‘A man like that is only after one thing’: On the Experiences of Young Women and Girls with J.D. Salinger (Part One)

This two-part blog post discusses the predatory and abusive experiences of many young women and girls in their differing relationships with writer J.D. Salinger throughout his long life.

Part one focuses on two relevant short stories by Salinger (‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor’) and details the experiences of Oona O’Neill, Sylvia Welter, Jean Miller, and Claire Douglas, as well as that of Shirlie Blaney and other teenage schoolchildren.

CW: Paedophilia, predation, grooming, emotional abuse, and neglect. Includes mentions of stillbirth and infanticidal and suicidal ideation.

J.D. Salinger, 1950 (Lotte Jacobi/Wikimedia Commons); Jean Miller, 1949 (Source)

Salinger the man and Salinger the writer can’t be separated, and indeed this is clear from reading any biographical information about the famous recluse — such that this occupied much of my initial thinking around this essay. But even if that’s the case, it’s certainly not necessary for his fiction to take centre stage, therefore always bringing it back to Salinger himself (sypmathetically framing him as a tortured artist, a complicated and traumatised man who could only find comfort and understanding in his young fictional characters). And so the shadows still persist around his image — and in fact pervaded my early experiences with the writer, being unaware for many years — while the focus remains on him and his fiction and not, instead, around the young women and girls variously pursued, groomed, and abused by him over many years.

This two-part blog post aims to hopefully give some space to their experiences, which still remain largely neglected — even the few experiences told by these women themselves — a condition that urgently needs to change to give them the justice they deserve and to provide the necessary space that’s required for them, and those who have suffered similar experiences, to heal.

I think it’s worthwhile, however, to quickly consider a couple of his short stories first, but not to indulge in his fiction for too long, as has frequently been done. This is to draw attention towards the highly inappropriate male characters in his fiction and how they act towards very young girls, which will provide some initial insight into the nature of the writer himself before then considering his own actions and perverse sexual interests— which is necessarily centred around the experiences of the many young women and girls (that we know about) who were pursued by him.

Fictional Men and Fictional Girls?

Salinger’s famous 1948 short story ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ is particularly telling. The story features the character of Seymour Glass — the oldest sibling in the Glass family, a family of seven siblings who appear in many of Salinger’s stories — and his wife Muriel on holiday at a beach resort in Florida. It begins with Muriel on the phone to her mother and reveals that Seymour, a veteran of the Second World War, has recently been discharged from hospital, likely suffering from PTSD — just as Salinger had. (He’d served as a non-combatant Counter Intelligence Corps agent in the US Army during the Second World War. His introduction to the war was through the D-Day landings of June 1944 and he was present during the liberation of the Kaufering IV concentration camp, a subcamp of Dachau, shortly before the war’s end. This and the war broke him. That much is clear. For more on Salinger’s experiences in the war, his complicated relationship with his Jewishness, and his mental breakdown and its relationship to his writing, I’d recommend Eberhard Alsen’s J.D. Salinger and the Nazis (2018). But I digress.)

In the story, a young girl named Sybil, another guest at the resort and estimated to be around four years of age, is out on the beach and notices Seymour lying alone. (The first time her age is alluded to is by the narrator in this disgusting line: ‘She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.’) She scolds the thirty-one-year-old — the age Salinger is in the picture at the start of this blog post — for allowing a different young girl, Sharon, to sit with him the night before as he played the piano in the hotel lounge. To appease her, Seymour, a stranger who seems to have befriended several children during his stay at the resort, suggests they go and look for bananafish in the sea — as well as asking for her to step closer to him so he can truly determine the colour of her bathing suit — but she insists that he choose between her and Sharon, which makes one think of the innocence of this age, of how anybody appears a potential friend.

They wade out into the water together — well, Seymour wades while he places Sybil on a rubber raft, and continually takes a hold of her ankles — and he tells her of the ‘very tragic life’ that bananafish lead (he then describes their life cycle, one that symbolises Salinger’s typical relationship between war and innocence).

After a playful remark from Sybil — where she says that she sees the clearly fictional bananafish beneath the water eating actual bananas — Seymour, no doubt charmed by her innocent claim (calling her ‘my love’), kisses the sole of one of her feet. ‘“Hey!” said the owner of the foot, turning around’ is how Sybil’s response is written in the story, with such distance. Her response to this assault is immediately dismissed by Seymour: ‘“Hey, yourself. We’re going in now.”’

He then returns her to the shore, where she then leaves.

Seymour returns to his room, where Muriel is now having a nap, reaches into his luggage, pulls out a pistol, and abruptly shoots himself in the head.

Another short story of Salinger’s is similar to ‘Bananafish’ in many ways, not least because — to Salinger fans, many of whom defend or minimise their revered man’s perverse interest towards girls and young women — it represents the relationship between innocence and war. But as with ‘Bananafish,’ ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor’ is centred around the innocence of another young girl and the problematic relationship the male protagonist, with all his power, forms with her.

First published in 1950, the narrator — later referred to as Sergeant X — recounts an experience he had while training in the US Army in England in June 1944 before the D-Day landings, as Salinger did. This character is clearly based off Salinger himself, and indeed the story relates to him in several ways. This is because the story of ‘For Esmé’ exists within his fictional world and is written by Seymour Glass’s younger brother Buddy, who is very clearly Salinger’s alter ego, being the in-world writer of many of Salinger’s own short stories. (I hope that wasn’t too much of a digression. I simply mean to emphasise the direct connection between these male protagonists and Salinger himself; they are widely accepted to be based on him.)

At the time of his training in England, Salinger would’ve been around twenty-five, so this seems an appropriate estimation of the age of Sergeant X. In the story, Sergeant X, on a break, takes a walk into the nearby town in Devon where he’s stationed and wanders into a church to listen to a choir rehearsal by a group of children. His attention is quickly drawn to one particular child, a girl of around thirteen, and who is described in significant detail, down to her nostrils. He claims his attention was drawn to her because of her voice, that it was the ‘sweetest-sounding.’

He then leaves the church but soon enters a tearoom to get out of the rain. Here, Sergeant X encounters the young girl again, who is with her younger brother Charles and their governess. In the story, Sergeant X tells us that the girl approaches him — after she notices him looking in her direction, that is — sensing how lonely he appears. They talk about choir practise and her dreams of becoming a professional singer. She soon tells him her name is Esmé and reveals further personal information, including that her and her brother are orphans, with their mother having died, likely in a German air raid on an English city, and their father having been killed while serving in the British Army in North Africa. To remember him, she wears his watch around her wrist. It being far too large for her reminds the reader of her comparably smaller size compared to Sergeant X, emphasising her youth.

Like many of the young characters in Salinger’s stories, Esmé is quite precocious. They engage in conversation (with Sergeant X notably eager, for he ‘almost hurried back’ to his own seat once having drawn one for her when she approached) while her brother chaotically interrupts. They talk about her parents, Sergeant X’s writing, and whether they speak French, before Esmé then apologises about her hair, saying it’s been dishevelled by the rain, that she must be ‘hideous to look at.’ But Sergeant X responds by saying that she doesn’t look hideous at all. Her innocence and physicality are again mentioned when he tells us that ‘she was wearing [characteristically childlike] white socks and her ankles and feet were lovely.’ Another focus on young girls’ feet.

As their conversation — considered flirtatious by some critics and reminiscent of the beginning of a love story between adults — nears its end, Esmé asks Sergeant X if she can write to him. He’s only too eager to respond. When her and Charles and their governess leave the tearoom, he remarks that ‘[i]t was a strangely emotional moment for me.’ They quickly return, however, because five-year-old Charles wishes to kiss Sergeant X goodbye, which the latter thinks would be ‘very nice,’ and so Charles kisses him on the cheek. Before he can leave, Sergeant X takes hold of Charles’s coat, exerting his power over the young boy, to repeat once more a joke the two of them had been telling each other throughout their time in the tearoom.

The narrative then jumps forward a year to 1945, to the protagonist broken by his experience of war — the story is no longer told in first person — while currently in Bavaria, occupying Europe in the weeks after V-E Day. Like Salinger and Seymour, he’s suffered a mental breakdown and spent time in hospital.

