Salinger (31 page)

“I’ve come to accept that Pynchon wrote those books,” Batchelor says. “What I came to accept was that, with Salinger and Pynchon, we are dealing
with two eccentrics, not one. Sometimes it takes getting a perspective on a situation and that’s what I’ve done in this case.”

By 1976, as he remained a source of gossip within the literary community, Salinger had been divorced from Claire for almost a decade. In that time Margaret had grown up and
attended college, and Matthew had gone off to Phillips Exeter Academy. Salinger apparently continued to write regularly. He saw his children as often as he could. In fact, on one occasion during
the fall of 1976, he went to Phillips Exeter to see Matthew perform in a play. It was ironic that Matthew, who routinely appeared in school plays, was toying with the idea of going into the
profession of acting, just as his father had considered doing when he was Matthew’s age. There was one difference. Whereas Sol was opposed to his son going into the arts, Salinger was
supportive of Matthew’s interest. In fact, if Matthew had decided to go into acting for a living, Salinger could not have been more pleased with that decision.

“In 1976, at Exeter I was in a school production of
Kennedy’s Children
with Matt Salinger,” says Becky Lish, Gordon Lish’s daughter. “The play takes place in
a bar, with four or five characters speaking monologues. There’s a bartender who has no lines, or, if he does, only one or two. Matt played the bartender who doesn’t speak. I remember
his father came to the show. I remember at the time being surprised at how old he was—he was an older man. I think I had
expected
my
father. Of course, as a
high-school student I thought that what we were doing was fascinating and thrilling and I’m sure it was anything but to Salinger, But there he was. In my memory I think he was sitting in the
front row. We all thought it was neat that he was there and also just sort of strange. I mean, some of us, myself included, had decided to be shipped off to prep school based on some sort of
fantasy that we could become Holden Caulfield.”

1

By the fall of 1978, a steady stream of fans, admirers, and journalists had been making its way to Cornish for some years. That fall, one
reporter would be more aggressive than most in stalking Salinger. The reporter was Michael Clarkson from the
Niagara Falls Review,
who, out of the blue one day, got in his car, drove from
Ontario to Cornish, and searched until he found Salinger’s house. Parking his car on the dirt road in full view, he waited so long he became conspicuous enough that Salinger drove down from
the house, got out, and approached Clarkson’s car. Neatly dressed in a black turtleneck, a brown tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and a pair of sneakers, Salinger stopped at the
driver’s window.

“Are you J. D. Salinger?” Clarkson said.

“Yes,” Salinger said. “What can I do for you?”

“I don’t know,” Clarkson said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Oh, c’mon, don’t start that,” Salinger shot back.

“Really,” Clarkson said. “All I know is I left my family and job and came a long way to see you.”

“You didn’t quit, did you?” Salinger said. “Are you under psychiatric care?”

“No,” Clarkson said, adding that what he really wanted, more than anything, was “to be published,” but that it had been hard for him to find someone he was
“comfortable with, who I can share with.”

Salinger told Clarkson one day he
would
find someone he would feel comfortable with; then he asked Clarkson why he thought he would be comfortable with Salinger, which Clarkson had
implied, of course, simply by being there.

“Your writing,” Clarkson said.

Salinger asked him if he had a way to make a living besides writing. It was at this point, when Clarkson told him he was a newspaper reporter on a police beat, that Salinger became horrified by
the fact that he had been talking to a journalist. With this, Salinger turned, bolted back to his car and got inside. Hurriedly Clarkson rushed over to him.

“But I’m here for myself, not my job,” Clarkson said, his voice full of emotion.

“I certainly hope so,” Salinger said, “because I don’t have it coming!” Furious, Salinger drove off in a huff.

The tone of Clarkson’s voice must have stayed with Salinger, for minutes later he sped back and stopped next to Clarkson’s car. Getting out, he approached Clarkson, who was again
sitting inside,
but before Salinger could start yelling Clarkson did something that gave Salinger pause. He began to read a note he had written to Salinger which said,
considering the fact that Clarkson had driven twelve hours to see him, Salinger could at least be gracious. Clarkson ended his note by stating that, in coming there, he had hoped to meet “the
person who wrote those books I love.”

Salinger seemed oddly moved by Clarkson’s note.

“Nothing one man can say can help another,” Salinger said. “Each must make his own way. For all you know I’m just another father who has a son.” As for writing,
Salinger believed the profession was still open to people who have “enough drive and ego.”

Then, ending their conversation, Salinger walked away.

One afternoon a year later, Salinger sat in his living room watching television when he looked up to see Michael Clarkson standing on the outside deck looking in at him through
the sliding glass door. Later, Clarkson would describe what
he
saw that afternoon:

Startled, Salinger, dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a white shirt, got up and walked over to the door. Kicking aside a piece of two-by-four that kept the glass door shut, he opened the door.
“You look much better now,” Salinger said. “Are you still reporting?”

Clarkson said he was.

