salinger spent the summer, when he was not working on new material, getting ready for the publication
of his next book. Salinger had decided to take two pieces of fiction that had appeared in the
New Yorker,
put them together, and release them as a book on their own. The pieces he had
chosen were related in that they both dealt with the Glass family, One was “Franny,” which was still being discussed even though it had appeared in the magazine years ago, and
“Zooey,” which seemed to Salinger to be the perfect companion piece. The book, to be called simply
Franny and Zooey,
was sold by Olding to Little, Brown, who scheduled it for
release in the early fall of 1961.

Besides correcting the galleys for the book, Salinger actually had very little to do to prepare for the book’s publication. This was true because of certain ground rules he had handed down
to the publisher. There would be no advance publicity for the book. There would be a simple and understated art design for the book, although Salinger would provide a brief statement about the
text; this decision itself was a compromise since Salinger had originally said he would write a 1,000-word introduction to the book but then changed his mind. There would be no advance sale of the
book to clubs or any similar outlet. In other words
Franny and Zooey
would be issued with as little fanfare as possible. The publisher would merely ship the book to stores, and those
readers who wanted to would buy it.

The publication date for
Franny and Zooey
was set for September 14. When readers did buy the book—125,000 copies were sold in its first two weeks of release alone—they
discovered, besides “Franny” and
“Zooey,” two new pieces of writing by Salinger. One was the book’s dedication, with a reference to his
year-old son and a testimonial to his
New Yorker
editor, William Shawn. “As nearly as possible,” it read, “in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon
companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of the
New Yorker,
lover of the long shot, protector of the
unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy-looking book.”

Naturally, the dedication was provocative, since it gave glimpses into Salinger’s private life—glimpses that a recluse who truly wanted to be a recluse never would have given. There
was the quick image of his one-year-old son having lunch with someone—was it Salinger? There was the revelation that his best friend was William Shawn, who was also his editor at the
New
Yorker,
and the added admission that Shawn was his best friend because Shawn loved long shots, protected unprolific writers, and defended flamboyant people. All of these, of course, were
references to the way Salinger must have viewed himself. The “heaven help him” comment was even Salinger’s own clue to let his readers know he understood that by naming Shawn as
his best friend he was unleashing a stream of ardent fans onto Shawn who would harass him in hopes of finding out more about Salinger—a fate Shawn could not have cherished.

The dedication was peculiarly revealing for someone who seemed to want to hide himself from the public. It appeared to be a tease, carefully crafted by Salinger himself. If Salinger had wanted
to
dedicate his book to Shawn but still intended to protect his privacy, all he had to do was run the dedication as most dedications of this sort are run. “To William
Shawn,” it should have read. Only someone playing hide-and-seek with his audience would offer these “catch me if you can” tidbits that made his fans want to know more, not less,
about him.

Besides the dedication, Salinger provided the dust-jacket copy, although it was nowhere near the 1,000 words he had promised for an introduction. It, too, was strangely autobiographical, full of
coded and uncoded references to his life and work.

Most significantly, the jacket copy referred to a number of other stories in the works. While it was true two other Salinger pieces had appeared (“Seymour” and “Raise High the
Roof Beam, Carpenters”), what the public could not have known in 1961—what would not become obvious for years to come—was that there were no unpublished Salinger manuscripts being
held by the
New Yorker.
According to all existing records, there were, in 1961, no new Salinger stories or novellas awaiting publication. But that was certainly not the impression Salinger
created, implying that there was plenty of material in the pipeline waiting to be published. Salinger closed the dust-jacket copy with a piece of disinformation, misreporting the town in which he
had taken up residence. His wife wanted him to say, Salinger wrote, that he lived in Westport, Connecticut, with his dog.

Franny and Zooey
stayed on the
New York Times
best-seller list for six months, going so far as to reach the number one spot. It did not achieve this kind of popular success
because of its critical reception,
however. Compared to the reviews of
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey’s
reviews were much
more harsh and mean-spirited. One after another, reviewers bemoaned the fact that, with all of his talent and originality, Salinger had been writing about the same subjects in the same way for ten
years. It looked as if Salinger was going to be guilty of the flaw reviewers criticized Fitzgerald for. Because he had not developed beyond the level of accomplishment he had achieved at the
beginning of his career, Fitzgerald was attacked for not living up to his potential as an artist. What was not said was this: From the start, he was writing at a level few writers ever reach, much
less surpass.

Often with veiled references to Fitzgerald, reviewers criticized Salinger, some more than others. “[Salinger’s] fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humor, its morbidity, its wry
but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present American life,” John Updike wrote in “Anxious Days for the Glass Family,” which ran on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
on September 17, 1961. “It pays the price, however, of becoming dangerously convoluted and static.” On November 18, Joan Didion was even less kind in
the
National Review.
Dismissing Salinger’s fiction as “spurious,” she focused on the Salinger cult. “I rather imagine that Salinger readers wish secretly that they
could write letters to Franny and Zooey and their brother Buddy . . . much as people of less invincible urbanity write letters to the characters in
As the World Turns
and
The Brighter
Day.
” In the December 1961
Yale Review,
J. N. Hartt reviewed the book, again negatively. “It is rather more apparent,” Hartt wrote about Salinger and his characters,
“that
he loves them than that they are lovable. The rest of us have access to them only in their talk. The talk is often hilarious, deeply tender, and charming. But
they cannot construct a world out of it; and so Salinger has not constructed a world out of them.”

Since the reviews were not selling the book, what
was
selling it was simple—an intense curiosity on the public’s part to see what Salinger had decided to publish. This
curiosity was fueled early on when
Time
magazine ran a cover story about Salinger on September 15. Of course, Salinger had known about the story for a while, since the magazine had been
approaching his friends and family members for interviews. Needless to say, he was disturbed that the magazine was doing the piece at all.