J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [139]
The harmony was short-lived. According to Claire, Salinger asked her to quit school and move into the Cornish cottage with him, much as Holden Caulfield had asked Sally Hayes. But Claire refused, and Salinger recoiled. “When I stood up to him on that one thing, college,” she later recalled, “he vanished.”11
Salinger was not the only romantic interest in Claire’s life at the time. There was also a twenty-three-year-old Harvard Business School MBA student named Colman M. Mockler, Jr., whom she had met at school. Mockler was artistically sensitive, unassuming, highly principled, and a formidable competitor for Claire’s attention. Salinger was distressed over Claire’s additional admirer. He also knew that when she was at school, she was likely with Mockler. So, when he asked Claire to leave Radcliffe and move to Cornish, he was plainly attempting to secure her affections and separate her from his competition. Claire responded with a clear choice, one that began to disintegrate Salinger’s contentment. She not only refused his request but, during the summer of 1953, traveled with Mockler, to Europe, where the couple stayed in Italy and where Mockler was likely introduced to Claire’s mother.12 Her decision to spend the summer overseas with Salinger’s rival had an understandably chilling effect on their relationship. When she returned from Europe in mid-September, Salinger refused to see her.
Salinger’s falling-out with Claire Douglas was exacerbated by an event that occurred in November. Among his Windsor High School friends was a senior named Shirlie Blaney. Blaney asked Salinger if she could interview him as part of a school project, and Salinger agreed. On November 9, they met at Harrington’s Spa. Salinger ordered lunch, and Blaney (who had arrived with a friend for support) began her interview. The girl’s questions were straightforward and not particularly intrusive: Where did Salinger go to school? When did he begin writing? What did he do during the war? Was The Catcher in the Rye autobiographical? Salinger had answered each of Blaney’s questions before, most notably for William Maxwell in his Book-of-the-Month Club interview, and he thought nothing of answering them now with a candid innocence common among friends.
On November 13, 1953, Shirlie Blaney’s interview appeared, not in a school project but in the local newspaper, the Daily Eagle–Twin State Telescope. The article was short, juvenile, and riddled with errors—it enrolled the author at New York University for an extra year, sent Sol Salinger to Austria and Poland with his son, and relieved Salinger of two years of army service. Blaney also reported things that she had obviously misinterpreted, erroneously claiming that Salinger was traveling to London to make a movie and that he had purchased his Cornish home two years before. The article is best remembered for Salinger’s reported quotation on The Catcher in the Rye. When asked if the novel was autobiographical, Salinger appeared to hesitate. “Sort of,” he hedged. “I was much relieved when I finished it. My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book, and it was a great relief telling people about it.” The line is still frequently quoted but, again, was nothing more than he had revealed previously to Maxwell.
A bittersweet portion of the Blaney article was contained in its preface, which included a short description of the author:
A very good friend of