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By Root 1469 0

in a low-class neighborhood that must have made Claire uncomfortable. Once inside, one noted the cheapness of its furnishings. After services and meditation, Claire and Salinger met privately with Swami Premananda, who, to Claire, seemed as unremarkable as the temple itself. After receiving instructions on breathing exercises and bestowing a donation on the guru, the couple was given a mantra to repeat, just as Franny had recited the Jesus Prayer, and were initiated into the Self-Realization Fellowship. Claire was disillusioned by the experience, but Salinger was rapturous. On the train back to Cornish that night, the couple made love, an event that Claire later recounted to her daughter, Margaret, as the occasion of her being conceived. Claire Salinger had become pregnant just two months after marriage.

As the pregnancy progressed, Claire became increasingly unhappy. Her sex life, she told friends, with Salinger had been sporadic at best, but she now accused him of treating her with physical revulsion. Claire believed that once her pregnancy became noticeable, Salinger reverted back to the disapproval of Sri Ramakrishna regarding women and sex. Ramakrishna had taught that sex was a worldly indulgence that should be reserved for procreation alone. Once Claire was pregnant, sex became a sin. The Gospels left little room for interpretation and was far less forgiving of romantic relationships than The Autobiography of a Yogi or the Self-Realization Fellowship:

By meditating on God in solitude the mind acquires knowledge, dispassion, and devotion. But the very same mind goes downward if it dwells in the world. In the world there is only one thought: woman and gold.4

Even within marriage, the Gospels equated pleasurable sexual relations with damnation. So Claire was distraught during the last half of 1955, and to make matters worse, Salinger was absorbed by his work, which included frequent trips to New York City, where he holed up in the offices of The New Yorker. As Claire’s pregnancy progressed, her ability to travel with her husband decreased, until by winter she found herself alone in the Cornish cottage. Working furiously, Salinger was happy in his new life, but Claire, isolated, began to see herself as a virtual prisoner.

The life that Salinger had built for himself and Claire in 1955 has often been regarded with scorn, used by detractors as a demonstration of his eccentricity and an accusation that he abandoned or even abused his wife. An understanding of Salinger’s nature and devotion to his craft reveal a grayer truth. Living in Cornish itself inevitably created solitude. The town was remote and sparsely populated. Life there had changed little in decades, perhaps centuries. Isolation is often the exchange made for living in a place of unspoiled beauty, and S. J. Perelman described their property as a “private mountaintop overlooking five states”—testimony that the beauty of Salinger and Claire’s Cornish home was, even by Perelman’s high standards, beyond compare.

Cornish remains a rural village today, but in 1955 it was especially at the mercy of nature. Winters were long and severe, and any sizable snowfall spelled instant isolation. Few roads were paved, and the spring thaw turned them into impassable streams of mud. For the village locals, many of whom had held their plots for generations, isolation and self-sufficiency were the assumed way of life, and no one thought Salinger’s lifestyle strange, especially as he had a new wife to consume his attentions.

It was also natural that Salinger chose the existence he did: a life of privacy, of regulation and absolute devotion to his craft. In his youth he had been considered something of a loner and had long struggled to find peaceful solitude in which to write. Over the years he had constantly fled New York in search of privacy and inspiration. While in the army he’d spent many weekends and furloughs in cramped hotel rooms, pecking away at his portable typewriter while his friends chased girls. Now, with a place of his own, one with extensive property, Salinger