“You tried to use me for the betterment of your career,” Salinger said. “The only advice I can give you is to read others, get what you can out of a book, and make your own
interpretation of what the author is saying. Don’t get hung up on the critics and that madness. Blend in your experiences, without writing facts, and use your creativity. Plan your stories
and don’t make rash decisions. Then, when it’s finished, you’re in your own stew.”

“You haven’t really given an explanation to your fans,” Clarkson said, “why you ran from them, then stopped publishing.”

“Being a public writer,” Salinger said, “interferes with my right to a private life. I write for myself.”

“Don’t you want to share your feelings?”

“No, that’s wrong,” Salinger said. “That’s where writers get in trouble.”

When it became obvious Salinger did not want to be talking to him, Clarkson ended their brief interlude. Before he did, he
could not help but ask Salinger if he would
like to join him for a drink one night.

“Thanks, but no,” Salinger said, smiling. “I’m busy these days.”

Then Clarkson left and Salinger returned to his television.

Within weeks, Clarkson had written an article based on his two encounters with Salinger, which he published in the
Niagara Falls Review.

2

In the narrative of Salinger’s life, especially that part which unfolded after he went into seclusion, one person would make a
brief appearance in the early summer of 1980 that would be discussed and debated for years to come. She was an avid tennis player from down South—from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be
precise—who had been born originally in Trenton, Mississippi. She was a writer for a newspaper called the
Baton Rouge Advocate,
and she got her start at the paper by doing a tennis
column. Her name was Betty Eppes—a kooky, overachieving woman who sprinkled her conversation with phrases like “neat” and “super-exciting”—and for the
Advocate
she had written about all kinds of “neat” and “super-exciting” people, everyone from Billie Jean King to Rod Laver to New Orleans Saints head football coach
Hank Stram. Then one day, while she was browsing in her local bookstore, she got a wild idea. She had always loved
The Catcher in the Rye
(even if Salinger was not one of her personal
favorite authors the way William Faulkner was), so she thought it would be interesting—actually she thought it would be “super-exciting”—if she traveled up from Louisiana to
New Hampshire to try to get an interview with him.
After all, others, like Shirlie Blaney and Michael Clarkson, had succeeded; certainly she had as much of a chance as they
did.

To have an excuse for the trip, just in case Salinger
wouldn’t
talk to her, Eppes lined up an interview with William Loeb, the publisher of the conservative newspaper the
Manchester Leader.
Talk about a backup, Eppes thought, Bill Loeb had probably never turned down an interview So, in early June, Eppes flew to Manchester and interviewed Loeb, whose main
message consisted of him urging all Americans to vote for Ronald Reagan for president. After she was done with Loeb, she rented a blue Pinto and headed for Salinger country.

When she got there, she stopped in Claremont at the
Claremont Eagle
to get the back issue in which Shirlie Blaney’s interview appeared. It had been because of that interview, Eppes
would later write, that Salinger had dodged “people [who were] trying to get an interview with [him] for twenty-seven years.”

In fact, Salinger had given the Fosburgh interview to the
New York Times
in 1974, but it made better copy to say the last interview Salinger had volunteered was to a high-school teenager
twenty-seven years ago, so that was the slant Betty Eppes put on her story. Following Claremont, Eppes drove her blue Pinto to the Cornish-Windsor area where, speaking with some of the locals, she
determined that the best way to ask Salinger for an interview was to put her request in a letter, go to the Windsor post office, and instruct the postal attendant to place the letter in
Salinger’s mailbox. That’s what Betty Eppes did. In the letter she told Salinger she would love to meet him the next morning at nine-thirty at Cummins Corner, a
business establishment in Windsor. Also, to let him know what she looked like if he did show up, she described herself, saying she was “tall with green eyes and red-gold
hair.”

The next morning, Eppes parked the Pinto near Cummins Corner in such a way that she could see Salinger if he appeared on the Windsor side of the covered bridge. Because the bridge had been
closed off to traffic for repairs, people coming and going from Windsor had to walk across the bridge. Then, at exactly nine-thirty, while Betty Eppes sat in her Pinto and studied the covered
bridge, she could not believe what she saw. “[H]e stepped out of the black of that covered bridge,” Eppes later wrote, “J. D. Salinger!”

With obvious determination, Salinger walked straight from the covered bridge to the Pinto and said to her, briskly, “Betty Eppes?” Eppes was so shocked over seeing Salinger in person
she actually began to cry. “He didn’t look like I thought he would,” she eventually wrote. “He had white hair. That freaked me out. In all of the pictures I had seen of him
he had dark hair. Not only that, but I was surprised by the intensity of the man. He walked almost like he was driven or pursued, his shoulders hunched up around his ear . . . it was almost a
run.
”

He shook her hand and stepped back. Eppes could not get over how tall he was. She also noticed his piercing black eyes.

“First,” Eppes wrote, “I thanked Mr. Salinger for coming. He said, ‘I don’t know why I did, actually. There’s nothing I can tell you. Writing’s a very
personal thing.’” Clearly, Salinger believed Eppes had sought him out to ask him about writing.