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What I heard at J.D. Salinger’s doorstep

01 April 2009

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Tom Leonard makes a pilgrimage to Cornish, New Hampshire, where the 90-year-old author of The Catcher in the Rye leads a reclusive existence with his third wife

He said that a couple of summers ago, an Irish student and Salinger devotee stayed at his B&B and announced his intention to go and talk to his literary hero. Mr Dean said he was amazed when the student returned to say he had found Salinger in his garden and been invited indoors for a three-hour chat about books. It showed that being reclusive didn’t mean the writer had to be heartless, he said, though others doubted the story. ‘I would be stunned if that were true. That’s not [Salinger’s] style at all,’ said a local police officer.

At the Railway Station restaurant in Windsor, another occasional Salinger haunt, a waitress said that when she last served him, everything had to be written down on a wipe board he brought with him because — she concluded — he was so deaf.

She recounted how her mother-in-law had told her that, as a teenager in Cornish in the 1950s, she and other local high-school pupils would be invited to Salinger’s house once a week so that — everyone presumed for the purposes of his writing — he could watch teenagers interact. ‘He doesn’t interact with us much now,’ she said.

Me neither. Moments after he disappeared from the kitchen, his wife — an attractive woman with perfect teeth and a blonde bob — opened the window to get rid of me on his behalf. We chatted briefly. She knew, for instance — presumably from the local police chief, whom I had had to call out — that I had got stuck in the snow on their road the previous night.

‘I’m so sorry you’ve come so far but, as you will know, my husband is someone who values his privacy,’ she said, all smiles. ‘I must ask you to leave now.’ The window is closed. The man who stopped talking to the world more than 50 years ago doesn’t intend to start now.

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Tariq

April 2nd, 2009 8:02pm Report this comment

This article is so pointless that I have to ask: April Fool?

Zack

April 3rd, 2009 3:18am Report this comment

"The man who stopped talking to the world more than 50 years ago doesn’t intend to start now."

No shit, Sherlock.

Vijay

April 3rd, 2009 9:59am Report this comment

What a waste! I really want to know what made you do the trip when everybody else, the world over, has given up in the last 50 years?!

Eliot C.

April 3rd, 2009 2:36pm Report this comment

Only a truly pathetic individual would stoop this low. So he doesn't want to live in our media culture and he's a 'recluse'; as I said, pathetic sums this up.

Alide

April 3rd, 2009 11:28pm Report this comment

Check your background. There was a Canadian journalist by the name of Michael Clarkson, who was nominated though not chosen for a Pulitzer Prize for getting an interview with Salinger , see http://www.lancetteer.com/Archives_Feature_Michael_Clarkson.htm or http://www.lancetteer.com/Archives_Feature_Michael_Clarkson.htm

beezz

April 5th, 2009 12:19pm Report this comment

Suggest you take a leaf out of Salinger's book Tom and not publish anything for the next 40 years. Must try harder - or shut the f*** up.

teledu

April 5th, 2009 3:34pm Report this comment

Did you get paid for this?

Margot Darby

April 5th, 2009 8:41pm Report this comment

Nice work. Salinger always struck me as a complete phony, a derivative writer animated by the fads of his youth and a thin velleity to have a kind of Thomas Merton spirituality, provided it wasn't too much trouble. (Obviously it was.) I see why this hoaxster hides out, but he has not earned the right not to answer questions.

Henry Wood

April 5th, 2009 9:24pm Report this comment

WTF was that all about? I tell you what, Tom, you come to my house and I'll tell ya to FO too, just like I tell everybody else. Some of us don't like company but can get by with comments to crap blogs like yours.

Sanjeev

April 6th, 2009 2:04am Report this comment

You are a nitwit, Tom Leonard. 50+ years later, don't you get it that the man does not want to talk to anyone. Why go hound him at his doorstep like this! Just so people can read about your stupid exploit. (Maybe in some way, you are elated to see this response. Isn't this what you wanted when you went to NH?)

James R

April 6th, 2009 6:49am Report this comment

I'm not defending Salinger's work, but then neither is he. He did not make himself a 'cult hero'. And, yes, he does have the right not to answer questions. He was born with it.