When alone, after the rude Corporal Z leaves him alone again in the civilian home that has become their quarters, he looks through his unopened letters and notices a small package that arrived from Devon and is dated June 1944. He opens it to find a letter from Esmé as well as the watch her father had given her. It’s this gift from — and the memory of — her that appears to motivate Sergeant X to recover (though it’s unlikely he can):

He wondered if the watch was otherwise undamaged, but he hadn’t the courage to wind it and find out. He just sat with it in his hand for another long period. Then, suddenly, almost ecstatically, he felt sleepy.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac — with all his f-a-c-u-l-i-t-i-e-s intact.

I’ve always thought ‘f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s’ was — as well as referencing one of the last things Esmé said to him — meant to imply his breakdown continuing, but perhaps it’s Sergeant X mirroring the hushed, innocent spelling-out of the world ‘s-l-a-i-n’ earlier in the story when Esmé tells him of her father’s death. Either way, Esmé and her innocence remain central in his mind as the story finishes — hence the story’s title, too.

Although there is no egregious act like in ‘Bananafish,’ — not like there has to be — ‘For Esmé’ still represents an interaction between an older male character and a younger female character (‘a very young girl,’ in Sergeant X’s own words) where there exists an inherent power imbalance and the very obvious presence of some unspoken tension from the protagonist’s perspective: be it the urge to assault a young girl or the immediate attraction towards a thirteen-year-old, seen clearly through, for example, Sergeant X’s insecurity over the temporary filling he has, hiding it when he first smiles at Esmé.

**

Academic Josef Benson, in his 2018 J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History, considers Salinger’s sexual interests — being markedly towards young girls, which is clear in these stories alone — and concludes that he was a ‘hebephil[e]’ (paedophile), being perversely attracted to minors, to children. This should be undisputed. Though we’ll see that his attraction to those older, though still significantly younger than himself, was central to the predatory relationships he began with young women and girls throughout his life.

In expressing this in his writing and by pursuing young women and girls, ‘Salinger perpetuated a culture of male dominance that his novel [The Catcher in the Rye] and protagonist [Holden Caulfield] seem to repudiate,’ writes Benson. This gets to the heart of a particular dichotomy around Salinger: he professes to be a protector of the young, the innocent, against the dangers of the adult world — a ‘catcher in the rye’ — but he himself is the predatory adult. As Benson writes:

At play here is a tragic paradox that plagued Salinger for the rest of his life and played a huge role in his decision to quit publishing after 1965 and reject the public: the very young women that he sought for their youth and innocence essentially were stripped of these very qualities by him. Subsequently, along with the relationships being exploitative and criminal, they had zero chance of lasting.

As well as the clear actions of the male protagonists, Benson considers a particular line in ‘For Esmé’ to indicate Salinger’s paedophilia. In the latter part of the story, when Sergeant X is initially alone before Corporal Z barges in, he thinks of the line from The Brothers Karamazov ‘“What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.’ Benson argues that ‘[i]t is reasonable to suggest that the quote is in relation to [Sergeant X’s, and by extension, Salinger’s] inability to love young children for whom he feels so much because of social mores.’ Writer David Shields — in his co-created 2013 project Salinger with screenwriter Shane Salerno, comprising an oral biography and comprehensive documentary film (distributed by The Weinstein Company…) — comes to the same conclusion. Salinger certainly seems ashamed and conflicted around his perversion, which indeed Benson explores when analysing The Catcher in the Rye, and it is without question that he feared the legality of his perverse thoughts and actions, but he nonetheless continually acted on his predatory impulses throughout his life, and so any ‘tragic,’ sympathetic feelings should not be directed towards the man himself (which is discussed more in part two).

Oona O’Neill

As much as I wish to consider Oona and her experience with Salinger to be centred around herself, which I hope is still primarily the case, there remains a perspective that is taken by those who have written about her and Salinger’s relationship that is focused around Salinger and the importance of Oona to him as a figure, a representation, that remained with him throughout his life. Though regrettable, this is a perspective that’s, I think, worth keeping in mind, particularly in the context of the experiences of the other women and girls focused on here.

In the summer of 1941, twenty-two-year J.D. Salinger and sixteen-year-old Oona O’Neill began dating. All seemed pure and perfect to him: he was working on his first (and only) novel, he was submitting short stories to The New Yorker — having had several stories appear in other publications — and he was on the precipice of marrying into a famous literary family, while his younger, socialite partner was mingling with the rich and famous of Manhattan in New York City’s epicentre for such a society: the Stork Club.

Oona O’Neill, 1943 (Associated Press/Wikimedia Commons)

Oona had a troubled childhood, being one of three children of Eugene O’Neill, a Nobel laureate in Literature (having received the prize in 1936). Oona O’Neill biographer Jane Scovell has said that Eugene ‘wasn’t interested in children,’ instead insisting that ‘his real children were the characters in his plays,’ and ultimately walked out on her when Oona was just three. He was an alcoholic, as was the father of Joyce Maynard, another young woman who Salinger later pursued — whose experience is discussed in part two— which is surely a parallel that cannot go unnoticed.

Salinger was intensely in love with Oona, spending the summer together going to plays and movies and museums, walking through Central Park and dining in restaurants and cafés. Salinger’s college friend and socialite Leila Hadley Luce (who is alleged to have done some deeply disturbing things) said the two of them ‘made a gorgeous couple.’

Though the age gap in their relationship was pronounced, such relationships are often accepted because they were ‘of their time,’ a dismissal that is, of course, all too problematic. Yet even at the time, Oona’s youth was apparent, and it was indeed played up by the society within which she was socialising. At the Stork Club nightclub, where she would go after finishing her homework, she would be photographed drinking a glass of milk, not only because she was under the drinking age but, surely, because milk carries connotations of childhood and innocence.

Aram Saroyan, quoted in the Salinger oral biography, observes that Oona was, knowingly or not, perhaps ‘looking for a father or guardian’ to guide her into her adult life. Remarking on the social scene more generally by also mentioning teenage socialites Gloria Vanderbilt and his mother Carol Grace, the three were said to be ‘the prettiest, most dazzling girls of their generation in the New York debutante scene.’ But there was ‘a sad story underneath all the glitz’ too, for they were ‘injured, beautiful, and not quite actualized.’ This seeking out of a father figure, an older man, is reflected by Oona dating, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen — as well as Salinger — Orson Welles and Peter Arno, ten and twenty years her senior, respectively.

By the autumn, however, their relationship had begun to fray. In a letter to friend Elizabeth Murray, Salinger wrote that ‘Little Oona’s hopelessly in love with little Oona,’ seemingly irritated at her for not giving him all the attention that he wanted and was maddened by the superficiality of the society the Stork Club cultivated. At the centre of his growing animosity towards Oona was that he realised she was not reciprocating the strong feelings he felt towards her — for not, as he hoped, falling to his knees over the fact that he was a writer, wishing for the veneration he later apparently despised. Nowhere can I find Oona’s perspective on her relationship with Salinger, which remains an unfortunate omission for the vast majority of the women discussed here.

**

Shortly after these letters followed the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service. Salinger immediately went to enlist in the army but, according to him, owing to a minor heart ailment, was classified I-B, as ‘fit only for limited military service.’ (It has been considered, however, by Shields and Salerno, that the reason for this classification was owing to a congenital testicular deformity that he had, perhaps an undescended testicle. This seems to have caused him considerable anxiety throughout his life, and does indeed bleed into his fiction, as Benson explores, but is not relevant to anything here beyond a passing mention.) Though, as the Second World War raged on, the US military reassessed Salinger in April 1942 and deemed him fit for service. This, as well as the hostility that was growing on Salinger’s part, marked the end of his and Oona’s relationship. At the same time, Oona was sent to Hollywood by her mother, to make a movie star of the 1942 Debutante of the Year (‘Five feet four and 125 pounds, Miss O’Neill is a student at the Brearley School, hoping to study drama’).

