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By Root 1610 0

construct something of a normal life. After returning from Britain, he moved back to New York City, where he hoped to blend into the population, settling into an apartment at 300 East 57th Street in the Sutton Place district of Manhattan. The area was pleasant and middle class, and Salinger had been familiar with it for years. Dorothy Olding, who had secured the apartment for him while he was in England, lived just a few buildings away. His friend Herb Kauffman also lived nearby, and the Sutton Cinema was his favorite movie house. Once moved in, Salinger found that something of the area’s comfort now embarrassed him. Like success itself, the location seemed to violate the values of humility and simplicity that he strove to embrace. So he took an apartment that was small and obscure and decorated it in a style that was shockingly ascetic.

All accounts agree as to the grim severity of Salinger’s new living quarters. According to the author Leila Hadley, whom Salinger briefly dated in 1952, the apartment contained few furnishings aside from a lamp, a drawing table, and a photograph of himself in uniform. Everything but the walls was black: the furniture, the bookshelves, even the bedsheets. To Hadley, these surroundings, and the self-portrait especially, reinforced her opinion that Salinger took himself far too seriously.7 Others held an even darker view of Salinger’s tastes, believing the blackness of the new apartment matched his own despair.8

The apparent contradiction involved in creating a cell-like atmosphere in a Sutton Place apartment was typical of Salinger throughout 1951. The year was among the most pivotal of his life, and his actions revealed the paradox of his personality in ways strikingly similar to Holden Caulfield. After asking John Woodburn not to send him reviews of Catcher and bragging about having cut himself off from any source of news while in Britain, once he settled in at East 57th Street, he seemed to digest every critical article he could acquire. Already disdainful of literary critics, his opinion quickly turned to disgust. Yet he continued to absorb every word.

Rather than embracing positive reviews and remaining contemptuous of those more negative, Salinger lashed out at them all. He thought them pedantic and smug. None, he claimed, expressed how the novel actually made the reader feel, and he condemned even the most glowing reviews for analyzing Catcher on an intellectual rather than spiritual level, therefore stripping the novel of its intrinsic beauty. So, though critical opinion certainly mattered a great deal to Salinger, he did not condemn the critics for attacking him personally. Rather, he blamed them for their inability to feel the experience of The Catcher in the Rye, and for that sin he pledged his undying scorn.9

When Catcher was published in Britain at the end of August, it was confronted with a far chillier reception. If a number of American critics had been unperceptive, the British appraisals were outright condescending. In a typical review, The Times Literary Supplement skewered the novel for what it called its “endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity.” Worse yet was a generally snobbish contempt for the novel’s literary construction. It wasn’t so much the American vernacular that had put off British reviewers, as Jamie Hamilton had feared, as the seemingly random nature of the novel’s structure. Consequently, British sales of The Catcher in the Rye were not good and Salinger was embarrassed when Hamilton began to suffer the penalty. His ire quickly turned on the unworthy Little, Brown and Company, which was enjoying far greater profits than his friend in London. After weighing the British reviews and sensing Hamilton’s distress, Salinger swore never to have anything more to do with Woodburn or his detestable colleagues at Little, Brown again. “Damn them all,” he said with a scowl.10

Salinger’s social life also suffered contradictions after Catcher’s release. As might have been expected, he now found himself more popular than before. Party and dinner invitations poured