J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [140]
Salinger’s reaction to the article was deep hurt. In his view, Blaney had deceived him by asking for the interview for a school project. It seems apparent that the Daily Eagle had used the young girl, but that was not the point. To Salinger, the incident implied that the infringement and subterfuge he so hoped to have escaped when he left New York was alive here too, in this seemingly idyllic community.
As the episode came so soon after Claire Douglas’s defection, Salinger’s reaction was extreme. He stopped going into Windsor and ended his relationship with the students. He began to avoid his neighbors. There would be no more cocktail parties or trips to basketball games, no more lunches at Harrington’s Spa or conversations over records and potato chips. Salinger withdrew from the people of Cornish as he had the crowds of New York. When the students went to his cottage to find out what had happened, Salinger sat inside motionless and pretended not to be home. Within weeks, he began to build a fence around his property.
From that point on, J. D. Salinger would turn his ambition away from being accepted by those around him and concentrate instead upon his own methods of finding comfort in life. In this concluding act of 1953, Salinger’s life once again resembled his art, but tragically. The Daily Eagle article had the same effect upon the author as the final “Fuck you” had upon Holden Caulfield. And, like Holden, Salinger resigned himself to the pitiful reality that Holden had acknowledged:
You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose.13
*Di Gesu’s claim that Salinger wanted a portrait for his fiancée is possible, although his recollection occurred thirty years after the incident and may have been flawed. Salinger was indeed romantically involved in late 1952 with either the mysterious “Mary” or Claire Douglas.
*From the unpublished memoirs of Antony di Gesu, San Diego Historical Society. The fact that Salinger allowed di Gesu to take forty-eight photographs of him is a testimony to the photographer’s method. In contrast, the famed photographer Lotte Jacobi managed to obtain far fewer images before Salinger bolted from her studio.
†Salinger requested that di Gesu not show any of the photographs he had taken, a promise the photographer honored for thirty years. When he asked Salinger why he was so reluctant to be recognized, Salinger told him that people reacted oddly around him in fear that he would write about them.
*In descriptions of Salinger the terms “foreign looking” and “exotic” arise repeatedly. With little doubt, the expressions were used to convey Salinger’s Jewish heritage.
12. Franny
Whereas Salinger’s break with Claire Douglas in the winter of 1953 may have put him into isolation, for Claire it proved to be devastating. When Salinger disappeared from sight, to the extent that Claire thought he had actually left the country, she physically collapsed.
During the opening days of 1954, Claire was diagnosed with glandular fever and hospitalized. Doctors decided to remove her appendix at the same time, leaving her physically depleted and emotionally exhausted. Throughout the ordeal, she heard nothing from Salinger. Keeping watch over her bedside was Colman Mockler, who provided the attention and affection she needed, while at the same time tapping Claire’s vulnerability with incessant pleas to marry him. Claire finally agreed, and they were soon wed.
Little has been reported about Claire’s first husband. In a 1961 interview with Time magazine, her half brother Gavin offered the ambiguous opinion that he “wasn’t a bad guy … but he was a jerk.” In fact, Mockler’s later