At first, they continued to send letters to each other while she was in Hollywood and he was away in basic training, and his adoration for her was still very apparent in the ten-page letters he sent to her daily. Things changed conclusively for Salinger, however, when Oona met Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin writes in his memoir:

I arrived early and on entering the sitting room discovered a young lady seated alone by the fire. While waiting for [Oona’s agent], I introduced myself, saying I presumed she was Miss O’Neill. She smiled. Contrary to my preconceived impression, I became aware of a luminous beauty with a sequestered charm and a gentleness that was most appealing.

Upon meeting him, Oona wrote: ‘Just met Charlie Chaplin. What blue eyes he has!’

As the two got to know each other, she stopped responding to Salinger’s letters, and he soon found out why. By early 1943, it was common knowledge that fifty-four-year-old Charlie Chaplin and Oona O’Neill were dating. They got married in June, a month after her eighteenth birthday. Her father became even more hostile, never seeing her again and refusing to open the letters his daughter continued to send to him. Salinger, too, grew increasingly bitter over the following months — as he had likely expected to marry her once the war was over — mailing nasty and spiteful remarks to her, such that Oona admitted she was glad she was no longer with him. He would call her a gold digger, though Scovell disagrees: ‘I think she did want security, and security is sometimes spelled m-o-n-e-y.’

Joyce Maynard — whose year-long relationship with Salinger, discussed in part two, began in 1972 when she was in her first year of university — says of his bitterness towards Oona and Chaplin, drawing on a curious parallel:

As late as 1972, Jerry Salinger spoke of Oona O’Neill, and he spoke with surprising bitterness of Charlie Chaplin. The irony was that when Salinger first wrote to me and invited me to move in with him, I was the same age Oona was when she married Chaplin, and Jerry was just a year younger than Chaplin was when he first met Oona.

In November 1997, over twenty years after her relationship with Salinger ended, Joyce, then writing her memoir, went — on her way back to New Hampshire to try to see him one last time — via Washington D.C. to see the over two hundred pages of letters written by Salinger that are stored in the Library of Congress. One letter, written to Elizabeth Murray, contains a strange and telling scene that is ‘filled with dark sexual overtones between Oona, age eighteen, and the pathetically geriatric Charlie Chaplin,’ thirty-six years older than her. Salinger’s resentment is all too apparent.

Regarding the perspective mentioned above, of Oona considered primarily through Salinger, Josef Benson writes:

That his experiences right after this devastating relationship were war experiences may have calcified his ideas and memories regarding Oona and the illusive future in front of them, causing these illusions to grow distorted in their meaning and beauty and innocence.

[…]

J. D. Salinger’s first love, Oona O’Neill, may be responsible for [or represented the first instance of] Salinger’s penchant for young women that continued throughout his life. His harrowing experiences in the war coupled with the disaster that was his relationship with Oona O’Neill drove him from other human beings. As a consequence, he resorted to the exploding medium of television to keep his eye on human life, something that is critical for an author. This reliance on television coupled with his emotional need to re-create his relationship with Oona compelled him to seek out famous actresses whom he first encountered as characters on television [like Elaine Joyce and Catherine Oxenberg, whose experiences are discussed in part two], a sort of willful ignorance of the chasm between fantasy and reality that may have been driven by the sublimated resentment of Oona O’Neill and all actresses to whom Salinger may have felt inferior.

Sylvia Welter

After the Second World War had ended in Europe in May 1945, Salinger remained stationed there for around a year as part of the Counter Intelligence Corps’ primary involvement in the process of denazification. It was during this time in Germany when he met Sylvia Welter. Little is known about her, though what is known — or speculated about — has been based around the short story Salinger wrote a few years later, ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,’ which means, again, considering his fiction for a moment.

In the latter part of the story, it is mentioned that there was a thirty-eight-year-old female character who was arrested by Sergeant X. She had been living in the house that had been taken by the CIC detachment (where Sergeant X was reading his letter from Esmé). She was arrested for allegedly being ‘a low official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic-arrest category.’ According to Margaret Salinger, J.D. Salinger’s daughter (he had two children, including a son, Matt, with his second wife, Claire Douglas, whose relationship with him is discussed below) in her 2000 memoir Dream Catcher, this part of the story is based on truth, for she states that Salinger himself arrested a woman for this reason. This woman was Sylvia Welter, she states, and in Margaret’s words, ‘[s]he and [her father] Jerry were married by summer’s end.’

Sylvia Welter, 1945 (Source)

The reason why so little is known about her is because of her nationality; she needed to keep it secret. She was German — as Eberhard Alsen concludes, as opposed to earlier biographers who mistook her for being French — but when her and Salinger got married in October 1945, she listed her nationality at the marriage registry as French (she was fluent in the language). This was because she would not have been able to marry Salinger if she revealed she was German, following various wartime laws issued by the US Army earlier that year, let alone move to the United States and live with him. Being familiar with issuing new identification documents as a CIC agent, however, Sylvia was easily forged a French passport by Salinger so they could travel to and live in New York, which they did in the summer of 1946. Upon arrival, she was able to claim French citizenship, having a French father.

Margaret’s account, though correct in identifying Sylvia as German, was otherwise false. Firstly, Sylvia was not arrested by Salinger. This is according to Alsen, as he did not find her name anywhere in the arrest reports of Salinger’s Fourth Infantry Division between the dates the two could have met. Secondly, Alsen concludes, after sustained inquiry — being the only account I can find anywhere that claims this — Sylvia was in no way affiliated with the Nazi Party; she had not been, as many others have stated over the years, involved with the Gestapo.

If she was not arrested by Salinger, then, how did they meet? It seems likely they just happened to meet one day in the small town of Weißenburg, where Salinger was stationed and where Sylvia worked as a doctor. (This was not the hospital Salinger went to following his mental breakdown in the summer of 1945.)

A further inaccuracy is Sylvia’s age. She’s not thirty-eight like the character in ‘For Esmé,’ but was in fact the same age as Salinger, born in 1919. (The character arrested in the story is instead an amalgamation of several people Salinger met while in Germany after the war had ended.) This is according to Alsen’s archival work, detailed in his 2018 book and revealed in interviews as part of Shields and Salerno’s Salinger project.

One thing we do know, however, is that their marriage was an unhappy one. Sylvia later told an old schoolfriend Hildegard Meyer that her new in-laws were deeply unkind to her, saying that she had never cried so much in her whole life. And then one morning, she noticed on her breakfast plate a one-way plane ticket back to Germany. Returning in June 1946 after eight months of marriage, she had only been in New York for a few weeks.

It was at the Sheraton Hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida — where ‘Bananafish’ is very likely set, or at least based around — where Salinger broke up with Sylvia. (This location is worth remembering as Salinger would return here again and again, becoming a focal point for his abusive relationships.) Hildegard put it succinctly: ‘They wanted to get rid of her.’ This seems very likely to have been because of her German nationality.

The reason why Salinger requested to annul their marriage, according to his old friend Leila Hadley Luce, was because he found out — though disproved to us — about her apparent involvement with the Gestapo. Their annulment become official in January 1949, though Sylvia, owing to bureaucratic mess, did not find out until August 1950 and also had to continue signing her name Sylvia Salinger-Welter for another five years.

The unhappiness in their marriage stemmed from several factors, including the mood swings Salinger was experiencing as a result of his PTSD. This was compounded by — as well as the intensely hostile environment Sylvia found herself in, with Salinger’s family disapproving of him marrying a German woman — the clear indication that he was developing negative, hurtful, passive aggressive feelings towards Sylvia very soon into their marriage, manifested through abusive remarks about her and her German nationality.

In a letter to friend Paul Fitzgerald, written a few months after Sylvia had left New York, Salinger wrote that — for Sylvia kept silent about her and Salinger’s relationship, taking what she knew to the grave, meaning we only have Salinger’s words — ‘If I gave you one or several reasons [for why Salinger and Sylvia were unhappy together], they would undoubtedly sound one-sided. Let’s let it go.’ He then said that he would endeavour to tell him honestly when they next saw each other. Whether he did or not, we do not know. But his claim that he, as a writer, would be unable to express both sides is certainly a reflection of how selfish and self-centred he was during this marriage — and indeed the countless other experiences here — because he can’t see the other side. Having read all I can about their relationship, I’ve found nothing to suggest Sylvia was the cause of any unhappiness in it. And even if she was — and it seems the only conflict between them that was related to her was her family’s unhappiness at her marrying an American, which is not the fault of Sylvia — this does not absolve Salinger of the emotional harm he directed at her.

