The Phonies of Cornish, New Hampshire

If you really want to hear about it, people in Cornish seem a lot like those phonies at Pencey Prep of Catcher in the Rye fame.

You know the worst thing about the January 27 death of J.D. Salinger? It’s all that lousy stuff about how every single resident of this boring town protected the privacy of the reclusive novelist, how they cleverly thwarted outsiders’ efforts to find Salinger’s home, how they and not the tourists really understood him, how great it was that a famous writer was just another regular at church suppers, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.

It’s hard to begrudge Salinger his decades of solitude – though it’s tempting. Sixty-five million copies of Holden Caulfield’s story enabled his creator to live out his days in isolated rural splendor. Did he have to be so crumby to people were so crazy about Holden that they went to the trouble of hunting down his creator? As Holden himself said, “What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

On the other hand, some people are only interesting when they’re young. At least J.D. knew when to disappear, for Chrissake. And Louis Brandeis got it right in 1890 when he said in the Harvard Law Review that the right to privacy is more important than “idle and prurient curiosity.”

But such curiosity is what makes life worthwhile for some people. Take Ackley for example. He was the guy down the hall from Holden at Pencey who had “sinus trouble, pimples, lousy teeth, halitosis, [and] crumby fingernails.” Just like Ackley barged in on Holden “about eighty-five times a day,” Salinger had Ackerman – Mike Ackerman, that is, the UPS man.

Eventually Ackerman couldn’t just deliver Salinger’s crumby packages, so he bought the general store nearby and, as he told the Valley News, had a great time fooling visitors who wanted to find Salinger’s house. “It really depended on the attitude of the person coming in how much fun we would have with that person,” said Ackerman to the paper.

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera,” said Ackerman. Oh – sorry. That was Holden again. Would it have been too much to ask for the owner of the Cornish General Store to be nice? He could have just said “old J.D. doesn’t want visitors,” for Chrissake.

You can’t really give directions in Cornish anyway, since they don’t have any landmarks. Nothing to see but the Augustus Saint-Gaudens historical site. Sure, there used to be some artists’ colony -- but that was ages ago and the museum about it isn't even in Cornish. It's across the river in Vermont.

A few doors from J.D.’s place is Peter Burling, who says that fooling “the annual parade of English majors” was “one of the most enjoyable municipal conspiracies ever.” I like Burling – you could start missing him, now that he’s not a state senator anymore. But someone from Washington, D.C., who went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School, isn’t too far from that parade himself. He just got to Cornish sooner than the rest of them, for Chrissake.

And speaking of enjoyable municipal conspiracies in Cornish, you know who was really a phony? Old Clark Rockefeller. He couldn’t even give his real name, for Chrissake. He just sort of shows up, doesn’t mention that he’s really some German guy named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and gets Burling to just give him the historic church Burling bought and fixed up. In exchange, ‘Rockefeller’ donates $110,00 to the town – money he got from his rich wife.

Today, Rockefeller is in jail somewhere. “What Clark figured out,” Burling told the New York Times in 2008, “was the truth that novelists sometimes find and write about. That the power of a name can blind you to the behaviors that would otherwise make you say, ‘This is nuts.’”

So even old J.D. would have had to admit that Cornish knows all about phonies. Maybe it just rubbed off on them, for Chrissake. At the end of Catcher in the Rye, Holden admits he’s going to miss everyone. But I won’t miss all that crap from people in Cornish about phonies and privacy. I really won’t.

[The above replaces an earlier version. The folks at the Valley News read the first edition and asked if I would like to rewrite it a bit for publication. It ran in the February 6, 2010 edition of the paper. If you really want to hear about it, I liked the newer version better. So don't complain that I got rid of that crumby old version, for Chrissakes. And don't bother telling me that my wife, who works at Mount Ascutney Hospital, was actually slightly acquainted with old J.D. herself. Nobody told me about it until after I wrote this goddam thing. Next up: A disquisition on Vermont Yankee, written in the manner of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."]