Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Sighting

It was a beautiful afternoon in early October 1994 and I had driven up from New York City to Cornish, New Hampshire, a town which for all intents and purposes does not exist. There are no business establishments to speak of in Cornish, only a general store on the side of the road and, not too far away, a white wooden meeting house situated near a building that serves as the volunteer fire department headquarters. Indeed, in Cornish, the only element of a town that does exist is a scattering of houses built here and there among the rolling wooded hills. Of course, the most asked-about house of all of these, I discovered once I found it, could not be seen clearly from the dirt road that passed by the entrance to its driveway, an entrance marked by two prominently displayed NO TRESPASSING signs. The house, true to the press reports that have been published about it through the years, is of a chalet style. It is neither cramped nor ostentatious but functional, and in October 1994 it had been, for well over two decades, the home of J. D. Salinger, the great American novelist and recluse. While I sat in my car on the side of the road and looked up at the house, much of which was blocked by foliage, I had the strangest feeling. What I felt — even though I could not confirm it — was that as I was watching the house someone inside it was watching me.

I had been given the general directions to Salinger's house by a woman known locally as the Bridge Lady. The Bridge Lady had acquired her name because over the years she had spent inordinate amounts of time at her own instigation during the spring, summer, and fall in a makeshift information booth near the covered bridge that spans the Connecticut River to connect Cornish with Windsor, Vermont, a town that does exist since it has its share of stores, restaurants, public buildings, gasoline stations, and the like. The covered bridge in question is the longest one in the country, so the Bridge Lady has been able to create a sort of purpose for herself by recounting a history of the bridge for tourists who stop at her information booth. Since the Bridge Lady and her husband worked for Salinger in the early 1960s (she was the housekeeper, he the groundskeeper), she talked with me about him a bit, although she was reluctant to give me specific directions to his house. Instead she told me, somewhat vaguely, to look among the dirt roads that wind along one particular mountain. Naturally, almost all of the residents of Cornish know the directions to Salinger's house. Over time, countless tourists have asked about it, just as they have inquired about other local attractions, such as the covered bridge.

Once I located the house, I retraced the route and noted the directions so that I could find it again in the future. On that cool autumn day in October, I turned left coming off the covered bridge from Windsor and drove down the main road that wound along the river. On my right I passed a side road which, a sign informed me, lead to the Saint-Gaudens Historical Site. Soon, I passed a green historic marker commemorating the old Cornish Colony. The marker stood near the Blow-Me-Down Mill, a three-story stone structure with wood siding. Past the mill, at the Chase Cemetery, a small graveyard surrounded by a white picket fence, I turned right onto a narrow asphalt road. Next I drove just over a mile, passing a three-story slat-shingled mansion and then two huge red barns built among green sloping hills, until I turned right at a small abandoned guard house.

Going up the asphalt road, I passed Austin Farms. Just beyond the farms, the asphalt road turned into a dirt road, which then ran under a long heavy canopy created by rows of tall green trees growing on either side of the road. In time, to my left, I saw a red house that appeared to be a converted barn. Next, continuing up the road, I topped a hill, which was bordered by spacious pastures — pastures, I later learned, that belonged to J. D. Salinger. Driving up the road, I stopped at an old dilapidated barn. Finally, I looked up through the trees on the hill in front of me and I saw it — Salinger's house. Looking about, I noticed several signs displayed here and there on posts and trees. It was the same sign I would see on the two trees next to his driveway. The sign read:

POSTED PRIVATE PROPERTY HUNTING FISHING TRAPPING OR TRESPASSING FOR ANY PURPOSE IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED

I had come here on this day in October to sit in my car on the side of the dirt road and look up at the house on the hill because the man who lived there had written The Catcher in the Rye, and because, since the publication of that book in 1951, he had lived his life in such a way as to make locating his house a noteworthy event. Why this has happened, why through the years a steady stream of admirers has made its way to Cornish, says a lot about fame and celebrity and, more specifically, the manner in which American society has come to glorify fame and celebrity in the latter part of the twentieth century. Most importantly, it also says something about the enduring power of art. For this much is true without question: If Salinger had not written a masterpiece that ranks among the best of its genre ever to be written, if he had not also written a group of stories that stand among the most original produced by any American author, few fans, including myself, would have made such an effort to find the house on the hill where he lives.

