In June, not long after publishing a post about Garth Williams, the artist who illustrated “Charlotte’s Web” and much more, I got a message from another Williams admirer, the children’s-book illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss. We had never met. “Sarah, if you’re ever in Burlington VT, come by my house to check out all the Garth Williams originals I’ve collected over the years,” he wrote. “All the inspirational studies for Charlotte (26 in graphite and ink, so good) and this gem here.” He attached a photo of a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of Wilbur walking past a fence, sobbing, as the old sheep glares at him. I was delighted. A couple of weeks later, realizing I’d be rambling around New England just after the Fourth of July, I wrote to Bliss and said I’d like to visit.
“Great! I’ll be around,” he wrote. “I actually just bought J. D. Salinger’s home in Cornish NH, about an hour and a half from Burlington, the art is there (it’s my studio now) and I’m there half the week. Let me know if you’d like to see the art in Burlington or Cornish.” This was startling. I told him that I’d love to visit Cornish, and a couple of weeks later there I was.
Cornish, on the Connecticut River, on the western border of New Hampshire, has a population of under two thousand. Around the turn of the twentieth century, it was home to the Cornish Art Colony, started by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, known for his bronze sculpture of Diana, once atop the old Madison Square Garden. His Sherman Memorial gleams brightly at the southeast corner of Central Park, and his Peter Cooper monument sits staunchly outside Cooper Union. In Cornish, Saint-Gaudens lived in a stately house on top of a majestic hill surrounded by studios and gardens and acres of forest. Maxfield Parrish and dozens of other artists and notables—including Isadora Duncan, Woodrow Wilson, and Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others—spent time in the area. It’s hilly, with views of Mt. Ascutney that make you wistful, resolving to better yourself, or, at least, your work.
Salinger lived in two different houses in Cornish. In 1953, two years after publishing “The Catcher in the Rye,” he moved from Manhattan to the house that Bliss now owns. That year, he published “Nine Stories,” seven of which had been published in The New Yorker. In the years that followed, he married Claire Douglas and they had two children, Margaret and Matt. He published, first in The New Yorker and then in books, the stories “Franny,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Zooey,” and “Seymour: An Introduction.” In 1965, “Hapworth 16, 1924” ran in The New Yorker. After that, he stopped publishing. In 1967, he and Claire divorced, and he moved to a second house, nearby, where he lived until his death. In 1983, Claire sold her house to a couple who owned it until Bliss bought it. Salinger was friendly with the couple; his widow, Colleen, is friendly with Bliss.
When I drove to visit Harry, I proceeded past the Saint-Gaudens place onto a rural dirt-and-rocks road, winding up a hill in a region of mountains. The sturdiness of the house came as a surprise: a barnlike garage, a barnlike house, woods, grass, a pleasantly tough idyll. When I parked in the driveway and walked up some stairs to a side door, I felt like an intruder; then Harry appeared, looking cheerful. He is a young-looking fifty-two. It was a bright, gorgeous, sunny day. He welcomed me inside.
My love of Salinger extends to almost all of his writing and almost none of the stuff surrounding it. I’d ignored the documentaries and the tell-alls; I enjoyed the essays and remembrances in The New Yorker after his death. I had never expected to visit his house. Being there, with Harry Bliss, was hard to comprehend.
The small front living room was a bit dark, with bright light coming in some windows. It felt familiar, smelled like a house full of knickknacks from many decades. A little kitchen tucked behind the living room had linoleum that I recognized from my grandmother’s kitchen of my childhood. (Two big bricks, two lighter, smaller sideways bricks, repeat.) A bowl full of blueberries had a ring of light-blue mid-century geometry that I recognized from my other grandmother’s kitchen. On the kitchen counter was a collection of little figurines of comic characters—Charlie Brown and others. These belonged to Bliss, an avid collector of his enthusiasms, who has lots of doodads. (“If you can get the Schroeder with the piano, it’s like a thousand bucks,” he told me later. “If you can get Linus with his original blanket, it’s like ‘Antiques Roadshow.’ ”)
The house, in general, felt like a grandparent’s house occupied by an eccentric younger sentimentalist. “I’m realizing this as I get older—I’m a caretaker,” Bliss told me this week. “It’s part of my personality. I love to look after things and preserve them.”
The house had light walls, dark wood, beams, sloping ceilings, cozy little nooks. A small upstairs room with a built-in bench was part of an original, rustic cabin, in which Carlotta Saint-Gaudens, a granddaughter of Augustus, had lived. Salinger had bought the house from her and added on. In a little hallway was the framed Garth Williams illustration of Wilbur. (Yesterday, I reread the part around that illustration, and was reminded that Wilbur was sobbing because the old sheep had grouchily told him he was going to be slaughtered—that’s what happened to pigs. That would not be the fate of Wilbur, or of any other beloved character, at Harry’s house.)
