Salinger by Paul Alexander

Author:Paul Alexander [Alexander, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447265801
Publisher: Picador

As weeks turned into months, Salinger began to venture out to various parties and community gatherings attended by local adults. At these parties, Salinger mixed with people who lived in or around Cornish. On such occasions, he was known to talk about his favorite topics, such as detective novels and Eastern religion. Then, at one party in nearby Manchester, Vermont, Salinger found himself instantly attracted to someone who was, ironically, anything but an adult. Claire Douglas was a Radcliffe College student. Her father, Salinger would later learn, was Robert Langton Douglas, the famous British art critic who in 1940 had moved his family from England to New York, although it was hard to determine exactly what arrangement of people Douglas defined as his “family.” When in 1928 Douglas married Claire’s mother, an enchanting Dublin native named Jean Stewart, he was sixty-three and had been married twice before to women with whom he had children. Claire was born in 1933, which made her, on that evening in Manchester, Vermont, nineteen years old.

Claire was fashionable. She was attractive in a “pretty” sort of way. She was, for her age, intellectual, though her intellectualism was mixed with a drive to learn about subjects like spirituality and religion. She had a captivating, friendly personality. Of everything, though, one could not help but be taken by her youthful appearance. She was, simply put, a young-looking nineteen. She could have passed for Lolita herself.

So far in his life, Salinger had fairly consistently dated—or at least been attracted to—teenage girls. First, there had been the girl in Vienna, then Oona, now Claire. He had also written about pubescent and prepubescent girls in his fiction—the girls in “The Young Folks,” Barbara in “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” Leah in “A Girl I knew,” Mattie, Phoebe, Esmé, and so on. In his life and in his fiction, one obsession of Salinger’s was becoming clear. As Salinger aged—and he was now thirty-four years old—he remained attracted to young women in their mid- to late teens.

Not long after the party in Manchester, Claire began seeing Salinger at his home in Cornish. If the local teenage girls who had visited Salinger had come to his house for platonic reasons, Claire was apparently motivated by something else. Obviously she was not bothered by May-December relationships since she had grown up with parents who represented that very model. In fact, Claire did not have any concerns about the fifteen-year age difference between Salinger and herself. Claire was, however, seeing someone else, a recent Harvard Business School graduate. They had been dating long enough to have started discussing marriage.

But this did not keep Claire from dating Salinger too, and they soon embarked on a romance. As they spent time together, they talked about many topics, among them Zen Buddhism. Describing Salinger to her family, Claire told them he lived in Cornish with his mother, his sister, fifteen Buddhist monks, and a yogi who stood on his head. The monks and

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