None of this was on my mind that afternoon in October 1994 as I sat in my car and looked up at his house. I only knew that I loved some of his stories and all of The Catcher in the Rye, that I found the Salinger myth strangely appealing, and that, because of these two facts, I had gotten in my car this morning in New York City, driven some two hundred and sixty miles to Cornish, New Hampshire, and searched Cornish's dirt roads until I found the house I knew to be his. Then, while I sat there with the car windows down, I suddenly heard the faint sound of gravel crackling under the weight of tires. Slowly the sound became louder and louder until I saw a car emerge from the thicket of trees to head down the hill and stop at the driveway's entrance. When I looked more closely, when I focused my attention on the car's driver, I saw who it was — Salinger himself. After pausing at the driveway's entrance, he pulled out onto the dirt road. It was then I could see him best. Haggard, hunched-over, his hair white and thinning, he looked like a very old man. If Holden Caulfield is frozen in time, always the youthful, evanescent teenager, his creator clearly was not; it was shocking to witness Salinger in his mid-seventies. Finally, as I continued to stare, as I thought to myself that I was looking at J. D. Salinger, he accelerated the car, and, leaving as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

CHAPTER 2

Two Biographies

In the careers of most modern and contemporary writers, a pattern of activity emerges. After the writer establishes himself, he produces his work, and periodically, about every three or four years, he releases that work by way of a publisher to the public. There are exceptions, since publishing-industry norms may or may not serve idiosyncratic writers. The author may be less prolific, as in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, because he struggles with a piece of writing for years before he can let it go. Or he or she may write only one book, which ends up being a masterpiece, as Harper Lee did with To Kill a Mockingbird. Or the author may die before the public comes to appreciate the full genius of his or her work, as was the case with Sylvia Plath. However, most authors, even those inspired by true genius, write and publish on a regular basis, primarily because they want to communicate with an audience. In all likelihood, that same impulse forces the writer to make himself available to his readers in the various ways writers have access to — by giving readings, for example, or answering fan mail. After all, should an author be successful, it is the readers, the people who buy the books, who allow him to enjoy the success he has achieved.

Almost all writers play by the rules of the game, which have evolved in the publishing-industry establishment — they do so, of course, because they want to stay in the good graces of the publishers, the people who make the rules — but, in a career that has spanned over half a century, J. D. Salinger has refused to comply with even the most basic of those rules. Only once — teaching a class at Sarah Lawrence — has he appeared before an audience at all. He has made phone calls to journalists and has had chance encounters with some; he has sat for a deposition or two, but he has never done a traditional interview. After the initial printings of his first book, he soon refused to allow his publisher to use a photograph of himself on the dust jacket of any of his books. He has never communicated with his readers; over the years he has even gone so far as to instruct his agents to throw away his fan mail without even bothering to show it to him.

But there's more. At one point in his career, he decided he didn't want his stories reproduced in anthologies; then he demanded that the four books he did publish between 1951 and 1963 could remain in print in paperback only if each edition featured the text between two plain covers and nothing else — no advertising copy on the front cover, no glowing blurbs on the back cover, no biographical information about the author anywhere, nothing resembling the trappings apublisher uses to sell and promote an author and his work. Finally, after 1965, even though he has often gone out of his way to let the public know he was continuing to write, he stopped publishing his work in either magazines or book form. By doing this, Salinger has achieved a kind of perverse celebrity: He has become a famous writer who writes but doesn't publish.

Consequently, Salinger's reputation, at least in the latter part of his life, is based not on the books he has written but on the books he allowed to be published. Of course, The Catcher in the Rye is his major work. "Salinger is a writer of great charm and purposefully limited scope and a perfection within that narrow compass," says Harold Bloom. "The Catcher in the Rye struck a nerve for one generation but it seems to appeal to sensitive young people in later generations as well. Its sensitivity fits the sensitivity of young people who are going to develop a consciousness and a distrust of the adult world. Probably it will survive." Tom Wolfe agrees: "The Catcher in the Rye captures the mood of the adolescent who wants desperately to fit in but doesn't want to seem as if he does, who wants to act flippantly but who, underneath that flippancy, has great sorrow."

