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By Root 1482 0

than a week after the fall of Cherbourg, a staff sergeant of the 12th Infantry Regiment, a man whom Salinger had served with since D-Day, was abruptly killed when his jeep hit a land mine. The staff sergeant was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart for valor, and his grief-stricken parents were consoled with the assurance that their son had died for a noble cause. Yet the accident had occurred between engagements, at a time when he should have felt safe. After surviving Utah Beach, Émondeville, and Montebourg, death had chosen the moment of least suspicion in which to strike him down.

The arbitrary nature of death made a lasting impression upon Salinger and wended its way into his work. The fate of Vincent Caulfield, killed by mortar fire while warming his hands in the Hürtgen Forest, and of Walt Glass, slain by an innocent-looking Japanese stove, are Salinger’s cries against the random structure of the hair-thin line that separates life and death. Salinger was encircled by such misfortunes throughout the war, and he came to recognize that death held no nobility and chose its victims without purpose. He himself had survived; but it was an outcome without reason. He could just as well have been driving that jeep in July 1944 or fallen victim to unseeing mortar fire in the forest. Consequently, when Salinger left the service, he took with him an entrenched fatalism that would echo throughout his life.

By 1960, it became clear that Salinger’s tendency toward fatalism had gained the power of religious conviction. In 1957, he told Jamie Hamilton that he held no control over the subjects of his own writings, that a higher force mandated them. He counseled Judge Hand in 1959 that if God wanted more from him, He would make it known. Even Salinger’s characters echoed this conviction. In “Seymour—an Introduction,” Buddy Glass advised readers that “the true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.”1

In April 1960, Salinger had a dark vision. He saw himself seated in a ballroom, looking on as dancers waltzed to the music of a band. Strangely, the music was becoming dimmer and dimmer to his ears as the dancers appeared farther and farther away. It’s a lonesome image of Salinger withdrawing from the world around him—not so much out of choice as out of fate. “I’ve been expecting this kind of seating arrangement for years and years,” he mourned. Yet in the end, he refused to complain. It was, he maintained, the only way he knew how to work, and he recognized that separation from the world was the price that his work demanded.2

Each winter at Cornish seemed to grow longer, and Salinger’s feelings of remoteness deepened. He was frequently depressed but refused to allow anything to tear him from his work.3 To worsen his situation, in September 1961, Peggy began school. Salinger had always lavished attention upon his daughter, and their daily walks together had become the highlight of his days. Her absence left a void in his schedule, and the hours previously spent with Peggy now found him entrenched in his bunker. Before long, work began to take precedence over everything else, and he frequently neglected opportunities to be with his family. During the winter holidays in 1961, Salinger and Claire flew with the children to New York City, where they stayed with Salinger’s parents on Park Avenue. But that trip was an exception. The following winter, Peggy and Matthew both developed bronchitis and Claire took them to Saint Petersburg, Florida, while Salinger remained home at his typewriter.4 In the winter of 1962, Claire and the children traveled to Barbados to spend time with Claire’s mother.* Again Salinger stayed behind, this time giving work on his new book as an excuse.5

At the same time, Salinger found he had few friends to whom he could turn. He had abandoned many. Along with Jamie Hamilton, he had discarded Robert Machell, who under different circumstances might have been his truest friend. After December 1959, there was little hope of renewing any bond with Whit Burnett. And those who had dared