The stories he could tell

February 21, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

CORNISH, N.H. (AP) — J.D. Salinger supposedly spent the latter half of his life writing for his own pleasure, composing each day in a pine house in the hills that overlooked towering maple trees, plowed hay fields and the neighboring mountains of Vermont.

The author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” who died Jan. 27 at 91, lived here for more than 50 years and continued to publish throughout his first decade in Cornish, releasing such fiction as “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.” But while he surely appreciated a setting that was “nice and peaceful,” a wish Holden Caulfield expressed in “Catcher,” Salinger was essentially a cosmopolitan author who set much of his fiction on campuses and in his native New York City and the surrounding area.

The book world knows no greater mystery than what Salinger might have written since he stopped sharing his work with the public in the 1960s. Former neighbor Jerry Burt has said, and continues to say, that Salinger told him he was keeping a stack of manuscripts in a safe. Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, and a former Salinger lover, Joyce Maynard, have also claimed he had a secret stash at home.

With his longtime literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, Inc., declining comment on any possible unreleased work, rumors of what Salinger wrote in his later New Hampshire life range from meditations on nutrition to continued adventures of the Glass family featured in much of his published work. But had he chosen to take on his immediate world, in Cornish, there would have been much — in the present and in the past — to inspire him.

He might have responded to the books about him, to the memoirs by his daughter and by Maynard that cast him as a crank and recluse in his Cornish years, an image foreign to the amiable and unassuming townsman fellow residents had encountered.

He might have chronicled his public life: the roast beef dinners at a church in nearby Windsor, Vt.; the Sunday trips (a little past 9 a.m., like clockwork, recalled neighbor Elizabeth Church) into town to buy The New York Times; visits to the auto shop and general store; the restoration overseen by Salinger’s wife, Colleen, of an old barn down the road.

“We kept hearing all the garbage about how weird he was,” says Salinger neighbor and former state senator Peter Burling. “But he was a good neighbor completely integrated into the town, with a real appreciation for young people. When we were kids, we used to have picnics out on his fields and he never seemed to mind.”

Salinger might have looked to the past. Cornish once was an artist colony that included founder Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Beaux-Arts sculptor known for his Civil War generals and a bronze statue of Diana in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a novelist-painter named Winston Churchill who was later confused with the statesman of the same name, a standoff settled when the British Churchill agreed to use his middle initial “S.” Salinger might have tried to capture in words Cornish painter Maxfield Parrish’s winterish-blue landscapes, or been intrigued by painter George de Forest Brush’s decision to live in a tepee on the grounds of Saint-Gaudens’ home.

Or he might have embellished on recent headlines. In the Cornish hills was a true-to-life “phony” worthy of Caulfield’s scorn, a German immigrant born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who called himself Clark Rockefeller and pretended to be part of the billionaire clan. In neighboring Plainfield lived Ed and Elaine Brown, who saw no good reason to pay federal taxes, a belief they acted upon by secluding themselves and building a defense of booby traps and 50-caliber sniper rifles.

“It’s funny that so many people were focused on Salinger when you had these other incredible events going on,” says Church.

Cornish residents, even those who spoke with him often, have no idea of what or whether Salinger wrote and are proud not to know. Revealing secrets in a small town can brand you for life, as fellow New Hampshire resident Grace Metalious learned in the 1950s when her tell-all novel of incest, murder and lust, “Peyton Place,” enraged the citizens of Gilmanton, 70 miles east of Cornish.

Salinger’s neighbors and fellow Cornish residents speak of the trust between themselves and Salinger. Neither spoke out of turn about the other.

But speaking out of turn is a writer’s job.

“As someone who has written mostly about Northern New England, the greatest challenge when you’re writing about a place that’s rural is to gain enough distance so that the stories you learned can be transformed by the creative process,” says novelist Jeffrey Lent, a former Cornish resident and author of the best-seller “In the Fall.” (Lent, who says he never met Salinger, now lives in his native Vermont.)

“You don’t want to have an angry neighbor. Northern New England has been overrun by people from other places, but there are still a lot of natives, and natives are where the really rich stories come out of. The stories can be extremely bizarre and very tantalizing, but you can’t just pluck them and use them whole.”

The most notable stories you hear about Salinger in Cornish are not about the author, though, but how others behaved around him: The visiting fans determined to camp out on his lawn; the teenager in the 1950s who persuaded the author to give her an interview for the local paper’s high school section, only to have the article end up on the editorial page.

But Salinger’s place in Cornish history is mostly that he lived here. He was not the town sage, the town drunk, or even, reputation aside, the town eccentric. He was simply the tall, dark-eyed man who liked to watch the horses at the county fair, buy lettuce at the market or invite children inside for cocoa.

At least in public, his life was likely too ordinary for a good memoir. You’d have to make something up.