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He has only once answered a reporter's questions (she was a 16-year-old Windsor, Vt., high school girl who wrote an article for her school paper in 1953). He will turn and run if addressed on the street by a stranger, and his picture has not appeared on a dust jacket since the first two printings of Catcher (it was yanked off the third edition at his request). He has refused offers from at least three book clubs for Franny and Zooey, and has not sold anything to the movies since Hollywood made a Susan Hayward Kleenex dampener of his Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut in 1949.
Salinger's family and friends respect his hermitage and protect him like Swiss pikemen. For some of them, the conspiracy of silence is wearying; Author Peter De Vries clams as loyally as anyone, but admits that knowing Salinger makes him feel like a TV gangster: "You go skulking around not talking."
Salinger fans have filled the resultant vacuum with splendid imagination. The author apparently listens now and then behind his locked door, because in Seymour, an Introduction, his fictional alter ego refers to "poignant get-well-soon notes from old readers of mine who have somewhere picked up the bogus information that I spend six months of the year in a Buddhist monastery and the other six in a mental institution." One source of bogus information is the author himself; in the jacket blurb for Franny and Zooey, which he wrote himself, he says with coy fraudulence that "I live in Westport with my dog." The dark facts are that he has not lived in Westport or had a dog for years. But to disprove such rumors and humors involves infiltrating a distant-early-warning system equipped to detect journalists half a continent away.
Searching for Seymour. Some of the Glass legend, of course, parallels fact. All the Glass brothers sometimes sound like Salinger—introspective, sensitive, obsessed with words, hating what seems phony, dabbling in mysticism—and incidents in the author's life turn up later in his fiction. Like the Glass children, Salinger was born in New York to a Jewish father and a Christian mother (to soothe her in-laws-to-be, Scotch-Irish Marie Jillich changed her name to Miriam when she married Sol Salinger). But Sol was, and is, a prosperous importer of hams and cheeses, and any connection he or Miriam ever had with show business is well hidden by the Salinger counterintelligence apparatus.
Sonny, as he was then called, a solemn, polite child who liked to take long walks by himself, had no brothers and only one sister, Doris, who was eight years older than he. Salinger once said that Seymour and Holden were modeled after a dead school friend, so reporters and Ph.D. candidates are forever searching for him. At least two of the author's prep school acquaintances died young, one of them a boy of great brilliance. But intensive detective work shows that Salinger, like a lonely child inventing brothers and sisters, has drawn most of his characters out of his own rare imagination.