The New Yorker:

From 1997: Don DeLillo’s undisclosed underworld.

By David Remnick

In the spring of 1988, the editors of the New York Post sent a pair of photographers to New Hampshire with instructions to find J. D. Salinger and take his picture. If the phrase “take his picture” had any sense of violence or, at least, violation left in it at all, if it still retained the undertone of certain peoples who are convinced that a photographer threatens them with the theft of their souls, then it applied here. There is no mystery why the Postpursued its prey. For whatever reasons (and one presumes they are not happy reasons), Salinger stopped publishing long ago—his last story, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker in 1965—and he has lived a reclusive life ever since. His withdrawal became for journalists a story demanding resolution, intervention, and exposure. Inevitably, the Post got its man. The journalists took Salinger’s picture. (“We’re sorry. But too bad. He’s a public figure.”) The paper ran a photograph on the front page of a gaunt, sixty-nine-year-old man recoiling, as if anticipating catastrophe. In that instant, the look in Salinger’s eyes was one of such terror that it is a wonder he survived it. “catcher caught” the headline screamed in triumph.

On the day Salinger’s picture appeared in the Post, another novelist of stature, Don DeLillo, began thinking about the inescapable and mystical power of the image in the media age, and, closer to home, about his own half-hearted attempts to keep his distance from the mass-media machinery. From the start, he had been shy of exposure outside the exposure of the work itself. When he published his first novel, “Americana,” in 1971, he had asked that the author’s note on the jacket read, simply, “Don DeLillo lives and works in New York City.” No offense intended, but he preferred to keep it that way.

After living in the Bronx and Manhattan for many years, DeLillo and his wife, Barbara Bennett, eventually settled a half hour’s train ride north of the city, in Westchester County. They live in a green, quiet place lousy with lawyers, doctors, editors, and bankers. They both work at home: DeLillo as a novelist in his upstairs study, Bennett as a landscape designer. (She used to be an executive at Citibank.) DeLillo does not teach, he rarely gives readings, and he keeps interviews to a minimum. When friends would ask his credo, DeLillo would say he lived by the words of Stephen Dedalus: “Silence, exile, cunning—and so on.”

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