Salinger (26 page)

The magazine’s cover featured a freehand drawing of Salinger from the chest up. On his face he holds a demure expression. Behind him there is a field of rye with a boy
rising up at the back of the field. It was the kind of drawing Salinger would have hated. Literal and devoid of irony, it took itself and its subject more seriously than the subject took himself.
Inside the issue the
Time
editors ran four freehand drawings by Russell Hoban. There was an angular rendering of Holden Caulfield, who gave the appearance of being a young Hamlet
contemplating his fate. “Salinger’s Holden Caulfield,” the drawing’s caption read. “Among the young, the mad, the saintly.” There was Franny lying on a sofa
under an elaborate blanket. “Franny,” the caption read. “In flight from dancing egos.” Next, Zooey, with a squarish
face that made him look
“[l]ike a Jewish-Irish Mohican.” Finally, there was Bessie, wearing her lounging outfit, smoking a cigarette, and affecting the look of an over-the-hill theatrical agent.
“Bessie,” her caption read. “With cups of consecrated chicken soup.”

In the “Letter from the Publisher,” Hoban warned readers that by doing these drawings he was violating Salinger’s characters’ “private rights to exist in the
reader’s mind.” But he did the drawings, he said, because of his love of the writer, an admiration that so defined his life he had named his first two daughters Phoebe and Esmé.
“Salinger, I think,” Hoban said, “is a man without eyelids. All of his material comes to him so painfully; it costs so much to write, more than anyone else who comes to
mind.” That pain, one could argue, is what Hoban captures in his dark, unusual drawings.

“I had already done two or three
Time
covers,” says Hoban, “so my editor gave me the Salinger story to do. I had probably told him that two of my children had been
named after Salinger characters. Phoebe and Esmé were such beguiling characters I thought they were good names for my first two daughters. I did the paintings entirely from imagination with
no models. These were my own readings of his stories.”

If he disapproved of the illustrations, Salinger surely detested the piece. Over the years, he would be extremely vocal to friends about his contempt for the
Time
cover story, which the
magazine’s editors had entitled “Sonny: An Introduction.” Primarily Salinger hated the piece because it invaded his privacy. “What they saw behind a cluster of
birches,” the magazine reported, referring to the reporters
who sneaked onto his property to get a look at where he lived, “was a simple, one-story New England
house painted barn-red. A modest vegetable garden, some yards and across a stream from the house—a little concrete cell with a skylight. The cell contains a fireplace, a long table with a
typewriter, books, and a filing cabinet.” After this, the magazine then called into question Salinger’s willingness to tell the truth, which must have also infuriated Salinger, When the
article mentioned the dust-jacket reference to his living in Westport with his dog, it did so this way: “One source of bogus information is the author himself; in the jacket blurb for
Franny and Zooey,
which he wrote himself, he says with coy fraudulence that ‘I live in Westport with my dog.’ The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog
for years.”

Salinger was also lucky. One aspect of Salinger’s life
Time
reporters had been examining but did not write about was his preoccupation with young girls. There had been one rumor
circulating that Sylvia—the young doctor he had met in Europe after the war—was not his wife, but a girl he had fallen in love with in Daytona Beach, Florida; she, too, had been
enthralled with him until her parents put an end to the friendship. On the issue of his fondness for young girls,
Time
had found someone who might help unravel Salinger’s potentially
scandalous attractions. When one reporter discovered this source, he sent the magazine the following telegram: “
WE HAVE FOUND A LEAD THAT MAY FINALLY OPEN MR.
SALINGER
’
S CLOSET OF LITTLE GIRLS
.” However, that lead did not produce convincing-enough proof for his information to be used in
Time
’s
cover story which was not an exposé at all but an appreciation. “Salinger,”
Time
concluded, “is clearly an original.”

3

The assault on Salinger’s privacy wasn’t over. On November 3, Ernest Havemann published “The Search
for the Mysterious J. D. Salinger” in
Life.
Accompanied by a haunting black-and-white photograph of Salinger walking on his property, the article, long and often compelling, featured
a description of Claire, whom Havemann had seen when he happened upon the Salinger house unannounced. “On the other side a baby began to cry,” Havemann wrote about what he had heard as
he approached the fence surrounding the house. “A screen door quickly slammed. A woman’s voice quietly comforted the child. And then the gate opened.” This was what Havemann saw:
“A young woman with blondish hair, barefoot and without make-up, stood there, holding her startled baby in her arms. Behind her was a little girl who had a friendly and expectant look as if
she hoped I had brought her a playmate.” Then Havemann told Claire he was a journalist. “Mrs. Salinger’s eyes said unmistakably, ‘Oh, Lord, not another one.’ She
sighed and said she had a set piece for visitors who want to meet her husband, the gist of it being absolutely no.” After that, Havemann said good-bye to Claire, “who was looking more
distressed by the moment.” Finally, the gate closed, and she was gone.