Certainly, the slender novel, published in 1951, afforded Salinger the career he has had. If he had not been the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, published in 1953, surely would not have been as successful as it was, even though it contained three short stories — "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," "For Esmé — With Love and Squalor," and "Teddy" — that are now considered by many critics to be models of the form. If he had not been the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey — two long stories previously published in the New Yorker that Salinger released as a book in 1961 — would not have been a runaway New York Times best-seller, a publishing event deemed so noteworthy Time magazine put Salinger on its cover. If he had not been the author of The Catcher in the Rye, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, a book of two more long New Yorker stories Salinger collected in 1963, would not have been a best-seller either. Then again, without question, the publication of these books increased the sales of The Catcher in the Rye, which had sold 3.5 million copies by 1961, 10 million copies by 1981, and 15 million copies by 1996. In late 1997, forty-five years after the paperback edition first appeared, the novel was still listed in the mid-seventies on the USA Today Top 100 paperback best-seller list.

All of this was helped considerably, at least from the standpoint of promotion, when in 1953 Salinger became a recluse. By cutting himself off from his audience, Salinger ensured that any contact he did make with the public merited coverage by the media. As a result, through the years he was able to see news reports about some of the most mundane events in his life — a photograph in Time of his going to the grocery store or an item in Newsweek about his showing up at the retirement party of an Army buddy. It has been argued that Salinger became famous for wanting not to be famous. However, simply because he turned into a recluse does not mean he didn't want fame. In fact, one could argue that by taking the position he did — and keeping it — he ensured he would remain famous for being a recluse. In short, whether he contrived to or not, Salinger has stayed in the public eye by withdrawing from it.

At some point one has to ask the obvious: Why did Salinger go into seclusion and remain there? Did he want to avoid attacks by critics and colleagues, such as the one Norman Mailer made against him in his 1959 essay "Evaluations — Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room," when Mailer dismissed Salinger as being "no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school"? (The remark itself would become notorious.) Or this one from Joan Didion, which appeared in the National Review: "What gives [Franny and Zooey] its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls." Or did something else motivate Salinger too? Did he arouse in his reading audience expectations he could not fulfill? Did he burn out? Was he never fully able to function in an adult world? Or, another theory, did he feel some drive within himself — emotional, sexual, or psychological — about which he wanted as few people as possible to know at any cost? Was there some instinct he had that was so troubling to him he was willing to alter the very way he lived his life to keep it secret?

* * *

Although he published stories during the 1940s and became internationally famous during the 1960s, Salinger is an icon of the 1950s. The country had endured two world wars, and the legacy of those wars, represented most painfully by the fact that almost every family in the nation had been touched by them in one way or another, defined the fabric of American culture. It was no coincidence that for most of the decade the president was a former five-star general, Dwight Eisenhower. It did not help that Americans now had to debate whether or not the country should enter the conflict between North and South Korea. In the end, of course, it was decided that to stop the spread of Communism the United States should fight alongside South Korea, and the nation's resulting entrance into the Korean conflict served to promote patriotism and to create a powerful growth of conservatism.

Joseph McCarthy cashed in on the public's fear of Communism and launched a campaign that was supposed to rid the nation of the Red Menace. One group targeted by McCarthy and his supporters was American Jews; another, broader group was the creative community. The extreme positions the conservatives took demanded that to defend the sanctity of the country the government had to oppose anything that could be considered liberal or free-thinking. So, in the middle of this stifling, reactionary period there was the sudden emergence of a singer like Elvis Presley who challenged the status quo by injecting blatant sexuality into his singing and live performance. There was the similar emergence of an actor like James Dean who reinvented the Hollywood icon by infusing in his art a raw individualism and a studied sexual ambivalence.

Salinger spoke to a generation in the same way that Presley and Dean did, and he used as the vehicle for that communication a sixteen-year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. When Salinger's initial audience encountered Holden, they instantly identified with what Holden was saying: Society was full of hypocritical people who held false beliefs and stood for nothing — "phonies," to quote Holden. This theme of phoniness resonated with Salinger's readers, especially those who came to the novel later in the decade. For they could look at the figures on the national scene at the time — McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and others — and know that what these figures were saying was not even genuine, much less true. Because Holden Caulfield so passionately articulated the phoniness represented by these men, The Catcher in the Rye would become a seminal document for the generation that came of age in the 1950s.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Salinger"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Paul Alexander.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---