It’s absolutely worth mentioning here that, according to Margaret, the reason why the marriage disintegrated between Salinger, from a Jewish family, and Sylvia was because Sylvia was in fact antisemitic. Alsen concludes, however, that there is no indication of this in any of Salinger’s letters to his friends about Sylvia, and so rules out this possibility. If she was, that would, of course, be worth focusing on and factoring into understanding the problems and harm caused in their relationship, but we simply can’t be sure.

In the end, Margaret, in reference to her father’s brief relationship with Sylvia, writes that, ‘when he was finished with a person, he was through with them.’ This is clear with Sylvia, and indeed with the many women and girls whose lives he entered throughout his long life.

Many years after her divorce from Salinger, Sylvia married another American man, moved back to the United States, to North Carolina, and set up her own ophthalmologist’s practice. She continued to claim she was French, having people call her ‘Sylvie.’ That is as much as is known about her.

Jean Miller

Around the time his and Sylvia’s divorce became official, Salinger was once again at the Sheraton Hotel in Daytona Beach.

Also spending time in the Floridian city was fourteen-year-old Jean Miller and her family, as they would make annual trips there every winter away from their home in New York. While there, she would attend a local private school during the day and then spend her afternoons reading and doing her homework on the beach or by the hotel pool. One afternoon, in January or February 1949, she was reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights when a stranger, a much older man, approached her and asked, again and again until she heard him, what she thought of the character of Heathcliff. The man, J.D. Salinger — though simply a man called ‘Jerry’ to her at first — was thirty years old. Her experience remains the most documented instance of Salinger’s paedophilia. (When he asked Jean how old she was and she answered, Salinger grimaced in response, she recalls, which reflects his insecurity around his sexual interest in young girls — but he continued to pursue her.)

Jean Miller, 1949 (Source)

As part of David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger project, Jean Miller Biddle, then in her seventies, opened up for the first time, revealing her years’ long experience with the famous writer. At the back of the oral biography in the acknowledgements where she is thanked for sharing her story (both through being interviewed and showing the letters she has from Salinger), it is mentioned that she was writing her memoirs. However, she died in May 2015, surrounded by her many friends and family. As far as I can find out, her memoirs, once being written with the help of a family friend, have been passed to her daughter, Jean Rosmarin, and I think are still yet to be published.

In her interview for the Salinger project, Jean recounts first meeting ‘Jerry,’ and it appears he was already using his growing fame to pursue young girls:

He looked old. And he was not going to stop talking, so I put my book aside. We began a conversation, and he was very intense. His mind seem to skitter over various topics. He told me he was a writer and that he had published a few stories in the New Yorker, and he felt this was his finest accomplishment.

They sat together for a while before she left. They saw each other again the following day, beginning their walks along the beach together, eating popcorn and ice cream, and getting to know each other. ‘He was having a wonderful time,’ Jean said. ‘We walked very slowly down to the pier. It was like he was escorting me.’ This continued every afternoon after school for around ten days.

I would do cartwheels on the beach, and then I would whip off into the ocean, and he would love that. I think he felt it was as close to a perfect, maybe even direct moment that he’d had — maybe ever had. These perfect moments: they got him away from his melancholy, his angst about the war. He seemed to take joy out of my childishness. The frivolity and the pure innocence of fourteen-year-old me, I think, is what he was attracted to.

Jean says that ‘Jerry’ talked to her about Oona, and that she could detect no bitterness at all, which seems at odds with what Joyce Maynard writes about, as well as the contents of his letters to Oona in the first place. Perhaps Salinger downplayed the hostility he felt towards her when with Jean, knowing it would not reflect well on him as it showed not only his bitterness but his hypocrisy towards Oona O’Neill and Charlie Chaplin by ridiculing their age gap while he was pursuing a fourteen-year-old girl.

Jean’s mother, however, was concerned for her young daughter, going on walks with a much older stranger. And she quickly found out that this ‘Jerry’ who was inappropriately involved with her daughter was the up-and-coming writer J.D. Salinger. Jean says:

She read the New Yorker, and she said, “He looks just like Seymour.” He did, but I didn’t know the story yet. I had no idea who Seymour was. I didn’t care. My mother said, “A man like that is only after one thing, Jean; you better be careful.” She knew he had written “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

It cannot go unnoticed that this location is clearly the basis for the setting of his recently published short story, as well as the similarity in age between Salinger and Seymour Glass.

Salinger’s stay in Daytona Beach had to come to an end — regrettably, it appeared to him — however, and on their final day together, Jean recalls him saying to her, ‘I’d like to kiss you goodbye, but you know I can’t.’ His insecurity around his paedophilia, and concern of getting caught, is all too clear. She also recalls, presumably from her mother, Salinger going to the lobby of the hotel as he was leaving and saying to her mother, ‘I am going to marry your daughter.’ One can only imagine her reaction to a man ‘that is only after one thing’ saying this about her young daughter. In Jeans own words, Salinger was courting her.

**

Jean knew that the two of them would stay in touch long after he left, that they would write to each other. And they did. They talked about everything from his writing to her home and school life generally. She was filled with anxiety during this time, terrified of somebody finding out they had been writing to each other, and so not being able to go to anybody to talk about the letters. In total, she remembers receiving around fifty or sixty letters from him over their first year of correspondence. (Though her mother, upon finding out, threw many of them away, so there were likely many more.) This is clearly an early instance of the isolation Salinger imposed on girls and young women — being, for example, through the neglect and emotional abuse of living with them or through controlling their diets — with this being an isolation imposed from afar: a secret implicitly told to be kept quiet, a common tactic of groomers.

Not only does her experience remind one of the much younger character of Sybil in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish,’ but the obsessive writing of letters between an older man and a young teenage girl mirrors that of Sergeant X and Esmé in ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,’ which was published a year after the two met. In fact, Jean tells Shane Salerno in her interview that Salinger had told her that had he not met her, he wouldn’t have been able to write ‘For Esmé,’ for he based the thirteen-year-old English girl on her.

They did meet again, however, in the spring of 1952 in New York City. It seems Jean’s parents had allowed her to meet with Salinger again, though they would be with her for the duration, where they went out for a meal together one night. (Here, she was exposed to his celebrity, with him being recognised following the recent publication of The Catcher in the Rye the previous summer).

When they continued to meet up, it appears it was just the two of them. They went to theatres, and to the Stork Club, the place he so despised. Perhaps this was him trying to recapture what he had with Oona — as seen with his predation towards, for example, Catherine Oxenberg, discussed in part two— as indeed, as him and Jean would watch performances together, he would ask her if she had considered becoming an actress. (Here, Salinger’s conflicted relationship with those in entertainment is clear. He seemed to both adore actresses, no doubt associated with his intense feelings for Oona O’Neill, but also seemed to revile them, seeing them as ‘phony,’ as Jean says regarding his predation towards Catherine, which is also no doubt influenced by the hurt and sense of entitlement he felt towards Oona as their relationship ended.)

In October 1953, he wrote a letter to her, now aged nineteen, that detailed exactly the directions she should take if she wanted to meet him in his new home in the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire (where he had recently moved to to live a more isolated life). At first, she said:

There was never an inkling of anything physical between us until much later. I would go up to Cornish; I’d spend the night with him in the same bed. Me over here, him over there. This happened several times because there was no place else to sleep. We were camping out. It’s absolutely the truth. It was a genderless relationship. We were friends. We were buddies. Sex did not come into it.

Salinger’s coercion is particularly clear when she remarks:

I probably would have fallen into bed with him at about the age of three if he’d asked me, but he didn’t. Somehow it never occurred. As long as it didn’t occur to him, it didn’t occur to me.

