J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist (Icons) by Thomas Beller

Author:Thomas Beller
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2014-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

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1133 Park Avenue

THE AWNING IS GREEN, and located off Park Avenue on Ninety-First Street. It is a warm spring day, the air filled with light drizzle. The tulips on Park Avenue are completely open, faltering but still glorious. The lobby is a tiny box; I come through the front doors and could have reached the elevator in ten steps. The doorman calls my name upstairs. Then I am in a tiny elevator, real wood paneling, art deco in design, rattling upward.

I had made getting into the Salinger apartment a kind of holy grail. I had written to almost everyone I knew and many people I didn’t. At one point I thought I’d found a contact to let me in, but then that person suddenly became vague. She was busy. Her kid was touring colleges, I was told. I waited a month and wrote again. “It’s not going to work, I am sorry” was the reply.

Was it guilt? More than once, when I told people I was working on a Salinger biography, they said, only half joking, “Leave that man alone!”

But I found another contact and now I was due for a tour of the building.

Prewar New York City apartments are central to J.D. Salinger’s sensibility and to his work. An apartment can become, especially in those instances in which the residents have an instinct for holding on to things, a kind of physical manifestation of the mind that moves within its walls. Seeing his apartment was an attempt to walk the map of the author’s consciousness. And, of course, I wanted to see if I would recognize it from his stories.

The tour was necessary because I still did not know in which apartment, exactly, the Salingers had lived. But there were only two apartments per floor. I could get a close enough idea. What was unclear to me, as I rattled upward in the elevator, was whether I was excited about seeing the place where the Salinger family had lived, or if I was excited about seeing the place where the Glass family had lived. Or the Caulfields. Or where Ginnie had sat waiting for Selena to come out of the bedroom with the taxi money in “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”

What I knew for a fact was that the Salingers had moved here in 1932 and that Sol and Miriam lived here for almost four decades. I knew that Doris Salinger had been married in this apartment in 1935, and that the marriage didn’t last. I knew that this was the apartment where J.D. Salinger must have first conceived and written almost all the characters for which he is famous, and the apartment to which he had brought his first wife when he finally returned home from Europe after the war. But what was foremost on my mind was not biography but fiction.

The day before I had been down to Princeton to read “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans.” Written in 1942, it shares with

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