We went downstairs, to the basement, where a long hallway led away from the house and back upstairs to a double garage: Salinger had connected them via a tunnel. He could go back and forth between the house and a studio apartment above the garage without being seen from outside. In 2013, David Denby wrote about Salinger and privacy in his withering review of the documentary “Salinger”:
The tunnel, well built and spacious, was carpeted; the garage was carpeted, too. There, Bliss had boxes of framed art, half emerging from bubble wrap: a Crumb, an old framed cover of Mad magazine in triptych (“DO NOT LOOK AT THE BACK COVER OF THIS MAGAZINE,” one said), many framed comics by great artists. We climbed a staircase to a little studio with white walls, a bright window, a kitchen area. In the back, there was a little office and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Bliss said that Salinger had liked to come there to be alone and work, and had stayed there toward the end of his first marriage. Bliss had been thinking that it might be a good space to have young artists come and use. He said that he was thinking about starting an artist’s residency for cartoonists.
We walked through the back yard, which has a sweeping view of the trees and mountains beyond, and, back into the house, to his own studio. Bliss showed me a drawing that Maurice Sendak had made of him. Then, ta-da!, the rest of the Garth Williams originals, a cache of drawings carefully protected with tissue paper. There was a wonderful, energetic sketch of Charlotte spinning her web, and sketches of Charlotte’s face in various forms—funny and eerie notions of what a spider face could be, which had been entertainingly discussed in his biography. E. B. White and Williams, and their editor, Ursula Nordstrom, had struggled to agree on a spider face for Charlotte that would not horrify yet not condescend. One sketch evoked both Mona Lisa and the Sphinx.
Today, the Center for Cartoon Studies, which offers a two-year M.F.A. program in White River Junction, Vermont, announced that it’s accepting applications for the Cornish C.C.S. Residency Fellowship—a monthlong residency at the house, in the above-garage apartment, for February, 2017. A cartoonist will live there, receive a small stipend, have access to the resources of the school, and give a lecture to its students. Bliss has turned the first floor of the garage into a cartoon-art gallery. His is the rare arts residency that requires snow tires and the willingness to empty a dehumidifier.
A few years ago, Bliss had a Sendak Fellowship, a program that began at Sendak’s property in Connecticut, when Sendak was alive; it’s now at a farm in upstate New York. “That experience had a pretty profound impact on me, this idea that you could go somewhere and be away from everything and have that intimacy with your work,” he said. “The idea of nurturing a graphic novelist—I’m so into it.”
Bliss has a long association with the Center for Cartoon Studies, which James Sturm and Michelle Ollie opened in 2005. The Center has helped stimulate a local economy that needed stimulating; its library, named for Charles Schulz, is the former town post office. The school draws visiting artists such as Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Garry Trudeau, and Chris Ware. A local who is not an artist, and whose comics-loving son took a cartooning class there last summer, told me that C.C.S.’s presence has improved the quality of life, or at least of the restaurants and cafés, in White River Junction. Bliss likes to imagine a cartoon-focussed revival of the Cornish Art Colony, and the logo he drew for the fellowship evokes it. “You know Diana, the Saint-Gaudens sculpture? She had the arrow,” he said. “Except instead of an arrow, I put a pen.”
What Salinger might have thought of all this is anybody’s guess. (Matt Salinger, an actor and producer, grew up reading comics, and he played Captain America in an ill-fated 1990 film.) Bliss explained to me why he’d bought the house in the first place. “I wanted solitude,” he said. “I don’t want to sound like a misanthrope, but I really wanted to be away from people.” He is married, and enjoys living in Burlington, but he finds working there difficult. On social media this spring, he saw an article saying that Salinger’s house, which had been on the market for a while, was still for sale. “ ‘Raise High the Roof Beam’ and ‘Nine Stories’ were pretty profound for me,” he told me. “I’ve always loved those books. I said, It’s not that far, I’ll take a drive.” He made an appointment to see it. “When I drove up and entered the house, I knew that I wanted it,” he said. “I really did. The kitchen floor was the exact same kitchen floor I had growing up in my parents’ house. It’s compartmentalized—there are a lot of little cubbies and nooks. It appeals to the child in me.” I thought of his Mad magazines and Peanuts figurines. “It’s cozy. It’s a cozy house,” he said.
By doing his work in solitude in Cornish, he said, he is much more productive, and able to be more present, and not work much, when he is home with his family in Burlington.
I said, “You compartmentalize, just like the little rooms in the house.”
“Just like the little panels in comics,” he said.