After the ordeal over the Ace Book’s reprint of
For Esmé
—
With Love and Squalor,
Salinger refused to allow Hamish Hamilton to publish
Franny and Zooey.
It would be hard to calculate the future profits Hamilton had blown by losing Salinger, but their business arrangement ended for good when Salinger turned down
Hamilton’s advance of ten thousand
British pounds and accepted one from William Heinemann for four thousand pounds. The money, of course, meant nothing to Salinger,
who, over the last ten years, had become nothing short of obsessive about controlling the design of his books.

When
Franny and Zooey
was published in England in June 1962, the reviews were bad there, too. On June 8, Frank Kermode wrote in the
New Statesman
that Salinger “very
carefully writes for an audience he deplores, an audience that disposes of a certain amount of smart cultural information and reacts correctly to fairly complex literary stimuli: an audience . . .
who have turned in pretty good papers on Flaubert or Faulkner. Or Salinger.” That same day, the
Times Literary Supplement
ran a mixed review. The critic praised “Franny”
but felt “Zooey” suffered from the “occasional intrusion of the author . . . that alters [the story’s] flavour—and not for the better.”

These reviews were nothing compared to the one Mary McCarthy published on June 3 in the
Observer Weekend Review.
McCarthy had made a name for herself by attacking other contemporary
writers, among them Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, and Gore Vidal. No doubt she intended to attract the same type of attention when she wrote “Closed Circuit,” her
review of Salinger, which was so vicious it bordered on a personal attack.

She called
The Catcher in the Rye
“false and sentimental.” She believed the bathroom-stall scene in “Franny” was intentionally misleading. “[I]ts strange
suggestiveness misled many
New Yorker
readers into thinking that Franny was pregnant—that was why, they presumed, such significance was attached to her shutting herself up in a
toilet in
the ladies’ room, hanging her head and feeling sick. . . . These readers were not ‘in’ on the fact that Franny was having a mystical
experience.” Then McCarthy focused on what she saw as the problem with
Franny and Zooey
—and maybe even the rest of Salinger’s fiction. “In Hemingway’s work,
there was hardly anybody but Hemingway in a series of disguises, but at least there was only one Papa per book. To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and loveable and simple,
is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger’s world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience—humanity. Outside are the phonies vainly
signaling to be let in.”

McCarthy had finally spoken the unspeakable. What if Salinger had invented all of the drama in his life simply to create a source of ceaseless attention for himself? What if Salinger was the
ultimate narcissist? After all, when one becomes an internationally famous author the public is dying to know more about, what better way to ensure the continuation of that attention than to run
from it? The actions of a narcissist can be perverse, but the goal of each action is the same: to get the audience to look, to look some more.

4

In the fall of 1961, Gordon Lish, then the director of linguistic studies at the Behavioral Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, wired
Salinger, as he had several other writers, to ask him if he would participate in a program sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity’s Job Corps. Specifically, Lish wanted Salinger
to write an essay about why he loved his work. The Job Corps’ program, entitled Why Work, was going to be targeted toward urban youth who were becoming unemployed in
alarmingly large numbers.

“In February 1962 the telephone operator at the Behavioral Research Lab said she had a Mr. Salinger on the phone for me,” Lish recalls, “and because of the nature of the
laboratory I thought that she was talking about Pierre Salinger, the press secretary to President Kennedy. So I was surprised to discover that it was J. D. Salinger. He started by saying,
‘You know who I am and you know I don’t reply to telephone calls and mail and I’m only doing this because you seem to be hysterical or in some sort of difficulty.’ That
struck me as amazing since the telegram had gone out in the fall sometime and here it was winter. But that was the pretext of his phone call—he said I was in some kind of problem. Then he
said, ‘You only want me to participate in this because I’m famous.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, it’s because you know how to speak to children.’ Then he said,
‘No, I can’t. I can’t even speak to my own children.’”

Following this comment, Lish gave Salinger a brief lecture on how he—Lish—had succeeded in talking to children. “I said it was easy to speak to children if you open up your
heart to them. After this, we talked for about twenty minutes, chiefly about children. His voice was very deep. Haggard-sounding, weary-sounding. He didn’t sound at all like I expected
Salinger to sound. He didn’t sound verbal. He possessed none of the adroitness I would have anticipated. Anyway, he did tell me he never wrote anything if it was not about the Glasses and the
Caulfields, adding that he had shelves and shelves filled with
the stuff. So I said, ‘Well, gee, that will be fine. Just give me some of that.’ Soon the phone
call ended and, of course, he didn’t agree to provide me with a piece on why he loved his work.”

That fall, Whit Burnett tried to get his own piece of writing out of Salinger when he asked if he could reprint a story in a
Story
magazine anthology. One would have
thought that considering their history with each other Burnett would have given up on trying to repair his friendship with Salinger—or at least given up on trying to get a story out of him.
But Burnett had accomplished what he had done in his career by being tenacious, and he certainly didn’t back away from confrontation with Salinger. What he learned was that Salinger could be
equally tenacious, especially when it came to the publication of his work. Again, Salinger said no.