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After a while, I got to wondering if Salinger was going to bring a halt to this, which was OK by me, because the tape recorder was getting pretty close to the end where the beep was going to go off.

Eppes reported that Salinger lost his temper. She claimed that after having witnessed the meeting, which took place in a Windsor parking lot, a local resident felt free enough to strike up a conversation with Salinger, who was repelled by the approach. The incident is possible, but it is also likely that Salinger had caught on to Eppes’s tactics and become indignant for that reason.

“What I Did Last Summer” was presented so unscrupulously as to elicit complete sympathy for Salinger, who appeared gentle and painfully shy. Thirty years after the article’s release, Betty Eppes would come deeply to regret her participation in the episode and to charge that Plimpton, notorious for his publicity-seeking exploits, had embellished much of the article’s contents. Regardless of who was responsible, the result of “What I Did Last Summer” was to do a massive disservice to future journalists and historians. The Eppes interview was Salinger’s last. He would never again contribute to the telling of his own story or publicly share his point of view.

• • •

In the years immediately following the murder of John Lennon, Salinger descended into rigid isolation, as if to fulfill in reality the image long imagined by the public. It was a process that Salinger was aware of and something he acknowledged with growing sadness. Yet his fatalism prevailed.

Between 1981 and 1985, Salinger suffered frequent periods of sour depression, episodes that, like Holden Caulfield, he termed “the blues.” Even his Vedantic faith seemed powerless to alleviate these moods. Seeking solace elsewhere, Salinger wandered in abstract spiritual directions, “farflung and Far-Eastern stuff” that he admitted beguiled him. Perhaps the deepest of these detours was astrology.

During the late 1970s, Salinger had written a story containing a character involved in astrology. As he researched the subject to enhance the piece, his character’s interest became his own and Salinger discovered that he had become an enthusiast and an adept designer of personal horoscopes. “The thing backfired on me,” he protested. When friends and family learned of his new preoccupation, they requested that he draw up their charts, and Salinger found himself constructing individual horoscopes with the same normalcy as the many fill-in crossword puzzles he worked on while riding on the train. Salinger’s fascination with astrology would eventually dissolve into a convenient distraction, while his depression remained and his rancor grew.12

Even the seasons seemed to measure the maturing of Salinger’s withdrawal. After having built his home in the hope of making it “sunny as hell,” he now claimed to loathe the summer. Summer became for Salinger the time of year most likely to produce fans sneaking about his house, their tire treads leaving evidence on his driveway and lawn. After having long reveled in New Hampshire autumns, praising the season’s bursts of color and invigorating chills, Salinger now found autumn depressing and began to crave only winter, explaining that frigid snows and mud enhanced his sense that his home was a fortress deterring unwelcome fans, pilgrims, and reporters.

On occasion, Salinger was forced to endure strangers even within his stronghold and regardless of the season. Years before, he had contracted for an L-shaped addition to his home that would hold a new bath, bedroom, and working studio in which to write, and where he would eventually store his unpublished manuscripts. Construction lasted for months, while Salinger became distraught over the clamor. He complained bitterly of workmen swarming over his property, stealing his privacy and making it impossible for him to work. When, in the spring of 1981, Salinger resolved that he needed a new woodshed built aside the house, the