[…]

At one point, he asked me to move in with him. That letter doesn’t survive. I showed it to a friend of mine, a boy from Amherst. I never, ever would have done it because my parents had too much control over me. But I did think about it. And I thought I could never really survive up there [in Cornish]. I had been there. I could see what would be expected of me, which was pretty much drudgery, and I was just too spoiled. I had too much self-interest to really take that invitation seriously.

**

During one evening together, in the back of a taxi, Jean tells of turning to Salinger and kissing him. She said that he probably would have been the one to kiss her first, but she did it anyway, a fact noted by her daughter years later to be significant to Salinger, for his anxiety and legal concern around his paedophilia meant that he might have restrained himself from acting first. Jean, however, thinks this didn’t matter to him, and after all, he had proclaimed to her when she was fourteen that he had wanted to kiss her.

Shortly after this, the two of them went to Montreal for the weekend and after a meal in a restaurant — where Salinger commented to Jean on a shy-looking young girl sat at another table — they went to their hotel room. In her words, she details what happened:

I told him I was a virgin, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t want the responsibility of that, I guess. The next day, having had my rite of passage, we flew back to Boston; from there, me on to New York and he on to West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Somehow, during the flight to Boston, he got the idea that his connecting plane was canceled. I began laughing because I was delighted that we could spend the afternoon together. I saw this veil come down over his face. I saw the look on his face. It was just a look of horror and hurt. It was terrible and conveyed everything. I knew it was over.

[…]

I didn’t have a plane until later in the day. He went right to the desk, got the ticket changed, hustled me right onto an earlier plane. There was no questioning, discussion, no ambiguity. I had come between him and his work, and it was over. I got maybe one or two letters from him after that, which don’t survive because I was too upset. I suffered, but I also blame myself. After all these years I should have known what he told me. Read the letters. All those letters say, “My work has to come first.”

As Benson suggests, Salinger’s excuse that his ‘work has to come first’ was to cover up the fact that — not to frame virginity as pure and sex as corrupting, but that this was how Salinger saw it — she no longer symbolised ‘the youthfulness or innocence that he may have compulsively sought in young women’ when grooming them, as well as now acting on his paedophilia. Jean would have been around nineteen or twenty years old, and Salinger around thirty-six.

The ending of their relationship is frequently framed — by those who knowingly or not refuse to examine further the nature of their relationship, namely why Salinger slept with Jean when he apparently seemed uncomfortable about being asked — in a way sympathetic to Salinger. It is often framed as a betrayal of sorts by Jean: the pair had a perfect relationship, but she spoiled it by wanting to have sex with him. Disgusting and ridiculous. Jean’s own feelings are what are frequently ignored. She says she was ‘damaged by [their] relationship,’ trusted and understood by a man who had so confidently entered her life determined to marry her.

She does say, however, that the hurt was ‘offset by almost five years of learning, joy, fun.’ However, she knew she was no longer a part of his life, and in her interview echoes the words of Margaret Salinger: ‘When Jerry Salinger was through with somebody, he was through.’

The two did see each other once more, however: a quick glance as their eyes met for a final time. It was 1955 and Jean was in Daytona Beach once again. She was driving down Main Street and saw the man who had courted her from fourteen years of age walking arm in arm with a young woman. When she looked again, the couple were gone. The woman, she later found out, was Claire Douglas, Salinger’s second wife.

Claire Douglas

In the autumn of 1950, as Salinger was still writing letters to then fifteen-year-old Jean Miller, he, aged thirty-one, attended a party in New York City, hosted by artist Beatrice Stein and her husband, a writer and translator for the New Yorker (the publication that had recently accepted his short story ‘For Esmé — with Love and Squalor’). Also attending was the sixteen-year-old school student Claire Douglas, whose parents lived in the same apartment building as the party’s hosts. Her daughter Margaret, writing in her memoir Dream Catcher, describes her mother as looking like the ‘wide-eyed, vulnerable, on-the-brink’ Audrey Hepburn of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a description that seems wholly consistent with Salinger’s perverse interest in young girls. She writes that every time their eyes met across the room, Claire blushed, afraid that he might think her too forward for frequently looking in his direction.

Claire Douglas, c.1952 (Source)

Though they did not talk much that night, having both brought dates to the party, Salinger was immediately infatuated with her, and the following day called Beatrice Stein to ask for Claire’s address at the all-girls’ boarding school she was attending in Pennsylvania, where she would be returning to after the party. Claire, a week later, received a letter from him, which began a series of phone calls and letters between them throughout her school year. (According to Salinger biographer Paul Alexander, because Claire’s father — the famous British art critic Robert Langdon Douglas — was significantly older than her and her mother, and her half-brother was forty years her senior, she was used to older (and military) men in her life, which, Alexander says, made it not usual for her to be attracted to the war veteran and writer fifteen years older than her. Whether this is simply an explanatory remark by him regarding Claire’s genuine attraction to Salinger or an attempt to put some of the blame on her when considering the abuse she was subject to in their relationship, I cannot be sure.)

Josef Benson has said that Salinger’s subsequent relationship with Claire ‘instantiated his penchant for very young women and the concomitant guilt, shame, and secrecy that inevitably followed.’ He also notes that Claire, being sixteen, was the same age as Oona O’Neill when she was dating Salinger ten years earlier, which once again suggests, at least in part, Salinger’s attempt to recreate what he thought he was entitled to with Oona.

As Oona and Joyce Maynard had alcoholic fathers, Claire’s early life was also strained — a parallel that cannot go unnoticed when considering the young women Salinger had relationships with — having attended a convent boarding school from the age of five and then moving between several foster homes over the following years. At thirteen, she refused to return to the convent, and began sleeping under the dining room table when visiting her parents during infrequent school holidays. This was likely due to the fear so instilled in her from the convent, for, in her own words ‘[t]hey were doing a number on my head, trying to coerce me into becoming a nun. The whole school was ordered to shun me, not to speak to me, until I had declared my decision. I was going mad.’

**

When, in the following summer of 1951, Claire returned to New York from Pennsylvania, her and Salinger met up. This was not for long, however, as both soon headed to Europe for separate reasons: Salinger to escape the attention in the United States following the publication of The Catcher in the Rye and Claire to Italy to see her dying father. (He died that year, aged eighty-seven, seventy years older than his daughter, his youngest of around fifteen children.) Upon returning to New York, Salinger moved into a new apartment and Claire would visit him. She later told her daughter her first impressions:

The whole apartment was black and white. I was appalled, frightened, excited, bug-eyed at the black sheets on his bed. They were the height of sophistication and depravity to me. For Jerry, though, I think the black sheets and the black bookshelves, black coffee table, and so on matched his depression. He really had black holes where he could hardly move, barely talk.

In the black sheets, the two would sleep together, though there was no sexual intimacy, for by this time in his life — and perhaps explaining part of (again, why do none of these sources consider legality?) his reluctance to have sex with Jean Miller, which in fact Josef Benson considers the driving factor for his involvement in this religious practice in the first place — Salinger was deeply devoted to Vedantic Hinduism. I think it’s worthwhile briefly expanding on this.

Vedanta is one of six schools of Hindu philosophy, which teaches that ‘The Creator’ Brahma is present in all metaphysical reality and that the goal is for one to achieve Brahma consciousness through continual reflection and meditation. Salinger had begun studying and practicing at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York in the late 1940s, and from then on, based major life decisions around its core tenets. For example, according to its outline for the stages of a man’s life, the second stage is to form a household: to marry and have children. Importantly here, one aspect of life Vedanta preaches considerably about is sex — or more specifically, sexual restraint. In The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, a 1942 English translation of the teachings of the nineteenth-century Bengali religious leader (which Salinger sent to his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, stating that it was the only book worth reading), it is written:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts, and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on “woman and gold,” I say, “Shame on him!” “Woman and gold” are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he can not act as he likes.

