Letters to J. D. Salinger

Part Two: Students and Teachers

PART TWO Students & Teachers ''You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry." - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye Dear Neighbor, Even though you live high up on the hills with a view across the river and famous covered bridge to Mount Ascutney, while I am moving in on the Flat with the traffic between Claremont and Hanover rumbling by, I feel that we should think of ourselves as neighbors. There are no more people in the town of Cornish than in some single New York City apartment houses and since we share the right to speak at the same town meeting about mutual concerns should we wish, it seems civil to offer you my greetings. I imagine that some of our neighbors - and perhaps even you - will feel that because I did write an introductory book about your fiction for a new series on many American authors, I have moved up here just to try to break in on your privacy; but I didn't. After spending three years trying to establish a Department of English at a new state university in Indianapolis, I felt that I needed a secluded place myself to get on with some of my own writing. I came to this area because one of my best former students had just competed successfully for a trial appointment at Dartmouth, and I wanted to be near someone that I felt I could depend upon in this unfamiliar region. I was also attracted here because my father's family had lived here for several generations in New Hampshire before migrating westward. At fifty, I thought it was time to become acquainted with ancestral country. I settled first, however, across the Connecticut River in Vermont; but, after a year, I decided that I'd like to buy a summer residence here. When spring thaw came, I started inspecting places around Lake Mascoma. I never even thought about Cornish. Even after a year living nearby, I still didn't even know how to get here. I ended up in the hills on a back road with my Volkswagen stuck in the mud. Undaunted, I finally found the connecting road to the Flat and a modified Greek revival house (c. 1830), as those with a roorn overhanging the front porch are called. I liked its possibilities for restoration and bought it. After redecorating the interior, I moved in with my aging mother. Not that I wouldn't like to get to know you, as I would all my neighbors, most of whom I have met; but not so that I could pester you with questions about what your stories mean or your private American Dream or even why such a long delay in getting another new story into the New Yorker, but because I've heard from Blair Watson, who runs the film program at Dartmouth, that you collect old movies and used to come up there to some of their programs until people started recognizing you. I collect films, too; and I thought we might both enjoy some exchanges. We wouldn't even have to meet. We could just exchange lists and reels through some neutral ground like town clerk Berenice Fitch's office or the Powers store near my house. I imagine you have many more 16mm prints than I've been able to collect; but I have some uncommon items like early Technicolor experiments and Orson Welles's first short. On the other hand, though, I recognized that you might not even want strangers looking at your prints, because, like the boy in Holden Caulfield's favorite story by his now-Hollywood-prostituted brother, "The Secret Goldfish," you didn't want anyone else to see your prize possessions because you had bought them with your own money. I hope you're still enjoying happy viewing anyway. Enjoy yourselfas you have given others enjoyment, Warren French ~ Warren French published the first book-length study of Salinger in 1963. He has also written critical texts on the writings of John Steinbeck and Frank Norris. 116 ~ Dear Mr. Salinger: As in many other schools across the country, The Catcher in the Rye was required reading in my high school in the early 1980s. Teachers assumed that we would identify with Holden Caulfield and his general distrust...