(11 of 12)
Uncharacteristically, Salinger threw a party to celebrate his marriage—it was attended by his mother, his sister (a twice-divorced dress buyer at Bloomingdale's), and Claire's first husband. A little later, at the Cornish town meeting, pranksters elected Salinger Town Hargreave—an honorary office unseriously given to the most recently married man; he is supposed to round up pigs whenever they get loose. Salinger was unamused.
Artistic Battle. He had begun another of his withdrawals; he no longer spoke to the teen-agers with whom he had talked for hours in Nap's Lunch, cut off his widely spaced visits with Cornish neighbors. Occasionally he was seen at work in the nearby Dartmouth library, wearing, as a friend described it at the time, a checked wool shirt and "Genghis Khan beard." His working habits have not changed: Salinger takes a packed lunch to his cement-block cell, and works from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. He can be reached there by phone—but. says a relative, "the house had damn well better be burning down." When he is not working, Salinger watches TV as avidly as any Fat Lady.
The author's most recent withdrawal may mean merely that his social needs are met by a wife and two children (Matthew, 1½, and Peggy, a precociously bright five-year-old). But Salinger is at work on his first really large body of fiction. The Glass family story cycle is already far longer than Catcher, and clearly it is nowhere near completion (a friend reports that Salinger intends to write a Glass trilogy). Since his marriage, the author has exhausted himself, and his supply of sociability, in a protracted effort to give his legend structure and direction, to deal with characters who speak his own most shadowed thoughts, and to solve the snarls caused by piecemeal publication. His face, after six years of struggle, shows the pain of an artistic battle whose outcome still cannot be seen. The battle almost certainly involves the matter of Seymour's sainthood and suicide.
Into the Essence. Once there was a man (so goes an ancient Taoist legend) who was so expert at judging horses that he ignored such trivialities as color and sex, looking as he did into the very essence of the beasts. Such a man, gifted with the eye for the core of reality, was Seymour—at least in the estimation of his family. His oldest surviving brother, Buddy Glass, remarks: "I haven't been able to think of anybody whom I'd care to send out to look for horses in his stead."