Recorded in the book is a confession from one of Ramakrishna’s disciples that he is having — and enjoying — sex with his wife, having already had children together. Ramakrishna replies: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You have children, and still you enjoy intercourse with your wife. Don’t you hate yourself for thus leading an animal life? Don’t you hate yourself for dallying with a body which contains only blood, phlegm, filth, and excreta?’

Salinger’s way of living from this point in his life — fixating on homeopathy, macrobiotics, acupuncture, and Dianetics (the predecessor to Scientology) — drastically shaped the lives of Claire Douglas and Joyce Maynard when they were in turn living with him. (Claire recalls, for example, Salinger picking on her for the absurd reason that she was not apparently thinking thoughts that were ‘Dianetically correct.’)

**

The two continued seeing each other as Claire finished school in Pennsylvania and moved to Massachusetts to study at Radcliffe College, the women-only institution for the then all-male Harvard University. (I cannot seem to determine what degree she studied, so all I can offer is my best guess of a Liberal Arts degree.) After her first year, she returned to New York for a summer job as a model for the Lord & Taylor department store. She kept it a secret, knowing Salinger would not approve. It was shortly after — on New Year’s Day, 1953, his thirty-fourth birthday — that he moved to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire, for seclusion, but the pair (though Salinger would remain distant in between visits) continued to visit each other, with him travelling to Radcliffe and her spending many weekends in his new, quiet cabin. (Claire would have needed written permission to be away from university at the weekends.) At one point, Salinger suggested to Claire that she drop out of university and move in with him. Surprised, she refused, and Salinger became distant once more. Desperate to get back in touch with him, she borrowed a car and drove to Cornish to find him, only to find the place still and lifeless. Margaret writes that her mother thought, though wasn’t sure, that he left and spent the year in Europe away from her.

Speaking to her daughter, Claire said that:

The whole world was your father — everything he said, wrote, and thought. I read the things he told me to read, not the college stuff nearly as much, looked on the world through his eyes, lived my life as if he were watching me. When I stood up to him on that one thing, college, he vanished.

Salinger’s need to control the young women he became involved with is clear through all of their experiences, but remains particularly clear with Claire’s because of what followed. When she found out he had left, she collapsed. She was hospitalised for a substantial period of time, suffering from a long bout of mononucleosis and the removal of her appendix.

‘[L]ike a snapshot of a building collapsing,’ writes her daughter, Claire’s memory of what followed remained surprisingly clear. Simply, she remembers feeling ‘sooooo tired’ and that ‘a very nice man from [Harvard Business School] wanted to marry me.’ This man was Coleman Mockler, and he was smitten with her. He repeatedly visited her in hospital and asked her to marry him. She finally said yes, to her relief, as she could then be left alone again ‘where it was sooooo quiet.’ Shortly after, when she was out of hospital, the pair eloped. They spent the summer together in Europe and when Claire returned in the autumn, Salinger refused to answer her phone calls. Her and Mockler’s marriage was annulled by the end of the year.

Margaret writes:

The impression I had as a young girl hearing this story was of somebody sleepwalking or in a fevered state. It worried me that such important things could happen to you in a dream or somewhere stuck between dreaming and waking.

In the summer of 1954, however, Salinger re-entered her life, and through his presence, drew her closer to Vedanta and away from the Christian fundamentalism of Mockler and her own childhood. She started reading The Way of a Pilgrim, a nineteenth-century Russian religious text that tells the story of a pilgrim travelling through Eastern Europe and Siberia while practising the Jesus Prayer.

To briefly mention Salinger’s fiction again, this text features heavily in the plot of his short story ‘Franny’ — about Franny Glass, the youngest sibling of the Glass family — which he was writing at the time. In the story, Franny has been reading The Way of a Pilgrim and is questioned on it by her thoughtless boyfriend Lane Coutell — an obvious stand-in by Salinger for Coleman Mockler — when the two of them meet up for the weekend. It is explained that practising the Jesus Prayer involves internalising the prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me’ after which something happens; ‘I don’t know what,’ Franny explains, ‘but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing.’ She then, feeling unwell, leaves their table at the restaurant where they — well, he — had been having lunch, and faints suddenly. She wakes up five minutes later in the manager’s office, and when Lane leaves, having carried her in, and promises to return after paying the check and getting a taxi, she, now alone, begins seemingly reciting the Jesus Prayer: ‘Her lips began to move, forming soundless words, and they continued to move.’ Franny’s religious breakdown/enlightenment — as, in the short story, the Christian prayer ritual, resulting in spiritual harmonisation, is compared to the seeing of God and of the Self in Hinduism — mirrors Claire’s claustrophobic years to come in Cornish.

As well as modelling Franny Glass around Claire, it has been considered that she served as inspiration for the character of Jane Gallagher in The Catcher in the Rye — or at least her character is worth reflecting on with Claire in mind, as the pair met only shortly before the novel was published, so Salinger likely had little time to rewrite the whole character. He did make one edit, however, and that was the name of the school Jane — a childhood friend of Holden’s — mentions she might attend; its name is Shipley, the same as the all-girls boarding school Claire was attending when they met. In the novel, Holden is concerned for her, though this is not simply his fixation of her no longer being the young girl he remembers, but that she is going on a date with a guy who he (rightly) despises and fears she may be sexually assaulted, as he also thinks she has been by her stepfather. Josef Benson raises the question as to whether, if Jane and Claire can be paralleled, Salinger would represent Holden — the ‘catcher in the rye,’ striving to protect her — or her stepfather, the predator and abuser. He is both, as Benson also considers, and so this dichotomy of protector/predator, seen through Jean Miller’s experience, for example, appears once again.

**

By the autumn of 1954, Claire had moved in with J.D. Salinger. They drove down to Massachusetts every week so she could attend classes from Tuesday to Thursday. Salinger became increasingly irritated at this arrangement, however, as the frequent travelling and staying for days at a time outside of his home in Cornish was, he would say, hindering his work on his current story, ‘Franny.’ The month this story was published — January of 1955 — just as Claire was going through the mid-year exam period of her final year at Radcliffe, Salinger gave her an ultimatum, the same as last time: to live with him in Cornish or to finish her degree.

She chose him, just four months away from graduating.

It wasn’t just her degree she was made to leave behind, but everything. All of her bridges had to be burnt, writes her daughter. All contact with everyone else she knew ceased; Claire was not even sure when a phone line was eventually installed to the cabin. Her university work — academic papers and fictional pieces she had written — was burnt, and Salinger requested for her not to bring any luggage with her from her now past life at Radcliffe College. (The same was the case with Joyce Maynard, who was made to leave most of her childhood possessions behind when she moved in with him, including her beloved bicycle which she had ridden since she was young.)

A month later, on 17 February 1955, the thirty-six-year-old J.D. Salinger and twenty-one-year-old Claire Douglas got married. On their marriage certificate, Salinger listed their marriage as his first, effectively erasing the existence of Sylvia Welter from both memory and physical records: ‘when he was finished with a person, he was through with them.’

Their daughter Margaret — born at the end of the year — has questioned her father’s apparent turn from, by 1953, seemingly dropping out of her mother’s life all together and renouncing all earthly and sexual attachments (though still sleeping with Jean Miller) and, by 1955, asking her to marry him. At first, she assumed it must have been another instance of his on-and-off relationship with Claire, but when later talking with her mother, she found out the true cause of this shift.

According to Claire, Salinger had found a new religious guru, one with a message that appeared to represent a reconciliation between the earthly and sexual attraction Salinger needed and the spiritual renunciation he also sought. His new guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, taught that ‘woman and gold,’ the two apparent vices of the world, could actually be changed from corrupting factors into something holy, sacred. This could be achieved through marriage, and, as outlined by Vedanta, formed the second stage of a man’s life. Not only their marriage but the birth of their daughter, their first child, had to be approved by Salinger’s spiritual guru. (Claire recalls that on the train home from Washington D.C. to Cornish that very evening after visiting a yogi, her and Salinger slept together in the sleeper car, and she was certain this was the night Margaret was conceived.)

