J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [152]
*The misinformation is characteristic of Salinger. It was his lifelong habit to alter facts that he did not consider to be anyone’s business. He especially enjoyed manipulating the indirect details of official documents, as he had done with his draft registration in 1942. Salinger’s marriage license, however, affirms his knowledge of his mother’s Iowa birthplace, a small fact that he would later allow to be denied.
*Perelman has long been credited with having introduced Salinger to Claire in 1954. The misconception was fostered by Salinger himself, who believed his early relationship with Claire Douglas to be a private affair and was perhaps wary of the innuendo of being romantically tied to Claire while she was underage.
*Despite the attention paid to refining “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” its original New Yorker publication contained two typographical errors that have survived succeeding reprints. Page 68 (Little, Brown and Company 1963 hardcover edition) uses the term “God damn,” while page 69 hyphenates the term into “God-damn.” The most noticeable error occurs on page 18, where a printing omission resulted in the line “In doing it, I hit my head a very audible crack on the roof.”
*In June 1942, Salinger was stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where Seymour was encamped when he wrote his “Carpenters” diary entries. However, Salinger still aligns himself with Buddy Glass through this reference. Fort Benning is easily a euphemism for Bainbridge Army Base, both situated in Georgia. Furthermore, Fort Benning had been the home base of Salinger’s 12th Infantry Regiment.
14. Zooey
On December 10, 1955, Claire gave birth to a seven-pound, three-quarter-ounce baby girl at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, and J. D. Salinger became a father.1 The new parents named the baby Margaret Ann.* Salinger had wanted to name her Phoebe, after Holden Caulfield’s sister, but Claire protested and won out at the last minute. So it was perhaps a compromise that, once legally named, Margaret Ann’s parents would actually call her Peggy, after the child heroine of “Blue Melody.”†
Salinger’s joy over Peggy’s birth was absolute. Here was a man from whose imagination had come Mattie Gladwaller, Phoebe Caulfield, and the remarkable Esmé. Even before Peggy was born, Salinger’s writings had expressed his anticipation and his resolve to be a good father. Seymour’s diary in “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” presented to the world exactly three weeks before Peggy’s birth, gave voice to Salinger’s own hopes and aspirations:*
I’ve been reading a miscellany of Vedanta all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach, strengthen each other, but above all, serve. Raise their children honorably, lovingly, and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected—never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.2
Actually, Salinger and Claire were unprepared for parenthood. Their pasts, temperaments, and circumstances had left them ill equipped for the everyday demands of raising a child. Claire was twenty-two. Her own parents had been nearly absent during her childhood, and she had little experience to draw upon aside from memories of nannies and foster parents. She was also increasingly vulnerable, exasperated by the isolation of Cornish and insecure in her marriage. Though almost thirty-seven, Salinger was also unready for the realities of fatherhood. Although the ideals of parenthood elated him, his own experiences