J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [145]
*One of the foster homes in which Claire and Gavin were placed was located in Sea Girt, New Jersey, a short distance from the home of Oona O’Neill and the town mentioned by Mattie Gladwaller in her letter to Babe in “A Boy in France.”
*When Franny’s character is later included as one of the Glass children, Salinger will change her first encounter with Way of a Pilgrim. In “Franny,” we are told that she discovered the book while taking a class on religion, but in “Zooey,” he tells us that she found the book on her late brother Seymour’s desk.
*Delivering a subtle verdict, Salinger, although overwhelmingly sympathetic to Franny’s character, hints at her misapplication of the Jesus Prayer when he causes her to miss the ashtray while explaining the theory behind the prayer.
†This is also the dilemma of the seeker in Way of the Pilgrim. As the book begins, he states, “The first Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians was being read, and among other words I heard these—‘Pray without ceasing.’ It was this text, more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to concern himself with other things also in order to make a living.”
*In his 1963 book J. D. Salinger (p. 139), Warren French justly observed that the inserted line actually reinforced the notion among the reading public that Franny was pregnant.
13. Two Families
On February 17, 1955, Jerome David Salinger was married to Claire Alison Douglas in a private ceremony performed by a justice of the peace. The wedding took place twenty miles west of Cornish, in Barnard, Vermont, and was attended by only the closest of family and friends. The couple had taken their prenuptial blood test on February 11 and taken out their marriage license the following day. Perhaps symbolic of their new beginning together, Claire and Salinger refused to acknowledge their previous marriages on the license, and the document claims to be the first union for both.1*
Upon returning to Cornish after the ceremony, the newlyweds hosted a small wedding reception. In attendance were Miriam Salinger, J.D.’s sister, Doris, and oddly enough, Claire’s first husband, Colman. As gifts to his guests, Salinger presented each with an inscribed copy of The Catcher in the Rye. To Claire, he presented his latest story, the tribute “Franny.” Cornish residents added to the occasion with their own tradition, electing the new groom to the honorary post of town hargreave. The appointment was a local custom that Salinger doubtless viewed with suspicion, as it jokingly required him to round up stray pigs, an activity the author had renounced years before while dragging swine by their hindquarters in Poland.
Once married, Salinger and Claire set about building a life for themselves in step with the purity of their religious beliefs and independent of the 1950s obsession with status and appearance. It was a life void of the phoniness and materialism that Salinger had repudiated in his writings and that both had renounced through their convictions, one of simplicity with an emphasis upon spirituality and nature. It was an austere existence—a Zen Buddhist version of Salinger’s apartment on East 57th Street. The couple drew their water from an old well. They grew their own food, and Salinger in particular developed a lifelong passion for organic