At the time, Claire recalled that she was ‘full of joy at having found a path,’ the one laid out by Yogananda, separate from her male-dominated Catholic upbringing. Margaret expresses her concern about this, about how her mother found this new path liberating to her. Her daughter gives the example of the story of Kashi Moni, the widow of Lahiri Mahasaya — the nineteenth-century guru to Yogananda. Her entire existence is subservient to that of her divine husband’s. In fact, filled with regret and anguish at not recognising his divinity sooner, she renounces him as her husband — while prostrate at his feet — proclaiming he is instead her guru. A later interaction between them is as follows, told by Kashi Moni:

One morning Lahiri Mahasaya entered this little room to fetch an article; I quickly followed him. Overcome by delusion, I addressed him scathingly. ‘You spend all your time with the disciples. What about your responsibilities for your wife and children? I regret that you do not interest yourself in providing more money for the family.’

The master glanced at me for a moment, then lo! He was gone. Awed and frightened, I heard a voice resounding from every part of the room: ‘It is all nothing, don’t you see? How could a nothing like me produce riches for you?’

‘Guruji,’ I cried, ‘I implore pardon a million times! My sinful eyes can see you no more; please appear in your sacred form.’

‘I am here.’ This reply came from above me. I looked up and saw the master materialize in the air, his head touching the ceiling. His eyes were like blinding flames. Beside myself with fear, I lay sobbing at his feet after he had quietly descended to the floor. ‘Woman,’ he said, ‘seek divine wealth, not the paltry tinsel of earth …’

As their daughter writes, this single interaction mirrors much of her parents’ marriage over the next decade.

**

After Margaret was born, Salinger’s view of Claire changed suddenly. Paul Alexander, quoted in Shields and Salerno’s oral biography, says that before she was pregnant, she represented to Salinger the image of youth he was so attracted to, but after giving birth, she was now a mother — mature, different — and their relationship changed permanently.

In the words of writer Geraldine McGowan, quoted in the Salinger project, Salinger appeared to believe that women (in his fiction and in his real life) did not break. He did not seem to realise that his new wife — aged twenty-two, secluded in a small town with no family or friends anywhere close by and with her first newborn to care for — would struggle. Salinger’s abusive behaviour and actions has been apparent in the experiences discussed so far and only continued into his second marriage and the family that was being raised around him while he was elsewhere, lost in his fiction.

Nanny to Claire and Salinger’s children when they were young, Ethel Nelson discussed in an interview with Shane Salerno the family dynamic she was privy to. Taking care of Margaret (‘Peggy’) from around age four or five, she immediately comments on the absence of the father and husband. He was never there. He was always in his ‘bunker,’ or ‘concrete cell,’ as it has also been called. It was a hundred yards down the garden from their house and contained only a fireplace, a typewriter on a long table, his books, and a filing cabinet filled with his writing. Here, Salinger would work for as much as sixteen hours a day, waking up at five or six o’clock in the morning to spend the days — and decades — chain-smoking while spending his life with his fictional family, the Caulfields and Glasses. Ethel says that nobody was allowed to bother the man when he was writing, not even knocking on the door. (He neglected his family duties just like Lahiri Mahasaya.)

Claire would spend all of her time raising her children — with Margaret frequently unwell in her early years — including her second child Matthew, born in February 1960. It goes without saying that Margaret and Matthew’s childhood and Claire’s years of marriage in Cornish were characterised by neglect and abandonment, as well as submission; Claire was expected to prepare three ‘New York restaurant’ meals every day for her husband, as well as, for example, wash the sheets twice a week in a place where there was no hot water. (When Margaret published her memoir in 2000 — which I whole-heartedly recommend for reading more about her and her family’s life — Matt Salinger responded in The New York Observer by publicly disagreeing with his sister’s ‘gothic tales of our supposed childhood.’ Consequently, they represent a schism within the family in how they view their relationship with their father. Margaret does write of moments of joy in her childhood, but the persistent neglect their father subjected his family to remains central in her memoir, while Matt has, since Salinger’s death in 2010, become public in praising him and his work, avoiding the problematic and abusive aspects.)

About Claire, Ethel says:

I don’t think Claire thought that was going to be her life with Jerry — left to do all the things for the children and make all the decisions for weeks, weeks at a time. She was alone.

In Dream Catcher, Margaret comments on the 1981 academic paper ‘Religious Cults: Havens for the Emotionally Distressed, Idealists and Intellectuals, and Strongholds of Authoritarian Personalities’ by sociologist Edward M. Levine. She supposes it could have the subtitle ‘At Home with J.D. Salinger.’ This seems clear when considering what Levine wrote: Such cult leaders (Salinger) are

authority figures with whom their converts [Claire Douglas] identify and their views and pronouncements are presented as infallible. […] [They provide] converts with a clear sense of meaning, direction, and purpose […] [and they] impose specific, demanding, and often ascetic and puritanical rules and regulations that govern most of the major aspects of converts’ daily lives.

This latter point is seen, for example, in Salinger’s fixation from this point in his life with acupuncture, macrobiotics, and homeopathy, as well as his deep religious involvement — tightly controlling the spiritual lifestyles and diets of those around him (be it megadosing on vitamin C, eating only raw foods, or avoiding protein). Margaret comments that during stressful periods of time — such as college campuses during the final term of the year, with deadlines and exams and uncertain futures — cult leaders are most effective at recruiting new members. The parallel with her mother and father is all too clear, with Salinger insisting she drop out of university at around the very same time of Claire’s education. She notes another similarity being that of ‘love bombing,’ which seems clear in the intense infatuation Salinger developed for Claire when they met, and no doubt his presence as an older and well-established man was used by him in attracting the attention of a sixteen-year-old school student. As Claire said, ‘The whole world was [J.D. Salinger] — everything he said, wrote, and thought.’

Claire grew deeply depressed as a result of her altered diet and the monumental stresses of an unwell newborn baby, which were compounded by the abuse of an absent husband and father (‘he was spending several days at a time in his one-room cabin, leaving my mother and me alone, in his dream house at the edge of the forest’). All of this was combined with Claire’s own need to be the perfect mother, driven by the need to not repeat the mistreatment she had suffered as a child at the convent boarding school and with various nannies in her youth. Things only grew worse for Claire. As midwinter in the secluded town of Cornish approached, according to her daughter, she had begun to make plans to murder her one-year-old child and then take her own life. She had planned to go through with her plans while in New York in early 1957, while with her husband on a work trip.

Thankfully, however, something stopped her, then and there in the hotel room while her husband was elsewhere. Her daughter speculates what it could have been: ‘Dumb luck? Grace? A sudden flash of mothers’ life force? Lahiri Mahasaya?’ On impulse, instead, Claire decided to run away with their young daughter. Her stepfather arranged an apartment for her and a nurse to care for Margaret while she visited a psychiatrist.

Four months later, Salinger, having left, returned to New York and persuaded Claire to return to Cornish, with this choice made for her backed up by her psychiatrist. So she returned. The four months of therapy had given her the courage to at least return on some of her own terms: Margaret would be allowed friends to play with, Claire herself would be allowed to socialise, and she would be allowed to take their daughter to a doctor when she was unwell, instead of relying on the Christian Science Salinger has turned to.

Between the birth of Margaret in 1955 and Matthew in 1960, Claire suffered a traumatic stillbirth while alone (Salinger was away working, locked up in a hotel room in Atlantic City). Margaret first recalls this experience, having been repressed deep inside, only when giving birth to her son almost thirty-five years later:

I’m three years old and terrible sounds are coming from the bathroom, sounds like the ones I hear in my ears now. My mother is in the bathroom, and I have to pee. I don’t dare knock on the bathroom door. I’m hiding in my room and stuffing my fingers in my ears, which doesn’t help. The noise stops. I hear the door shut and Mama’s footsteps fade down the hall to their bedroom. When the door is shut, I creep out quietly and steal into the bathroom. I haven’t peed in so long I just had to go in there or risk sitting in cold, wet clothes until somebody finds me. You never knew how long that could be. Just short of forever. I dash in and barely make it, plunk down on the toilet and pee. I get up and flush like a good girl. Mama’s shrieks reach me, too late. ‘Don’t flush the toilet. Don’t flush it!’ I look and there in the toilet is a baby, all watery and bloody, but a small, real baby. And I’d killed it.

