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By Root 1605 0

Salinger went to great lengths in “Zooey” to rationalize his continuing publication despite the spiritual pitfalls of success. Zooey had told Franny that she had no choice but to act because God had given her the gift. Salinger felt the same about his own vocation and believed it his duty to continue publishing in the effort to share his point of view. But when his writings were successful, profits were inevitable, as applause was inevitable if Franny acted well on stage. These were the fruits of labor against which Seymour and Buddy had so sternly warned. They were tied to ego and spiritual death. The religious consequence of the profits produced by Salinger’s work made him extremely uncomfortable, but it was Little, Brown and Company that took the lion’s share of those profits, and that fact made Salinger furious.

Salinger’s disgust with his publishers was soothed by the return of Claire and Peggy to Cornish. By summer 1957, the renovations on the cottage had been completed. Peggy moved into the nursery and played on the newly landscaped lawn. The family room held a television and a piano, almost in mimicry of the Glass family apartment. Barely three years old, Peggy was a special delight to her father, and Salinger’s letters overflowed with recounts of her antics and the joy she provided daily. According to her father, Peggy was a happy, active child, whom Salinger had nicknamed “the Dynamo.” He reveled in playing jazz records for his daughter and teaching her to dance. She had begun to talk, and in January Salinger bragged to Judge Hand that she even recognized her last name. Of course, she believed that everyone was named Salinger, even characters on television.

The same letters that celebrated Peggy’s childhood also cursed the long winter and conveyed Salinger’s anxiety over its possible effect upon Claire. Even as “Zooey” was hitting the newsstands, he was already engulfed in his next project, yet another Glass story that would consume him. When the time came to fulfill his promise to Claire and embark on the long vacation to Europe, he found that he could not leave Cornish or the work he had begun. “The fact is, I suppose,” he explained with some embarrassment, “I love this place for working.”2 According to Salinger, Claire remained patient and good-natured despite the postponement, for which he was grateful. He lamented that he realized how much his rigorous writing schedule took a toll on his wife and sarcastically moaned that it must be “Heavenly to be married to a man who’ll give you a weekend in Asbury Park in five years.”3 Despite his contriteness, Salinger’s obsession with his work only deepened. When Jamie Hamilton had his American representative, Robert Machell, attempt to arrange a meeting with Salinger in New York in February 1958, Salinger declined. It might be a number of years until he could tear himself away from his work, he said in excuse.4

The message that Salinger delivered through these apologies is unmistakable: his family meant a great deal to him and he was happy to have them back, but his work came first. In a very real sense, he was becoming prisoner to it. His Glass family series had become a compulsion that demanded satisfaction at all costs, even at the price of losing Claire and Peggy yet again. Consequently, throughout 1958 and well into 1959, the life of J. D. Salinger and the construction of the next Glass family installment melted into a single story. By the time he completed his next work, a novella titled “Seymour—an Introduction,” he had become completely entrapped by his own creation.

• • •

When Salinger turned thirty-nine on January 1, 1958, he was writing steadily, satisfied with both the pace and the results of his work.5 Eight months later, however, he had still not completed the story. By then The New Yorker had arranged to set aside an entire issue to feature the new work, which by autumn had already surpassed “Carpenters” in length. After working tirelessly for an entire year without a break, Salinger began to fall ill. In late summer, he suffered a series of colds