Between the years of 1951 and 1993, Salinger wrote a series of letters to his friend E. Michael Mitchell, a graphic artist who designed the original jacket cover of “The Catcher in the Rye” (that famous red horse), and lived next to Salinger in Westport. Two weeks after his death, eleven letters addressed from the author to Mitchell are being prepared for exhibition at the Morgan Library in midtown Manhattan.
From the brief glimpses of the letters in this New York Times article, Salinger’s voice sounds wonderfully familiar. He addresses the first letter, from May 22, 1951, “Dear Buddyroos” and recounts an evening he spent in London, where he had cocktails at the home of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh: “Naturally…some gin went up my nose. I damn near left by the window.”
I find the fact that Salinger had drinks with Olivier particularly interesting, as I’ve just reached the bit in “Catcher” where Holden criticizes Olivier’s performance in “Hamlet” (though he also calls him “a helluva handsome guy”). I have to wonder what came up during the conversation that night…
The letters also contain mouthwatering clues that Salinger continued to write well beyond his retreat from the publishing world, and that he was keenly aware of developments in pop culture through the years. He describes that his daughter’s delight in discovering that the Sherry-Netherland suite they inhabited on one particular trip to New York had been used by the Beatles, and he mentions the joy of riding the subway. It appears that New York in general, though, eventually lost its charms for him, and he recounts instead the happiness he found riding through his fields in August with “a big dopey tractor.” Even from these brief glimpses, a new image of Salinger emerges; not as a mythical recluse who shunned the world, but a man who merely wanted to enjoy his life on his own terms, out of the prying public eye. Quite understandable.
That said, I know that reading these letters would be an invasion of the privacy he so highly valued, but…I have to admit it. I’m dying to see these.