Claire had endured this incredibly harrowing experience six months into her pregnancy, and had tried to preserve her stillborn child for her doctor to examine.

As Matthew was born in February of 1960, a year later, Claire was seemingly not given much time at all to process her trauma — or perhaps she deeply wished for another child after what had happened, and possibly this was tied up with her need to please her husband, as is consistent with the authoritarian personality.

**

After having to leave a summer camp early because she was unwell, Margaret Salinger — then ten years old — was told by her parents that they were getting a divorce, after eleven years of marriage. To her, it came as no surprise at all — witnessing the tensions and fights and neglect over the years — but her six-year-old brother burst into tears and ran out of the house and down the road. She tried to comfort her little brother:

[N]othing is going to be any different when they get divorced, except maybe they won’t fight as much. They both love you. They just hate each other. Daddy will still live in his house, Mom and you and I will still live in our house, and Daddy will still come over to visit and play ball on the roof and go for a walk with the doggies and everything. All right? It’s no big deal.

In September 1966, a couple of months later, Claire filed for a divorce. She was thirty-three, her husband forty-seven. Her psychiatrist, who had been treating her since that summer, determined that her marriage with Salinger had caused severe strain on her physical and mental health. She reported experiencing nervous tension, weight loss, and sleeplessness — which were aspects of her health that were reported to have improved somewhat following her filing for divorce, but still persisted as their marriage remained intact.

The libel stated:

The libelee, wholly regardless of his marriage covenants and duties has so treated the libelant as to injure her health and endanger her reason in that for a long period of time libelee has treated libellant with indifference, has for long periods of time refused to communicate with her, has declared that he does not love her and has no desire to have their marriage continue, by reason of which conduct the libelant has had her sleep disturbed, her nerves upset and has been subjected to nervous and mental strain, and has had to seek medical assistance to effect a cure of her condition, and a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.

It was clear Claire would gain custody of their children, while Salinger would pay child support ($5,000 a year). According to their daughter, this was the main concern for her father, not the divorce’s impact on his young children: ‘Child support, pet food, clothing, tuition — all were part of the great conspiracy to “sponge” off him.’ Claire was also granted ownership of their house and its surrounding land in Cornish. Salinger acquiesced to this, knowing that otherwise she and their children would have left the small town completely. Following this, he built another house for himself down the road, to stay within walking distance.

His bitterness towards Claire intensified as she began dating other people. She kept it a secret at first — though Margaret knew, and as a child was uncontrollably angry towards her because of this — and would lie about it when challenged by Salinger, who began to refer to her as a pathological liar.

Ethel Nelson, their children’s nanny when they were young, said of Claire when she found out about their divorce:

She’s free. Claire’s free. Now she can go and become her own person. […] Claire was a lady, and she deserved to be treated like one. Jerry didn’t treat her like one. So I was glad to hear that she was free. Sorry. I’m sorry. That was hard. I just didn’t like seeing anyone go through that.

About Salinger, she has said, echoing a sentiment consistently expressed by his daughter: ‘He wanted perfection. If you let him down in any way, you were no longer to be associated with him. He would not be your friend. He would not speak to you.’

Claire did become her own person, now free from the neglect and restraints of her marriage. In the early 1970s, she studied at Dartmouth College, completing the degree she had left almost two decades earlier to marry and live with Salinger. She began studying at the New York Association for Analytical Psychology and became a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst. In fact, she has published more books than her ex-husband. She is entirely independent of him, and has never spoken about him publicly.

Shirlie Blaney and Other Teenage Schoolchildren

When Salinger moved to Cornish, New Hampshire in 1953 — when still seeing Jean Miller and Claire Douglas — the ‘recluse’ would attend local school dances and sporting events. He would escort teenage girls. He would also go out and watch films with the local school’s students and invite them into his home to listen to music. In fact, Ethel Nelson was part of the group of high school schoolchildren who Salinger involved himself in. About him, she has said:

He was just one of the guys. I don’t think anybody was awestruck. He had written Catcher in the Rye, but we really didn’t know about that. We just enjoyed him because he was someone willing to be there and take us to games and he was fun to be around. He was a good guy. You know, back then, who thought about what you did? […] All the girls wanted to go. We would go to the game, and then a lot of the girls who were allowed to would continue on by going to the restaurants and having meals with him. I wasn’t allowed to. My parents were pretty strict.

Though Ethel says they did not really know much about The Catcher in the Rye and his writing, she nonetheless makes it clear that they were all aware that he was ‘Jerry Salinger the writer,’ an explicit abuse of power by Salinger seen through all of the experiences discussed here.

Ethel had attended the same high school as a girl called Shirlie Blaney, though Shirlie was in the year above. Her and Salinger went on several dates, with her parents likely being unaware, Ethel has said. Nothing is known about the nature of these dates, or why this is the case: were these dates somehow, as one can imagine many saying, inconsequential — though that is absurd considering the pronounced age gap and Salinger’s clear sexual history with young girls — or perhaps was Shirlie sworn to secrecy by the older man?

What is only ever focused on between Shirlie and Salinger is that she was the editor of the school’s yearbook and wanted to interview him. He accepted, which says a lot in itself, but under the promise that it would only appear in the school paper. But instead, it appeared on the front page of the Claremont Daily Eagle (now the Eagle Times), a broadsheet that widely circulates through many towns in New Hampshire. The story revealed to the public the background of their new reclusive resident: where he grew up, his early life, his work on The Catcher in the Rye, as well as the very telling line: ‘About 75 percent of his stories are about people under 21 and 40 per cent of those about youngsters under 12.’

Feeling betrayed, Salinger stopped involving himself with the local teenagers, including Shirlie Blaney. I cannot determine how exactly the interview ended up in the local newspaper instead of the school paper — did Shirlie hope to publish it more widely, knowing it would be good for her future career if she decided this was what she wanted to do, as at the time she had expressed, to Salinger himself, her hopes of becoming a writer; or had somebody else taken her story, bought it without her knowing, and published it elsewhere? — but it was at this point that Salinger receded further from the public eye. This breach of his privacy is what is commonly focused on (which I consider more in part two in reference to Joyce Maynard’s memoir detailing her year-long relationship with Salinger), but what is conveniently and consistently ignored is Salinger’s close relationships with teenage schoolchildren in the first place.

This blog post continues in part two.

References

Alexander, P. (1998) ‘J.D. Salinger’s Women,’ New York, 9 February. Available at: https://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/2162/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).

Alsen, E. (2018) J.D. Salinger and the Nazis. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Benson, J. (2018) J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Elias, B. (2019) ‘J.D. Salinger Was A Shockingly Creepy Womanizer Who Took Home Underaged Girls Into His 60s,’ Ranker, 26 February. Available at: https://www.ranker.com/list/jd-salinger-love-and-relationships/beth-elias (Accessed: 18 January 2022).

Halpin, M. (2010) ‘Salinger: “Recluse” with an ugly history of women,’ Salon, 9 February. Available at: https://www.salon.com/2010/02/09/jd_salinger_and_the_women/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).

Hummel, K. and Wood, S. (2015) ‘Salinger’s Fictional and Non-Fictional Love Affairs,’ Cabrini College Salinger Project, 1 June. Available at: https://ccsalinger.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/salingers-fictional-and-non-fictional-love-affairs/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).

Maynard, J. (1999) At Home in the World: A Memoir. New York: Anchor Books.

Salinger, J.D. (1991 [1953]) Nine Stories. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Salinger, J.D. (1994 [1961]) Franny and Zooey. Suffolk: Penguin Books.

Salinger, M.A. (2001) Dream Catcher: A Memoir. Glasgow: Scribner.

Schmidt, D. (2015) ‘J.D. Salinger’s Women,’ Cabrini College Salinger Project, 1 June. Available at: https://ccsalinger.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/j-d-salingers-women/ (Accessed: 18 January 2022).

Shields, D. and Salerno, S. (2014) Salinger. London: Simon & Schuster.