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Salinger in 1946 was back in New York, rid not only of soldiering but of a brief, unsuccessful marriage to a European woman physician. Though the two were obviously incompatible, he later insisted that they had a telepathic link, were aware of the same events happening at the same time. He lived with his parents on Park Avenue and spent his nights in Greenwich Village. Gentle and humorous, he loved arguing about grammar and augmented his skinny frame with bar bells. Although this was years before Buddhism was peddled in supermarkets, he eagerly studied Zen, gave reading lists on the subject to his dates. He brought an astonishing collection of girls to the Village, bagged with unobtrusive efficiency at a drugstore in Manhattan's chaste Barbizon Hotel for Women. Friends could almost see him storing up dialogue. The Barrymore of Camp Wigwam fended off two curious Barbizonians with elaborate legpulls; one girl returned to the real world convinced that he was a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens.
Across the River. Soon Salinger was much too absorbed with writing to need the Village, and he began a series of withdrawals. The first took him to a cottage 24 miles away, in Tarrytown. Friends apparently found his address, because he hid out in a sweatbox near the Third Avenue el for his three-week push to finish Catcher. He decided to move again, and in one of the notable failures of Zen archery, hit on Westport. The artsy-ginsy exurb was no place for Salinger. "A writer's worst enemy is another writer," he remarked ungraciously and accurately somewhat later.
There were no writers in Cornish, N.H., and no plumbing or furnace in the gambrel-roofed cottage Salinger bought on a 90-acre hillside tract overlooking the Connecticut River. That winter he happily carried water from his stream and cut wood with a chain saw. For company he hiked across the river to Windsor, Vt., and passed the time with teen-agers in a juke joint called Nap's Lunch. The kids loved him, but mothers worried that the tall, solemn writer fellow from New York would put their children in a book.
The Blue Suitcase. In 1953, at a party in Manchester, Vt., Salinger met Claire Douglas, an English-born Radcliffe student. She was unimpeachably rightlooking, extraordinarily pretty, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt. Claire was fascinated by the intense, 34-year-old author, and visited him several times in Cornish. She soothed her family with a story that showed close attention to the master's style: Salinger lived, she said, with his mother, sister, 15 Buddhist monks, and a yogi who stood on his head. The girl discovered mysticism. "She was hung on the Jesus Prayer." recalls her brother Gavin, a wandering movie photographer. "Jerry is very good at hanging people on things."
Abruptly, Claire broke off with Salinger and married a young blue-suit from the Harvard Business School. Just as abruptly, she ended the marriage after several months and returned to Cornish. She and Salinger were married in 1955. His wedding present to his bride was Franny, whose heroine has Claire's looks, mannerisms, and—the sort of private salute that amuses the author—Claire's blue suitcase.